By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Aug 28 2012 (IPS)

Impoverished Laos is unlikely to cancel a Thai project to build a mega dam across the Mekong River at Xayaburi, despite warnings from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that it could devastate the region’s rich biodiversity.

Over 1,780 known freshwater fish species have been identified in the ‘Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot’ which includes the Mekong and parts of the Chao Phraya River that flows through Thailand, revealed the 158-page report released last week by the IUCN, ahead of its world congress to be held in Jeju, South Korea from Sep. 6-15.

IUCN, which is based Switzerland and is world’s oldest and largest global environmental network, assists societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and biodiversity of nature and to ensure that the use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.

“The Mekong ranks third (after the Amazon and Congo) or second in the world in terms of diversity of river fish depending on whether the verified species total or the higher estimate is accepted,” notes the IUCN study,  ‘The Status and Distribution of Freshwater Biodiversity in Indo-Burma’.

The study has strengthened a growing anti-dam movement that has united campaigners from several countries in the region that are likely to be affected by the 1,260-megawatt hydropower project being built at a cost 3.8 billion dollars.

“This is an unprecedented scientific contribution for us to know what is in the river between (the Laotian cities of) Luang Prabang and Vientiane,” Robert Mather, head of IUCN Southeast Asia, told IPS. “It shows how little we understand the river or the impact of the planned dam.”

The report is expected to feed discussions about dams like the Xayaburi at the IUCN gathering at  Jeju, which is expected to include more than 1,200 government and non-government organisations (NGOs) from 160 countries.

“This study will help to shape the real questions that need to be asked when doing EIAs (environment impact assessments) before building the dam,” Mather said. 

Early August, Thai communities rallying against the Xayaburi dam had lodged a petition against the energy ministry and the state-run Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) in the country’s administrative courts, charging these bodies with failure to inform the public about the environmental and social impacts of the dam.

But, on Aug. 24, Norkun Sitthiphong, permanent secretary in Thailand’s energy ministry, announced that construction work for the Xayaburi dam was on track and that electricity production was scheduled to begin by 2019.

“The Xayaburi power plant plays a crucial role in Thailand’s power development,” the Thai official said, affirming the close link Thailand has as a major investor of this dam, the first of a cascade of 11 dams being planned to harness the lower waters of Southeast Asia’s largest river.

Earlier studies by the Mekong River Commission (MRC), an inter-government agency, estimate that the proposed dams could result in agricultural losses worth more than 500 million dollars annually and reduce dietary fish intake of Thai and Lao people by 30 percent.

It could also result in the creation of reservoirs along the Mekong,  studies by the MRC, in which Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam are members and Myanmar (or Burma) and China are dialogue partners.   

The MRC is yet to clear construction for the dam and announced in December that it would approach international development partners to study the dam’s implications before doing so.

Activists believe that it is not too late to stop the Xayaburi dam especially because of a growing movement against it.

“This is the first time local communities have gone to the Thai courts to stop a cross-border hydropower project,” says Premrudee Daoroung, co-director of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance, Bangkok-based green lobby.

“They are turning to a clause in the Thai constitution that requires government agencies to conduct public hearings on projects like the Xayaburi dam, which will impact Thai communities and Thailand’s biodiversity,” she told IPS.

“Their biggest concern is that the dam will devastate fishing in the Mekong, which has been their main livelihood for generations,” Daoroung told IPS. “Their campaign began out of fear that the Xayaburi dam will affect the annual fish migration in the Mekong.”

Loss of biodiversity is another concern. “The currency for measuring fish biodiversity is species, not kilograms, dollars or catch per unit of effort,” the IUCN report said.

Grassroots communities in Cambodia and Vietnam have expressed similar concerns in their ‘Save the Mekong’ campaign.

The Xayaburi dam could, they say, threaten the livelihoods of some 60 million people living in the lower Mekong, who harvest an estimated 2.2 to 3.9 billion dollars worth of fish caught annually – or about a quarter of the world’s annual inland-water catch.

Besides food security this campaign, which has now been endorsed by nearly 60,000 people, has also forged other bonds.

“The outcry has been strong because of the centrality of the river to millions of people, as well as to the region’s history and cultural identity,” says Carl Middleton, a Mekong River expert who lectures at the International Development Studies Programme at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

“Just as the river is shared between the countries, so the proposed Xayaburi dam has brought many people together in opposition to the project,” he told IPS. “The size of the public response opposed to the Xayaburi dam is unprecedented for a hydropower project in the region.”   

But, the protests have produced a mixed response from Laos, one of the poorest of the six countries that shares the Mekong, a 4,880 km-long river that flows through southern China, touching Myanmar (or Burma) and Thailand, and through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Laos has set its sights on becoming the battery to the region by tapping its rivers through mega-hydropower projects and selling the energy generated to its neighbours, such as Thailand. The foreign exchange, Vientiane argues, can help one-third of the country’s 5.8 million population living in poverty.

Laos had assured neighbours, Western donors and an intergovernmental river development body that it would not proceed with the controversial dam till the cross-border environmental and social impacts have been assessed. In July, Vientiane had even announced suspension of the project.

Ch. Karnchang Plc (CK), one of Thailand’s largest infrastructure builders and owner of 50 percent of the shares of Xayaburi Power, the controversial dam’s developer, suggest otherwise.

In mid-August, CK’s chief executive Plew Trivisvavet confirmed that the dam developer had not skipped a beat in its construction plans. “We’re still working on the project, as no one has told us to stop,” he told journalists.

Plastic debris washed up on Coco Beach in Goa, India, where the Mandovi River empties into the Indian Ocean. Credit: Hajjo ms/CC BY 3.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 10 2012 (IPS)

Plastic trash is altering the very ecology of the world’s oceans. Insects called “sea skaters”, a relative of pond water striders, are now laying their eggs on the abundant fingernail-sized pieces of plastic floating in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean instead of relying on a passing seabird feather or bit of driftwood.

With an average of 10 bits of plastic per cubic metre of seawater, there are now plenty of places for sea skaters to lay eggs in a remote region known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, 1,500 kilometres west of North America. Not surprisingly, egg densities have soared, a new study has found.

“We’re seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic,” says Miriam Goldstein, study co-author and graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

This is the first proof that plastics in the open ocean are affecting marine invertebrates (animals without a backbone), which will have consequences for the entire marine food web.

“We simply don’t have the data to know what those consequences will be. It is a very remote region of the ocean, hard to get to and expensive to conduct research,” Goldstein told IPS.

The North Pacific Gyre is one of five large systems of rotating currents in the world’s oceans. It has become better known in recent years as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. It has at least 100 times more plastic today than it did in 1972, according to the study published this week in the journal Biology Letters.

“There were no hard surfaces before in the North Pacific Gyre other than the occasional feather and piece of wood,” says Miriam Goldstein, study co-author and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

“The ocean looks pretty normal out there in the gyre. There is no floating island of trash as some people imagine,” Goldstein told IPS.

It would be far better if there was a plastic island in the gyre. It would be possible to clean it up and likely have less of an impact on marine life, she said. Nearly all plastics break down into smaller and smaller pieces and everything from turtles to seabirds and fish mistake bits of plastic as food.

Researchers at Scripps have also reported that nine percent of the fish collected during their expedition to the Gyre had plastic waste in their stomachs. They estimated that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific Ocean ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tonnes per year.

At least 95 percent of Northern fulmars, a common seabird in the North Sea numbering in the millions, have one to several dozen bits of plastic in their stomachs, Andries van Franeker, a seabird expert, told IPS previously. Van Franeker is a biologist with the Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies at the University of Wageningen in Holland.

A related species, the tiny Wilson’s storm petrels, unknowingly transport an estimated 35 tonnes of plastic in their stomachs during their annual migrations between the North Atlantic and the Antarctic, he said.

No one knows how much plastic is in the oceans. Another expedition in the Pacific recently concluded that waters between five and 30 meters deep contained at least 250 percent more and as much as 27 times more plastic than the top three or four metres.

“Almost every tow we did contained plastic regardless of the depth,” said expedition leader Giora Proskurowski, a researcher at the University of Washington.

Until now, decades of research into how much plastic litters the ocean was done using fine nets to skim the surface and underestimated the true amount of plastic debris in the oceans, Proskurowski said in a release.

Proskurowski and colleagues found that winds push the confetti-size pieces of plastic debris deep into the water, and they then float back up when winds calm. Based on these findings and multiple measurements at various depths, they determined there is far more plastic in world’s oceans than anyone realised.

About 260 million tonnes of new plastic is made each year. Plastic does not really biodegrade, it only breaks down into smaller pieces until it is microscopic – microplastic particles – that can remain in the environment for hundreds of years.

In 1950, just five million tonnes of plastic was manufactured globally – about two kgs for every person. Today, each person in developed countries uses about 100 kgs of plastic annually and less developed use 20 kgs, although that number is growing rapidly.

The UNEP-Global Programme of Action (GPA) estimates that about 80 percent of the plastics and other human-made debris originates from land sources not from shipping.

California nearly became the first U.S. state to ban plastic bags but a multi-million-dollar lobby effort by the plastics industry killed the proposed legislation as it came to a final vote, said Kirsten James, water quality director of Heal the Bay, a California environmental group.

“Less than five per cent of the 19 billion plastic bags used in California every year are recycled,” James previously told IPS.

