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Ecuador to World: Pay $3.6B Or We'll Drill in the Amazon
Northern lights - from an angle we haven't seen
Inca secrets may lie in knots
Ocean noise threatens sea life
UN promotes Chernobyl wildlife tours
UN promotes Chernobyl wildlife tours
Dinosaur found in belly of prehistoric mammal
Fight to save planet from killer asteroids
Skeptics chop away at UN billion-tree plan
UN's Kosovo cleanup shows war was wise
Fight to save planet from killer asteroids
Skeptics chop away at UN billion-tree plan
UN's Kosovo cleanup shows war was wise
Galapagos' UN listing threatened by illegal fishing
Western 'bio-pirates' cheating Africa over impotence treatment
Earth summit reminded that poverty remains so curb spending
Wildlife extinction rate down dramatically: UN
Errors prompt UN review of climate change panel
Canada won't help UN save great apes
U. S. eyes bold space vision: travel to moon, then Mars
Galapagos Islands placed on endangered heritage list
Cellphone use blamed for pushing apes to extinction
Russian academic claims lead in race to Mars
Israeli peace efforts paying off with greater UN participation
UN paying dearly for blunders: audit
A Balkan nightmare: toxic food and water
Western 'bio-pirates' cheating Africa over impotence treatment
Earth summit reminded that poverty remains so curb spending
Wildlife extinction rate down dramatically: UN
Errors prompt UN review of climate change panel
Canada won't help UN save great apes
U. S. eyes bold space vision: travel to moon, then Mars
Galapagos Islands placed on endangered heritage list
Cellphone use blamed for pushing apes to extinction
Russian academic claims lead in race to Mars
Israeli peace efforts paying off with greater UN participation
UN paying dearly for blunders: audit
A Balkan nightmare: toxic food and water
Ecuador to World: Pay $3.6B Or We'll Drill in the Amazon
Canada urged to contribute to Ecuador fund to prevent Amazon oil drilling
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - Ecuador won strong new United Nations backing Monday as the South American country pushed for rich countries to give it as much as $3.6 billion in exchange for not drilling for oil in the Amazon.
Canada is among countries the UN and Ecuador are targeting to contribute to a fund that the Ecuadorean government says it will spend on alleviating poverty and development of ``renewable'' energy sources, such as wind and solar power.
The UN says the cash would enable the preservation of the Yasuni National Park - a million-hectare tropical rainforest at the intersection of the Andes, the Amazon and the equator.
The region is home to various indigenous tribes who live in isolation and hundreds, if not thousands, of different species of trees and plants.
UNESCO, the UN's educational, scientific and cultural agency, declared the park a world biosphere reserve in 1989.
But Yasuni also sits on top of Ecuador's largest proven heavy crude reserves, estimated at 846 million barrels.
Addressing the UN General Assembly on Monday, Lenin Moreno Garces,
Ecuador's vice-president, spoke of the ``generosity'' of the Ecuadorean people, saying the country could make twice as much money if it were to exploit the reserves.
He argued that handing over the cash would give the world a chance to ``assess the value of lifestyle of the Amazon peoples'' while saving the atmosphere from being filled with 407 million tonnes of temperature-raising carbon dioxide if the oil were burned.
``Ecuador has decided not to receive 50 per cent of the potential income that oil will generate just as long as the international community makes a similar effort to our own,'' said Moreno.
``I call on our fellow countries across the world - especially the industrialized countries - to support the Yasuni Initiative,'' which is focused on three oilfields on the park's eastern boundary.
At a news conference, Moreno signalled that the rich countries have the ``greatest responsibility'' for contributing to the fund - and warned that if Ecuador does not get the money, it would begin drilling.
``By the end of 2011, if we haven't received at least $100 million, we will have to go to Plan B and extract the oil,'' Moreno said.
He also raised the spectre of environmental damage should there be an accident, giving the example of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as evidence ``you can never be certain there's not going to be contamination.''
``The lower part of the Amazon forest is swampy ground and you could imagine (the) ecological disaster (that) would (result).''
But he vowed that Ecuador would ``employ the very latest technology'' to minimize any ecological damage.
An agreement Ecuador signed in August 2009 with the UN's Development Program says donors could have 13 years to pay the entire contribution.
``There is nothing around this wonderful decision taken by the people of Ecuador and the government that is not wonderful,'' gushed Rebeca Grynspan, UNDP associate administrator, who signed the agreement on behalf of the UN agency.
``We are totally convinced in UNDP that the sustainable development, environment and climate change are totally interlinked with the objectives of poverty eradication and human development,'' she added.
Grynspan insisted that Ecuador was contributing $3.6 billion to the fund - even though the amount was only on paper as ``revenue that they are foregoing.''
She also spoke of Ecuador's ``guarantees'' that a future Ecuadorean government would not exploit the oil after donors hand over the $3.6 billion - expressing UNDP's confidence in certificates Ecuador plans to issue that promise refunds in the event of drilling.
But not only do the certificates say that any money would be returned without interest, many donor countries may be wary of their worth given Ecuador defaulted on international bonds in 1999 and 2008.
Canada is contributing to other climate-change initiatives, and ``isn't in a position'' to give directly to the Yasuni fund, said Meredith McDonald, spokeswoman for Peter Kent, secretary of state for foreign affairs of the Americas.
But while some critics have charged the scheme is little more than an innovative way to effect a major cash transfer from the developed to developing world, environmental activists in many Western countries are lobbying for their respective governments to participate.
Moreno said Ecuador intends to ``follow up on commitments'' from Belgium, Spain, Italy, Turkey and China, while Chile had already made a ``symbolic'' contribution of $100,000.
But he said Germany, while initially enthusiastic, had presented Ecuador with a series of questions about the certificates of guarantee.
``We think it's an innovative approach,'' said a spokesman with the German mission to the UN. ``There is no decision yet, but talks are going on.''
Postmedia News Mon Sep 27 2010
Northern lights - from an angle we haven't seen
Finding its weak point
Phenomenon to be photographed from above, below
By Steven Edwards
NEW YORK - Canadian and American space physicists are set to unlock the mysteries of the northern lights in an ambitious project with NASA that will allow them to photograph the legendary phenomenon from above and below.
Encouraged by successful tests of three ground-based cameras in northern locations this past winter, a team from the University of Calgary will begin installing 13 more across or near the Canadian Arctic in the summer, while American scientists will set up four cameras in Alaska.
With additional pictures from cameras on five satellites NASA will launch in October, 2006, the scientists hope to be able to predict the time and intensity of the northern light shows, whose dancing columns of colour have inspired awe since time immemorial.
The US$180-million project -- funded mostly by NASA with a contribution from the Canadian Space Agency -- is one of the most advanced examples of ground-space co-ordination in the history of space exploration.
But apart from exciting scientists by giving them a greater understanding of cosmic processes, there is also a practical goal to the investigation.
On occasion, the forces that create the lights, named aurora borealis by the French astronomer Pierre Gassendi in 1621, produce unusually powerful energy surges.
Above the Earth, these surges can damage or knock out communications satellites, which today transmit everything from television programming, to the latest prices on the world's stock exchanges, to vital messages between air-traffic controllers.
At ground level, the surges can cause powerful distortions of the Earth's magnetic field, which in turn can disable electricity grids.
A nine-hour power loss in Quebec in 1989 is an example of the damage aurora-related energy storms can cause.
Scientists fear such outages are likely to increase in frequency as rising demand for electricity in North America means that many power grids are operating almost perpetually at peak levels and don't require much of a surge to put them over the top.
"If we can anticipate a surge by creating a sort of space weather map, we can protect grid systems by reducing the load on them in advance," said William Liu, the project's senior scientist at the Canadian Space Agency in Montreal.
"We can also mothball a satellite and reroute its communications in the short term, and design better, more resistant satellites in the long term."
It has long been known that the northern lights follow a sudden burst of energy created by the emission of electrical particles from the sun, the so-called solar wind. What's not known is exactly where the outburst -- likened by many scientists to the snapping of an elastic band -- occurs.
Some of the released energy reacts with other particles in the atmosphere, "exciting" them into emitting light. But some distorts the Earth's magnet field, or causes damage to satellites.
Knowing the location of the weak point in the process would help scientists predict the consequences.
"It would be akin to an avalanche expert identifying the weak point of a snow-covered mountain," said Mr. Liu.
Brian Jackel of the University of Calgary puts the importance of the research on a par with seismic studies.
"It's like looking at earthquakes and volcanoes," he said. "They're pretty rare and difficult to understand, but the consequences of not understanding them are pretty big."
The ground cameras will snap shots of a northern lights eruption every five seconds, and other equipment will measure the distortions of the magnetic field.
"The big thing for us is the extent to which this is an integrated ground-based and space-based mission," Mr. Jackel explained.
"In the past, people tended to either do something on the ground with cameras or [magnetic field detectors], or someone flew a satellite into space. By putting the two of them together you get a tremendous amount more information."
Natural Resources Canada and scientists from the University of Alberta in Edmonton are also involved, while the job of building and operating the five satellites has gone to the University of California, Berkeley.
"This is probably the oldest and most important problem to solve in the field, and that is why a very large international magnetospheric community is behind it," said Vassilis Angelopoulos, who leads the project at Berkeley.
He said the project has been given the name Themis -- the blind Greek goddess of justice -- to reflect its mission to be an impartial judge in the investigation. But being space scientists, the project participants have also given the letters a more space-age signification: "Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms."
Fri Apr 15 2005
NEW YORK - New research suggests the Inca, who controlled the largest pre-Columbian empire of the Americas, did have the means to record language despite long being considered a civilization that had failed to develop writing.
The hidden history of Inca rule, which extended up and down the Andes for 100 years before the Spanish conquest of 1532, may be contained in the Incas' famous knotted strings, called khipu, the latest research indicates.
Until now, khipu (also spelled quipu) were widely thought to be little more than accounting tools, with various knot combinations representing totals like beads on an abacus. Because no one has ever been able to decipher the knot patterns, many scholars have said khipu were the haphazard concoctions of individuals, and were not ''recording machines'' designed to be read universally. Some scholars have even dismissed khipu as mere ''reminders'' for their owners to do tasks or recite stories, like string tied around a person's finger.
But comprehensive study by an antiquities scholar at Harvard University suggests the patterns not only conformed to a universal standard, but represented a writing system that was the technological equivalent of systems developed by the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Mayans and the Chinese.
While none of those systems is as versatile as an alphabet-based one, which can represent an infinite number of sounds, they were all early breakthroughs in mankind's ability to record his surroundings more efficiently than in pictures.
''When you think about it, the idea that the khipu is just a cacophonic or wildly chaotic system producing radically idiosyncratic records to account for the state of goods and resources just doesn't make sense,'' said Gary Urton, who joined Harvard faculty last year as professor of pre-Columbian studies. ''I believe it is based on a shared system of record-keeping whereby sign values are assigned to these khipu structures.''
Compared to the civilizations of ancient Greece or Rome, the Inca have been the focus of relatively few studies, so many mysteries surrounding them have yet to be resolved.
Deciphering khipu could yield answers to the Inca's other secrets, such as how they built precision-fit walls without a cementing material, or what use they made of their subsequently ''lost city,'' Machu Picchu.
Evidence suggesting khipu could be interpreted by anyone trained to read them came two weeks ago after hundreds of hours of painstaking analysis of 32 khipu discovered in 1997 among 225 mummy bundles in a rock overhang in northern Peru.
Mr. Urton and his team identified matching patterns or sequences, believed to convey numerical data, in three of the khipu.
''So we have the first evidence of a system of checks and balances,'' he said. ''With that new find, we're getting the first clear evidence that these people were not just keeping information in a way that only one official had the only record, and only he could testify.''
Mr. Urton has also begun arguing that khipu incorporated a binary code capable of conveying at least 1,536 pieces of information. For comparison, the earliest forms of Sumerian cuneiform had 1,300-1,500 signs, and Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphics 600-800.
Mr. Urton bases his argument on the typical decisions a khipu maker had to make when constructing a khipu.
For example, khipu were invariably made from cotton or wool, tasking the khipu maker to choose one or the other when creating a knotted string. The maker would then have to decide whether to spin or ply in clockwise or counter-clockwise directions. Hanging the knotted string on the front or back of the main cord would also present two choices. In all, there were six sets of alternatives, plus a choice of 24 colours, Mr. Urton said. That permutates into 1,536 different ways to ''write'' a khipu sign.
If Mr. Urton is right, the Inca not only adopted a computer-age binary code at least 500 years before the invention of computers, but also gave the world its only known three-dimensional ''written'' language, given that writing to date has always been laid down on flat surfaces, such as paper.
Mr. Urton presents his conclusions in his just-released book, Signs of the Inka Khipu, using the spelling of Inca used today in Quechua, the official language of the Inca empire.
Confirming Mr. Urton's conclusions depends on being able to translate khipu, which would be simple with the discovery of a South American equivalent of the Rosetta Stone -- the basalt slab found at Rosetta, near Alexandria in Egypt, that allowed scholars to decipher an Egyptian hieroglyphic text from demotic and Greek translations.
Hope that a ''Rosetta khipu'' exists comes from evidence the Spaniards initially worked closely with khipu keepers as they tried to insert themselves into the Inca's administrative system without disrupting it too much, to avoid slowing the flow of wealth.
''There was a tremendous amount of production of documents on administrative matters in the early Spanish colonial state in Peru,'' Mr. Urton said. ''And the main source of information for the Spaniards as they set up a colonial empire was the khipu keepers, whom they would call in and say, 'Read me the information off your khipu.' ''
As in Canada under French colonial rule, Catholic religious orders such as the Jesuits were prodigious record keepers, and may have produced a translation of a khipu that has yet to be found.
But the closest to a match so far is only a complex khipu containing 3,005 knots that Mr. Urton has argued is reflected in Spanish documents mentioning a khipu keeper known as the ''Lord of the 3,000 Tribute Payers.'' Made up of 12 sections containing two sets of 365 strings, Mr. Urton said the khipu is clearly a two-year calendar recording the work 3,000 subjects did for the Inca state.
Mr. Urton said he is optimistic a khipu and a parallel document in a European language -- most likely Spanish -- will be found.
''One can't give a reasonable estimate of how long that might take, because there are not that many people working in this field, and thousands of documents to go through in archives,'' he said.
In the meantime, Mr. Urton and his team are mimicking wartime code breakers by trying to identify similarities in khipu patterns. Information is fed into a computer database as it is gradually collected from some 600 khipu held in museums.
The work of Mr. Urton and his team is at the ''cutting edge,'' according to Thomas Cummins, professor of the history of pre-Columbian and colonial art at Dumbarton Oaks, a research library in Washington, D.C., that is administered by Harvard trustees.
Mr. Urton's binary theory is drawn from the analysis and re-analysis of his own observations and the work of other scholars, including William J. Conklin, a research associate at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., who was the first to suggest, in 1997, that spinning, plying and colour-coding were an important part of the khipu system.
''Over the years, research has been ... fragmented,'' Mr. Urton said. ''My theory brings together the different features.''
Ship traffic, military sonar, and seismic air guns used in oil and gas exploration are creating a cacophony that is drowning out the natural sounds of marine life, the scientists have been telling a UN conference this week on oceans and the law of the sea.
They want ships fitted with quieter engines, navies to invent more fish-sensitive sonars, and oil and gas companies to use their exploration guns only when they're sure there are no schools of fish, whales or dolphins around.
They add that some areas should be declared sea sanctuaries, where all human activity is banned regardless of oil and gas potential.
The call for international regulations comes from the North American Ocean Noise Coalition, the European Coalition for Silent Oceans, and the South American Noise Coalition.
“Squid have been found with exploded ears, and exploded organs,” said Marsha Green, an animal behavior scientist, who is also part of a U.S. federal advisory committee on acoustic impacts on marine mammals.
“Deadly man-made sounds are invading the silent world, and some sounds are so loud and intense, they are injuring, deafening and killing marine life.”
The groups say man-made noise levels under the sea have doubled every decade for the past six decades. Green said whales flee when faced with noise of 120 decibels - produced, for example, by a 25-horsepower engine on a small inflatable craft. But oil and gas air guns blast with a noise intensity of 240 decibels.
“Because we are talking about a logarithmic scale, that's a trillion times louder,” she said.
Intense and sudden noise causes brain hemorrhaging and disorientation in marine life, the groups say. Reduced catch counts of 45% to 70% in areas of loud man-made noises show fish have scattered or been killed, they argue.
The disorienting effect of sonic activity on whales, dolphins and squid is shown by numerous examples of stranding on beaches, the scientists say. Some 34 whales beached themselves in North Carolina in January following U.S. Navy sonar tests.
Other beachings believed related to noise pollution over the past 30 years have occurred in Hawaii, the Canary Islands, Corsica, Greece and in several Caribbean locations. The groups believe the U.S. Navy knows more than it is letting on about the effect of sonar exercises on marine life. They also say naval authorities refuse to release autopsy results of the whales killed in the January beaching.
The groups say the United States, France, Portugal, Norway and South Korea in March opposed the idea of putting ocean-noise pollution on the international agenda. They hope to change minds today when one of the many committees looking for topics to discuss at the UN's fall summit assesses the marine scientists' case.
June 10, 2005
UNITED NATIONS - Amid new efforts to help provide work for chronically underemployed survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, the United Nations plans to promote areas contaminated by the plant's radioactive cloud as havens for eco-tourists.
A report produced by several leading UN agencies says lack of human activity in those areas has allowed plants and animals to flourish.
"It sounds odd, but the restricted areas have actually developed over the past 16 years or so into an extraordinary environmental opportunity," said Kalman Mizsei, deputy UN co-ordinator for Chernobyl. "The natural environment has returned there. It is a huge area that is very natural, with lots of wildlife and unique types of animals."
Tour operators say the idea is a non-starter.
"What type of unique animals -- three-headed deer?" said Fergus Maclaren, a Canadian serving as director for the International Year of Eco-tourism, in Burlington, Vt.
The explosion and fire at Chernobyl's No. 4 reactor on April 26, 1986, contaminated not only vast areas of surrounding Ukraine, but also a quarter of Belarus and parts of Russia.
Soviet authorities evacuated the most dangerously radiated areas near the plant, but 200,000 people still live in contaminated areas and many of those who were resettled still do not have jobs.
Other job creation projects suggested in the UN's A Strategy for Recovery are fostering small businesses and reviving agriculture.
Safety of visitors is a concern for tour operators.
"Anyone visiting the area would want repeated and well-tested reassurances that the area around Chernobyl is safe to visit," said Martha Chapman, spokeswoman for Signature Vacations, one of Canada's largest tour operators. "And those assurances would have to come from third party associations of scientists -- not local scientists."
Eco-tourism is a growing part of the industry, with popular destinations including the Galapagos Islands, the Masai Mara region of Kenya and Nepal.
"When there are so many wonderful and truly natural destinations in the world, why would an eco-tourist visit Chernobyl?" said Mr. Maclaren.
Mr. Mizsei insists there are few health dangers for tourists because "accurate maps of contaminated areas are available."
Wed Feb 13 2002
© 2002 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
NEW YORK - A fossil unveiled in New York Wednesday challenges the long-held view that mammals of the dinosaur age were no bigger than rats and lived in mortal fear of being eaten by the giant reptiles.