Keeping plastic trash out of the ocean is as simple as setting up a mandatory deposit system with a high enough value on anything plastic to ensure it is too valuable to throw away, says van Franeker. Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries all have deposit systems for plastic bottles and recycling rates are better than 95 percent as a result.

On Wednesday, the United States intelligence community unveiled a first-ever assessment of global water-security issues.

The assessment predicts that water in shared basins will increasingly be used as political leverage. Credit: UN Photo/Ky Chung

According to one of the assessment’s lead authors, Major General Richard Engel, water-stressed countries, being forced to focus on pressing internal issues, are increasingly unable to support U.S. policies and strategic interests.

While the assessment does not foresee water being a main instigator of state-to-state violence or state failure in the next decade, beyond that “water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage.” In addition, “water shortages and pollution probably will harm the economic performance of important (U.S.) trading partners.”

The Global Water Security assessment is the result of a request made by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011. Clinton has previously stated that water and sanitation constitute the two most basic of development priorities.

The end result of the intelligence community’s research is not a comprehensive global look at the issue. Rather, it focuses on seven river basins between the Nile and the Mekong for which there is a “clear intersection of risks of availability and U.S. strategic interests”, according to Casimir Yost, the director of the Strategic Futures Group at the National Intelligence Council, which authored the report.

At the public launch of the assessment, Engel admitted, “The intelligence community went into this project reluctantly. When we looked into it, however, we realised that this was a top-level national security issue.”

For the United States, he suggested, one of the opportunities in the coming decades will be to make available to the rest of the world the country’s expertise in water management.

Indeed, doing so has increasingly become a U.S. priority. The assessment comes on the heels of the creation, in March, of the U.S. Water Partnership, a public-private body likewise devoted to mobilising U.S. water-related knowledge.

There is general agreement that the U.S. does have a role to play in, for instance, providing and fostering scientific understanding on global water-related issues, particularly as water-related issues could become increasingly politicised in the future, leaving the data open to manipulation.

Still, there is disagreement about how exactly the United States should engage beyond this role.

Some suggest that the United States needs to get its own house in order before feeling confident in offering too much advice to the rest of the world.

“In the U.S., we have very serious concerns about how we have managed out own river systems,” says Alexandra Cousteau, a filmmaker and advocate associated with National Geographic.

“The U.S. has indeed made significant contributions in these issues in the past,” says Ellen Laipson, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank here in Washington.

“But now we have to think global: we have to remember that we’re here to solve the problem, not to accrue influence. We have to make sure that these discussions are not limited to Washington.”

Laipson notes that the U.S. government has long had a tendency to be overly reliant on a world vision that focuses on national governments.

“It’s tricky to write this (assessment) within the U.S. government,” she says, “because officials tend to overlook local-level administration as well as supranational bodies.”

According to both Laipson and Cousteau, supranational bodies – such as those made up of governments and stakeholders from throughout a river basin – have proven to be particularly adept at making decisions that balance national security interests with those of local livelihoods and rights.

Cousteau focuses particular emphasis on lower-level bodies.

“Oftentimes, we don’t give enough credit or support to local communities who are coming up with solutions to water-related problems,” she says. “Collectively, these groups are having an impact on water-security issues in their countries – and they can have an even larger impact if they are empowered.”

She also warns that the new intelligence community assessment puts too little concern on the degradation of rivers as systems, including the ecologies and human communities that depend on the health of the system overall.

“It’s these systems, these wetlands, that act as buffers for many of the larger security issues that we’re discussing,” she says. “These river systems mean prosperity for many people.”

Interestingly, history bears out such a view. Despite the omnipresent importance of freshwater systems through the centuries, the historical record suggests that water issues – including water scarcity – have more often than not been grounds for cooperation rather than conflict, including in the modern age.

In a seminal 1998 paper, researcher Aaron T. Wolf wrote that during the 20th century “only seven minor skirmishes” took place, and “no war has ever been fought over water. In contrast, 145 water-related treaties were signed in the same period.”

“These patterns suggest that the more valuable lesson of international water is as a resources whose characteristics tend to induce cooperation, and incite violence only in the exception.”

By Walter García and Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 9 2012 (IPS)

The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), whose mandate includes the preservation and protection of the world’s fast-degrading oceans, will play a pivotal role in Expo 2012, an international exhibition to be formally opened later this week in the coastal town of Yeosu in South Korea.

“From the U.N.’s perspective, the seas form part of what is commonly referred to as the ‘global commons’, and as such, any threat to this global resource ought to be addressed,” Amina Mohamed, a U.N. assistant secretary-general and UNEP‘s deputy executive director, told IPS.

She pointed out that the largest creatures in the world live in the oceans (blue whales) as well as the smallest (bacteria).

“Protecting our oceans is tantamount to protecting our planet and is critical for long-term sustainable development,” said Mohamed, who is also co-commissioner-general of Expo 2012 and a former Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

The primary theme of Expo 2012, which runs May 12 May through Aug. 12 – is “the living ocean” and the protection of the world’s marine ecosystems.

The U.N. Pavilion located in the exhibition site will bring together more than 20 U.N. agencies and international organisations, primarily to showcase their collective efforts at the sustainable use of oceans and coasts.

The participating agencies include the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Seabed Authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Ocean Institute and the World Food Programme (WFP).

In an interview with IPS, Mohamed said that UNEP, as the lead U.N. agency, will coordinate the preparatory work of the agencies, as well as their participation.

She pointed out that coasts and ocean resources are key to economic development and growth, and therefore offer the potential for transitioning to a green economy and a sustainable future, as envisaged by the upcoming Rio+20 summit of world leaders in Brazil in June.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How important is the protection of marine resources in the context of the global environment? A: Protection of marine resources, and specifically oceans, is extremely important for a number of reasons. Oceans comprise more than 70 percent of our planet, are crucial to sustaining the Earth’s life- supporting systems, especially in regulating our climate, and provide food and income to the billions of people who depend on marine ecosystems for their livelihoods.

Indeed oceans, coasts, and islands are vital suppliers of diverse resources and ecosystem services that are essential for the survival of human civilisation. We must remain deeply aware of the importance of the oceans, coasts and islands so that they continue to serve as a source of prosperity for humankind.

Oceans, coasts and islands have also functioned as foundations for cultural development throughout human history. Consequently we must increase our efforts to protect and develop maritime cultures in order to help them conserve marine resources sustainably and ensure the equitable sharing for present and future generations.

In addition, oceans constitute a conduit for trade and exchange that connect the economies of the entire world. In light of the oceans interconnectedness, all nations of the world should strive to make it a place of safe navigation and welfare for all mankind. People depend on all of these for their wellbeing. And every second breath we take comes from oceans’ oxygen.

Q: Will Expo deal with related issues such as the rise in piracy and also the Law of the Sea (which was essentially the creation of the United Nations)? A: Visitors to the U.N. Pavilion will have the opportunity to learn about the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea.

However, the theme of the expo may not address the issue of piracy directly but we are keen to deliver the following key messages, namely that oceans are the heart and lungs of the planet and determine every form of life that inhabit them.

Q: What specific messages do you plan to convey regarding the world’s oceans at Expo 2012? A: Coasts and oceans are resilient but have their limits, and so if millions of tourists enjoy them every year and if limited fish stocks are over-fished, we need to give them time to recover. Care and sustainable use can make a difference.

Additionally, land-based activities such as agriculture and industries have a significant impact on the overall quality of our oceans. Poor use of resources leads to the generation of pollution loads through wastewater discharges and air pollution emissions. To this end, we must remember that removing pollutants is more expensive than avoiding them in the first place.

Oceans and inland water resources also provide important sources of food, nutrition and income for billions of people.

Q: Will protection of marine resources be on the agenda of Rio+20, billed as one of the biggest summit meetings on the global environment? A: Protection of marine resources will be on the agenda of the Rio+20 conference. Under this item, discussions will focus on various matters, including the role of oceans in sustaining Earth’s life support system; sustainable exploitation of the oceans and their resources; conservation, sustainable management and equitable sharing of marine and ocean resources; economic, social and environmental contribution of coral reefs to island and coastal states; significance of the Global Marine Assessment process; impact and prevention of ocean acidification, restoration of global fish stocks, conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity.

In addition to this prominent feature of oceans in the Rio+20 text, there will be an ‘Oceans Dialogue event’ in Rio on Jun. 16 at the Rio Conventions pavilion. And arrangements have been put in place to celebrate ‘Oceans Day’ (during the summit).

Q: Regarding the impact of oceans on humans, how threatening is sea level rise on the world’s smaller island nations such as Maldives, Tuvalu and Solomon islands? Does UNEP have a role here? And can the Expo provide any guidance to these countries? A: The rise in sea level poses serious challenges to the whole world. It is estimated that sea levels have been rising at an average rate of 2.5mm per year between 1992 and 2011. This scenario clearly supports the view that small island nations remain a special case for sustainable development in view of their unique and particular vulnerabilities.

The vulnerability of small island nations has worsened over the last two decades if the rate of rising sea level is anything to go by. There exists therefore a strong basis for increased efforts to assist small island nations to deal with this global challenge including the need to convene a third international conference for the sustainable development of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the very near future.

UNEP is uniquely placed to provide information that would assist the Small Island Nations deal with their vulnerabilities. We have for instance published a report titled “Green Economy in a Blue World” which sets out several options that address challenges faced by these countries. These options range from transition to green growth in fisheries to developing a sustainable tourism sector.

Excerpt:

Without major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, sunlight is to kill an unknown number of ocean phytoplankton, the planet’s most important organism, a new study reports this week.

Phytoplankton is a vital component in the ocean's food chain, and generates at least half of the oxygen we breathe. Credit: NOAA/public domain

In the not so distant future, sunlight, the very source of life for phytoplankton, will likely begin to kill them because of the ocean’s increasing acidity, researchers from China and Germany have learned.

“There’s a synergistic effect between increased ocean acidity and natural light,” says Ulf Riebesell of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany.

Riebesell added that it was also possible “phytoplankton could adapt”.

Researchers were surprised to discover that diatoms, one of the most important and abundant types of phytoplankton, fared very badly during shipboard experiments conducted by co-author Kunshan Gao, from the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University, Xiamen China.

Previous experiments in labs like Riebesell’s found that diatoms actually did better in high-acid seawater, unlike most other shell- forming plankton. Burning fossil fuels has made the oceans about 30 percent more acidic researchers discovered less than 10 years ago. Oceans absorb one third of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from using fossil fuels.

The good news is this has slowed the rate of global warming. The bad news is oceans are now more acidic and it will get worse as more CO2 is emitted. This is basic, well-understood ocean chemistry.

Gao and his team made several trips into the South China Sea taking samples from surface waters where phytoplankton are found. While still on the research vessel, those samples were made as acidic as the oceans are likely to be in 2100 without major emissions reductions (800-1000 parts per million compared to current 392 ppm).

As expected under these conditions, certain types of plankton like coccolithophores did not do well but surprisingly, diatom productivity also declined.

One possible reason was the much brighter natural light on the ship versus that in science labs, Riebsell and Gao suspected. Followup lab experiments with lights mimicking the intensity of natural light in the subtropical zone of the South China Sea confirmed that the combination of high-acid sea water and light intensity was more than diatoms could handle.

Riebsell speculates that diatoms stressed by high-acid conditions can’t cope with the energy they receive from sunlight at the same time. Their study was published May 6 in Nature Climate Change.

“We don’t know at what point the combination of a certain level of ocean acidity and sunlight leads to the decline of diatoms,” he said.

This is just one of many recent studies finding negative impacts as the oceans become more and more acidic.

By 2040, most of the Arctic Ocean will be too acidic for shell- forming species including most plankton. Significant areas of the Antarctic Ocean will be similarly affected, oceanographer Carol Turley from Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK previously told IPS.

The cold waters of the polar regions allow more CO2 to be absorbed faster, turning the oceans more acidic sooner. The oceans haven’t seen a rapid change like this in 60 million years, said Turley.

She warned that global warming is also raising water temperatures and reducing the amount of oxygen in seawater in some regions. This is another potentially dangerous combination.

“Our research suggests the impact of oceanic acidification upon marine plankton could be more serious than previously thought,” said John Beardall from the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University.

Beardall and colleagues from several research centres calculate that without major reductions in CO2 emissions, ocean acidity will have a significant impact on phytoplankton before 2100. Their findings were also recently published in Nature Climate Change.

It’s not just plankton. The large and continuing decline of oysters, both wild and farmed, in the Pacific Northwest have now been linked to increased ocean acidity. Scientists have shown that oyster larvae have difficulty building shells in corrosive waters, according to a study in the journal Limnology and Oceanography published last month.

“For the oceans, the Pacific Oyster larvae are the canaries in the coal mines for ocean acidification,” said Richard Feely, a co-author of the study and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Fish and other species are showing changes in their growth, behaviour and reproduction, according to other research.

Not only are the oceans big, covering 70 percent of the planet, they are complex. Recent work by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at San Diego reveals there is huge variability in ocean acidity levels.

That makes “global predictions of the impacts of ocean acidification a big challenge,” said Jennifer Smith, a marine biologist with Scripps.

The only prediction Riebesell is willing to make is about the high likelihood of a major decline in the ocean’s biodiversity (number and types of living things) if rates of fossil fuel emissions continue. Roughly 80 percent of all life is found in the oceans.

“Changes in the oceans are happening too fast for most species to cope,” he said. “It’s clear we are conducting a giant experiment on the planet and we don’t know what we are doing.”

Come May 12, South Korea will host its largest single landmark event for the year – an achitecturally-glittering Expo 2012 – continuing a 161-year-old tradition going back to the first Great Exhibition in England in 1851 showcasing the steam engine.

Expo 2012 is expected to attract nearly 11 million domestic and international visitors during the three-month fest. Credit: Courtesy of Expo 2012

The world fairs that followed included the 1876 international exhibition in the U.S. city of Philadelphia, which focused on the telephone as its thematic centrepiece, and the 1885 exposition in Antwerp, Belgium, highlighting the automobile.

The primary theme of this year’s international exhibition, hosted by one of Asia’s leading economic superpowers, is “the living ocean” and the protection of the world’s maritime resources.

According to the United Nations, 60 percent of the world’s major marine ecosystems are either damaged or overexploited.

The last world expo, held in 2010 in Shanghai, China, was based on the theme “Better City, Better Life” and the next expo, scheduled to take place in Milan, Italy in 2015, will focus on the cultural heritage of that city.

Located in the coastal town of Yeosu, home to Korea’s major ports, industrial complexes and national marine parks, Expo 2012 will showcase the achievements of the 21st century in marine science technology.

Described as a “green expo”, the exhibition’s environmental theme runs parallel to the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (also known as Rio+20) scheduled to take place in Brazil mid-June.

The United Nations, which has set up a giant pavilion, the second largest after Korea, is playing a key role in Expo 2012.

With more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface covered in oceans, says the United Nations, the lives of human beings are intimately linked to oceans.

“Oceans are the heart and lungs for our planet, producing 40 percent of the earth’s fresh water and 75 percent of the oxygen we breathe.”

And the world body aims to advance the sustainable management of oceans, coasts and small island developing states which face the threat of being wiped off the face of the earth due to sea-level rise and the degradation of the global environment.

The Expo organisers say they have established environmental guidelines for the first time in the long history of world exhibitions: carbon-neutral, eco-friendly buildings powered by solar and ocean thermal energy.

The government of Korea has invested over 1.9 billion dollars on the exhibition, which runs May 12 through Aug. 12 this year.

At the same time, it is also spending nearly 11 billion dollars constructing new roads, installing a high-speed train service between Seoul and Yeosu and building a massive tourism infrastructure in the coastal city.

The event is expected to attract nearly 11 million domestic and international visitors during the three-month fest.

Ambassador Samuel Koo, the U.N. Commissioner-General for Expo 2012, told IPS, “For a country which has hosted the Olympics, the World Cup and G20 Summit, the Expo represents another big opportunity to showcase its image as a major economic, high-tech and cultural powerhouse.”

This, he pointed out, will spur tourism, promote employment and upgrade Korea’s least developed region, the site of the exhibition, located at the centre of the south coast abundant in marine resources.

The event will bring the public and private sectors together, with the participation of some of Korea’s leading industrial companies, including Daewoo Shipping and Marine Engineering, with Korean traditions linking the latest technologies.

“Most importantly,” said Ambassador Koo, “it brings Korea closer to the international community in the spirit of cooperation and a shared sense of responsibility for marine protection and development.”

The Expo has attracted 105 countries, 24 U.N. and other international organisations and Korea’s top conglomerates which all have built their own state-of-the art pavilions.

All the major cities and provinces of Korea are also represented at the three-month exhibition.

At least 50 countries, including the United States, China, Japan, Germany, France and Spain will have individual pavilions.

Also, 50 developing nations have designed joint national pavilions classified into three clusters: the Pacific Pavilion, the Atlantic Pavilion and the Indian Ocean Pavilion.

France will focus on “desalination of sea water”; Germany on “achievements in oceanic and coastal related science and technology; Russia on “Ocean and Person – Path from the Past to the Future”; and the United States on “Diversity, Wonder and Solutions.”

By Christopher Pala
CRISFIELD, Maryland, U.S., Apr 25 2012 (IPS)

Authorities in Maryland and Virginia have rescued the Chesapeake Bay’s blue crab from the brink of collapse, tripling its population in five years, by using methods that emerging crabmeat-exporting countries in Asia and Central America could emulate, scientists say.

“It’s one the most successful fishery stock rebuilding programmes ever, anywhere,” said Douglas Domenech, Virginia’s secretary of natural resources.

“There are a lot of things that you can do to reduce the catch in a fishery,” said Richard Robins, the chairman of the commission that regulates crab-fishing in Virginia. “But this was the first time we used them all at once.”

The result: 2010 was the Cheseapeake’s second-biggest harvest in 60 years of the hand-sized crabs whose Latin name, Calinestes sapidus, means tasty, beautiful swimmers, and 2011 came close.

Here in Crisfield, the self-described crab capital of the world, Dan Dize, a 33-year-old crab fisherman, now catches more crabs per pot. He admitted he was worried about rising fuel costs eating up his profits, but added, “I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”

After a day on the bay, he unloaded 3,500 live crabs packed tightly in 26 wooden baskets that would soon be heading for markets in Washington and New York.

For the second half of the 20th century, the crab population in the Chesapeake, the United States’ biggest bay that’s home to one of the world’s biggest crab fisheries, had oscillated around 400 million crabs, the average annual harvest was 250 million crabs. But in 1997, the population declined to about 130 million crabs and despite efforts to reduce the catch, up to 100 million crabs were still being caught each year.

“You can’t harvest 80 percent of anything year after year and expect it to last,” explained British-born Tom Miller, a fisheries ecologist who heads the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.