The fossil of the cat-sized mammal has the remains of a dinosaur inside its stomach. The mammal, now extinct, lived in northeastern China.
Never before have scientists found evidence that early mammals ate dinosaurs or any other vertebrates.
The cat-sized mammal and a second dog-sized mammal fossil found in the same area are both about 130 million years old. Their size they are much larger than most mammal fossils found in that era suggest our distant ancestors could hold their own in dinosaur times. Mammals were players long before they "inherited" the Earth following the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
"We can now see dinosaurs were edible and maybe even tasty," said paleontologist Meng Jin as he raised a cloth covering the cat-sized fossil at the American Museum of Natural History. "This is a great discovery that gives us a drastically new picture of many of the animals that lived in the age of the dinosaurs."
In part, the fossil finds make obsolete the standard children's book representation of the Mesozoic era 140 million to 65 million years ago which typically shows large dinosaurs as central figures of the environment, and tiny mammals relegated to a corner, if they are even included.
The existence of carnivorous mammals may also have placed evolutionary pressure on some dinosaurs to grow larger or develop bird-like features to avoid being a meal for their warm-blooded contemporaries.
Villagers stumbled across the fossils two years ago in a part of Liaoning province where sediments have preserved many dinosaur bones and early birds. Meng and colleagues at Beijing's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology named the mammals Repenomamus (reptile-mammals) because they had some reptile characteristics, including short limbs.
Meng and his graduate student Hu Yaoming discovered dinosaur remains in the cat-sized mammal Repenomamus robustus during research at the New York museum this past summer.
"We knew the bones did not belong to this mammal," he said. "Under the microscope we saw teeth and realized it was a baby dinosaur."
The mammal had eaten a young psittacoasaur, a two-legged parrot-faced herbivore. The unfortunate beast was about a third of the size of its devourer. As an adult the psittacoasaur would have been two metres long.
Meng said it's not clear whether the mammal had killed the dinosaur, or was eating carrion. However, the dinosaur's worn teeth show it had eaten a meal or two, and had not simply been snatched helpless at birth.
Other analysis revealed only part of the dinosaur was in the mammal's stomach, indicating the feast had been shared. The remains were also in chunks, indicating that chewing came later in the evolutionary cycle.
Meng said the good condition of both fossils indicate the animals died suddenly but without violence, probably poisoned by volcanic gases. Sediments and volcanic ash then covered them.
The dog-sized mammal Repenomamus giganticus died with its tail curled around it for warmth.
Both mammals became extinct sometime before the end of the age of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are believed to have disappeared following climate change provoked by an asteroid or comet hitting the earth.
Meng, the museum's associate curator in the Division of Paleontology, is the lead author of an article that appears today in the scientific magazine Nature describing the fossils. His co-authors are Hu and Wang Yuanqing, a researcher at the Beijing institute.
Thu Jan 13 2005
CanWest News Service
The countdown begins next week for the United Nations to take on the task of saving the world – not from the usual scourges of war, disease or poverty, but from an asteroid attack.
Former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is among experts who say the planet needs an international agreement on who does what if we face a direct hit. The first of four international workshops aimed at drawing up a protocol begins in Strasbourg, France, on Wednesday.
The average Earth-constrained soul worries little about falling victim to a "near-Earth object" strike. Astronauts, however, often see it differently. Under the leadership of the Association of Space Explorers, Mr. Hadfield and other former spacemen have argued for a political plan to use technology to deflect all but the most immovable Earth-bound asteroids.
"When people have had a chance to leave Earth, it tends to give us a different perspective," Mr. Hadfield said from Moscow, where he is serving as operations chief for the International Space Station.
Noting that an estimated 1,000 tonnes of meteorites burn up on their way toward Earth every day, Mr. Hadfield said the craters and scars from objects that made it through our protective atmosphere are a sobering sight for space travellers.
"Every once in a while, a big-enough one comes that has a major impact," Mr. Hadfield says.
"But because, for the first time in history, we have the technology to detect one of these things as it is coming, it would be irresponsible of us not to have a plan for both (predicting) where it might hit and (doing) something ... about it."
The most devastating strike in recent history came in 1908 when an enormous asteroid or piece of comet caused an explosion as big as that set off by Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated by the United States. The space rock resulted in what has become known as the Tunguska Event at the location of the river of the same name in Siberia.
While we may today be able to use rockets to push or pull away such an object before it collides with Earth, complex problems remain.
Who, for example, should carry out and pay for such an operation? And what if the asteroid were hurtling towards, say, the United States, and American deflection efforts caused it to crash into China? Would Washington have to indemnify Beijing? In the absence of a fixed remedy, is there a danger that Beijing would interpret the U.S. action as an act of war?
Diplomats, scientists, academics, international law experts and even insurance officials are invited to the workshops. The goal is to have a draft protocol on asteroid countermeasures ready for presentation by 2009 to the UN's Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart first suggested creating an international protocol at the 2005 congress of the space explorers association, which he founded.
Later that year, the U.S. Congress asked NASA, the U.S. space agency, to expand an asteroid-tracking project called the Spaceguard Goal to include asteroids 140 metres in diameter and larger.
The project was also supposed to propose ways to deflect those that menace our planet.
"Our telescopes have been getting better and better, and if you can find a lot of things that can potentially threaten you, then the next thing is to start thinking about protecting yourself against them," Mr. Schweickart said in an interview.
NASA warned in a report in March that its budget won't cover the $1 billion U.S. needed by 2020 to locate at least 90 per cent of the 20,000 asteroids and comets that could threaten the Earth.
However, an international agreement to share the costs among member states of the UN could solve the problem. Under the current formula for cost-sharing at the world body, the United States pays a little less than a quarter of the UN's global budget, while Canada pays around three per cent.
Any draft protocol devised by space experts would have to be endorsed by the UN's 192 member states before becoming legally binding on all.
In the meantime, Earth remains defenceless against the largest asteroids, like the 10-kilometre-wide behemoth believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Fortunately, there are only about 60 of the bodies known to exceed five kilometres across, and Mr. Schweickart says being hit by one is a "one-in-a-hundred-million-years type of event."
Sat May 5 2007
© 2007 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
UNITED NATIONS - The islands that inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution – Ecuador's Galapagos – are in danger of being delisted as a Natural World Heritage Site because of government failure to crack down on illegal fishing.
Canadian Marc Patry will be part of a UNESCO delegation leaving Sunday to tell the Ecuadorian president: "Protect the islands or risk having them re-classified."
If expert studies determine illegal fishing has caused substantial damage to ecosystems, UNESCO could list the islands as an Endangered World Heritage Site, strip them of all Heritage classifications, or issue a schedule for improvements.
Any form of re-classification would be bad news for Ecuador, which earns around $200 million US annually from tourists who visit the islands because of their supposed pristine condition and wide variety of plant and animal species.
"If the world body that oversees the quality of these sites says it no longer meets the required standards, people might think twice before going to Galapagos," Patry said from Paris, headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
The roots of the crisis go back a decade ago when fishermen from the mainland began moving to the islands in large numbers after exhausting coastal stocks.
They originally sought sea cucumber, but as that species became scarce, many turned to long-line fishing for shark, tuna, swordfish and squid.
However, the technique also kills marine life for which the Galapagos are famous, including turtles, seals and sea birds.
"Ecuador has recently tightened shark exports at the national level, but ... on the whole, they have been caught up with other things," said Patry.
Commercial fishing is officially banned in the Galapagos Marine Reserve, but rangers have been hard pressed to enforce the law despite having access to an additional patrol boat lent by the Canadian-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
While the fishing community now makes up a large part of the archipelago's 20,000 population, fishermen have also been quick to mount protests, some of them violent, as they press for legalization of long-line fishing. Sea Shepherd founder and president Paul Watson also says Ecuadorian authorities have succumbed to corruption.
"The corruption is just out of control," he said from the society's Farley Mowat vessel off Eastern Canada in the campaign against the seal-pup hunt.
"The fishermen are getting everything they wanted. And if they legalize long-lining in the Galapagos, it will be the death of the marine reserve."
Sea Shepherd began joint patrols with the Ecuadorian rangers in 2000 after publishing a report in 1995 on deteriorating conditions.
"Every time we go down there I confiscate miles and miles of long lines and I intercept long liners," Watson said. "I had our larger vessel there last July and arrested four, and turned them over to the rangers. Our other vessel is intercepting them all the time."
One protest saw fishermen threaten to introduce goats to one of the islands. Another saw them threaten rangers with gasoline bombs. They have also manned roadblocks and threatened to cut off turtles' heads.
The archipelago's World Heritage status will be reviewed by UNESCO's 21-country World Heritage Committee at its annual meeting in July.
The archipelago's fishing industry earns only $6 million USa year for the Ecuadorian economy, but the Ecuadorian government says it hopes to please both the fishermen and the tourist industry. "It may be impossible," said a senior official at the Ecuadorian mission to the United Nations. A plea for international help has been made to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has asked the world body's development agency to get involved.
The country's leading conservation group, Fundacion Natura, says the problem is linked to a political crisis in Ecuador that has resulted in five environment ministers and eleven Galapagos governors in two years.
"We are going through a period of crisis and Galapagos can't isolate itself from the problems of the rest of the country," said Ruth Elena Ruiz, acting director of the group.
CanWest News Service
Thu Apr 7 2005
UNITED NATIONS - The Canadian maker of a product marketed as a natural treatment for impotence is branded a suspected "bio-pirate" by U.S. and South African environmental groups in a new study.
The term refers to acquiring biological resources, ranging from plants to bacteria, without giving the country of origin a chance to negotiate for a share of any eventual profits.
A UN biodiversity convention grants countries sovereign rights over their flora and fauna, but there is little a government can do to claim compensation once a natural material is taken overseas.
Canada will take part in international talks in Brazil next month at which developing countries will lead calls for an eventual deal on who gets what.
The new study, Out of Africa: Mysteries of Access and Benefit Sharing, points the finger at some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies as it focuses on natural material taken from the world's poorest continent to Western laboratories.
"We're against theft and against not recognizing these things couldn't have happened without the countries from which they were taken," said Beth Burrows, head of the Edmonds Institute in Washington state, which published the 54-page study with the African Centre for Biosafety.
"It's not simply that someone [takes a] plant. They also talk to people who say, 'You know we've been using this for 500 years.' That's their early science, and they deserve recognition, remuneration and respect."
Written by Jay McGown, a leading advocate of country-of-origin rights, the report says the Canadian company Option Biotech has patented the seeds of Aframomum stipulatum of the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) "for use in" its product Biovigora, marketed as a sex-enhancer.
Mr. McGown describes the plant as a member of the ginger family with "documented uses in Congolese traditional medicine."
A Web site promotion of Biovigora says Africans used Aframomum to season food, and tribesmen who consumed the "rare spice" were locally renowned "for centuries ... for their particularly high vitality and their sexual capacities."
The seeds were "brought to a laboratory" for analysis, the company continues, adding on another Web page "scientists of Canada ... discovered that Aframomum ... was at the source of this sexual vitality."
Mr. McGown says the company is promoting the product as a natural alternative to the anti-impotence drug Viagra.
"While 'Biovigora' may never rival Viagra as a multi-billion-dollar money-maker, it is a patented Option Biotech property sold at more than 750 stores across Canada," he writes, saying it costs $34.99 for 24 capsules.
But he adds that his review of the company's "available information" failed to produce evidence of a benefit-sharing agreement with Congo or "any other country where A. stipulatum is used."
Ms. Burrows writes that time restraints meant Mr. McGown's research was not exhaustive.
Health Canada says Biovigora has not been authorized for sale in Canada, although the company has applied for a licence.
Nathalie Lalonde, a Health Canada spokeswoman, said department inspectors would be informed "for follow-up" that sales may be underway.
No one from Option Biotech, which is also believed to have traded as Oasis Biotech and is said to operate from Ste-Julie, Que., returned calls for comment.
China, India and Brazil, all with a huge diversity of plant and animal life, stand to benefit most from a benefits-sharing deal. But many Western companies argue they are entitled to what they get because they finance the often huge research-and-development costs with no guarantee of success.
"Historically [in the West], we've felt that innovation has merited being rewarded, and this stuff was free and seen as in the public domain up until the [1992] convention," said Jock Langford, senior policy advisor with Environment Canada's genetic resources unit.
The International Convention on Biodiversity says a country has the right to know if its genetic resources are being accessed, unless local laws say otherwise.
But there are no powers to police violators, said Arthur Nogueira, a senior official at the treaty's Montreal headquarters.
Canada has no domestic law setting charges for Canadian plants used by the pharmaceutical industry.
Among other companies named in the report is the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer.
Mr. McGown said it obtained a microbe from Kenya's Lake Ruiru for a drug sold in Canada and the United States under the name Precose, which helps diabetes sufferers. The company has responded publicly that the drug was developed through biotechnology.
The report also says "only time will tell" if the Bushmen of southern Africa's Kalahari desert will get an improved deal for commercial use of Hoodia cactus extracts, which help suppress appetite.
Mr. McGown says the British drug company Phytopharm struck a deal with them in 2003, but has since licensed Hoodia to Unilever, maker of Slim Fast and other diet foods.
"It's a free-for-all out there, and until the convention solves the problems of access and benefit sharing, the robbery will continue," Mr. McGown said.
Tue Feb 21 2006
© 2006 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
UNITED NATIONS - Concerned that its international conferences are increasingly seen as opportunities for delegates to indulge in lavish receptions while staying at top hotels, the United Nations has urged delegates to curb their wining and dining at the "Earth summit" in South Africa next week.
A leaked memo reminds delegates they will be in southern Africa at a time when food shortages are affecting 13 million people in the region.
Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister, and two Cabinet ministers will be among the 65,000 people descending on Johannesburg between Aug. 26 and Sept. 4 for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the largest-ever gathering organized by the UN.
"We must keep in mind this conference is taking place in the midst of a major food crisis," said the memo. "It would be wise to refrain from excessive levels of hospitality, and any event sponsored by the United Nations should be of modest, even frugal dimensions."
The memo comes after delegates attending a recent world hunger conference in Rome were spotted on shopping sprees.
UN officials have also made moves to counter complaints the summit will cause more pollution than it prevents. The UN Development Program plans to ask delegates to each contribute US$10 to a fund called the Johannesburg Climate Legacy to offset environmental damage caused by vehicles delivering them to the city.
Participating businesses will be asked to hand over between US$1,000 and US$100,000.
Studies for the Climate Legacy estimate the delegates' journeys and activities at the conference will generate 289,619 tons of carbon dioxide, one of the so-called greenhouse gases that are said to be contributing to global warming.
UNDP said money collected for the Climate Legacy will be used for "long-term, carbon-reducing, renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects in schools, hospitals and communities" in South Africa.
The Johannesburg conference is billed as an opportunity for governments to live up to hundreds of promises over the years to fight world poverty while protecting the environment.
In addition to Mr. Chretien, more than 100 national leaders have agreed to spend at least some time at the conference, including Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, the French President, and Gerhard Schroeder, the German Chancellor.
But George W. Bush, the U.S. President, plans to skip the conference, sending Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, to head the U.S. delegation.
This came as a blow to conference organizers, who have said the presence of leaders is necessary to give decisions clout.
The conference is a follow to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which launched international campaigns to combat global warming and reduce the extinction rate of species.
Poverty alleviation has been added for Johannesburg in a reflection of the UN's increasing tendency to integrate its international campaigns.
"Developed countries in particular have not lived up to the promises they made either to protect the environment or to help the developing world," wrote Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, in a recent editorial.
Canada says the conference will achieve little unless governments commit themselves to detailed policies.
"We cannot simply rely on broad visions to spur action," said David Anderson, the Environment Minister, who heads Canada's delegation until the arrival of Mr. Chretien, expected Aug. 31.
But preparatory talks have revealed deep divisions over what should emerge from the gathering. Part of the problem, say critics, is that the agenda is too broad.
While a focus of debate will be the effect globalization is having on the developing world, there will also be major discussions on access to clean water, sanitation services, health services, energy production, food production, biodiversity on land and in the sea, shrinking fisheries, shrinking forests and melting glaciers, to name just a few topics.
A UN push to promote development by encouraging partnerships between business, non-governmental aid organizations and governments in developing countries is backed by Canada and is expected to be addressed by Susan Whelan, Minister for International Co-operation.
But many developing countries also want an international treaty setting out new social, labour and environmental standards for business, which Washington opposes, reflecting its general opposition to new bureaucracies.
There is also likely to be little harmony as Washington links aid to progress in adopting democratic institutions. The UN's newest annual report on international development showed a slowing of the trend towards democratization over the past 15 years.
Many oil-producing countries oppose efforts by some governments -- notably European ones -- to promote discussion on renewable energy sources.
Developing countries want commitments that their agricultural products will find markets in the developed world, again a sore point for the United States, whose farm subsidies work against this.
South Africa will also push for debt relief for poor countries and increased investment from the developed world.
Wed Aug 21 2002
© 2002 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Black & White Photo: Saurabh Das, The Associated Press / A homeless man takes a rest yesterday in Johannesburg, South Africa, host to the World Summit on Sustainable Development next week.
UNITED NATIONS - Half as many birds, mammals and fish are becoming extinct as a century ago, when the world's human population was a fraction of its current six billion, a new United Nations report finds.
Conservationists have said for years that creatures are disappearing from the planet faster than they can be named.
But the UN Environment Program's World Atlas of Biodiversity, released this week, shows the international rate of extinction is today as low as it was in the first part of the 16th century.
The Earth lost about 20 known species of mammals, birds and fish in the last third of the 20th century, the atlas shows. About 40 were lost a century ago, when the population was 1.6 billion.
Creatures lost from Canada since the first part of the 19th century include the sea mink, a species of the woodland caribou that roamed British Columbia, the passenger pigeon, the Labrador duck and the great auk, a flightless bird. Conservation programs run by governments or organizations are credited with helping maintain diversity.
"The apparent reduction in the extinction rate from the late 19th century onwards may be in part attributed to management action designed to maintain highly threatened species, and there is indeed good evidence that populations of a small number of target species have recovered significantly," the report says.
Of 193 species of mammals in Canada, 15 are threatened, including the grizzly bear, the Peary caribou and the swift fox. The Migrating Bird Convention Act of 1916 was Canada's first legislation protecting wildlife. A bill now before parliament aims to protect 233 wildlife species -- including plants, animals and mollusks.
"The point is that we can make a difference," said Eleanor Zurbrigg, Chief of Recovery with the Canadian Wildlife Service.
The biodiversity atlas, produced by UNEP's World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, England, is the first comprehensive map-based view of global wildlife distribution. It shows that humans have directly impacted almost 47% of the global land area in the past 150 years.
Human beings, who divert 40% of the Earth's plant growth for their own use, are still causing a rate of extinction 100-200 times greater than would occur naturally, the report warns.
Wildlife diversity in Southeast Asia, the Congo Basin and parts of the Amazon is most at risk today, the report adds. One scenario shows that by 2032, as much as 48% of these areas will be converted for agriculture, plantations and urban use, compared to 22% today.
"We must address the issue of genetic resource-sharing by giving developing countries, where the majority of biodiversity remains, an economic incentive to protect wildlife by paying them properly for the plants and animals whose genes get used in new drugs or crops," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director.