While the population never collapsed completely, the drop of crabmeat supply led local companies that wholesaled Chesapeake crab to increase imports from Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Central America of high-quality crab meat, which is picked by hand from steamed crabs, pasteurised and shipped under refrigeration.

“Crab and crabmeat imports into Baltimore went from 10.5 million dollars in 1995, when the Chesapeake harvest was starting to decline, to over 110 million dollars in 2011,” said Douglas Lipton, a fisheries economist at the University of Maryland.

“Now we’re hearing that while these Asian crab fisheries bring good income to their communities, the crabs are being taken faster than they reproduce, so that if they don’t act soon, they could experience the declines we saw in the Chesapeake.”

In many communities around the world, particularly those that depend on fishing, leaders are sometimes able to persuade local fishermen to fish less if a particicular fish population has visibly diminished.

But in most developing countries, the sampling equipment and know-how that Western scientists use to determine how a given population is weathering being intensely fished are generally lacking, making the kind of restrictions that led to the rescue of the Chesapeake crab less precise.

“The countries that import seafood, like the United States, need to export their expertise in fishing sustainably,” said Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, perhaps the world’s most influential fisheries expert.

“In this case, foreign aid should take the form of sending American crab specialists to the exporting countries so they can scientifically assess how fast the crab populations are responding to increased harvests. Then they can come up with ways to prevent overfishing so the fishery can keep on benefitting everyone.”

“Getting people to fish less anywhere is very hard,” said Miller, the Maryland fisheries ecologist. “Usually you keep on rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and when it starts to sink, you impose a fishing moratorium, which is very disruptive to the communities.”

In the Chesapeake, the solution came after Robins, the owner of a seafood packing business, was appointed to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission in 2004. He realised that piecemeal efforts to curtail the catch weren’t working and called for a blue-ribbon commission to determine why.

Miller was the senior scientist on the panel, whose report came up with what he calls the “kindergarten solution”, so easy a five-year- old could have figured it out: “If there aren’t enough babies, stop killing the mommies.”

“We needed to save at least half the number of pregnant females that were being harvested, about 30 million crabs,” says Miller. “Overall, we wanted the harvest to be no more than 46 percent of the stock.”

A broad array of measures was put in place, with the reduction of the fall harvest of females migrating to the mouth of the bay in both states the most effective. A winter dredge fishery of buried hibernating pregnant females in Virginia was closed and a spawning- season sanctuary was extended, explained Robins, who helped coordinate the measures.

The local fishermen were not happy, but the spring 2009 survey of 1,500 spots up and down the bay found that the new restrictions had raised the female population by 70 percent, while the male population barely changed.

In 2010, the yearly survey showed females were up 200 percent from the 2008 level. A survey published in late April showed that this year, the total number of Chesapeake crabs is, at 764 million, triple what it was in 2007.

Meanwhile, added Robins, the fisheries official, the average price Virginia fishermen got for their crabs remained stable at two dollars a kilo between 2008 and 2010, while the amount of crabs caught rose by more than a third. He expects prices to go up again.

“We saw that when the scallop fishery recovered,” he says. “Demand increased and now prices are at an all-time high, and there’s three times more scallops being harvested now than in the 1980s.”

If Robins is right, prices will rise to offset Dize’s expenses, demonstrating that more often than not, saving a species from commercial extinction – the point at which it costs more to catch a fish than the fish can be sold for – benefits the fishermen who traditionally fight restrictions on their work.

Reacting to a series of deadly crocodile attacks, the Sri Lankan government has drawn up plans to capture the free-ranging beasts and confine them to parks. Conservationists oppose this move.

Villagers bathe behind wire mesh to ward off crocodiles in the Nilwala river. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

On Apr. 12, Sri Lanka’s wildlife department ordered an operation to capture crocodiles lurking in the rivers and estuaries of this island country and relocate them in conservation parks for the safety of citizens – and that of the protected animal.

What triggered the wildlife department’s move was an attack on an 18-year-old woman in the Nilwala river, just outside this village, on Apr. 4. Nuwanthika Sathsaran’s remains were recovered by villagers.

Wildlife officials later captured a four metre-long crocodile that was believed to have attacked Nuwanthika and also dragged away a mother of three who was washing clothes in the river, a week earlier.

Whether the wildlife department will persist with the capture programme is uncertain and it is currently in consultation with experts and conservationists. Meanwhile the department has also undertaken a crocodile census, the first in the country.

Encounters with crocodiles – living fossils that once breathed the same air as the dinosaurs – can and should be avoided, says Anslem de Silva, vice-chairman of the crocodile specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in South Asia and Iran.

“I have told the government that setting up conservation parks is not feasible. With this new plan, whenever people see a crocodile, they will ask authorities to come and catch it, even if it is a harmless one.

“We should be paying attention to educating people and stopping them from encroaching on crocodile habitats,” de Silva told IPS.

According to de Silva the two species of crocodiles found in Sri Lanka, the saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) and the marsh crocodile (Crocodylus palustris) are apex predators in the ecosystem and ‘keystone species’, surviving from the Jurassic age.

Herpetologists estimate that over the past 15 years more than 130 people have been attacked by crocodiles, resulting in 35 fatalities. At least 50 crocodiles have also been killed in encounters with human beings in the same period.

De Silva says the wildlife department’s plans to set up crocodile conservation centres – in Kirala Kele in the Southern Province and in the Muthurajawela wetlands in the Western Province – are unsound.

Muthurajawela, a heavily populated area north of Colombo, has vast stretches of scrub and marshlands which are crocodiles habitats. Rathmalana, a marshy area south of the capital city, is also steadily being encroached upon.

Crocodiles often stray from marshy areas into urban waterways, especially during floods.

While the government remains undecided on how to deal with crocodiles and encroachments, people have begun retaliating against known man-eaters in their neighbourhoods – though this is illegal because crocodiles are protected animals.

On Feb. 12, the residents of Ragama town, north of Colombo, used a large hook baited with a chicken to capture and kill a five-metre specimen, weighing more than 1,000 kg, believed to have been responsible for the disappearance of Sebastian Angelo Uday Kumara, 36, who went missing on Jan. 26.

“What is happening is that human beings are increasingly encroaching on crocodile habitats. There have been crocodile attacks reported from the Nilwala river for hundreds of years – but this is a crocodile habitat,” Namal Kamalgoda conservationist and former president of the Sri Lanka Natural History Society, told IPS.

Citizens compelled to share streams and waterways with crocodiles see the situation differently. “Look, I have been living here all my life and these creatures were never here until about 5-6 years ago,” says Kuruppuarchachi Dharmapala, a middle-aged resident of Pallupitiya village.

Dharmapala told IPS that the animals have seriously disrupted life in the village where it is customary for people to bathe and wash clothes in the river. “We are now forced to bathe in wire mesh cages,” he said.

Survivors of crocodile attacks are certainly not impressed by the fact that the crocodile is a living fossil or by its status on the food chain, but see it as a serious menace.

Six months ago, Sunil Shanta was taking a dip in a stream that runs behind his house in Pallulpitiya when he felt a stabbing pain in his buttocks. “I turned around to see a long snout and a pair of shining eyes,” he told IPS.

The predator tried to drag Shanta into the water, but he managed to grab an overhanging tree branch and scream for help. His neighbours were able to beat back the beast, leaving a severely injured Shanta to spend the next two months in a hospital.

Other crocodile attack victims who have saved themselves by screaming for help include M. Seneviratne, a politician belonging to the left-wing Peoples’ Liberation Front, who was set upon by a reptile while fishing in Anuradhapura, a famed pilgrimage and tourist centre, in 2010.

Attacks are not confined to the rural areas, and sightings are now being frequently reported in the urban areas of Sri Lanka, a sign that the crocodile population is growing.

De Silva said increasing salinity in the island country’s estuaries and rivers, attributable to climate change and rise in sea levels can affect crocodile populations. “There is evidence to suggest that the crocodile population increases when salinity and acidity levels rise.”

As Sri Lanka urbanises conflict is inevitable, says Kamalgoda. “We are forcing crocodiles to eat us as there is nothing else left for them to eat.”

Kamalgoda said the situation of the crocodile is no different from that of other Sri Lankan wildlife such as elephants and leopards that are being crowded out by human settlements. “This is the inevitable path of development and animals will always be the losers,” he said.

A Catholic priest from the Philippines, a mother of three from Argentina, and the founder of the NGO Friends of Lake Turkana in Kenya all have one thing in common: they have helped to motivate their respective local communities to protect the natural environment around them and to stand up for their rights.

On Monday, Edwin Gariguez, Sofia Gatica and Ikal Angelei, along with three other grassroots activists, were declared winners of the so- called “Green Nobel”. Ma Jun from China, Evgenia Chirikova from Russia and Caroline Cannon from the U.S. also took the 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize.

Water is a special focus of this year’s prize, with two of the winners being outstanding river activists.

For one of them, Ikal Angelei, the prize comes at an important juncture in her struggle to stop construction of the massive Gibe III Dam in Ethiopia, which would block access to water for indigenous communities around Lake Turkana.

With a projected cost of 1.7 billion dollars, the Gibe III dam upstream of the Omo River, which began construction in 2006, is the single largest infrastructural work being undertaken in Ethiopia and is supposed to provide 1,800 MW of electricity.

The Omo River provides up to 90 percent of the total water flowing into Lake Turkana, whilst the other 10 percent is provided by the Turkwel and the Kerio.