The atlas notes that less than 1% of the world's 250,000 tropical plants have been screened for potential pharmaceutical applications. Since 80% of people living in developed countries rely on medicines based largely on plants and animals, the potential for developing new pharmaceuticals is enormous.
In the United States, 56% of the top 150 prescribed drugs -- with an economic value of US$80-billion -- are linked to discoveries made in the wild, the report says. But the current rate of extinction of plants and animals could be depriving mankind of one major drug every two years, it adds. In the past 400 years, 675 species have disappeared, the report says, including 83 mammals and 128 birds.
UNITED NATIONS - In a step-back from what it once presented as ``settled science,'' the United Nations announced Friday it would launch a review of its embattled climate change panel, whose credibility has been tarnished by global warming reporting errors.
The planned overhaul of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes just weeks after Britain's University of East Anglia launched its own quality control inquiry into the content of hacked e-mails that appear to show scientists seeking to silence dissenting climate change opinion.
Climate change skeptics say that, taken together, the two reviews amount to an admission on the part of those raising the global warming alarm that they have been relying on shaky data.
But the UN and climate change advocates say the errors exposed do not undermine the central conclusions of the IPCC's watershed 2007 ``assessment'' report - that climate change is a fact, and that the prevailing view among leading scientists is that industrial activity has significantly aggravated its intensity.
Details of the IPCC review panel will be disclosed next week, but it will be at arm's length of the IPCC, Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the UN Environment Program, said on the sidelines Friday of the agency's annual conference, on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.
``It will be a credible, sensible review of how the IPCC operates,'' he said.
Nuttall revealed that UNEP member states - ministers and officials of more than 135 countries are attending the conference - insisted that the review panel be ``fully independent and appointed by an independent group of scientists themselves.''
It is expected to come up with ways to better police the work of thousands of volunteer scientists who contribute to the assessment reports, which are produced every five or six years.
Nuttall said results of the review were expected to be ready for an IPCC plenary meeting in South Korea in October.
``I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue,'' he said in an indication the UN sees the review as a key tool for reversing the rising storm over the 2007 report errors and other controversy.
Canada's delegation at the conference was expected to have been part of the push for the review, but the office of Environment Minister Jim Prentice Friday adopted a standoff posture publicly.
``We don't have a specific comment on this,'' said Frederic Baril, spokesman for the minister.
A central question of the review will be the fate of IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian engineer. His reputation has been severely bruised by not only the months-long crisis involving the body, but also conflict of interest allegations.
Pachauri has denied taking consulting fees from business interests, saying he does not profit personally, but instead channels the fees to a non-profit research centre he runs in New Delhi.
But he remains the frontman for fallout over the biggest of the IPCC's admitted errors: the now widely discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035; and the overstating of how much the Netherlands is below sea level.
The exaggerations are critical because the 2007 report, as joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize that year with former U.S. vice president Al Gore, had come to drive political momentum toward a new, much more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
The UN is keen to regain the high ground in the global warming debate as it manoeuvres to be at the centre of any expansion of climate change governance institutions.
At the Bali conference, UNEP executive director Achim Steiner told reporters Friday that environmental government reform was a key part of this week's discussions, and that governments had raised the possibility of a World Environment Organization (WEO) along the lines of the World Trade Organization, which has disciplinary powers.
``The status quo is no longer an option,'' Steiner said. ``Within the broader reform options, the WEO concept is one of them.''
The conference - which is taking place at Bali's Nusa Dua, an enclave on the island known for its large international five-star hotels - marks the biggest gathering of climate change delegates since last year's chaos-ridden Copenhagen summit.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa called on countries to win back public trust by injecting greater urgency into negotiations ahead of the UN climate summit in November in Cancun, Mexico, another internationally popular resort city.
``To regain political momentum, the process must be open, transparent and inclusive,'' Natalegawa said.
Departing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said the Cancun meeting offered a huge opportunity to put the operational framework proposed in Copenhagen in place.
There were also calls for more commitment from China and India on capping emissions, with their support seen as crucial for a binding global accord.
China, the world's top emitter, and India, a fast expanding emitter, both failed to explicitly endorse the Copenhagen agreement, which pledged to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius along with billions of dollars in financing.
Fri Feb 26 2010
Fisheries and Oceans Minister Gail Shea said yesterday the federal government is protecting Canada's ocean resources, even as a United Nations study showed the world's seas are filthier than ever.
In a statement marking World Oceans Day, Shea called on Canadians to "consider the importance of oceans" to local livelihoods.
But the head of the UN Environment Program said the biggest single step any government can take is to ban the manufacture of supermarket-style plastic bags.
The bags and plastic bottles compose most of the plastic refuse that, in turn, is by far the most pervasive type of marine litter around the world, according to the report, titled Marine Litter: A Global Challenge.
Smokers are also identified in the 233-page report as being huge contributors to marine-borne garbage, tossing butts and cigarette wrappers that account for 40 per cent of the trash in the Mediterranean and more than half the rubbish off the coast of Ecuador.
Conducted with the Ocean Conservancy advocacy group, the report attempts to take stock of waterborne garbage in 12 major seas. It says that, despite international and localized protection measures, "alarming quantities of rubbish" thrown out to sea continue to pose safety and health threats to people and wildlife. The trash also damages nautical equipment and adversely affects tourism by defacing coastal areas.
"Marine litter is symptomatic of a wider malaise: namely, the wasteful use ... of natural resources," said Achim Steiner, UNEP executive director.
"Some of the litter, like thin film, single-use plastic bags, which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere (because) there is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere."
The report was released to coincide with the UN's first official recognition of World Oceans Day, which Canada proposed in 1992. It recommends governments increase public and business awareness of the effects of littering in or near the sea - and selectively impose fines on those who don't listen.
"This report is a reminder that carelessness and indifference is proving deadly for our oceans and its inhabitants," said Philippe Cousteau, chief executive officer of EarthEcho International, and an Ocean Conservancy board member.
Environment Canada operates a permit system controlling the disposal of waste and other material at sea.
The report says fines would work as a deterrent if they are as large as the $500,000 the United States imposed in 1993 on the cruise ship Regal Princess for dumping 20 bags of garbage into the sea.
Saying tourists have a "significant impact" on the state of the seas, the report praises the Seychelles and Mauritius for contributing almost nothing to the marine litter load in the western Indian Ocean despite being popular tourism destinations.
But in an illustration of the power of ocean winds and currents, it says the Seychelles have to put up with other people's garbage arriving during the southeast monsoon season. The report also laments that trash dumped off Western Australia ends up on the east coast of South Africa.
While Canadian waters were not among those studied, fisheries in northern regions like the Shetland Isles are highlighted as having suffered economic losses because of garbage arriving from elsewhere.
Cigarettes are the main source of Canadian marine debris, according to a recent separate report from Ocean Conservancy.
In South Asia, the growing ship-breaking industry has become a major source of marine debris, the latest report found.
Hazardous wastes, meanwhile, enter the western Indian Ocean, South Asian seas and the Black Sea because of poor solid-waste management facilities in the respective littoral states.
Tue Jun 9 2009
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Colour Photo: CHERYL RAVELO, REUTERS / A man collects recyclable plastic items washed onto the Philippine coast from the sea.
UNITED NATIONS - A global crisis meeting to save the great apes from extinction opens in Paris this week as conservationists warn that gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans are disappearing, even from two dozen protected areas in Africa and Southeast Asia, despite a United Nations recovery project.
The gathering is the first of its kind on such a scale and will see UN agencies appeal for US$25-million -- their biggest ever request for man's closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
The money will be used to kick-start the Great Apes Survival Project -- called Grasp for short -- which conservationists say has failed to halt the decline in many great ape populations.
Launched two years ago by the UN Environment Program, Grasp received praise from David Anderson, the Environment Minister, when he addressed the agency's governing council in February as outgoing president.
But while he cited it as being among UNEP's main achievements under his two-year presidency, Canada will send only a note-taker to the emergency Paris meeting, where delegates aim to thrash out a radical action plan.
"There are other more important initiatives in which Canada is interested," said Sebastien Bois, spokesman for Environment Canada, in explanation of why Canada has not contributed directly to Grasp. He added Canada supports the project "in principle."
Britain, Germany, Japan and Norway are already directly contributing to Grasp -- but less than US$1-million has been collected.
All three great ape species have been disappearing from their natural habitats for years, but increased rates of economic expansion have led the World Conservation Union, a global umbrella group, to warn of a high risk of extinction for some ape groups in 20 to 50 years.
The problem is that great apes are indigenous mainly to poor countries that see development of their natural resources as a necessity.
But mineral exploitation and agricultural activity disturb natural ape habitats, and logging destroys them. Roads also grant access to poachers, who hunt apes for bush meat, a high-priced delicacy in Africa.
A recent study showed a new threat comes from the spread of Ebola virus, which can be passed between humans and apes.
Under greatest threat are orangutans of Sumatra and Borneo. Their untouched habitat will shrink by 99% by 2030 at the current pace of human expansion, environmental experts say. Their loss to the wild would be permanent because orangutans in captivity rarely take to the forest when re-introduced, primate experts say.
There are also only a few hundred mountain gorillas still living wild in Central Africa, which is slowly emerging from decades of war and inter-ethnic slaughter. Cross River gorillas in Nigeria are similarly few in number.
Environmentalists say expected economic activity in resource-rich tropical areas will reduce the undisturbed natural homelands of African apes by 90% by 2030.
"It is not too late to stop uncontrolled exploitation of these forests," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP head. "But the clock is at one minute to midnight."
Noting the failure of reserves that exclude all economic activity, Grasp aims to create large areas called "biospheres" that have a core of virgin forest, but allow "sustainable" activities in "transition" areas.
"Part of the answer is to harness the power of tourism," said Matthew Woods, a Victoria, B.C., environmental science major working with UNEP in Africa. "There are projects in places like Rwanda that charge around US$250 a pop for people to sit with the gorillas.
"Some of the money goes into the pockets of the locals, so they see value in maintaining the forest, and not chopping down trees for firewood or agriculture."
Small-scale farming is also compatible, but while logging and plantation agriculture are ruled out, Grasp officials highlight other benefits .
"We hope to install the biosphere reserves across borders, which we believe will encourage trade and also help with peace building, something that is especially needed in central Africa," said Lucilla Spini, primate expert with UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), host of the Paris meeting.
Saving the great apes will also save "thousands and thousands of other animals, both high and humble, that live in the same forests," added Nick Nuttall, chief UNEP spokesman.
Canada gives US$2.5-million annually in "assessed" payments to UNEP, and last year gave US$10-million for specific projects, mostly in support of environmental agreements.
"Canada tries to focus its efforts on programs that reflect our priorities ... when allocating limited financial resources," Mr. Bois explained.
The Paris meeting, which runs to Friday, will see primate experts from around the world confer with representatives of current and potential donor countries, and also the 23 states targeted by Grasp. Delegates will produce a Global Great Ape Conservation Strategy, which will top the agenda at a much bigger intergovernmental gathering before the end of 2004.
NEW YORK - Raising the prospect of a new space race, George W. Bush is expected to announce soon that the United States will return Americans to the moon, then aim for a manned mission to Mars.
With the Soviet Union no more and its Russian successor state short of cash, the competitor this time will be China.
China's progress in space exploration is beginning to set off alarms in Washington after Beijing said this week that it plans to land a man on the moon by 2020.
China put a man into space in October and says it will send up three "Sinonauts" within two years.
Washington is abuzz with talk that Mr. Bush will breathe new life into the U.S. space program on one of three occasions:
- On Dec. 17, in a speech marking the centenary of the Wright brothers' first powered and sustained airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
- In January, in his State of the Union address to Congress.
- On Feb. 1, which besides being the first anniversary of the crash of the space shuttle Columbia is also Super Bowl Sunday. Houston is home to both the big game and NASA's human spaceflight program.
Although the White House is tight-lipped on the subject, Mr. Bush is expected to confirm new missions to the moon and speak about the possible establishment of a permanent lunar station.
Since the last manned moon landing in 1972, technology has advanced in leaps and bounds, enabling a host of activities, including energy exploration.
Mr. Bush would show U.S. sights are firmly set on Mars by explaining how a permanent lunar presence will allow technology and skills to be developed for a manned trip to the red planet.
It is unlikely Mr. Bush will set a timeline for reaching Mars, which is about to be visited by two unmanned probes, one American and one European. A Japanese spacecraft with a Canadian instrument on board has been plagued by technical problems and may not be able to enter Mars orbit as planned.
At his daily briefing yesterday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said it would be "premature to get into any speculation about our space policy" and refused to confirm any pending announcement.
But an interagency group that includes White House officials, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe and representatives from the Department of Defense has been meeting for several months to come up with specific space exploration options for the President to consider, and sources familiar with those meetings have suggested big plans are in the works.
Fuelling expectation of a major announcement are reports that Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, has discussed the subject of space exploration with senior members of Congress.
Two Texas Republican senators have also recently written to Mr. Bush urging him to "elevate the priority of the space program."
With a manned flight to Mars the next big prize in space, China is beginning to look like the fabled tortoise in the race against the more capable but less determined hare.
Clearly, the United States could reach the finish line first, but the slow-but-sure Chinese might surprise the Americans if they do not spring into action.
The United States was similarly asleep at the switch four decades ago when the Soviet Union opened the final frontier by sending its Sputnik satellite into orbit, then captured the world's imagination with the first manned space flight.
Those achievements prompted President John F. Kennedy to deliver his "bold challenge" to Congress on May 25, 1961.
He said the United States should commit itself to landing a man on the moon "before the decade is out."
Chinese officials have said that in contrast to the U.S.-Soviet space race, China will move ahead at its own careful, cost-effective pace.
"We will focus on deep-space exploration," said Luan Enjie, director of China's National Aerospace Bureau.
Mr. Bush's commitment would give Americans a renewed sense of being on the cutting edge of progress amid their anxiety about terrorism and the struggle to bring Iraq under control.
Mr. Kennedy delivered his "bold challenge" after the U.S. humiliation in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which saw Cuban leader Fidel Castro repel a U.S.-backed bid to overthrow him.
Mr. Bush would also be setting the stage for completing yet more work started by his father, George Bush.
While the senior Bush sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, his son's administration achieved that with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq this year.
On space, George Bush Sr. marked the 20th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing with an address on July 20, 1989, calling for a permanent U.S. presence on the moon and, ultimately, a mission to Mars.
Dan Quayle, then vice-president, and Richard Truly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration headed a group called the Space Exploration Initiative, whose 1991 America at the Threshold report set out a plan of action.
But with the exception of current efforts to build the International Space Station as a base orbiting Earth, no part of the plan has been implemented.
Even the ISS is behind schedule and over budget. It has also been scaled back since the loss of the Columbia.
Indeed, the United States has never regained the enthusiasm for the space program it had during the heady days of the early moon shots. Part of the problem, many people say, is the general lack of excitement generated by the low Earth orbits of the shuttles.
There are also cost concerns after the shuttles proved neither as reliable nor as inexpensive as NASA had promised.
Fourteen crew members died in the Columbia disaster, which occurred during re-entry, and in the 1986 loss of the Challenger, which exploded soon after takeoff.
The shuttles were grounded for 30 months after the Challenger loss while the accident was investigated.
During 18 years of flight, the cost of an average mission has been US$500-million, far higher than initial claims that payloads such as satellites could be sent into space for as little as US$100 a kilogram.
The launch schedule has also been erratic, while competition has emerged from China and the Europeans.
Fri Dec 5 2003
UNITED NATIONS - The Galapagos Islands, the Ecuadorean archipelago whose wildlife inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, were declared an endangered world heritage site yesterday after Ecuador admitted it could not properly protect them.
UNITED NATIONS - Cellphone users are killing off some of the most endangered apes in Africa, according to a new television documentary.
Eighty per cent of the world's known supply of coltan -- a mineral used in cellphone production -- is found in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the eastern lowland gorilla is fighting for survival as a species.
But the region is filled with foreign armies, militia and crime syndicates fighting for control of its natural resources -- including coltan. By driving a growing demand for coltan, cellphone users are "unwittingly ... contributing to the apes' downfall," says the British company Television Trust for the Environment in the film No hiding place -- Part Two.
Although fighting in parts of the Congo has fallen off, a recent United Nations report says peace deals have done nothing to abate the plunder of areas rich in minerals and other resources.
Eight national parks in eastern mountain ranges were once full of rare fauna and wildlife, but they are now subject to "highly organized and systematic exploitation," the report says.
The eruption of Congo's civil war saw neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda enter the country to support rebel groups trying to topple the Kinshasa government. Troops from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia arrived to support the national government.
With the spread of mobile phones, world prices for coltan jumped from US$65 to US$600 a kilogram in just a few years. It is now plundered with as much gusto in the region as diamonds, copper, cobalt and timber, the UN says.
Coltan is used in capacitors that regulate voltage and store energy in mobile phones. Its value as an income source for the regional power brokers is explained in the documentary by Ian Redmond, a British primatologist.
"Miners have to pay one spoonful of coltan to the military," he says of the system operating in one region. "That means about US$15. There are about 15,000 people working here, each paying US$15 per week to the military who control the region. That's something in the region of US$1-million a month going into the pockets of the militia."
The UN Environment Program last year launched an international campaign to save the gorilla, orangutan and chimpanzee from extinction. "The clock is standing at one minute to midnight for the great apes," Klaus Toepfer, UNEP director, said at the time.
The TVE documentary says the number of eastern lowland gorillas has declined by 80%-90% in the last five years and just 3,000 remain. Extensive logging over the last decade has opened vast spaces for exploitation, Dr. Jane Goodall, renowned for her four decades of work with chimpanzees, says in the documentary.
"Hunters from the towns go along the roads and shoot everything -- elephants, apes, monkeys, bats and birds," she says. "They smoke it, load it on to the trucks and take it into the cities. It doesn't feed starving people, but people who'll pay more for bushmeat."
Wed Jun 12 2002
© 2002 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Black & White Photo: Johnny Eggitt, Agence France-Presse / Only 3,000 eastern lowland gorillas remain in the Congo.
Edition: National Story Type: News Note: sedwards@nationalpost.com Length: 492 words Idnumber: 200206120174
UNITED NATIONS - In an echo of the 1960s space race, one of Russia's leading academics said Tuesday that Russia is already ahead in efforts to land people on Mars.
While President George W. Bush's 2004 call for a manned U.S. mission to Mars has an undetermined target date, Lev Zelyony, director of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, saidRussia will be ready by 2025 at the latest.
"We lost the race to the moon," he told Interfax news agency. "(But) we have something of a head start in this race as we have the most experience in manned (long-duration) space flight."
Even after the Russian space program all but collapsed when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Russian cosmonauts continued to man the Mir space station before it was de-orbited in 2001.
They subsequently spent time in the International Space Station (ISS), whose in-orbit assembly began in 1998 as a joint project of several space agencies, including Canada's.
"This means that a chain of manned flights has never been torn," said Zelyony.
Long-duration experience is important because a flight to Mars would take at least six months each way.
The U.S. has almost parallel experience, however, and three-quarters of everyone who has ever flown into space has been aboard one of the 120 or so flights of the U.S. shuttles.
Much of Russia's revival of its space program has come through co-operation with the European Space Agency, which in recent years has established itself as a major player in space exploration.
It too has spoken of launching a manned mission to Mars - but not before 2030.
Zelyony said if preparations need to begin now, Russia could be ready as early as 2023.
"It is prestigious and real and it is Russia's priority to land a cosmonaut on Mars," he said. "This task can be solved both economically and technically."
Neither the Russian government nor the Russian Space Agency has mentioned a timeline for a manned Mars mission.
"They have tremendous and proven capability in space and, if they really want to, I'm not at all saying they couldn't put people on Mars by 2025," Chris Hadfield, former Canadian astronaut who now heads Space Station Operations, said from Houston.
"But to even set a date is somewhat fanciful. We have to invent some things between now and then."
Under a plan backed by Bush, NASA aims at building an "outpost" on the moon over five years beginning in 2019 that would be permanently manned. From there, sights would be set on Mars.
Wed Jan 9 2008
UNITED NATIONS - Peace efforts in the Middle East are coinciding with some doors being opened for Israel at the United Nations, which for decades has marginalized the Jewish state.
After being named without objection to the UN's Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Israel could also join the governing bodies of the Environment Program and the housing agency Habitat.
The Jewish state's tentative emergence from the shadows has been made possible by Western democracies, which allowed Israel to join the Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG) at the United Nations three years ago.
States can sit on the UN's governing boards and committees only if they belong to one of its international blocs.
But Arab and Muslim countries kept Israel out of its geographic home in the Asian group for more than 40 years, effectively making it a second-class UN member.
Israeli officials are thrilled at the changes.
"We have a lot to contribute to the work of the international organization, and we must demonstrate to the world what we already know -- that Israel is far greater than the Arab-Israeli conflict," said Arye Mekel, Israel's deputy ambassador to the United Nations.
"The only way to do this is by hard work and wide participation in the different UN forums and organs."
But membership of the Security Council, the UN's most powerful body, remains a distant dream.
WEOG, which includes Canada, has already picked candidates for its two designated seats on the 15-member body for more than a decade ahead.
Israel would also have a difficult time mustering the necessary two-thirds majority in the 191-member General Assembly, where a coalition of developing nations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia routinely sides with the Arab countries in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"We can't even get a 50% plus one majority in the General Assembly, let alone two-thirds," said one Israeli official.
In addition, Arab and Muslim states have not stopped protesting Israel's presence on the international stage. Last month, for example, their senior diplomats boycotted a disarmament committee when it was due to be chaired by the Jewish state for four weeks.
The Conference on Disarmament is an independent body comprising 66 nations, including Canada, although its budget comes from the United Nations and it reports to the General Assembly.
Led by Iran, Arab and Muslim states sent only low-level diplomats to the conference, which meets in Geneva, and had them sit behind tables that did not show their countries' names.
"It was all rather childish really," said Andrew Srulevitch, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based monitoring group.
Still, several Western diplomats said the action was low key as anti-Israel protests go, with one pointing out the Arab and Muslim states "could have made more noise."
Mr. Srulevitch also said Israel's admission to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs marks a softening of opposition to the Jewish state at the United Nations.
Israel's candidature had to be endorsed by the 56-member Economic and Social Council, but no Arab or Muslim countries on that body objected when the matter came before them in April.
The council will meet this summer to consider candidates for Habitat's governing council, while the 191-member General Assembly, due to meet in September, must underwrite membership of the governing council for the UN Environment program.
WEOG has put Israel's name forward on the expectation of endorsements.
"These are small steps in the right direction to the ending of Israel's exclusion from the regional grouping system at the UN," Mr. Srulevitch said.
WEOG accepted Israel as a member in 2000 after overcoming reservations from Ireland, Italy and Spain. But it also set conditions, including a review of membership after four years and a ban on running for any post for three years.
Israel was also restricted to running only for posts decided at the UN's New York headquarters, and not those chosen at regional offices in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi.
Finally, Israel had to agree to continue to seek membership of the Asian group.
Given the Asian group's continued refusal to admit it, UN Watch suggests Israel be allowed to remain a WEOG member.
"WEOG is a group of Western liberal democracies," Mr. Srulevitch said.
"As a Western democracy, Israel should feel no less at home in WEOG as Australia, New Zealand or Canada."
Israeli officials say they are taking one step at a time.
"Maybe now with the peace process, everybody now has really big hopes," said one. "You can never know what will happen. We are very optimistic."
Fri Jun 6 2003
© 2003 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
UNITED NATIONS - Winter descends on northern Iraq without fail each year, but that did not stop United Nations officials being caught out by the annual drop in temperatures.
By forgetting the sequence of seasons last year, they had to pay "emergency" prices for winter supplies to care for refugees in northern Iraq, an area administered by the world body.
The cost of the relief effort was 61% higher than necessary, according to the annual report of the UN's internal audit service.
Purchases were made "on an exigency basis, even though the requirements were known in October," says the report, produced by the Office of Internal Oversight Services.
The finding is just one in a litany of examples of UN mismanagement, sloppy bookkeeping and fraud uncovered by OIOS during the 12 months preceding June 30.
One of the few examples of efficiency is the UN gift shop.
Then again, "gift centre operations" are contracted out to a private retail vendor, which, says the report, has increased royalties to the UN since it took on the task of selling UN souvenirs and books.
Handing over other UN duties to private relief agencies -- known as non-governmental organizations -- has proven less lucrative.
Some NGOs made "significant" exchange-rate gains by charging the UN in U.S. dollars and then paying for goods and services in local currencies, the report says.
OIOS auditors identified waste and theft over the year totalling US$17-million, but have recovered only US$5.3-million.
Despite producing a daily avalanche of paperwork, the UN's publishing services unit in Geneva is paid for doing nothing for almost 14 "working" weeks a year because they contract out so much work, according to the report. This resulted in a loss of $100,000 in 1998 alone.
Although the number of its employees has remained the same since 1996, the workload of copy preparers and proofreaders has fallen by half, the report says.
OIOS auditors found that UN employees at headquarters in New York took almost two weeks off sick over the year, with some staying at home almost three weeks.
Meanwhile, employees in the UN centre of Nairobi, Kenya, scooped up payroll overpayments totalling $42,000.
Nairobi was also at the centre of the UN's most embarrassing misdirection of funds for the year. More than $700,000 given by countries to help the UN environment program clean up the planet ended up in the New York bank account of a struggling single mother, who spent part of the funds on a cleaning project of her own: She bought a laundromat.
Susan Rouse Madakor was subsequently convicted of fraud and will be sentenced in February.
In UN-administered Kosovo, OIOS auditors found that computer problems led to $324,000 being overpaid to UN employees in "subsistence" allowances, which augment pay for people working away from home.
The OIOS admits it could do better, too. Seventy per cent of its staff are in New York, but 75% of its cases are elsewhere in the world. "Extensive travel is required," says the report, which recommends establishing more offices beyond New York.
UNITED NATIONS - An environmental task force is ready to begin assessing the extent of a largely hidden but deadly legacy of the Kosovo conflict – pollution.
Monitors from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the UN Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) will enter Kosovo as soon as they get the green light from the UN civil administration being established to temporarily run the province.
As thousands of refugees return to Kosovo, one fear is that sewage systems have been destroyed or fallen into disrepair, leading to human waste entering water supplies, causing cholera and other diseases to strike.
In the longer term, water supplies for entire regions both in and downstream from Yugoslavia could become carcinogenic cesspools if pollutants produced in the firestorms that engulfed bombed oil refineries and chemical plants are not quickly detected and removed.
"We urgently need clear, detailed and credible information on the impacts on human settlements and infrastructure, and on the possible environmental repercussions of the Balkans conflict," said Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister who now heads UNEP and UNCHS.
The findings of a single UNEP representative who accompanied a UN humanitarian-needs mission to Yugoslavia last month suggest the region's environmental health is hanging in the balance.
The findings were included in the mission's report, which says that "toxic smoke from huge fires and leakage of harmful chemicals into the soil and the water table have contributed to as yet unassessed levels of environmental pollution which will have a negative impact on health and ecological systems."
During its visit, the mission assessed the consequences of an April 18 attack on a petrochemical plant in Pancevo, 15 kilometres northeast of Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.
"The destruction . . . resulted in the release of various chemical fluids into the atmosphere, water and soil," says the report. "This poses a serious threat to health in the region. Many of the compounds released . . . can cause cancer, miscarriages and birth defects. Others are associated with fatal nerve and liver diseases."
Once it begins its work, the task force will be under pressure to rapidly identify contaminated areas before reconstruction begins, said Jim Sniffen, a UNEP spokesman. Because entire villages have to be rebuilt to replace ones destroyed by Serb forces, locations must be chosen where water supplies are safe and sustainable.
"We would have problems of water scarcity if sites were chosen that are so badly contaminated that local water could not be consumed," said Mr. Sniffen. "Having to bring in water from other sources would have a serious impact on the economic development of a community."
Though the task force will at first concentrate on assessing pollution levels in Kosovo, the environmental effects of the conflict go far beyond the borders of both the province and Yugoslavia.
Because many of the chemical plants or oil refineries bombed by NATO lie on the banks of the Danube or its tributaries, contaminants have entered the regional river system and been carried downstream to Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine before being emptied into the Black Sea.
Bulgaria reported a major oil slick on April 7 after NATO planes bombed a refinery upstream. This forced authorities to close water intakes that normally provide backup supplies of drinking water for local communities.
In Romania, the Ministry of Waters, Forests and Environmental Protection issued a report stating it feared fish stocks in the Danube may be reduced after monitoring devices recorded abnormally high concentrations of toxic heavy metals in the river.
The report said that on April 23, zinc levels peaked at 55 times the maximum admitted level while levels of heavy metals such as copper, chrome, cadmium and lead had also exceeded acceptable norms.
Acid rains have also occurred in Romania as a result of the conflict, the Environment News Service has reported.
For nine days at the end of April, up to 10 times the levels of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and ammonia were monitored in rains that fell in southwestern Romania, said the news service. On May 15, meanwhile, a 10- to 15-kilometre-long smoke cloud floated for several hours over Romania following the bombing of the Prahovo oil terminal.
For Philip Weller, who directs the Danube Carpathian Program for the World Wide Fund for Nature, the entire Balkan region has become environmentally hazardous.
"The scale of the human tragedy in Yugoslavia is already enormous," he said from Vienna. The World Wide Fund for Nature "is concerned that long-term damage to the environment in both Yugoslavia and surrounding Balkan countries will only increase problems in the region."
Mr. Weller said it is crucial to avoid delaying a cleanup of the Danube, which provides water for up to 10 million people. "This is a trans-boundary issue. Now that the war [is] over, urgent action has to be taken to protect the lower Danube and the millions of people whose security is linked to its environmental health."
Not only are human beings threatened. The river supports some of Europe's last surviving and richest natural wetlands, including the Danube's own vast and globally important delta region.
In the short term, the pollutants that have entered the Danube threaten to wipe out several riverine organisms, says World Wide Fund literature. In the long term, they would lead to a buildup of toxins in the food chain and render some species unable to reproduce.
Sturgeon presently on their spawning run and water-dependent birds such as pelicans and herons may be the first to be affected, according to Mr. Weller.
"The humanitarian issues are first and foremost in our minds," he said. "However, only immediate measures to stop the downstream flow of pollution will prevent an ecological catastrophe from following the humanitarian one."
Opinion is mixed as to whether fast action can significantly undo the damage already done.
Immediate action could contain the spread of contaminants, said Dr. Matthew Bramley, a Montreal-based specialist in toxins with the environmental lobby group Greenpeace. In particular, dioxin -- human carcinogens released by fires in bombed chemical plants -- can be "cleaned up by specialists" in places it is detected, he said.
"Usually, it is a question of digging up the contaminated soil and taking it away to be stored safely," he said. "If not, it remains an ongoing source of contamination for years to the water system and the food chain. And anything grown on the soil will also be contaminated."
But long-term damage to the environment is unavoidable no matter how fast and efficient the cleanup efforts, according to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader and current president of the environmental organization Green Cross International.
Writing in Italy's La Stampa newspaper, Mr. Gorbachev pointed to the extent of pollution caused during the 1991 Gulf War.
"Scientists and environmental experts estimate that 40% of Kuwait's strategic water resources have been irreversibly polluted with oil," writes Mr. Gorbachev.
To limit environmental damage in future conflicts, he argues that international rules of war should be amended to prohibit attacks on "certain industries and infrastructure." In particular, he says, "nuclear power stations, and some chemical and petro-chemical plants" should be off-limits.
NATO said it targeted chemical plants, oil refineries and gasoline dumps during the Kosovo conflict because they contributed to the Yugoslav war machine.
Weapons that may have "particularly dangerous, long-term and massive environmental and medical consequences" should also be prohibited, according to Mr. Gorbachev.
At the top of his weapons-to-ban list are those that contain depleted uranium, which the United States has confirmed it used during the Kosovo conflict.
Depleted uranium is about 40% less radioactive than natural uranium and has a variety of military applications, including increasing the penetrating power of armour and anti-armour rounds by taking advantage of the metal's density and metallurgical properties.
Depleted uranium weapons were first used extensively against Iraq, where they became associated with Gulf War syndrome -- an unexplained sickness suffered by some veterans of the conflict.
Baghdad has blamed the use of depleted uranium weapons for an increased number of birth defects, leukaemia and other cancers in Iraq since the war.
But a recent study of depleted uranium by the Rand Corporation, a California-based research institution, did not find any significant link between the metal and the Gulf War syndrome.
The corporation suggested, nevertheless, that further studies be carried out, given that the use of depleted uranium is likely to increase in the future.
NATO'S ENVIRONMENTALLY DANGEROUS TARGETS:
Pristina: Petroleum fuel storage, bombed April 9, 10, 14 & 26.
Smederevo: Petroleum fuel storage, bombed April 20.
Novi Sad: Petroleum refinery, bombed April 22, 26 and May 1, 3, 4, 7.
Nis: Petroleum products storage, bombed May 14 & 24.
Glogovac: Oil refinery, bombed May 16
Batinica: Petroleum products storage, bombed May 18.
Belgrade: Petroleum products storage bombed May 19.
Prahovo: Petroleum production plant bombed May 15, 26.
Bor: Oil refinery, bombed May 27.
Pozega: Petroleum fuel storage, bombed May 29.
BULGARIA:
- April 7: Report of a major oil slick in the Danube River after NATO planes bombed a refinery upstream.
ROMANIA:
- April 23: Monitoring devices record abnormally high concentrations of toxic heavy metals in the Danube River. Zinc levels reached a peak 55 times the maximum allowed level.
- April 21-30: Up to 10 times above normal concentrations of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and ammonia are monitored in rains on southwestern Romania.
- May 15: A 10- to 15-km long smoke cloud floats for several hours over Romania following the bombing of the Prahovo oil terminal.
Wed Jun 23 1999
© 1999 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Map: Federation of American Scientists / NATO's Environmentally Dangerous Targets: (See print copy for complete map.) • List: Federation of American Scientists / NATO's Environmentally Dangerous Targets: (Online) • Black & White Photo: Desmond Boylan, Reuters / In the Serb town of Novi Sad, oil refineries burn beside the Danube River -- the source of drinking water for 10 million people.
Encouraged by successful tests of three ground-based cameras in northern locations this past winter, a team from the University of Calgary will begin installing 13 more across or near the Canadian Arctic in the summer, while American scientists will set up four cameras in Alaska.
With additional pictures from cameras on five satellites NASA will launch in October, 2006, the scientists hope to be able to predict the time and intensity of the northern light shows, whose dancing columns of colour have inspired awe since time immemorial.
The US$180-million project -- funded mostly by NASA with a contribution from the Canadian Space Agency -- is one of the most advanced examples of ground-space co-ordination in the history of space exploration.
But apart from exciting scientists by giving them a greater understanding of cosmic processes, there is also a practical goal to the investigation.
On occasion, the forces that create the lights, named aurora borealis by the French astronomer Pierre Gassendi in 1621, produce unusually powerful energy surges.
Above the Earth, these surges can damage or knock out communications satellites, which today transmit everything from television programming, to the latest prices on the world's stock exchanges, to vital messages between air-traffic controllers.
At ground level, the surges can cause powerful distortions of the Earth's magnetic field, which in turn can disable electricity grids.
A nine-hour power loss in Quebec in 1989 is an example of the damage aurora-related energy storms can cause.
Scientists fear such outages are likely to increase in frequency as rising demand for electricity in North America means that many power grids are operating almost perpetually at peak levels and don't require much of a surge to put them over the top.
"If we can anticipate a surge by creating a sort of space weather map, we can protect grid systems by reducing the load on them in advance," said William Liu, the project's senior scientist at the Canadian Space Agency in Montreal.
"We can also mothball a satellite and reroute its communications in the short term, and design better, more resistant satellites in the long term."
It has long been known that the northern lights follow a sudden burst of energy created by the emission of electrical particles from the sun, the so-called solar wind. What's not known is exactly where the outburst -- likened by many scientists to the snapping of an elastic band -- occurs.
Some of the released energy reacts with other particles in the atmosphere, "exciting" them into emitting light. But some distorts the Earth's magnet field, or causes damage to satellites.
Knowing the location of the weak point in the process would help scientists predict the consequences.
"It would be akin to an avalanche expert identifying the weak point of a snow-covered mountain," said Mr. Liu.
Brian Jackel of the University of Calgary puts the importance of the research on a par with seismic studies.
"It's like looking at earthquakes and volcanoes," he said. "They're pretty rare and difficult to understand, but the consequences of not understanding them are pretty big."
The ground cameras will snap shots of a northern lights eruption every five seconds, and other equipment will measure the distortions of the magnetic field.
"The big thing for us is the extent to which this is an integrated ground-based and space-based mission," Mr. Jackel explained.
"In the past, people tended to either do something on the ground with cameras or [magnetic field detectors], or someone flew a satellite into space. By putting the two of them together you get a tremendous amount more information."
Natural Resources Canada and scientists from the University of Alberta in Edmonton are also involved, while the job of building and operating the five satellites has gone to the University of California, Berkeley.
"This is probably the oldest and most important problem to solve in the field, and that is why a very large international magnetospheric community is behind it," said Vassilis Angelopoulos, who leads the project at Berkeley.
He said the project has been given the name Themis -- the blind Greek goddess of justice -- to reflect its mission to be an impartial judge in the investigation. But being space scientists, the project participants have also given the letters a more space-age signification: "Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms."
Fri Apr 15 2005
© 2005 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Colour Photo: Paul Grover / The US$180-million project -- funded mostly by NASA with a contribution from the Canadian Space Agency -- to photograph the northern lights from above and below is one of the most advanced examples of ground-space co-ordination in the history of space exploration. Researchers will set up 13 cameras across the Canadian Arctic and four in Alaska.
Illustration: • Colour Photo: Paul Grover / The US$180-million project -- funded mostly by NASA with a contribution from the Canadian Space Agency -- to photograph the northern lights from above and below is one of the most advanced examples of ground-space co-ordination in the history of space exploration. Researchers will set up 13 cameras across the Canadian Arctic and four in Alaska.
Inca secrets may lie in knots
The Inca shared records with the conquistadores; they may have drawn from a three-dimensional language
By Steven Edwards
NEW YORK - New research suggests the Inca, who controlled the largest pre-Columbian empire of the Americas, did have the means to record language despite long being considered a civilization that had failed to develop writing.