According to Jeffrey A. Gritzner, a geography professor at the University of Montana in the U.S., there will be a drop in the lake level of up to 10 to 12 metres once the dam opens.

“Even a slight drop of as little as five metres would cause cessation of flooding, leading to a reduction in the lake’s water which will result in rising salinity. This will cause a destruction of significant commercial interests around the lake which include fishery and tourism,” said Gritzner, who is part of the Africa Resources Working Group (ARWG).

Ikal Angelei founded the group Friends of Lake Turkana (FoLT) in 2008, and in response to her advocacy, last August, the Kenyan parliament passed a unanimous resolution for the government to demand an independent environmental assessment from Ethiopia.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee also responded to her appeals by passing a resolution to halt dam construction until further investigation.

The World Bank and African Development Bank are considering funding the transmission line that would justify completing the dam, and Ikal is now pressuring the banks to stay out of this project.

Chinese journalist and director of the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) Ma Jun was awarded the 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize for creating unprecedented environmental transparency in China and empowering Chinese citizens to demand justice for industrial pollution.

In 1999, Ma Jun published the book “China’s Water Crisis”, which exposed the pollution and the impacts of dams and diversions on the health of rivers across China.

“Ma Jun and Ikal Angelei live and work in very different contexts and take quite different approaches in their work on behalf of healthy waters and healthy communities,” Jason Rainey, executive director of San Francisco based NGO International Rivers, told IPS.

“Yet, they are both creative strategists who effectively articulate the crises effecting the rivers of the world, and have a sharp understanding of how to work ‘upstream’ to influence the decision- makers who are often far removed from the impacts of their decisions.

“Both recognise that ecological and economic ‘sustainability’ cannot be achieved if society fails to take care of our living rivers,” he added.

The Goldman Environmental Prize was established in 1990 by San Francisco civic leader and philanthropist Richard N. Goldman and his wife, Rhoda H. Goldman, who is a descendent of Levi Strauss.

Richard Goldman founded the insurance company Goldman Insurance and Risk Management, and with his wife he established the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund in 1951.

The prize is awarded to six persons each year, one in each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America), and has so far been given to more than 150 people from more than 80 countries.

The “Green Nobel” has been given to other river activists before, including Chinese journalist Dai Qing won the Goldman Prize in 1993, primarily for her authorship and organising to bring transparency and critique to the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China.

Chilean environmentalist Juan Pablo won the prize in 1997 due to activism against the ecological damages from a series of dam building projects at the Biobío River.

Women, like these indigenous women hauling water in Chiapas, Mexico, are often responsible for securing water for their families. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 13 2012 (IPS)

So-called water schools, which educate communities on the resource and its links with the environment, gender and climate change, are helping to raise awareness on proper water management in Mexico, at a time of severe drought.

In recent years, projects of this kind have been set up in different parts of Mexico, especially in areas where water is scarce and measures to make water use more efficient are needed.

“We are training people to understand the relationship between water and gender, to influence public policies,” Araceli Díaz, the president of the NGO Calmécac, told IPS. “We assess the problems faced by different regions, and then design a water policy agenda.”

In 2011, Calmécac – named after the schools attended by the children of the nobility in the Aztec empire – set up a water school in the city of Taxco, in the state of Guerrero, 150 km south of Mexico City. Outreach workers from 12 surrounding municipalities are active in the school.

Because it suffers from chronic water shortages as well as pollution of water sources by gold and silver mining, that southwestern region is in need of special conservation and clean-up measures.

Mexico as a whole is highly vulnerable in terms of water supplies. And the situation has been aggravated by the effects of climate change, which in the medium to long term will threaten the availability of water, with negative impacts on food, agriculture, human health and biodiversity, experts from academia and civil society point out.

Besides the problem of pollution of groundwater, at least 100 of the country’s 653 aquifers are overexploited.

Water schools began to emerge in the decade of the 2000s in several countries of Latin America, due to the critical problems with water. The aim is to educate communities on the value of water, and instruct them in efficient, rational usage techniques. The schools also introduce new habits of water recycling, reuse and treatment.

In addition, they address the link between water and women, since in many communities it is women who are responsible for hauling, storing and distributing water, especially in areas where supplies are scarce.

These locally-based experiences “are important and valuable approaches, because the training and awareness-raising is carried out at a local level. Each local context has a very different set of problems,” Edith Kauffer, at the public Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), told IPS.

“Both local capacity-building and government policies are necessary – they are complementary,” said the researcher, who lives in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern state of Chiapas.

“The solution does not only lie in the hands of civil society. Governments have a role to play too,” she said.

Since 2011, central and northern Mexico have been hit by drought, which has caused significant damage to the agriculture and livestock sectors. And several studies forecast that northern Mexico will continue to suffer water stress in the long term.

In Mexico, 30 percent of households do not have piped water and 15 percent receive water through other means only every three days, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

One of the water schools operates in the town of Malinalco, population 25,600, in the central state of Mexico, next to the Federal District (the capital). Its work focuses on cleaning up the San Miguel river and improving treatment of sewage or blackwater, and greywater, which is wastewater generated by domestic activities like bathing and washing clothes and dishes.

“We carry out community work with the local population to raise awareness about pollution of bodies of water,” Macaira Vera, the head of the water school in Malinalco, told IPS. “The key has been community work, driving it home to local people that if we pollute the water, we are killing ourselves.”

The initiative promoted the installation of 125 household biodigesters – containers that convert organic waste into fertiliser and biogas – and the construction of four community plants to treat sewage that previously ended up in the river.

An office that provides advice on water, helping the local population work out specific water treatment and handling problems, was also established.

Each biodigester serves 18 families, and each plant has the capacity to process 1.5 litres of sewage per second. The organisation also carries out monthly analyses of water quality at the community plants and in local wells.

Heavily polluted by raw sewage and fertiliser runoff, the San Miguel river is the hub of the work of the water school, which identified 125 spots where sewage was dumped into the river in 2008.

“We decided to try to get these issues onto the public agenda; we formed online networks to communicate with each other and try to get incorporated into the spaces where these issues are discussed, and decisions are reached,” Díaz said.

In its assessments, Calmécac found problems of water availability and supplies, serious pollution, obsolete water distribution infrastructure, and a lack of citizen participation in decision-making.

The organisation is seeking funds to create a wetlands sewage treatment system – constructed wetlands that clean wastewater by filtration, settling, and bacterial decomposition – and to promote eco-techniques like rainwater collection and recycling.

It also foments family gardens, “to get people to change their consumption habits and learn to grow their own food,” and hydroponics – a method of growing plants using mineral nutrient solutions instead of soil – Calmécac’s Díaz said.

“The priorities are improving access to piped water, improving water quality, and tackling the enormous lack of sewage treatment,” said Kauffer, who is involved in research into the border rivers between Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, along this country’s southern border. “There are practically no rivers that aren’t polluted.”

Chiapas, one of the poorest states of Mexico, which is nonetheless rich in water, has around 25 sewage treatment plants, but half of them operate deficiently.

In Malinalco, in the state of Mexico, “pollution has been reduced, but the main problem is garbage,” Vera said. “There is less inorganic trash, but more organic waste. And water is scarce, not due to a lack of sources, but because of the poor distribution by the grid, which is very old.”

In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution declaring that safe and clean drinking water is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights, and the U.N. Human Rights Council declared it legally binding.

U.N. member countries are thus legally obliged to amend their laws, to bring them into line with the U.N. General Assembly resolution. But Mexico has not yet reformed its general law on water.

Naseema Akhtar, 38, worries that her daily treks to collect clean water from the mountain springs around her village of Bonpora, in Kashmir’s Kupwara district, are getting longer. She is already doing more than seven km every day.

Women in rural Kashmir walk great distances to fetch clean water. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

Akhtar, and other women from Bonpora, 110 km north of Srinagar, carry pieces of cloth with them to strain the water – though this is poor defence against dangerous water-borne pathogens.

“We know that the cloth only removes insoluble solids, but what can we do? There is no other source of safe water for our daily needs,” said Akhtar. People in most of Kashmir’s hamlets rely on water from mountain springs or, if unable to walk distances, resort to the risky streams and ponds nearby.

Kashmir, a distinct region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, has seen armed separatist militancy since 1989, complicated by territorial claims over the region by neighbouring Pakistan.

“When the mountain springs get scanty or dry up, we are forced to use the stagnant water in small ponds around our village,” says Shahzad Mir, a resident of Badibera village, also in Kupwara district.

Badibera, since December, has the benefit of water pumped out of a bore well installed by the state government, but the water is hard with dissolved minerals, including fluorides. The residents complain that the supply is erratic and may fail for days together.

“In the summers, people here regularly fall sick and children seem particularly prone to diarrhoea and other ailments,” said Mir. “Doctors tell us that this happens because of drinking dirty water.”

Zareefa Begam, a 43-year-old woman in Mir’s village, has learnt it the hard way. “Last year, all my three kids suffered severe diarrhoea and I had to stay away from work for more than a week to look after them.”

Other villagers said they were spending more out-of-pocket than ever before for treating stomach ailments, especially young children.

“Children are most vulnerable to water-borne diseases,” says Dr. Rehana Kousar, nodal officer for Integrated Disease Surveillance Project at Kashmir’s health directorate. “Repeated diarrhoea can lead to severe malnutrition, stunted growth and even death.”

Poor rural families, says Kousar, suffer on many counts. “They end up spending money on transportation and medicines, apart from having to take out time from earning livelihoods. And the women, as caregivers, take the brunt of it.”

Under-five mortality rate in Jammu and Kashmir state is 43 per 1,000 – nowhere near achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing the rate to 31 per 1,000 by 2015.

Tufail Mattoo, director of rural sanitation in Kashmir, identifies the major cause of diarrhoea and other water-borne diseases to open defecation in the rural areas. “The rains leach the faecal matter into the water bodies, making them unsafe.

“We are trying very hard to discourage open defecation, but it is going to take time to convince the people,” Mattoo told IPS.

Srinagar’s State Medical Hospital treats thousands of patients for diseases like typhoid, cholera and hepatitis in the summer months. “About 90 percent of the patients come from villages where contaminated water is emerging as a huge health risk,” Rafreeq Ahmed, a doctor at the hospital, told IPS.

A government survey released in March said that more than 65 percent of Kashmir’s seven million people drink untreated water and that the bulk of the population depends on water from ponds, streams and wells.

The survey, taken together with a study released in February by the Integrated Disease Surveillance Unit (IDSU), showing high coliform bacteria count in Kashmir’s water bodies, gives clues to why diarrhoeal diseases are on the rise in the region. Coliform bacteria found in water, soil and on vegetation warn of the presence of dangerous faecal pathogens, including bacteria, viruses, protozoa and larger parasites.

Said Dr. Sajjad Ahmed who was part of the team of doctors who carried out the IDSU study: “There is a dangerous trend in which raw, untreated sewage is channelised into water bodies without any treatment, and that is why the water sources are showing such high levels of contamination.”

“In all the rural areas of Kashmir, toilets are build close to water bodies,” says senior gastroenterologist at the Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Ghulam Mohammad Malik.

Malik also laid blame on security forces – deployed in Kashmir to fight separatist militancy and stop infiltration from Pakistan – who often bypass sanitation rules. Some 500,000 troops are presently stationed in Kashmir, most of them deployed in the strategic upper reaches, adding to the contamination of the natural springs.

“Security personnel form a good percentage of the population of Kashmir and obviously their behaviour is a major influence,” says Rishab Khanna, president of Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN). “We are seeking to engage them as part of our awareness campaigns.”

Kashmir’s status as a major tourist and pilgrimage destination contributes to the waste disposal problem. According to official information, there are 4,300 hotels in 22 tourist resorts and towns across Kashmir functioning without proper sewage disposal facilities.

In 2011, Kashmir received two million tourists including 634,000 Hindu pilgrims headed for the Amarnath cave shrine in Anantnag district. “Heavy tourist influx makes matters worse when you have no infrastructure to treat waste,” says Khanna.

IYCN, which has been organising environmental safety campaigns in Kashmir for the last two years, advocates green solutions such as converting the human waste into organic fertilizer.

“Right now Kashmir imports vast quantities of synthetic fertilizer from outside the state,” Khanna said. “Converting the waste into fertilizer will make for safe disposal as well as savings on farming inputs,” he said.

By Patricia Grogg and - -
SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Mar 26 2012 (IPS)

In this eastern Cuban city, Danny Dip Leyva has begun to use her shower again after decades of hauling water into her house by hand. But in Aurora, a small neighbourhood on the outskirts of Havana, Manuel Roque still longs for a regular supply of piped water.

Many areas in Cuba still rely on tanker trucks for water. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Experts note that the worst natural disasters in Cuba are associated with hydrometeorological events, including drought and hurricanes, which are aggravated by climate change.

The worst drought in recent years, in 2004 and 2005, began in eastern Cuba but eventually affected the entire country, causing some three billion dollars in losses. In Cuba, the dry season runs from November to April, and 80 percent of annual precipitation occurs from May to October. As of February 2012, the country’s 240 reservoirs held nearly 5.6 million cubic metres of water, or 56.5 percent of capacity.

While the situation is not as critical as it was in 2005, experts point out with concern that 82 reservoirs were at less than 50 percent of capacity, and that 39 of these were below 25 percent of capacity and 10 percent were completely dry. Havana, with reserves at just 19 percent of capacity, was one of the cities with the most dire water shortages.

The long and narrow Cuban archipelago has no major natural freshwater sources, making rainfall its principal source of water. The country’s reservoirs are part of a strategy followed by the government since the 1960s, to provide supplies during the dry season.

According to reports from the National Institute of Water Resources (INRH), Cuba increased its capacity from 48 million cubic metres in 13 reservoirs in 1959 to almost nine billion cubic metres today. In addition to these surface water reserves, the country has three billion cubic metres of underground water reserves.

In recent years, the Cuban government has revived plans that were interrupted by the severe economic crisis of the 1990s, hoping to find a long-term solution to water shortages with engineering works in the eastern and central regions to transfer water from rainy mountain regions to drier areas.

The strategy includes the construction of reservoirs, canals and pipelines, as well as more than 80 km of mountain tunnels. Once completed, the distribution network will benefit at least nine of the country’s 15 provinces. The programme is considered vital for the eastern region, due to its scarce groundwater reserves.

“This is adaptation on a major scale, and at a high economic cost. It is also necessary for society to accept that drought is here to stay, and that people must prepare and find solutions, such as having recipients for storing water, or if they have animals, storing forage and having places to move their livestock,” Carlos Rodríguez, a land-use planning and environmental expert, commented to IPS.

While he noted that Santiago and other parts of eastern Cuba are among the most vulnerable to drought, he said water shortages are also a problem in western provinces such as Havana and parts of Pinar del Río, 160 km from the capital.

Santiago, a city of about half a million, has six reservoirs. But its water supply was inadequate for decades, and entire generations grew up carrying water to their homes. “Piped water was available every six to 30 days,” INRH official Gerardo Linares told reporters.

The population grew and water sources became even more insufficient. Moreover, the city’s old, deteriorated water grid presented another obstacle for piping water to people’s homes. But this year, Santiago’s residents have a modern new aqueduct and water purification plant.

“Our quality of life has taken an enormous leap forward. Now we have water almost every day from our taps. In the past, water would flow every 15 or even 20 days, and taking a shower was a luxury,” Dip Leiva, who lives in Santiago’s José Martí district, built in the 1960s, told IPS.

In Havana, water distribution is uneven: in some neighbourhoods water is always available, while in others, such as Roque’s, there is running water every other day, but only in the very early morning. “Our water tanks aren’t always filled up all the way, and sometimes we end up waiting for water that never comes,” Roque told IPS.

According to official figures, 10.7 million of Cuba’s 11.2 million inhabitants have access to drinking water. Water is delivered to the homes of 8.4 million people, while 1.7 million have piped water less than 200 metres from their homes, and about 600,000 receive water from tanker trucks, known here as pipas.

“We have 2,411 human settlements, which are supplied with water through 22,326 km of piping,” equivalent to 14 times the island’s circumference, INRH official Caridad Díaz said on a television programme broadcast late last year.

However, the drought and the poor state of the water pipe system in Havana, population 2.2 million, are conspiring against stable distribution. Water authorities have acknowledged that about half the water pumped nationwide does not reach its destination, due to leaks in the pipes.

The government plan for the “updating” of the economic model includes prioritising and expanding a programme to rehabilitate the country’s water distribution networks, including the sale of fittings and accessories to the public. The plan also includes the mandatory regulation of metered consumption and rates that depend on consumption, both in the state and private sectors.

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA , Mar 25 2012 (IPS)

Sahara Bibi, a 47-year-old poor Muslim woman living on one of the climate- impacted islands of Eastern India’s fragile Sundarbans archipelago in West Bengal state, was forced to pull her two young sons out of school and send one of them to the Southern state of Kerala to earn a decent income.

A resident of Mousuni village in the Namkhana area of the Sundarbans, Sahara has lost her home twice in seven years owing to erosion caused by the rising sea level as a result of the severe impact of climate change.

Declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO and home to a highly unique ecology – including the world's largest mangrove gene pool and the endangered royal Bengal tiger – the Sundarbans (spread across a 9630 square kilometer-area in India and covering 16,370 square kilometres in Bangladesh) face a drastic threat from global warming and attendant climatic change.

Here, the sea level has been rising at a rate higher than the global average for years now, wreaking havoc on the archipelago’s population of roughly 4.37 million people, according to 2011 provisional data released by the Indian census department.

Furthermore, a new study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), one of India’s leading environment pressure groups, in partnership with the Kolkata-based South Asian Forum for Environment (SAFE), has revealed a double whammy for the region’s people – not only loss of habitat from climate change but also a complete lack of climate-sensitive development planning.

According to "Living with Changing Climate: Impacts, vulnerability and adaptation challenges in Indian Sundarbans", inadequate development planning is forcing people in this fragile region to migrate to other parts of India in search of livelihoods, while the number of climate refugees in the area swells and vast swathes of agricultural land is either devoured by the encroaching sea or rendered unfit for cultivation.

When Sahara’s younger son Sahzahan went to the Southern Indian state of Kerala to work as a mason, she was shattered. But now her son earns 300 rupees (roughly six dollars) a day and persuades others from their village to join him as a migrant labourer. Since migration is dependent on networks and acquaintances, Kerala is quickly becoming a depot for scores of workers fleeing their ravaged home in search of minimum-wage jobs.

When the CSE quizzed Sahara about the efficacy of government schemes for alternative livelihood in her region, she said she had heard nothing about it.