The hidden history of Inca rule, which extended up and down the Andes for 100 years before the Spanish conquest of 1532, may be contained in the Incas' famous knotted strings, called khipu, the latest research indicates.
Until now, khipu (also spelled quipu) were widely thought to be little more than accounting tools, with various knot combinations representing totals like beads on an abacus. Because no one has ever been able to decipher the knot patterns, many scholars have said khipu were the haphazard concoctions of individuals, and were not ''recording machines'' designed to be read universally. Some scholars have even dismissed khipu as mere ''reminders'' for their owners to do tasks or recite stories, like string tied around a person's finger.
But comprehensive study by an antiquities scholar at Harvard University suggests the patterns not only conformed to a universal standard, but represented a writing system that was the technological equivalent of systems developed by the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Mayans and the Chinese.
While none of those systems is as versatile as an alphabet-based one, which can represent an infinite number of sounds, they were all early breakthroughs in mankind's ability to record his surroundings more efficiently than in pictures.
''When you think about it, the idea that the khipu is just a cacophonic or wildly chaotic system producing radically idiosyncratic records to account for the state of goods and resources just doesn't make sense,'' said Gary Urton, who joined Harvard faculty last year as professor of pre-Columbian studies. ''I believe it is based on a shared system of record-keeping whereby sign values are assigned to these khipu structures.''
Compared to the civilizations of ancient Greece or Rome, the Inca have been the focus of relatively few studies, so many mysteries surrounding them have yet to be resolved.
Deciphering khipu could yield answers to the Inca's other secrets, such as how they built precision-fit walls without a cementing material, or what use they made of their subsequently ''lost city,'' Machu Picchu.
Evidence suggesting khipu could be interpreted by anyone trained to read them came two weeks ago after hundreds of hours of painstaking analysis of 32 khipu discovered in 1997 among 225 mummy bundles in a rock overhang in northern Peru.
Mr. Urton and his team identified matching patterns or sequences, believed to convey numerical data, in three of the khipu.
''So we have the first evidence of a system of checks and balances,'' he said. ''With that new find, we're getting the first clear evidence that these people were not just keeping information in a way that only one official had the only record, and only he could testify.''
Mr. Urton has also begun arguing that khipu incorporated a binary code capable of conveying at least 1,536 pieces of information. For comparison, the earliest forms of Sumerian cuneiform had 1,300-1,500 signs, and Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphics 600-800.
Mr. Urton bases his argument on the typical decisions a khipu maker had to make when constructing a khipu.
For example, khipu were invariably made from cotton or wool, tasking the khipu maker to choose one or the other when creating a knotted string. The maker would then have to decide whether to spin or ply in clockwise or counter-clockwise directions. Hanging the knotted string on the front or back of the main cord would also present two choices. In all, there were six sets of alternatives, plus a choice of 24 colours, Mr. Urton said. That permutates into 1,536 different ways to ''write'' a khipu sign.
If Mr. Urton is right, the Inca not only adopted a computer-age binary code at least 500 years before the invention of computers, but also gave the world its only known three-dimensional ''written'' language, given that writing to date has always been laid down on flat surfaces, such as paper.
Mr. Urton presents his conclusions in his just-released book, Signs of the Inka Khipu, using the spelling of Inca used today in Quechua, the official language of the Inca empire.
Confirming Mr. Urton's conclusions depends on being able to translate khipu, which would be simple with the discovery of a South American equivalent of the Rosetta Stone -- the basalt slab found at Rosetta, near Alexandria in Egypt, that allowed scholars to decipher an Egyptian hieroglyphic text from demotic and Greek translations.
Hope that a ''Rosetta khipu'' exists comes from evidence the Spaniards initially worked closely with khipu keepers as they tried to insert themselves into the Inca's administrative system without disrupting it too much, to avoid slowing the flow of wealth.
''There was a tremendous amount of production of documents on administrative matters in the early Spanish colonial state in Peru,'' Mr. Urton said. ''And the main source of information for the Spaniards as they set up a colonial empire was the khipu keepers, whom they would call in and say, 'Read me the information off your khipu.' ''
As in Canada under French colonial rule, Catholic religious orders such as the Jesuits were prodigious record keepers, and may have produced a translation of a khipu that has yet to be found.
But the closest to a match so far is only a complex khipu containing 3,005 knots that Mr. Urton has argued is reflected in Spanish documents mentioning a khipu keeper known as the ''Lord of the 3,000 Tribute Payers.'' Made up of 12 sections containing two sets of 365 strings, Mr. Urton said the khipu is clearly a two-year calendar recording the work 3,000 subjects did for the Inca state.
Mr. Urton said he is optimistic a khipu and a parallel document in a European language -- most likely Spanish -- will be found.
''One can't give a reasonable estimate of how long that might take, because there are not that many people working in this field, and thousands of documents to go through in archives,'' he said.
In the meantime, Mr. Urton and his team are mimicking wartime code breakers by trying to identify similarities in khipu patterns. Information is fed into a computer database as it is gradually collected from some 600 khipu held in museums.
The work of Mr. Urton and his team is at the ''cutting edge,'' according to Thomas Cummins, professor of the history of pre-Columbian and colonial art at Dumbarton Oaks, a research library in Washington, D.C., that is administered by Harvard trustees.
Mr. Urton's binary theory is drawn from the analysis and re-analysis of his own observations and the work of other scholars, including William J. Conklin, a research associate at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., who was the first to suggest, in 1997, that spinning, plying and colour-coding were an important part of the khipu system.
''Over the years, research has been ... fragmented,'' Mr. Urton said. ''My theory brings together the different features.''
Mon Jun 30 2003
© 2003 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Black & White Photo: Ricardo Choy Kifox, The Associated Press / The "lost city" Machu Picchu represents a mystery to archeologists. Part of the reason is the absence of a written Inca language, which could be resolved if knotted strings are shown to be more than accounting tools.
© 2003 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Black & White Photo: Ricardo Choy Kifox, The Associated Press / The "lost city" Machu Picchu represents a mystery to archeologists. Part of the reason is the absence of a written Inca language, which could be resolved if knotted strings are shown to be more than accounting tools.
Ocean noise threatens sea life
BY STEVEN EDWARDS
Fish and sea mammals are going deaf and dying because of increasingly intense noise pollution in the formerly silent ocean depths, marine scientists say as the United Nations today considers placing the matter on its international agenda.Ship traffic, military sonar, and seismic air guns used in oil and gas exploration are creating a cacophony that is drowning out the natural sounds of marine life, the scientists have been telling a UN conference this week on oceans and the law of the sea.
They want ships fitted with quieter engines, navies to invent more fish-sensitive sonars, and oil and gas companies to use their exploration guns only when they're sure there are no schools of fish, whales or dolphins around.
They add that some areas should be declared sea sanctuaries, where all human activity is banned regardless of oil and gas potential.
The call for international regulations comes from the North American Ocean Noise Coalition, the European Coalition for Silent Oceans, and the South American Noise Coalition.
“Squid have been found with exploded ears, and exploded organs,” said Marsha Green, an animal behavior scientist, who is also part of a U.S. federal advisory committee on acoustic impacts on marine mammals.
“Deadly man-made sounds are invading the silent world, and some sounds are so loud and intense, they are injuring, deafening and killing marine life.”
The groups say man-made noise levels under the sea have doubled every decade for the past six decades. Green said whales flee when faced with noise of 120 decibels - produced, for example, by a 25-horsepower engine on a small inflatable craft. But oil and gas air guns blast with a noise intensity of 240 decibels.
“Because we are talking about a logarithmic scale, that's a trillion times louder,” she said.
Intense and sudden noise causes brain hemorrhaging and disorientation in marine life, the groups say. Reduced catch counts of 45% to 70% in areas of loud man-made noises show fish have scattered or been killed, they argue.
The disorienting effect of sonic activity on whales, dolphins and squid is shown by numerous examples of stranding on beaches, the scientists say. Some 34 whales beached themselves in North Carolina in January following U.S. Navy sonar tests.
Other beachings believed related to noise pollution over the past 30 years have occurred in Hawaii, the Canary Islands, Corsica, Greece and in several Caribbean locations. The groups believe the U.S. Navy knows more than it is letting on about the effect of sonar exercises on marine life. They also say naval authorities refuse to release autopsy results of the whales killed in the January beaching.
The groups say the United States, France, Portugal, Norway and South Korea in March opposed the idea of putting ocean-noise pollution on the international agenda. They hope to change minds today when one of the many committees looking for topics to discuss at the UN's fall summit assesses the marine scientists' case.
June 10, 2005
UN promotes Chernobyl wildlife tours
'Three-headed deer?'
By Steven Edwards
A report produced by several leading UN agencies says lack of human activity in those areas has allowed plants and animals to flourish.
"It sounds odd, but the restricted areas have actually developed over the past 16 years or so into an extraordinary environmental opportunity," said Kalman Mizsei, deputy UN co-ordinator for Chernobyl. "The natural environment has returned there. It is a huge area that is very natural, with lots of wildlife and unique types of animals."
Tour operators say the idea is a non-starter.
"What type of unique animals -- three-headed deer?" said Fergus Maclaren, a Canadian serving as director for the International Year of Eco-tourism, in Burlington, Vt.
The explosion and fire at Chernobyl's No. 4 reactor on April 26, 1986, contaminated not only vast areas of surrounding Ukraine, but also a quarter of Belarus and parts of Russia.
Soviet authorities evacuated the most dangerously radiated areas near the plant, but 200,000 people still live in contaminated areas and many of those who were resettled still do not have jobs.
Other job creation projects suggested in the UN's A Strategy for Recovery are fostering small businesses and reviving agriculture.
Safety of visitors is a concern for tour operators.
"Anyone visiting the area would want repeated and well-tested reassurances that the area around Chernobyl is safe to visit," said Martha Chapman, spokeswoman for Signature Vacations, one of Canada's largest tour operators. "And those assurances would have to come from third party associations of scientists -- not local scientists."
Eco-tourism is a growing part of the industry, with popular destinations including the Galapagos Islands, the Masai Mara region of Kenya and Nepal.
"When there are so many wonderful and truly natural destinations in the world, why would an eco-tourist visit Chernobyl?" said Mr. Maclaren.
Mr. Mizsei insists there are few health dangers for tourists because "accurate maps of contaminated areas are available."
Wed Feb 13 2002
© 2002 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Dinosaur found in belly of prehistoric mammal
By Steven Edwards
NEW YORK - A fossil unveiled in New York Wednesday challenges the long-held view that mammals of the dinosaur age were no bigger than rats and lived in mortal fear of being eaten by the giant reptiles.
The fossil of the cat-sized mammal has the remains of a dinosaur inside its stomach. The mammal, now extinct, lived in northeastern China.
Never before have scientists found evidence that early mammals ate dinosaurs or any other vertebrates.
The cat-sized mammal and a second dog-sized mammal fossil found in the same area are both about 130 million years old. Their size they are much larger than most mammal fossils found in that era suggest our distant ancestors could hold their own in dinosaur times. Mammals were players long before they "inherited" the Earth following the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
"We can now see dinosaurs were edible and maybe even tasty," said paleontologist Meng Jin as he raised a cloth covering the cat-sized fossil at the American Museum of Natural History. "This is a great discovery that gives us a drastically new picture of many of the animals that lived in the age of the dinosaurs."
In part, the fossil finds make obsolete the standard children's book representation of the Mesozoic era 140 million to 65 million years ago which typically shows large dinosaurs as central figures of the environment, and tiny mammals relegated to a corner, if they are even included.
The existence of carnivorous mammals may also have placed evolutionary pressure on some dinosaurs to grow larger or develop bird-like features to avoid being a meal for their warm-blooded contemporaries.
Villagers stumbled across the fossils two years ago in a part of Liaoning province where sediments have preserved many dinosaur bones and early birds. Meng and colleagues at Beijing's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology named the mammals Repenomamus (reptile-mammals) because they had some reptile characteristics, including short limbs.
Meng and his graduate student Hu Yaoming discovered dinosaur remains in the cat-sized mammal Repenomamus robustus during research at the New York museum this past summer.
"We knew the bones did not belong to this mammal," he said. "Under the microscope we saw teeth and realized it was a baby dinosaur."
The mammal had eaten a young psittacoasaur, a two-legged parrot-faced herbivore. The unfortunate beast was about a third of the size of its devourer. As an adult the psittacoasaur would have been two metres long.
Meng said it's not clear whether the mammal had killed the dinosaur, or was eating carrion. However, the dinosaur's worn teeth show it had eaten a meal or two, and had not simply been snatched helpless at birth.
Other analysis revealed only part of the dinosaur was in the mammal's stomach, indicating the feast had been shared. The remains were also in chunks, indicating that chewing came later in the evolutionary cycle.
Meng said the good condition of both fossils indicate the animals died suddenly but without violence, probably poisoned by volcanic gases. Sediments and volcanic ash then covered them.
The dog-sized mammal Repenomamus giganticus died with its tail curled around it for warmth.
Both mammals became extinct sometime before the end of the age of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are believed to have disappeared following climate change provoked by an asteroid or comet hitting the earth.
Meng, the museum's associate curator in the Division of Paleontology, is the lead author of an article that appears today in the scientific magazine Nature describing the fossils. His co-authors are Hu and Wang Yuanqing, a researcher at the Beijing institute.
Thu Jan 13 2005
CanWest News Service
Canadian astronaut fights to save planet from killer asteroids; Chris Hadfield argues the world needs an agreement on who does what if we face a direct hit, writes Steven Edwards at the UN.
The countdown begins next week for the United Nations to take on the task of saving the world – not from the usual scourges of war, disease or poverty, but from an asteroid attack.
Former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is among experts who say the planet needs an international agreement on who does what if we face a direct hit. The first of four international workshops aimed at drawing up a protocol begins in Strasbourg, France, on Wednesday.
The average Earth-constrained soul worries little about falling victim to a "near-Earth object" strike. Astronauts, however, often see it differently. Under the leadership of the Association of Space Explorers, Mr. Hadfield and other former spacemen have argued for a political plan to use technology to deflect all but the most immovable Earth-bound asteroids.
"When people have had a chance to leave Earth, it tends to give us a different perspective," Mr. Hadfield said from Moscow, where he is serving as operations chief for the International Space Station.
Noting that an estimated 1,000 tonnes of meteorites burn up on their way toward Earth every day, Mr. Hadfield said the craters and scars from objects that made it through our protective atmosphere are a sobering sight for space travellers.
"Every once in a while, a big-enough one comes that has a major impact," Mr. Hadfield says.
"But because, for the first time in history, we have the technology to detect one of these things as it is coming, it would be irresponsible of us not to have a plan for both (predicting) where it might hit and (doing) something ... about it."
The most devastating strike in recent history came in 1908 when an enormous asteroid or piece of comet caused an explosion as big as that set off by Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated by the United States. The space rock resulted in what has become known as the Tunguska Event at the location of the river of the same name in Siberia.
While we may today be able to use rockets to push or pull away such an object before it collides with Earth, complex problems remain.
Who, for example, should carry out and pay for such an operation? And what if the asteroid were hurtling towards, say, the United States, and American deflection efforts caused it to crash into China? Would Washington have to indemnify Beijing? In the absence of a fixed remedy, is there a danger that Beijing would interpret the U.S. action as an act of war?
Diplomats, scientists, academics, international law experts and even insurance officials are invited to the workshops. The goal is to have a draft protocol on asteroid countermeasures ready for presentation by 2009 to the UN's Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart first suggested creating an international protocol at the 2005 congress of the space explorers association, which he founded.
Later that year, the U.S. Congress asked NASA, the U.S. space agency, to expand an asteroid-tracking project called the Spaceguard Goal to include asteroids 140 metres in diameter and larger.
The project was also supposed to propose ways to deflect those that menace our planet.
"Our telescopes have been getting better and better, and if you can find a lot of things that can potentially threaten you, then the next thing is to start thinking about protecting yourself against them," Mr. Schweickart said in an interview.
NASA warned in a report in March that its budget won't cover the $1 billion U.S. needed by 2020 to locate at least 90 per cent of the 20,000 asteroids and comets that could threaten the Earth.
However, an international agreement to share the costs among member states of the UN could solve the problem. Under the current formula for cost-sharing at the world body, the United States pays a little less than a quarter of the UN's global budget, while Canada pays around three per cent.
Any draft protocol devised by space experts would have to be endorsed by the UN's 192 member states before becoming legally binding on all.
In the meantime, Earth remains defenceless against the largest asteroids, like the 10-kilometre-wide behemoth believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Fortunately, there are only about 60 of the bodies known to exceed five kilometres across, and Mr. Schweickart says being hit by one is a "one-in-a-hundred-million-years type of event."
Sat May 5 2007
© 2007 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Skeptics chop away at billion-tree plan
The UN says its massive planting of trees will cut global warming. Some environmentalists say it probably won't help, and could do more harm than good.
By Steven Edwards in New York
An ambitious United Nations plan to oversee the planting of one billion trees worldwide – including 50 million in Canada – moved ahead yesterday despite mounting criticism from arguably unexpected quarters.
Officials at the Nairobi headquarters of the UN's environment wing declared that groups and governments around the world have pledged to exceed the goal -- and said the initiative will help fight climate change and poverty.
"People talk too much. We are no longer talking; we are working," said Kenya's Wangari Maathai, whose work as a "green" activist won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.
UN Environment Program chief Achim Steiner said the pledges represent a "billion statements" by people worldwide who are saying "time has run out for debating."
Monaco's Prince Albert II is among other international figures who've lent their names to the overall UN effort, while actress Daryl Hannah is backing the planting drive in Canada.
But among the rising number of critics are activists and scientists who share the UN's premise that global warming is a fact -- but say the "Billion Tree" campaign risks causing more harm that good.
"You can't just say, 'There's a billion extra trees; it's automatically a good for the environment,'" said Kevin Smith, author of The Carbon Neutral Myth, a newly released report by Amsterdam-based Carbon Trade Watch. "You have to work out the local context, where you're planting them, and what type of trees you're planting."
He told of a planting scheme in Uganda that resulted in farmers being thrown off their land.
More widely known is the case of eucalyptus plantations in Brazil that, says Mr. Smith, are a "disaster for local biodiversity," and absorb so much water they "deplete people's water resources."
While Mr. Smith is a strong supporter of the premise that man-produced "greenhouse gases" have caused or accelerated global warming, his report says there is a "huge degree in variation in estimates of how much (carbon dioxide) trees are capable of absorbing."
The 80-page report also cites a recent study by the Carnegie Institu
tion of Washington in Stanford, California, which concluded most forests do not have any overall impact on global temperature because of the additional heat trees in temperate regions absorb.
"The idea that you can go out and plant a tree and help reverse global warming is an appealing, feel-good thing," said Ken Caldeira, a co-author of the Carnegie study. "To plant forests to mitigate climate change outside the tropics is a waste of time."
Meanwhile, a top United Nations official says he is no longer alarmed by Canada's stand on the Kyoto Protocol now that he better understands the government's position.
"I must admit, I was worried for some time, but I was much encouraged by the clarification," Yvo de Boer, executive secretary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in Montreal yesterday.
He said he now understands that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government wasn't rejecting the value of the Kyoto accord, but rather observed its objectives cannot be met within the target deadline. Mr. de Boer was responding to reporters' questions after his speech.
Launched at a major UN climate meeting in November, the Billion Tree campaign had by yesterday recorded 1,013,331,365 pledges to plant. Of these, a little more than 14 million were already in the ground, the UN said.
"There were many people around the world asking, 'What can I do about (climate change) and Wangari Maathai said let's get people planting trees," recounted UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall. "This was essentially the empowerment of people ... and people are already sending in videos and pictures to demonstrate that they have done it."
Environment Canada said yesterday it had made no pledges on behalf of the Canadian government, but a Canadian environmental group called Our World Clean Air Forest Initiative has told the UN it wants to be a campaign partner.
"Our pledge of 50 million trees will be planted in Canadian cities ... over the next decade," said spokesman Randolph Lee.
Wed May 23 2007
© 2007 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration:
• Colour Photo: The boreal region is among the last stretches of original forest on Earth. The UN's program would see 50 million trees planted in Canada.
• Colour Photo: Actress Daryl Hannah is among the celebrities backing the planting drive in Canada.
UN's Kosovo cleanup shows war was wise
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - Teams of environmental cleanup experts dispatched by the United Nations to Kosovo after the NATO bombing have successfully restored the four most polluted industrial sites to near-pristine condition.
This is counter to the beliefs held by some environmental groups. They claim the sites had been so polluted by the 1999 bombing they would always pose a threat to residents' health.
In the activists' view, allowing Slobodan Milosevic, then Yugoslavia's ruler, to continue his ethnic cleansing campaign in the Serb province was preferable to hobbling his war machine.
Now, officials of the UN Environment Program (UNEP) say the four sites -- Pancevo, Kragujevac, Novi Sad and Bor -- are in better shape than they were before the war. They point out that much of the pollution was not the result of the NATO campaign. Rather, it was caused by years of neglect under the country's Communist rulers.
The success of the cleanup, the first of its kind ever undertaken by the United Nations, bodes well for similar efforts unfolding in Afghanistan and Liberia, and planned for Iraq when the security dangers subside. It shows that, over the long term, progress can be made on all fronts in the struggle to build a better society when a dictatorial regime is overthrown.
"The closure of UNEP's [cleanup] activities in the Balkans is a positive signal," said Klaus Toepfer, the program's executive director. "It demonstrates that ... southeastern Europe is progressing from conflict to peace."
The level of damage appeared enormous at the time, as the bombs set off firestorms in oil refineries, chemical plants, car plants and other factories.
Environmentalists said the release of pollutants would turn Yugoslavia's water reserves into carcinogenic cesspools.
Because many of the targets were on the banks of the Danube or its tributaries, contaminants would flow into Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine, they warned.
Bulgaria reported a major oil slick on the river after NATO planes bombed a refinery upstream. In Romania, the government said high concentrations of toxic heavy metals in the Danube threatened fish stocks. Acid rain fell on Romania.
The bombing of another oil terminal sent a 10- to 15-kilometre-long smoke cloud over the country.
Among the prophets of doom was Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader. Long-term damage to the environment was unavoidable, no matter how fast and efficient cleanup efforts were, he said in an article in Italy's La Stampa newspaper as head of the environmental organization Green Cross International. For his part, Mr. Milosevic claimed repeatedly the West had caused irreparable damage to the entire region.
The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland were the biggest donors among 10 European Union backers of the UN cleanup. The work began with on-site assessments by experts who toured the country in mobile laboratories.
"It was the first time the UN had done this after a war," said Robert Bisset, Paris-based spokesman for UNEP.
"The experts found there wasn't a huge amount of environmental damage caused by the war, but the war had made the pollution problem worse."
The four cities with the biggest industrial targets were flagged as "hot spots" needing immediate attention. Pollution ranged from liquid mercury on the ground at Pancevo to PCB leakage into the soil from a car factory in Kragujevac.
"One of the big images of the war was a big black cloud over Pancevo," Mr. Bisset said. "But it's a fine line to know what quantity of pollutants were in the ground before the war."
The cleanup involved carting away thousands of tonnes of soil, treating other deposits and training local authorities in techniques to prevent future pollution. A big rebuilding program included replacement of damaged or ageing sewage treatment plants and other waste-removal infrastructure such as pipes. Following completion of 17 separate projects, UNEP says fresh drinking water is now assured for tens of thousands of people.
"The result is not perfect but it is certainly restored to the state it was before the conflict," Mr. Bisset said.
"In fact, the Serbs are in a better position today, thanks to the new equipment, the new technologies and the training."
In a ceremony in Belgrade on Friday, UNEP handed over the documentation and equipment used in the cleanup to the Serbian Ministry of Science and Environmental Protection.
"More work is needed in Pancevo and Bor [because of earlier] inadequate technologies," Miroslav Spasojevic, head of the ministry's international co-operation department, said after the ceremony.
"But Kragujevac and Novi Sad are not to be regarded as black spots any more."
Wed May 12 2004
© 2004 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Galapagos' UN listing threatened by illegal fishing
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - The islands that inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution – Ecuador's Galapagos – are in danger of being delisted as a Natural World Heritage Site because of government failure to crack down on illegal fishing.
Canadian Marc Patry will be part of a UNESCO delegation leaving Sunday to tell the Ecuadorian president: "Protect the islands or risk having them re-classified."
If expert studies determine illegal fishing has caused substantial damage to ecosystems, UNESCO could list the islands as an Endangered World Heritage Site, strip them of all Heritage classifications, or issue a schedule for improvements.
Any form of re-classification would be bad news for Ecuador, which earns around $200 million US annually from tourists who visit the islands because of their supposed pristine condition and wide variety of plant and animal species.
"If the world body that oversees the quality of these sites says it no longer meets the required standards, people might think twice before going to Galapagos," Patry said from Paris, headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
The roots of the crisis go back a decade ago when fishermen from the mainland began moving to the islands in large numbers after exhausting coastal stocks.
They originally sought sea cucumber, but as that species became scarce, many turned to long-line fishing for shark, tuna, swordfish and squid.
However, the technique also kills marine life for which the Galapagos are famous, including turtles, seals and sea birds.
"Ecuador has recently tightened shark exports at the national level, but ... on the whole, they have been caught up with other things," said Patry.
Commercial fishing is officially banned in the Galapagos Marine Reserve, but rangers have been hard pressed to enforce the law despite having access to an additional patrol boat lent by the Canadian-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
While the fishing community now makes up a large part of the archipelago's 20,000 population, fishermen have also been quick to mount protests, some of them violent, as they press for legalization of long-line fishing. Sea Shepherd founder and president Paul Watson also says Ecuadorian authorities have succumbed to corruption.
"The corruption is just out of control," he said from the society's Farley Mowat vessel off Eastern Canada in the campaign against the seal-pup hunt.
"The fishermen are getting everything they wanted. And if they legalize long-lining in the Galapagos, it will be the death of the marine reserve."
Sea Shepherd began joint patrols with the Ecuadorian rangers in 2000 after publishing a report in 1995 on deteriorating conditions.
"Every time we go down there I confiscate miles and miles of long lines and I intercept long liners," Watson said. "I had our larger vessel there last July and arrested four, and turned them over to the rangers. Our other vessel is intercepting them all the time."
One protest saw fishermen threaten to introduce goats to one of the islands. Another saw them threaten rangers with gasoline bombs. They have also manned roadblocks and threatened to cut off turtles' heads.
The archipelago's World Heritage status will be reviewed by UNESCO's 21-country World Heritage Committee at its annual meeting in July.
The archipelago's fishing industry earns only $6 million USa year for the Ecuadorian economy, but the Ecuadorian government says it hopes to please both the fishermen and the tourist industry. "It may be impossible," said a senior official at the Ecuadorian mission to the United Nations. A plea for international help has been made to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has asked the world body's development agency to get involved.
The country's leading conservation group, Fundacion Natura, says the problem is linked to a political crisis in Ecuador that has resulted in five environment ministers and eleven Galapagos governors in two years.
"We are going through a period of crisis and Galapagos can't isolate itself from the problems of the rest of the country," said Ruth Elena Ruiz, acting director of the group.
CanWest News Service
Thu Apr 7 2005
Western 'bio-pirates' cheating Africa over impotence treatment: report
Canadian firm named
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - The Canadian maker of a product marketed as a natural treatment for impotence is branded a suspected "bio-pirate" by U.S. and South African environmental groups in a new study.
The term refers to acquiring biological resources, ranging from plants to bacteria, without giving the country of origin a chance to negotiate for a share of any eventual profits.
A UN biodiversity convention grants countries sovereign rights over their flora and fauna, but there is little a government can do to claim compensation once a natural material is taken overseas.
Canada will take part in international talks in Brazil next month at which developing countries will lead calls for an eventual deal on who gets what.
The new study, Out of Africa: Mysteries of Access and Benefit Sharing, points the finger at some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies as it focuses on natural material taken from the world's poorest continent to Western laboratories.
"We're against theft and against not recognizing these things couldn't have happened without the countries from which they were taken," said Beth Burrows, head of the Edmonds Institute in Washington state, which published the 54-page study with the African Centre for Biosafety.
"It's not simply that someone [takes a] plant. They also talk to people who say, 'You know we've been using this for 500 years.' That's their early science, and they deserve recognition, remuneration and respect."
Written by Jay McGown, a leading advocate of country-of-origin rights, the report says the Canadian company Option Biotech has patented the seeds of Aframomum stipulatum of the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) "for use in" its product Biovigora, marketed as a sex-enhancer.
Mr. McGown describes the plant as a member of the ginger family with "documented uses in Congolese traditional medicine."
A Web site promotion of Biovigora says Africans used Aframomum to season food, and tribesmen who consumed the "rare spice" were locally renowned "for centuries ... for their particularly high vitality and their sexual capacities."
The seeds were "brought to a laboratory" for analysis, the company continues, adding on another Web page "scientists of Canada ... discovered that Aframomum ... was at the source of this sexual vitality."
Mr. McGown says the company is promoting the product as a natural alternative to the anti-impotence drug Viagra.
"While 'Biovigora' may never rival Viagra as a multi-billion-dollar money-maker, it is a patented Option Biotech property sold at more than 750 stores across Canada," he writes, saying it costs $34.99 for 24 capsules.
But he adds that his review of the company's "available information" failed to produce evidence of a benefit-sharing agreement with Congo or "any other country where A. stipulatum is used."
Ms. Burrows writes that time restraints meant Mr. McGown's research was not exhaustive.
Health Canada says Biovigora has not been authorized for sale in Canada, although the company has applied for a licence.
Nathalie Lalonde, a Health Canada spokeswoman, said department inspectors would be informed "for follow-up" that sales may be underway.
No one from Option Biotech, which is also believed to have traded as Oasis Biotech and is said to operate from Ste-Julie, Que., returned calls for comment.
China, India and Brazil, all with a huge diversity of plant and animal life, stand to benefit most from a benefits-sharing deal. But many Western companies argue they are entitled to what they get because they finance the often huge research-and-development costs with no guarantee of success.
"Historically [in the West], we've felt that innovation has merited being rewarded, and this stuff was free and seen as in the public domain up until the [1992] convention," said Jock Langford, senior policy advisor with Environment Canada's genetic resources unit.
The International Convention on Biodiversity says a country has the right to know if its genetic resources are being accessed, unless local laws say otherwise.
But there are no powers to police violators, said Arthur Nogueira, a senior official at the treaty's Montreal headquarters.
Canada has no domestic law setting charges for Canadian plants used by the pharmaceutical industry.
Among other companies named in the report is the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer.
Mr. McGown said it obtained a microbe from Kenya's Lake Ruiru for a drug sold in Canada and the United States under the name Precose, which helps diabetes sufferers. The company has responded publicly that the drug was developed through biotechnology.
The report also says "only time will tell" if the Bushmen of southern Africa's Kalahari desert will get an improved deal for commercial use of Hoodia cactus extracts, which help suppress appetite.
Mr. McGown says the British drug company Phytopharm struck a deal with them in 2003, but has since licensed Hoodia to Unilever, maker of Slim Fast and other diet foods.
"It's a free-for-all out there, and until the convention solves the problems of access and benefit sharing, the robbery will continue," Mr. McGown said.
Tue Feb 21 2006
© 2006 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Curb spending, Earth summit delegates told
'Any event sponsored by the United Nations should be of modest, even frugal dimensions'
Reminded of poverty
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - Concerned that its international conferences are increasingly seen as opportunities for delegates to indulge in lavish receptions while staying at top hotels, the United Nations has urged delegates to curb their wining and dining at the "Earth summit" in South Africa next week.
A leaked memo reminds delegates they will be in southern Africa at a time when food shortages are affecting 13 million people in the region.
Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister, and two Cabinet ministers will be among the 65,000 people descending on Johannesburg between Aug. 26 and Sept. 4 for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the largest-ever gathering organized by the UN.
"We must keep in mind this conference is taking place in the midst of a major food crisis," said the memo. "It would be wise to refrain from excessive levels of hospitality, and any event sponsored by the United Nations should be of modest, even frugal dimensions."
The memo comes after delegates attending a recent world hunger conference in Rome were spotted on shopping sprees.
UN officials have also made moves to counter complaints the summit will cause more pollution than it prevents. The UN Development Program plans to ask delegates to each contribute US$10 to a fund called the Johannesburg Climate Legacy to offset environmental damage caused by vehicles delivering them to the city.
Participating businesses will be asked to hand over between US$1,000 and US$100,000.
Studies for the Climate Legacy estimate the delegates' journeys and activities at the conference will generate 289,619 tons of carbon dioxide, one of the so-called greenhouse gases that are said to be contributing to global warming.
UNDP said money collected for the Climate Legacy will be used for "long-term, carbon-reducing, renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects in schools, hospitals and communities" in South Africa.
The Johannesburg conference is billed as an opportunity for governments to live up to hundreds of promises over the years to fight world poverty while protecting the environment.
In addition to Mr. Chretien, more than 100 national leaders have agreed to spend at least some time at the conference, including Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, the French President, and Gerhard Schroeder, the German Chancellor.
But George W. Bush, the U.S. President, plans to skip the conference, sending Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, to head the U.S. delegation.
This came as a blow to conference organizers, who have said the presence of leaders is necessary to give decisions clout.
The conference is a follow to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which launched international campaigns to combat global warming and reduce the extinction rate of species.
Poverty alleviation has been added for Johannesburg in a reflection of the UN's increasing tendency to integrate its international campaigns.
"Developed countries in particular have not lived up to the promises they made either to protect the environment or to help the developing world," wrote Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, in a recent editorial.
Canada says the conference will achieve little unless governments commit themselves to detailed policies.
"We cannot simply rely on broad visions to spur action," said David Anderson, the Environment Minister, who heads Canada's delegation until the arrival of Mr. Chretien, expected Aug. 31.
But preparatory talks have revealed deep divisions over what should emerge from the gathering. Part of the problem, say critics, is that the agenda is too broad.
While a focus of debate will be the effect globalization is having on the developing world, there will also be major discussions on access to clean water, sanitation services, health services, energy production, food production, biodiversity on land and in the sea, shrinking fisheries, shrinking forests and melting glaciers, to name just a few topics.
A UN push to promote development by encouraging partnerships between business, non-governmental aid organizations and governments in developing countries is backed by Canada and is expected to be addressed by Susan Whelan, Minister for International Co-operation.
But many developing countries also want an international treaty setting out new social, labour and environmental standards for business, which Washington opposes, reflecting its general opposition to new bureaucracies.
There is also likely to be little harmony as Washington links aid to progress in adopting democratic institutions. The UN's newest annual report on international development showed a slowing of the trend towards democratization over the past 15 years.
Many oil-producing countries oppose efforts by some governments -- notably European ones -- to promote discussion on renewable energy sources.
Developing countries want commitments that their agricultural products will find markets in the developed world, again a sore point for the United States, whose farm subsidies work against this.
South Africa will also push for debt relief for poor countries and increased investment from the developed world.
Wed Aug 21 2002
© 2002 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Black & White Photo: Saurabh Das, The Associated Press / A homeless man takes a rest yesterday in Johannesburg, South Africa, host to the World Summit on Sustainable Development next week.
Wildlife extinction rate down dramatically: UN
Conservation credited
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - Half as many birds, mammals and fish are becoming extinct as a century ago, when the world's human population was a fraction of its current six billion, a new United Nations report finds.
Conservationists have said for years that creatures are disappearing from the planet faster than they can be named.
But the UN Environment Program's World Atlas of Biodiversity, released this week, shows the international rate of extinction is today as low as it was in the first part of the 16th century.
The Earth lost about 20 known species of mammals, birds and fish in the last third of the 20th century, the atlas shows. About 40 were lost a century ago, when the population was 1.6 billion.
Creatures lost from Canada since the first part of the 19th century include the sea mink, a species of the woodland caribou that roamed British Columbia, the passenger pigeon, the Labrador duck and the great auk, a flightless bird. Conservation programs run by governments or organizations are credited with helping maintain diversity.
"The apparent reduction in the extinction rate from the late 19th century onwards may be in part attributed to management action designed to maintain highly threatened species, and there is indeed good evidence that populations of a small number of target species have recovered significantly," the report says.
Of 193 species of mammals in Canada, 15 are threatened, including the grizzly bear, the Peary caribou and the swift fox. The Migrating Bird Convention Act of 1916 was Canada's first legislation protecting wildlife. A bill now before parliament aims to protect 233 wildlife species -- including plants, animals and mollusks.
"The point is that we can make a difference," said Eleanor Zurbrigg, Chief of Recovery with the Canadian Wildlife Service.
The biodiversity atlas, produced by UNEP's World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, England, is the first comprehensive map-based view of global wildlife distribution. It shows that humans have directly impacted almost 47% of the global land area in the past 150 years.
Human beings, who divert 40% of the Earth's plant growth for their own use, are still causing a rate of extinction 100-200 times greater than would occur naturally, the report warns.
Wildlife diversity in Southeast Asia, the Congo Basin and parts of the Amazon is most at risk today, the report adds. One scenario shows that by 2032, as much as 48% of these areas will be converted for agriculture, plantations and urban use, compared to 22% today.
"We must address the issue of genetic resource-sharing by giving developing countries, where the majority of biodiversity remains, an economic incentive to protect wildlife by paying them properly for the plants and animals whose genes get used in new drugs or crops," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director.
The atlas notes that less than 1% of the world's 250,000 tropical plants have been screened for potential pharmaceutical applications. Since 80% of people living in developed countries rely on medicines based largely on plants and animals, the potential for developing new pharmaceuticals is enormous.
In the United States, 56% of the top 150 prescribed drugs -- with an economic value of US$80-billion -- are linked to discoveries made in the wild, the report says. But the current rate of extinction of plants and animals could be depriving mankind of one major drug every two years, it adds. In the past 400 years, 675 species have disappeared, the report says, including 83 mammals and 128 birds.
Sat Aug 3 2002
© 2002 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.Errors prompt UN review of climate change panel
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - In a step-back from what it once presented as ``settled science,'' the United Nations announced Friday it would launch a review of its embattled climate change panel, whose credibility has been tarnished by global warming reporting errors.