Nor has she been provided with any information about the perils of climate change in the Sundarbans, despite being a climate refugee herself. All she knows is that the number of pre-seasonal cyclones has only increased in the Sundarbans, with the worst – Cyclone Aila – causing utter devastation and massive deaths in May 2009.

Unlike Sahara, Saikh Rustam (52), also hailing from the Namkhana area, is better informed about government schemes but is unable to avail himself of their benefits.

Rustam’s home has been devoured by the rising sea level thrice in just 12 years. The advancing sea robbed him of his livelihood as a farmer and he was forced to become a fisherman.

However, "during the monsoon, when the river is dangerous, there is no livelihood even as a fisherman," he told IPS.

Rustam says he has heard about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), a flagship government rural poverty alleviation plan promising 100 days of wage labour per financial year to rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

"But I prefer not to get engaged in MGNREGS because the payment is made in a bank account. I did not have an account earlier, while even now one has to lose a day’s wage to go to the bank located far away," he said.

Urgent need for climate-sensitive development

According to official statistics, sea surface temperature (SST) in the Sundarbans is increasing at the rate of 0.5 degrees centigrade per decade, compared to the global increase of 0.06 degrees centigrade per decade.

The Sundarbans is losing land rapidly and soil salinity is increasing fast, posing a dire threat to the future of agriculture in the region.

The Indian part of Sundarbans has been losing land at the alarming rate of 5.5 square kilometres per year over the past ten years.

In the same period, the frequency of cyclones increased by 26 percent, according to the CSE.

The joint CSE-SAFE research report also warned that one of the most biodiverse habitats in the world is getting pummeled not only by a changing climate, but also by the complete lack of development planning.

"With a growing population, there is a constant conflict between conservation and livelihood needs. The costs of conservation are globally dispersed but not locally enjoyed. With a growing subsistence economy, no global market for the produce from the region and little benefits from tourism, a majority of the population is forced to suffer grinding poverty," says lead researcher and author of the report, Aditya Ghosh.

CSE-SAFE researchers also report that broad development planning for the region has failed to envisage how people will continue living in the island with a sense of security and dignity.

"There is a piecemeal approach that can, at best, serve a short term agenda. Population pressure and diminishing returns from natural resources are at loggerheads (and) the sustainability of the island itself is threatened," Ghosh added.

The report goes on to claim that many families in the Sundarbans are now entirely dependent on remittances from migrant family members for all major household expenses.

According to Chandra Bhushan, head of CSE’s climate change programme, development planning in the Indian Sundarbans has never included the impacts of climate change impacts in its purview.

"This is quite evident in the way everything from electrification to land management is being done here. A decentralised distribution network for renewable energy has not been promoted," Bhushan lamented.

According to SAFE chairperson Dipayan Dey, the paradigm for sustainable development in the Sundarbans must shift from disaster-based hazard mitigation to community-based climate adaptive intervention.

"Before it is too late, (strong) political will to advocate community governance of natural resources must emerge," he stressed.

Excerpt:

By Athar Parvaiz and - -
SRINAGAR, India, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

As separatist militancy peters out in Kashmir, the valley is beset by armies of tourists who bring in the dollars but devastate the fragile ecology of ‘Asia’s Switzerland’.

Unplanned construction at the Sonamarg resort, Kashmir. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

“While development of modern infrastructure is of paramount importance for meeting the needs of tourism industry, it is important to design such development in an eco-friendly fashion to preserve and conserve the fragile ecology and environment of Sonamarg,” says the yet unpublished report.

“The development which has already taken place at Sonamarg, or is in progress, has serious, adverse impacts on the ecology and environment,” the report, made available exclusively to IPS, warns.

According to the report, the waste generated by hundreds of thousands of tourists is disposed of untreated and no thought given to scientific management while effluents are finding their way into the Sindh River, which flows through the resort.

“This causes extensive pollution of the river because no sewerage treatment plant (STP) is in place and the same needs to be planned at the earliest,” the report says.

“Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is not managed scientifically as prescribed under the municipal solid waste management rules under the Environment Protection Act 1986. For this purpose a modern landfill site needs to be developed as is mandatory under the Act, to manage MSW.”

Environment activists in Kashmir, which forms part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, say that Sonamarg has so far been spared the havoc visible in other famed tourist spots in the state such as Gulmarg and Pahalgam.

“Unfortunately, this pristine valley is going the same way as the other major tourist spots and the same kind of degradation is now to be seen in Sonamarg,” Musavir Ahmed, an environment activist with Serene Kashmir, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), told IPS.

“Pahalgam and Gulmarg have been turned into concrete jungles through unplanned construction that ignored such basics as treatment for liquid and solid waste,” Ahmed said.

Kashmir’s tourist spots attracted visitors through the last two decades of violent insurgency, but the footfalls are increasing as peace descends on the valley.

According to official figures, 1.4 million tourists visited Kashmir in the summer of 2011 with fiscal 2011-2012 generating 950 million dollars compared to 531 million dollars in 2006-2007.

About half-a-million people are directly or indirectly associated with the tourism industry in the Kashmir region, which accounts for seven million of Jammu and Kashmir’s 12.5 million strong population.

Such is the rapidity of the degradation that environmental groups fear that the very features that attract tourists to Kashmir will now work towards their destruction.

The Pahalgam Peoples Welfare (PPW), an NGO, has filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Jammu & Kashmir High Court asking for intervention in stopping illegal constructions in Pahalgam and the court has already served notices to the government and its arm, the Pahalgam Development Authority.

“Through the PIL, we have conveyed to the court that building bylaws are being violated,” said Reyaz Ahmed, member secretary of PPW.

“Powerful officials and influential businessmen have converted the green zones in the master plan into areas for construction after purchasing chunks of land in Pahalgam,” Ahmed said.

Environmental activists are encouraged by the fact that the court has taken oversight of the government’s plans to cleanse Srinagar’s famed Dal lake, which has turned into a vast cesspool as result of raw sewage being discharged into it.

Sabah ul Solim, senior scientist at Kashmir’s Lakes and Waterways Development Authority, says the Dal has now become a repository of nutrients, which is upsetting its ecological balance.

“The Dal lake has become so rich in nutrients that farmers use the silt for organic manure in their orchards during the de-silting operations,” Solim told IPS. The nutrients foster the growth of stubborn underwater weeds that are choking out other plant species and reducing the depth of the lake.

“We have around 6,000 people living around the lake while there are 600 houseboats that accommodate tourists,” said Solim. “All the raw sewage from homes, hotels and houseboats is discharged into the lake with unfortunate results.”

“We tried installing mini-STPs in the houseboats, but they proved impractical to operate and maintain,” Solim said.

According to Shahid Ahmad, who teaches environmental science at the Sri Pratap College in Srinagar, the lake has also shrunk in size. “Massive encroachments and the erection of many structures and hotels along the banks have led to a serious reduction in the total area of the lake.”

According to official estimates the Dal lake has lost 10 sq km to encroachments since 1953 when the it measured 25 sq km.

The Dal lake’s case is not an isolated one in Kashmir. Ahmad says that the Wullar, Mansbal, and Anchar lakes are likewise under threat. “Wullar, among the largest freshwater lakes in Asia, has shrunk from 190 sq km to about 72 sq km.”

Gulmarg, 50 km north of Srinagar, has no waste treatment facility although thousands of tourists throng the ski resort every summer, leaving behind large amounts of waste.

Atal Dillu, tourism commissioner, acknowledges the many loopholes in Kashmir’s tourism policy. “Yes there are lacunae. We are working on installation of STPs and incinerators at the major tourist sites.”

Excerpt:

Orphaned ship in the former Aral Sea, near Aral, Kazakhstan. Credit: Public domain

By Correspondents
TASHKENT, Mar 22 2012 (IPS)

The saga of the Aral Sea is now a tale of two bodies of water. One holds the promise of a happy ending, the other remains enmeshed in tragedy.

Political geography is a major factor in separating positive and negative. Residents of Kazakhstani settlements along the Aral’s northern shore, including Aralsk, are guardedly optimistic these days. For a couple of generations they watched the Aral steadily shrink and the local economy wither. But recent government rescue measures have stabilised sea levels, helping local fishing communities slowly start to rebound.

Across the salty seabed-cum-desert in Uzbekistan, meanwhile, there is little reason for hope.

In Muynak, another former fishing town, residents are looking for any opportunity to leave. They say they are suffering health problems from dust storms. They also complain that their government is doing nothing to reverse the disaster.

Five decades ago, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world. Aralsk and Muynak were thriving fishing towns on its shores. Then, in the 1960s, Soviet authorities diverted the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the Aral’s two principal tributaries, to encourage the cultivation of cotton and rice.

By 1990, the Aral Sea had shrunk to one-tenth of its original volume and split into two. Some experts say the Uzbek portion of the Aral will completely dry up soon.

Local communities bore the brunt of what is often called the worst man-made ecological disaster in history. Fish stocks were killed off and local communities lost their livelihoods. Receding waters left behind land encrusted with salt and pesticides.

A public health crisis ensued: the region now suffers from a tuberculosis “epidemic,” according to the United Nations. In addition, infant mortality rates are worse than in South Asia.

“Some 70 percent of the 1.1 million people in Karakalpakstan (an Uzbek autonomous region bordering the Aral) suffer from chronic maladies – respiratory illnesses, typhoid fever, hepatitis and esophageal cancers,” says UNESCO.

Tens of thousands area residents have left the area.