The planned overhaul of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes just weeks after Britain's University of East Anglia launched its own quality control inquiry into the content of hacked e-mails that appear to show scientists seeking to silence dissenting climate change opinion.
Climate change skeptics say that, taken together, the two reviews amount to an admission on the part of those raising the global warming alarm that they have been relying on shaky data.
But the UN and climate change advocates say the errors exposed do not undermine the central conclusions of the IPCC's watershed 2007 ``assessment'' report - that climate change is a fact, and that the prevailing view among leading scientists is that industrial activity has significantly aggravated its intensity.
Details of the IPCC review panel will be disclosed next week, but it will be at arm's length of the IPCC, Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the UN Environment Program, said on the sidelines Friday of the agency's annual conference, on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.
``It will be a credible, sensible review of how the IPCC operates,'' he said.
Nuttall revealed that UNEP member states - ministers and officials of more than 135 countries are attending the conference - insisted that the review panel be ``fully independent and appointed by an independent group of scientists themselves.''
It is expected to come up with ways to better police the work of thousands of volunteer scientists who contribute to the assessment reports, which are produced every five or six years.
Nuttall said results of the review were expected to be ready for an IPCC plenary meeting in South Korea in October.
``I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue,'' he said in an indication the UN sees the review as a key tool for reversing the rising storm over the 2007 report errors and other controversy.
Canada's delegation at the conference was expected to have been part of the push for the review, but the office of Environment Minister Jim Prentice Friday adopted a standoff posture publicly.
``We don't have a specific comment on this,'' said Frederic Baril, spokesman for the minister.
A central question of the review will be the fate of IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian engineer. His reputation has been severely bruised by not only the months-long crisis involving the body, but also conflict of interest allegations.
Pachauri has denied taking consulting fees from business interests, saying he does not profit personally, but instead channels the fees to a non-profit research centre he runs in New Delhi.
But he remains the frontman for fallout over the biggest of the IPCC's admitted errors: the now widely discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035; and the overstating of how much the Netherlands is below sea level.
The exaggerations are critical because the 2007 report, as joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize that year with former U.S. vice president Al Gore, had come to drive political momentum toward a new, much more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
The UN is keen to regain the high ground in the global warming debate as it manoeuvres to be at the centre of any expansion of climate change governance institutions.
At the Bali conference, UNEP executive director Achim Steiner told reporters Friday that environmental government reform was a key part of this week's discussions, and that governments had raised the possibility of a World Environment Organization (WEO) along the lines of the World Trade Organization, which has disciplinary powers.
``The status quo is no longer an option,'' Steiner said. ``Within the broader reform options, the WEO concept is one of them.''
The conference - which is taking place at Bali's Nusa Dua, an enclave on the island known for its large international five-star hotels - marks the biggest gathering of climate change delegates since last year's chaos-ridden Copenhagen summit.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa called on countries to win back public trust by injecting greater urgency into negotiations ahead of the UN climate summit in November in Cancun, Mexico, another internationally popular resort city.
``To regain political momentum, the process must be open, transparent and inclusive,'' Natalegawa said.
Departing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said the Cancun meeting offered a huge opportunity to put the operational framework proposed in Copenhagen in place.
There were also calls for more commitment from China and India on capping emissions, with their support seen as crucial for a binding global accord.
China, the world's top emitter, and India, a fast expanding emitter, both failed to explicitly endorse the Copenhagen agreement, which pledged to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius along with billions of dollars in financing.
Fri Feb 26 2010
Oceans have become world's dumpsite: report
Cigarette butts, plastic bags and bottles form bulk of garbage, UN reveals
By STEVEN EDWARDS at the UNITED NATIONS
Fisheries and Oceans Minister Gail Shea said yesterday the federal government is protecting Canada's ocean resources, even as a United Nations study showed the world's seas are filthier than ever.
In a statement marking World Oceans Day, Shea called on Canadians to "consider the importance of oceans" to local livelihoods.
But the head of the UN Environment Program said the biggest single step any government can take is to ban the manufacture of supermarket-style plastic bags.
The bags and plastic bottles compose most of the plastic refuse that, in turn, is by far the most pervasive type of marine litter around the world, according to the report, titled Marine Litter: A Global Challenge.
Smokers are also identified in the 233-page report as being huge contributors to marine-borne garbage, tossing butts and cigarette wrappers that account for 40 per cent of the trash in the Mediterranean and more than half the rubbish off the coast of Ecuador.
Conducted with the Ocean Conservancy advocacy group, the report attempts to take stock of waterborne garbage in 12 major seas. It says that, despite international and localized protection measures, "alarming quantities of rubbish" thrown out to sea continue to pose safety and health threats to people and wildlife. The trash also damages nautical equipment and adversely affects tourism by defacing coastal areas.
"Marine litter is symptomatic of a wider malaise: namely, the wasteful use ... of natural resources," said Achim Steiner, UNEP executive director.
"Some of the litter, like thin film, single-use plastic bags, which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere (because) there is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere."
The report was released to coincide with the UN's first official recognition of World Oceans Day, which Canada proposed in 1992. It recommends governments increase public and business awareness of the effects of littering in or near the sea - and selectively impose fines on those who don't listen.
"This report is a reminder that carelessness and indifference is proving deadly for our oceans and its inhabitants," said Philippe Cousteau, chief executive officer of EarthEcho International, and an Ocean Conservancy board member.
Environment Canada operates a permit system controlling the disposal of waste and other material at sea.
The report says fines would work as a deterrent if they are as large as the $500,000 the United States imposed in 1993 on the cruise ship Regal Princess for dumping 20 bags of garbage into the sea.
Saying tourists have a "significant impact" on the state of the seas, the report praises the Seychelles and Mauritius for contributing almost nothing to the marine litter load in the western Indian Ocean despite being popular tourism destinations.
But in an illustration of the power of ocean winds and currents, it says the Seychelles have to put up with other people's garbage arriving during the southeast monsoon season. The report also laments that trash dumped off Western Australia ends up on the east coast of South Africa.
While Canadian waters were not among those studied, fisheries in northern regions like the Shetland Isles are highlighted as having suffered economic losses because of garbage arriving from elsewhere.
Cigarettes are the main source of Canadian marine debris, according to a recent separate report from Ocean Conservancy.
In South Asia, the growing ship-breaking industry has become a major source of marine debris, the latest report found.
Hazardous wastes, meanwhile, enter the western Indian Ocean, South Asian seas and the Black Sea because of poor solid-waste management facilities in the respective littoral states.
Tue Jun 9 2009
© 2009 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Colour Photo: CHERYL RAVELO, REUTERS / A man collects recyclable plastic items washed onto the Philippine coast from the sea.
Canada won't help UN save great apes
Cites other priorities
Agency seeks $25M to save animals from extinction
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - A global crisis meeting to save the great apes from extinction opens in Paris this week as conservationists warn that gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans are disappearing, even from two dozen protected areas in Africa and Southeast Asia, despite a United Nations recovery project.
The gathering is the first of its kind on such a scale and will see UN agencies appeal for US$25-million -- their biggest ever request for man's closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
The money will be used to kick-start the Great Apes Survival Project -- called Grasp for short -- which conservationists say has failed to halt the decline in many great ape populations.
Launched two years ago by the UN Environment Program, Grasp received praise from David Anderson, the Environment Minister, when he addressed the agency's governing council in February as outgoing president.
But while he cited it as being among UNEP's main achievements under his two-year presidency, Canada will send only a note-taker to the emergency Paris meeting, where delegates aim to thrash out a radical action plan.
"There are other more important initiatives in which Canada is interested," said Sebastien Bois, spokesman for Environment Canada, in explanation of why Canada has not contributed directly to Grasp. He added Canada supports the project "in principle."
Britain, Germany, Japan and Norway are already directly contributing to Grasp -- but less than US$1-million has been collected.
All three great ape species have been disappearing from their natural habitats for years, but increased rates of economic expansion have led the World Conservation Union, a global umbrella group, to warn of a high risk of extinction for some ape groups in 20 to 50 years.
The problem is that great apes are indigenous mainly to poor countries that see development of their natural resources as a necessity.
But mineral exploitation and agricultural activity disturb natural ape habitats, and logging destroys them. Roads also grant access to poachers, who hunt apes for bush meat, a high-priced delicacy in Africa.
A recent study showed a new threat comes from the spread of Ebola virus, which can be passed between humans and apes.
Under greatest threat are orangutans of Sumatra and Borneo. Their untouched habitat will shrink by 99% by 2030 at the current pace of human expansion, environmental experts say. Their loss to the wild would be permanent because orangutans in captivity rarely take to the forest when re-introduced, primate experts say.
There are also only a few hundred mountain gorillas still living wild in Central Africa, which is slowly emerging from decades of war and inter-ethnic slaughter. Cross River gorillas in Nigeria are similarly few in number.
Environmentalists say expected economic activity in resource-rich tropical areas will reduce the undisturbed natural homelands of African apes by 90% by 2030.
"It is not too late to stop uncontrolled exploitation of these forests," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP head. "But the clock is at one minute to midnight."
Noting the failure of reserves that exclude all economic activity, Grasp aims to create large areas called "biospheres" that have a core of virgin forest, but allow "sustainable" activities in "transition" areas.
"Part of the answer is to harness the power of tourism," said Matthew Woods, a Victoria, B.C., environmental science major working with UNEP in Africa. "There are projects in places like Rwanda that charge around US$250 a pop for people to sit with the gorillas.
"Some of the money goes into the pockets of the locals, so they see value in maintaining the forest, and not chopping down trees for firewood or agriculture."
Small-scale farming is also compatible, but while logging and plantation agriculture are ruled out, Grasp officials highlight other benefits .
"We hope to install the biosphere reserves across borders, which we believe will encourage trade and also help with peace building, something that is especially needed in central Africa," said Lucilla Spini, primate expert with UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), host of the Paris meeting.
Saving the great apes will also save "thousands and thousands of other animals, both high and humble, that live in the same forests," added Nick Nuttall, chief UNEP spokesman.
Canada gives US$2.5-million annually in "assessed" payments to UNEP, and last year gave US$10-million for specific projects, mostly in support of environmental agreements.
"Canada tries to focus its efforts on programs that reflect our priorities ... when allocating limited financial resources," Mr. Bois explained.
The Paris meeting, which runs to Friday, will see primate experts from around the world confer with representatives of current and potential donor countries, and also the 23 states targeted by Grasp. Delegates will produce a Global Great Ape Conservation Strategy, which will top the agenda at a much bigger intergovernmental gathering before the end of 2004.
Mon Nov 24 2003
© 2003 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.Bush expected to target moon, Mars
Red China is new rival
Announcement may come at Kitty Hawk
By Steven Edwards
NEW YORK - Raising the prospect of a new space race, George W. Bush is expected to announce soon that the United States will return Americans to the moon, then aim for a manned mission to Mars.
With the Soviet Union no more and its Russian successor state short of cash, the competitor this time will be China.
China's progress in space exploration is beginning to set off alarms in Washington after Beijing said this week that it plans to land a man on the moon by 2020.
China put a man into space in October and says it will send up three "Sinonauts" within two years.
Washington is abuzz with talk that Mr. Bush will breathe new life into the U.S. space program on one of three occasions:
- On Dec. 17, in a speech marking the centenary of the Wright brothers' first powered and sustained airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
- In January, in his State of the Union address to Congress.
- On Feb. 1, which besides being the first anniversary of the crash of the space shuttle Columbia is also Super Bowl Sunday. Houston is home to both the big game and NASA's human spaceflight program.
Although the White House is tight-lipped on the subject, Mr. Bush is expected to confirm new missions to the moon and speak about the possible establishment of a permanent lunar station.
Since the last manned moon landing in 1972, technology has advanced in leaps and bounds, enabling a host of activities, including energy exploration.
Mr. Bush would show U.S. sights are firmly set on Mars by explaining how a permanent lunar presence will allow technology and skills to be developed for a manned trip to the red planet.
It is unlikely Mr. Bush will set a timeline for reaching Mars, which is about to be visited by two unmanned probes, one American and one European. A Japanese spacecraft with a Canadian instrument on board has been plagued by technical problems and may not be able to enter Mars orbit as planned.
At his daily briefing yesterday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said it would be "premature to get into any speculation about our space policy" and refused to confirm any pending announcement.
But an interagency group that includes White House officials, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe and representatives from the Department of Defense has been meeting for several months to come up with specific space exploration options for the President to consider, and sources familiar with those meetings have suggested big plans are in the works.
Fuelling expectation of a major announcement are reports that Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, has discussed the subject of space exploration with senior members of Congress.
Two Texas Republican senators have also recently written to Mr. Bush urging him to "elevate the priority of the space program."
With a manned flight to Mars the next big prize in space, China is beginning to look like the fabled tortoise in the race against the more capable but less determined hare.
Clearly, the United States could reach the finish line first, but the slow-but-sure Chinese might surprise the Americans if they do not spring into action.
The United States was similarly asleep at the switch four decades ago when the Soviet Union opened the final frontier by sending its Sputnik satellite into orbit, then captured the world's imagination with the first manned space flight.
Those achievements prompted President John F. Kennedy to deliver his "bold challenge" to Congress on May 25, 1961.
He said the United States should commit itself to landing a man on the moon "before the decade is out."
Chinese officials have said that in contrast to the U.S.-Soviet space race, China will move ahead at its own careful, cost-effective pace.
"We will focus on deep-space exploration," said Luan Enjie, director of China's National Aerospace Bureau.
Mr. Bush's commitment would give Americans a renewed sense of being on the cutting edge of progress amid their anxiety about terrorism and the struggle to bring Iraq under control.
Mr. Kennedy delivered his "bold challenge" after the U.S. humiliation in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which saw Cuban leader Fidel Castro repel a U.S.-backed bid to overthrow him.
Mr. Bush would also be setting the stage for completing yet more work started by his father, George Bush.
While the senior Bush sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, his son's administration achieved that with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq this year.
On space, George Bush Sr. marked the 20th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing with an address on July 20, 1989, calling for a permanent U.S. presence on the moon and, ultimately, a mission to Mars.
Dan Quayle, then vice-president, and Richard Truly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration headed a group called the Space Exploration Initiative, whose 1991 America at the Threshold report set out a plan of action.
But with the exception of current efforts to build the International Space Station as a base orbiting Earth, no part of the plan has been implemented.
Even the ISS is behind schedule and over budget. It has also been scaled back since the loss of the Columbia.
Indeed, the United States has never regained the enthusiasm for the space program it had during the heady days of the early moon shots. Part of the problem, many people say, is the general lack of excitement generated by the low Earth orbits of the shuttles.
There are also cost concerns after the shuttles proved neither as reliable nor as inexpensive as NASA had promised.
Fourteen crew members died in the Columbia disaster, which occurred during re-entry, and in the 1986 loss of the Challenger, which exploded soon after takeoff.
The shuttles were grounded for 30 months after the Challenger loss while the accident was investigated.
During 18 years of flight, the cost of an average mission has been US$500-million, far higher than initial claims that payloads such as satellites could be sent into space for as little as US$100 a kilogram.
The launch schedule has also been erratic, while competition has emerged from China and the Europeans.
Fri Dec 5 2003
© 2003 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration:
• Color Photo: Neil Armstrong, NASA, The Associated Press / IMPELLED BY FEAR OF COMMUNIST DOMINANCE OF COSMOS, U.S. MAY RESURRECT THE SPACE RACE: Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. poses for a photograph beside the U.S. flag during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon on July 20, 1969. Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, who took this picture, were the first men to walk on the lunar surface. The satellite has been a pedestrian-free area since 1972.
Illustration:
• Color Photo: Neil Armstrong, NASA, The Associated Press / IMPELLED BY FEAR OF COMMUNIST DOMINANCE OF COSMOS, U.S. MAY RESURRECT THE SPACE RACE: Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. poses for a photograph beside the U.S. flag during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon on July 20, 1969. Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, who took this picture, were the first men to walk on the lunar surface. The satellite has been a pedestrian-free area since 1972.
Galapagos Islands placed on endangered heritage list
Ecuador admits it cannot protect fragile ecology
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - The Galapagos Islands, the Ecuadorean archipelago whose wildlife inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, were declared an endangered world heritage site yesterday after Ecuador admitted it could not properly protect them.
The UN's World Heritage Committee made the ruling as it considers additions to its list of World Heritage Sites, one of which is expected to be Ottawa's Rideau Canal, today or tomorrow.
In a letter to the committee, Ecuador proposed convening an international conference to seek funds and technical help for preserving Galapagos, which earns the South American nation more than US$200-million a year in tourism.
"They were for re-classification as a way of raising a red flag about the islands," said one insider.
But Captain Paul Watson, a Canadian maritime conservationist, said Ecuador itself is to blame for the deteriorating state of Galapagos, where the activities of increasing numbers of illegal fishermen in the past decade have become the biggest threat to indigenous marine life, such as turtles, seals and sea birds.
"It's not a question of passing laws – we have all we need, but they're ignored because of institutional incompetence, bribery and fear of the fishermen," said Mr. Watson, whose Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has made saving Galapagos one of its central tasks.
Despite a commercial fishing ban within 100 kilometres of the archipelago, poachers catch shark, tuna, swordfish, squid and sea cucumber, prized as a delicacy in the Far East.
Residency controls are poorly policed, and arrivals of boats from the mainland have led to numerous "invasive species," both animal and vegetable, settling in. "It's illegal to have dogs and cats on the islands, but so far we have spayed and neutered 3,000 and we haven't even gotten close to getting them all," said Capt. Watson, who is expects to travel to Galapagos on Friday to captain Sea Shepherd's Farley Mowat as a show of solidarity with local patrols.
Since 2000, the conservation group has operated its vessel Sirenian with two Ecuadorean patrol boats, but the number of illegal fishermen continues to mount, helping swell the islands' population to 35,000.
"When we first arrived, there were marine iguanas sunning themselves on the main street of Puerto Ayora, but you'll never see that again," Capt. Watson said.
Canada has a seat on the 21-member Heritage Committee, which falls under the UN's Paris-based Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and is currently meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand.
"Making a comeback is not impossible because Ecuador has also proven they can solve a lot of the problems," said Marc Patry, an Ottawa-area native and UNESCO natural heritage specialist focused on Galapagos.
"They eradicated goats that people had brought to the largest island, but when they first proposed the plan, critics said it was impossible because there had been 150,000."
But he said caps have to be enforced on tourism, despite the economic needs of the largely struggling developing country.
"Tourism is generating a dynamic island economy, which draws economic migrants from the continent, who arrive with their continental customs and chickens and plants and what-have-you," he said.
"So Ecuador's big challenge now is to get its institutional act together so that people know what they have to do."
In an example of turf squabbles, members of the armed forces beat up Raquel Molina, the Galapagos National Park chief, and three park rangers in March after they ventured into an area the military said was restricted.
In the last decade, international institutions and aid groups have given about US$30-million for conservation work on the islands.
"It's very important that everyone know this government is taking the bull by the horns and addressing the problems seriously to resolve them … so that future generations can enjoy what we are still able to enjoy," said Maria Isabel Salvador, Ecuador's Tour-ism Minister.
Ecuador's call for an international conference comes on the heels of a request that other countries pay it to halt development of a giant oil field in the Amazon rainforest.
Wed Jun 27 2007
© 2007 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Cellphone use blamed for pushing apes to extinction: TV documentary
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - Cellphone users are killing off some of the most endangered apes in Africa, according to a new television documentary.
Eighty per cent of the world's known supply of coltan -- a mineral used in cellphone production -- is found in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the eastern lowland gorilla is fighting for survival as a species.
But the region is filled with foreign armies, militia and crime syndicates fighting for control of its natural resources -- including coltan. By driving a growing demand for coltan, cellphone users are "unwittingly ... contributing to the apes' downfall," says the British company Television Trust for the Environment in the film No hiding place -- Part Two.
Although fighting in parts of the Congo has fallen off, a recent United Nations report says peace deals have done nothing to abate the plunder of areas rich in minerals and other resources.
Eight national parks in eastern mountain ranges were once full of rare fauna and wildlife, but they are now subject to "highly organized and systematic exploitation," the report says.
The eruption of Congo's civil war saw neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda enter the country to support rebel groups trying to topple the Kinshasa government. Troops from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia arrived to support the national government.
With the spread of mobile phones, world prices for coltan jumped from US$65 to US$600 a kilogram in just a few years. It is now plundered with as much gusto in the region as diamonds, copper, cobalt and timber, the UN says.
Coltan is used in capacitors that regulate voltage and store energy in mobile phones. Its value as an income source for the regional power brokers is explained in the documentary by Ian Redmond, a British primatologist.
"Miners have to pay one spoonful of coltan to the military," he says of the system operating in one region. "That means about US$15. There are about 15,000 people working here, each paying US$15 per week to the military who control the region. That's something in the region of US$1-million a month going into the pockets of the militia."
The UN Environment Program last year launched an international campaign to save the gorilla, orangutan and chimpanzee from extinction. "The clock is standing at one minute to midnight for the great apes," Klaus Toepfer, UNEP director, said at the time.
The TVE documentary says the number of eastern lowland gorillas has declined by 80%-90% in the last five years and just 3,000 remain. Extensive logging over the last decade has opened vast spaces for exploitation, Dr. Jane Goodall, renowned for her four decades of work with chimpanzees, says in the documentary.
"Hunters from the towns go along the roads and shoot everything -- elephants, apes, monkeys, bats and birds," she says. "They smoke it, load it on to the trucks and take it into the cities. It doesn't feed starving people, but people who'll pay more for bushmeat."
Wed Jun 12 2002
© 2002 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Black & White Photo: Johnny Eggitt, Agence France-Presse / Only 3,000 eastern lowland gorillas remain in the Congo.
Edition: National Story Type: News Note: sedwards@nationalpost.com Length: 492 words Idnumber: 200206120174
Russian academic claims lead in race to Mars
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - In an echo of the 1960s space race, one of Russia's leading academics said Tuesday that Russia is already ahead in efforts to land people on Mars.
While President George W. Bush's 2004 call for a manned U.S. mission to Mars has an undetermined target date, Lev Zelyony, director of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, saidRussia will be ready by 2025 at the latest.
"We lost the race to the moon," he told Interfax news agency. "(But) we have something of a head start in this race as we have the most experience in manned (long-duration) space flight."
Even after the Russian space program all but collapsed when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Russian cosmonauts continued to man the Mir space station before it was de-orbited in 2001.
They subsequently spent time in the International Space Station (ISS), whose in-orbit assembly began in 1998 as a joint project of several space agencies, including Canada's.
"This means that a chain of manned flights has never been torn," said Zelyony.
Long-duration experience is important because a flight to Mars would take at least six months each way.
The U.S. has almost parallel experience, however, and three-quarters of everyone who has ever flown into space has been aboard one of the 120 or so flights of the U.S. shuttles.
Much of Russia's revival of its space program has come through co-operation with the European Space Agency, which in recent years has established itself as a major player in space exploration.
It too has spoken of launching a manned mission to Mars - but not before 2030.
Zelyony said if preparations need to begin now, Russia could be ready as early as 2023.
"It is prestigious and real and it is Russia's priority to land a cosmonaut on Mars," he said. "This task can be solved both economically and technically."
Neither the Russian government nor the Russian Space Agency has mentioned a timeline for a manned Mars mission.
"They have tremendous and proven capability in space and, if they really want to, I'm not at all saying they couldn't put people on Mars by 2025," Chris Hadfield, former Canadian astronaut who now heads Space Station Operations, said from Houston.
"But to even set a date is somewhat fanciful. We have to invent some things between now and then."
Under a plan backed by Bush, NASA aims at building an "outpost" on the moon over five years beginning in 2019 that would be permanently manned. From there, sights would be set on Mars.
Wed Jan 9 2008
Israeli peace efforts paying off with greater UN participation
Joins drug commission
But Security Council still a distant goal for marginalized state
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - Peace efforts in the Middle East are coinciding with some doors being opened for Israel at the United Nations, which for decades has marginalized the Jewish state.
After being named without objection to the UN's Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Israel could also join the governing bodies of the Environment Program and the housing agency Habitat.
The Jewish state's tentative emergence from the shadows has been made possible by Western democracies, which allowed Israel to join the Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG) at the United Nations three years ago.
States can sit on the UN's governing boards and committees only if they belong to one of its international blocs.
But Arab and Muslim countries kept Israel out of its geographic home in the Asian group for more than 40 years, effectively making it a second-class UN member.
Israeli officials are thrilled at the changes.
"We have a lot to contribute to the work of the international organization, and we must demonstrate to the world what we already know -- that Israel is far greater than the Arab-Israeli conflict," said Arye Mekel, Israel's deputy ambassador to the United Nations.
"The only way to do this is by hard work and wide participation in the different UN forums and organs."
But membership of the Security Council, the UN's most powerful body, remains a distant dream.
WEOG, which includes Canada, has already picked candidates for its two designated seats on the 15-member body for more than a decade ahead.
Israel would also have a difficult time mustering the necessary two-thirds majority in the 191-member General Assembly, where a coalition of developing nations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia routinely sides with the Arab countries in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"We can't even get a 50% plus one majority in the General Assembly, let alone two-thirds," said one Israeli official.
In addition, Arab and Muslim states have not stopped protesting Israel's presence on the international stage. Last month, for example, their senior diplomats boycotted a disarmament committee when it was due to be chaired by the Jewish state for four weeks.
The Conference on Disarmament is an independent body comprising 66 nations, including Canada, although its budget comes from the United Nations and it reports to the General Assembly.
Led by Iran, Arab and Muslim states sent only low-level diplomats to the conference, which meets in Geneva, and had them sit behind tables that did not show their countries' names.
"It was all rather childish really," said Andrew Srulevitch, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based monitoring group.
Still, several Western diplomats said the action was low key as anti-Israel protests go, with one pointing out the Arab and Muslim states "could have made more noise."
Mr. Srulevitch also said Israel's admission to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs marks a softening of opposition to the Jewish state at the United Nations.
Israel's candidature had to be endorsed by the 56-member Economic and Social Council, but no Arab or Muslim countries on that body objected when the matter came before them in April.
The council will meet this summer to consider candidates for Habitat's governing council, while the 191-member General Assembly, due to meet in September, must underwrite membership of the governing council for the UN Environment program.
WEOG has put Israel's name forward on the expectation of endorsements.
"These are small steps in the right direction to the ending of Israel's exclusion from the regional grouping system at the UN," Mr. Srulevitch said.
WEOG accepted Israel as a member in 2000 after overcoming reservations from Ireland, Italy and Spain. But it also set conditions, including a review of membership after four years and a ban on running for any post for three years.
Israel was also restricted to running only for posts decided at the UN's New York headquarters, and not those chosen at regional offices in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi.
Finally, Israel had to agree to continue to seek membership of the Asian group.
Given the Asian group's continued refusal to admit it, UN Watch suggests Israel be allowed to remain a WEOG member.
"WEOG is a group of Western liberal democracies," Mr. Srulevitch said.
"As a Western democracy, Israel should feel no less at home in WEOG as Australia, New Zealand or Canada."
Israeli officials say they are taking one step at a time.
"Maybe now with the peace process, everybody now has really big hopes," said one. "You can never know what will happen. We are very optimistic."
Fri Jun 6 2003
© 2003 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
UN paying dearly for blunders: audit
Waste and theft cost $17-million – but gift shop doing well
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - Winter descends on northern Iraq without fail each year, but that did not stop United Nations officials being caught out by the annual drop in temperatures.
By forgetting the sequence of seasons last year, they had to pay "emergency" prices for winter supplies to care for refugees in northern Iraq, an area administered by the world body.
The cost of the relief effort was 61% higher than necessary, according to the annual report of the UN's internal audit service.
Purchases were made "on an exigency basis, even though the requirements were known in October," says the report, produced by the Office of Internal Oversight Services.
The finding is just one in a litany of examples of UN mismanagement, sloppy bookkeeping and fraud uncovered by OIOS during the 12 months preceding June 30.
One of the few examples of efficiency is the UN gift shop.
Then again, "gift centre operations" are contracted out to a private retail vendor, which, says the report, has increased royalties to the UN since it took on the task of selling UN souvenirs and books.
Handing over other UN duties to private relief agencies -- known as non-governmental organizations -- has proven less lucrative.
Some NGOs made "significant" exchange-rate gains by charging the UN in U.S. dollars and then paying for goods and services in local currencies, the report says.
OIOS auditors identified waste and theft over the year totalling US$17-million, but have recovered only US$5.3-million.
Despite producing a daily avalanche of paperwork, the UN's publishing services unit in Geneva is paid for doing nothing for almost 14 "working" weeks a year because they contract out so much work, according to the report. This resulted in a loss of $100,000 in 1998 alone.
Although the number of its employees has remained the same since 1996, the workload of copy preparers and proofreaders has fallen by half, the report says.
OIOS auditors found that UN employees at headquarters in New York took almost two weeks off sick over the year, with some staying at home almost three weeks.
Meanwhile, employees in the UN centre of Nairobi, Kenya, scooped up payroll overpayments totalling $42,000.
Nairobi was also at the centre of the UN's most embarrassing misdirection of funds for the year. More than $700,000 given by countries to help the UN environment program clean up the planet ended up in the New York bank account of a struggling single mother, who spent part of the funds on a cleaning project of her own: She bought a laundromat.
Susan Rouse Madakor was subsequently convicted of fraud and will be sentenced in February.
In UN-administered Kosovo, OIOS auditors found that computer problems led to $324,000 being overpaid to UN employees in "subsistence" allowances, which augment pay for people working away from home.
The OIOS admits it could do better, too. Seventy per cent of its staff are in New York, but 75% of its cases are elsewhere in the world. "Extensive travel is required," says the report, which recommends establishing more offices beyond New York.
Tue Nov 14 2000
© 2000 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved. A Balkan nightmare: toxic food and water
Pollution from bombed sewage systems and chemical plants could threaten millions in southeastern Europe
By Steven Edwards
UNITED NATIONS - An environmental task force is ready to begin assessing the extent of a largely hidden but deadly legacy of the Kosovo conflict – pollution.
Monitors from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the UN Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) will enter Kosovo as soon as they get the green light from the UN civil administration being established to temporarily run the province.
As thousands of refugees return to Kosovo, one fear is that sewage systems have been destroyed or fallen into disrepair, leading to human waste entering water supplies, causing cholera and other diseases to strike.
In the longer term, water supplies for entire regions both in and downstream from Yugoslavia could become carcinogenic cesspools if pollutants produced in the firestorms that engulfed bombed oil refineries and chemical plants are not quickly detected and removed.
"We urgently need clear, detailed and credible information on the impacts on human settlements and infrastructure, and on the possible environmental repercussions of the Balkans conflict," said Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister who now heads UNEP and UNCHS.
The findings of a single UNEP representative who accompanied a UN humanitarian-needs mission to Yugoslavia last month suggest the region's environmental health is hanging in the balance.
The findings were included in the mission's report, which says that "toxic smoke from huge fires and leakage of harmful chemicals into the soil and the water table have contributed to as yet unassessed levels of environmental pollution which will have a negative impact on health and ecological systems."
During its visit, the mission assessed the consequences of an April 18 attack on a petrochemical plant in Pancevo, 15 kilometres northeast of Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.
"The destruction . . . resulted in the release of various chemical fluids into the atmosphere, water and soil," says the report. "This poses a serious threat to health in the region. Many of the compounds released . . . can cause cancer, miscarriages and birth defects. Others are associated with fatal nerve and liver diseases."
Once it begins its work, the task force will be under pressure to rapidly identify contaminated areas before reconstruction begins, said Jim Sniffen, a UNEP spokesman. Because entire villages have to be rebuilt to replace ones destroyed by Serb forces, locations must be chosen where water supplies are safe and sustainable.
"We would have problems of water scarcity if sites were chosen that are so badly contaminated that local water could not be consumed," said Mr. Sniffen. "Having to bring in water from other sources would have a serious impact on the economic development of a community."
Though the task force will at first concentrate on assessing pollution levels in Kosovo, the environmental effects of the conflict go far beyond the borders of both the province and Yugoslavia.
Because many of the chemical plants or oil refineries bombed by NATO lie on the banks of the Danube or its tributaries, contaminants have entered the regional river system and been carried downstream to Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine before being emptied into the Black Sea.
Bulgaria reported a major oil slick on April 7 after NATO planes bombed a refinery upstream. This forced authorities to close water intakes that normally provide backup supplies of drinking water for local communities.
In Romania, the Ministry of Waters, Forests and Environmental Protection issued a report stating it feared fish stocks in the Danube may be reduced after monitoring devices recorded abnormally high concentrations of toxic heavy metals in the river.
The report said that on April 23, zinc levels peaked at 55 times the maximum admitted level while levels of heavy metals such as copper, chrome, cadmium and lead had also exceeded acceptable norms.
Acid rains have also occurred in Romania as a result of the conflict, the Environment News Service has reported.
For nine days at the end of April, up to 10 times the levels of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and ammonia were monitored in rains that fell in southwestern Romania, said the news service. On May 15, meanwhile, a 10- to 15-kilometre-long smoke cloud floated for several hours over Romania following the bombing of the Prahovo oil terminal.
For Philip Weller, who directs the Danube Carpathian Program for the World Wide Fund for Nature, the entire Balkan region has become environmentally hazardous.
"The scale of the human tragedy in Yugoslavia is already enormous," he said from Vienna. The World Wide Fund for Nature "is concerned that long-term damage to the environment in both Yugoslavia and surrounding Balkan countries will only increase problems in the region."
Mr. Weller said it is crucial to avoid delaying a cleanup of the Danube, which provides water for up to 10 million people. "This is a trans-boundary issue. Now that the war [is] over, urgent action has to be taken to protect the lower Danube and the millions of people whose security is linked to its environmental health."
Not only are human beings threatened. The river supports some of Europe's last surviving and richest natural wetlands, including the Danube's own vast and globally important delta region.
In the short term, the pollutants that have entered the Danube threaten to wipe out several riverine organisms, says World Wide Fund literature. In the long term, they would lead to a buildup of toxins in the food chain and render some species unable to reproduce.
Sturgeon presently on their spawning run and water-dependent birds such as pelicans and herons may be the first to be affected, according to Mr. Weller.
"The humanitarian issues are first and foremost in our minds," he said. "However, only immediate measures to stop the downstream flow of pollution will prevent an ecological catastrophe from following the humanitarian one."
Opinion is mixed as to whether fast action can significantly undo the damage already done.
Immediate action could contain the spread of contaminants, said Dr. Matthew Bramley, a Montreal-based specialist in toxins with the environmental lobby group Greenpeace. In particular, dioxin -- human carcinogens released by fires in bombed chemical plants -- can be "cleaned up by specialists" in places it is detected, he said.
"Usually, it is a question of digging up the contaminated soil and taking it away to be stored safely," he said. "If not, it remains an ongoing source of contamination for years to the water system and the food chain. And anything grown on the soil will also be contaminated."
But long-term damage to the environment is unavoidable no matter how fast and efficient the cleanup efforts, according to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader and current president of the environmental organization Green Cross International.
Writing in Italy's La Stampa newspaper, Mr. Gorbachev pointed to the extent of pollution caused during the 1991 Gulf War.
"Scientists and environmental experts estimate that 40% of Kuwait's strategic water resources have been irreversibly polluted with oil," writes Mr. Gorbachev.
To limit environmental damage in future conflicts, he argues that international rules of war should be amended to prohibit attacks on "certain industries and infrastructure." In particular, he says, "nuclear power stations, and some chemical and petro-chemical plants" should be off-limits.
NATO said it targeted chemical plants, oil refineries and gasoline dumps during the Kosovo conflict because they contributed to the Yugoslav war machine.
Weapons that may have "particularly dangerous, long-term and massive environmental and medical consequences" should also be prohibited, according to Mr. Gorbachev.
At the top of his weapons-to-ban list are those that contain depleted uranium, which the United States has confirmed it used during the Kosovo conflict.
Depleted uranium is about 40% less radioactive than natural uranium and has a variety of military applications, including increasing the penetrating power of armour and anti-armour rounds by taking advantage of the metal's density and metallurgical properties.
Depleted uranium weapons were first used extensively against Iraq, where they became associated with Gulf War syndrome -- an unexplained sickness suffered by some veterans of the conflict.
Baghdad has blamed the use of depleted uranium weapons for an increased number of birth defects, leukaemia and other cancers in Iraq since the war.
But a recent study of depleted uranium by the Rand Corporation, a California-based research institution, did not find any significant link between the metal and the Gulf War syndrome.
The corporation suggested, nevertheless, that further studies be carried out, given that the use of depleted uranium is likely to increase in the future.
NATO'S ENVIRONMENTALLY DANGEROUS TARGETS:
Pristina: Petroleum fuel storage, bombed April 9, 10, 14 & 26.
Smederevo: Petroleum fuel storage, bombed April 20.
Novi Sad: Petroleum refinery, bombed April 22, 26 and May 1, 3, 4, 7.
Nis: Petroleum products storage, bombed May 14 & 24.
Glogovac: Oil refinery, bombed May 16
Batinica: Petroleum products storage, bombed May 18.
Belgrade: Petroleum products storage bombed May 19.
Prahovo: Petroleum production plant bombed May 15, 26.
Bor: Oil refinery, bombed May 27.
Pozega: Petroleum fuel storage, bombed May 29.
BULGARIA:
- April 7: Report of a major oil slick in the Danube River after NATO planes bombed a refinery upstream.
ROMANIA:
- April 23: Monitoring devices record abnormally high concentrations of toxic heavy metals in the Danube River. Zinc levels reached a peak 55 times the maximum allowed level.
- April 21-30: Up to 10 times above normal concentrations of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and ammonia are monitored in rains on southwestern Romania.
- May 15: A 10- to 15-km long smoke cloud floats for several hours over Romania following the bombing of the Prahovo oil terminal.
Wed Jun 23 1999
© 1999 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration: • Map: Federation of American Scientists / NATO's Environmentally Dangerous Targets: (See print copy for complete map.) • List: Federation of American Scientists / NATO's Environmentally Dangerous Targets: (Online) • Black & White Photo: Desmond Boylan, Reuters / In the Serb town of Novi Sad, oil refineries burn beside the Danube River -- the source of drinking water for 10 million people.
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