“Every day those who stayed have to cope with sandstorms carrying pesticides and other harmful chemicals,” said a woman from Nukus, an Uzbek town near the Aral Sea, who left 10 years ago because of her worsening health.

After Central Asian states gained independence in 1991, the international community started urging them to take joint action to address the Aral issue. In 1993, the five formed the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS) and pledged to fund a rescue effort.

But since then, they have agreed on little, and the sea has continued to shrink. During his April 2010 visit to Uzbekistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged “all the leaders … to sit down together and try to find solutions.”

“Many (Central Asian) officials do not view the problem as a very urgent. …Frictions arising from different national interests have also hampered their efforts to save the sea,” said a Samarkand-based journalist who has covered the disaster for Uzbek state television.

Efforts to solve the Aral conundrum have been entangled in broader problems related to the management of water resources in the region, added the journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity fearing government retribution.

Uzbekistan seems uninterested in altering the status quo. Little, if any, of the water from the Amu Darya ever reaches the sea; instead, it is siphoned off to feed a diminishing cotton crop, which officials sell on international markets for hard currency.

“The upstream countries (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) have been reluctant to help,” the journalist said. “They believe that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan must deal with the problem because the lake lies on their territories.”

Kazakhstan’s initiative offer reasons for hope. The Kok-Aral dam – a 64-million-dollar collaboration between the Kazakh government and the World Bank – has trapped water from the Syr Darya in a Kazakh portion of the former sea since 2005.

The project appears to be paying off. As the water levels slowly rise, salinity in the Kazakhstani portion of the sea has decreased by five times and fauna have returned. A few hopeful former residents are now returning to Aralsk and other villages along the shore.

Though critics assert that Kazakhstan has effectively jettisoned large swaths of the former sea to save a small portion, Central Asia-based environmentalists commend the steps and say it is time for Tashkent to make a similar effort.

If one believes Uzbek state-controlled media outlets, the Aral Sea crisis receives ample government attention in Tashkent. A January TV broadcast reported that over the past decade, the Uzbek government has spent close to one billion dollars on saving the Aral and improving living conditions for the region’s residents.

A Tashkent-based environmentalist scoffed at the figure. “Apart from running some public awareness campaigns on the necessity of preserving water, the government is doing nothing substantial,” the environmentalist said.

Some are increasingly concerned that officials in Tashkent welcome the desertification of the area around the Aral. In recent years, the state-controlled gas concern, Uzbekneftegaz, has been prospecting for oil and gas deposits in the Aral Sea bed with Russian and Asian partners.

Adding to environmentalists’ worries, authorities seem to do whatever they can to keep the crisis, as well as the plight of local residents, out of the public eye.

In June 2011, Elena Urlaeva, one of the few human rights activists based in Tashkent, visited Nukus, the largest Uzbek town near the sea. Following her trip, she produced a report describing residents’ rising health problems and criticising government inaction.

That August, Urlaeva said she was beaten by Uzbek police. And, in November, authorities threatened to put Urlaeva into a psychiatric prison – an old Soviet-era tactic to silence dissent. Urlaeva told Uznews.net that she was targeted for criticising the government’s policies in Karakalpakstan.

“How can we solve the problem if we can’t even publicly discuss it?” said the Samarkand journalist.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Excerpt:

By Walter García and Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 16 2012 (IPS)

The United Nations, which is hosting a major international summit on the global environment in Brazil in late June, points out that while the world’s oceans account for 70 percent of the earth’s surface, only one percent of this area is protected.

Sam Koo Credit: Courtesy of Sam Koo

“Sixty percent of major marine ecosystems (are) either damaged or over-exploited…having negative effects on mangroves and coral reefs,” the world body warns.

The growing degradation of the oceans, including overfishing, pollution and loss of biodiversity, will be high on the agenda of the Rio+20 summit of world leaders Jun. 20-22, a follow-up to the historic 1992 Earth Summit in the Brazilian capital.

Touching on many related issues will be Expo 2012, scheduled to take place May 12 through Aug. 12 in South Korea’s coastal city of Yeosu, which will focus on the protection of the world’s oceans and coastlines.

Titled “The Living Ocean and Coast: Diversity of Resources and Sustainable Development”, Expo 2012 will also shed light on the advances in technology concerning the ocean and coastlines – and ways to resolve the challenges facing these great resources.

Ambassador Sam Koo, commissioner general of Expo 2012, told IPS, “Oceans indeed are the new frontier for international cooperation, and man’s harmonious coexistence with the marine environment is of utmost importance if countries are to work together internationally to preserve the planet.”

A former senior official of the United Nations and president of the Seoul Tourism Organisation, Koo is an ex-newspaperman with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York.

In an interview with IPS U.N. Bureau Chief Thalif Deen, Koo said a total of some 106 countries and 27 international organisations are expected to participate in the 2012 Yeosu Expo, as it is known in Korea.

South Korea is expecting more than 10 million people to visit the Expo, including half a million foreigners, mostly from China.

Koo described Expo “as by far the biggest event in Korea this year.”

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How important is Expo against the backdrop of the continued environmental degradation of the oceans and the coasts? A: The Expo will play a crucial role simply because so many visitors will carry away an indelible message that urgent policy changes are needed to care for our oceans. The Yeosu Declaration, which aims to strengthen developing countries’ capacities in dealing with the marine-related challenges, is expected to be signed by most countries present at the World Expo.

Key topics in the declaration will be understanding the value of the seas and coasts; restoration of the marine ecosystem and biological resources being damaged; sustainable use and preservation of the marine environment and resources; promotion of knowledge and fact- based understanding about climate change.

Other topics in the proposed declaration include achieving an increase in the use of marine resources based on the “green growth” principle; focusing on achieving sustainable development without harming or misusing natural resources; participation of citizens in pursuing marine cooperation; and international cooperation to use the seas as a space for co-existence of mankind.

Q: How can the Expo help resolve some of these issues? How can the oceans become new frontiers for international cooperation? A: The Expo is a platform for communicating an important message to people often difficult to reach. In educating visitors on what they can do to help preserve our planet, the Expo hopefully will contribute to new ways of thinking. Lectures and demonstrations at a variety of pavilions will address the Expo’s themes.

Q: Since the Law of the Sea is primarily the creation of the United Nations, what role will the U.N. play in the Yeosu Expo? A: The Law of the Sea defines the rights and responsibilities nations have in their use of the world’s oceans, thereby establishing guidelines for businesses, environment and the management of marine resources.

The United Nations will be at the World Expo with a 1.400-m2 pavilion. Through the combined efforts of 24 U.N. agencies, the pavilion will demonstrate the U.N.’s work and efforts related to oceans and coasts. The pavilion will show visitors in an entertaining way their choices to influence our planet’s most important recourses and how they can help ensure the sustainability of our oceans and coasts.

Q: What are the primary themes and main goals of the Yeosu Expo? A: The main theme has been split up into three sub-themes.

Development and preservation of the ocean and coast. This sub-theme aims to inspire a new level of cooperation in the international community to combat climate change and create an environment where development and preservation find a better balance.

New resources technology. Illustrated will be the progress and future prospects of marine technology, a new growth driver for the advancement of humankind.

Creative maritime activities. The relationship between the oceans and humankind through culture and art will be explored. Additionally it promotes the new ideals of people and societies living in harmony with the ocean.

In addition, the Yeosu Expo will be an important forum for public education on these diverse topics. This is an effort to create programmes that will change the way we look at responsible development of the oceans. We are sure visitors will return home impressed and better informed.

Q: In seeking international commitments on the oceans, what key outcomes from the Expo do you expect? What are the next steps after the Expo? A: As mentioned, most participating countries are thought to sign the Yeosu Declaration, which aims to strengthen developing countries’ capacity to deal with the changing marine environment. After the declaration has been signed, the Yeosu Project will come into force.

This project is the practical element that translates the spirit of the Yeosu Declaration and Expo theme into action. These actions include assistance to developing countries in the form of education and training programmes and sharing of knowledge between nations.

At the end of the Expo, part of the facilities will remain for ocean research and marine-related organisations. In this way, the Expo will continue to play a role in keeping our seas healthy for generations to come.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis and - -
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

Empowering rural women in the Iraqi marshlands, who mostly remain off the radar of international support, must involve local languages and dialects as well as local women trainers, says Mishkat Al Moumin, founder of the Iraqi group Women and the Environment Network (WATEO).

Mishkat Al Moumin, founder of the Iraqi group Women and the Environment Network (WATEO). Credit: Rousbeh Legatis/IPS

Through training in resources management and environmental design at the village level, WATEO empowers rural women as primary users of environmental resources, particularly water.

Hailing recent efforts by U.N. Women, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), and the U.N. Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) to address issues facing rural women, she said, “Hopefully, more discussion and actions will take place.”

IPS correspondent Rousbeh Legatis talked to Al Moumin about the daily challenges faced by rural Arab women in the marshes and the importance of culturally appropriate interventions.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Could you describe rural women’s environmental livelihood in Iraq? A: Women and the Environment worked among rural women living in the Iraqi marshlands, an area of 20,000 square kilometres, and according to UNEP having the most unique ecosystem in the Middle East that goes back to 5,000 years B.C.

Saddam (Hussein’s) regime destroyed the marshlands by draining them and launching systematic attacks against the Marsh Arabs, estimated at around half a million. Forty thousand fled to Iran and around 100,000 became internally displaced.

After the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003, the Marsh Arabs returned and cooperated with the ministry of environment and International organisations to rehabilitate the ecosystem of the marshland. Around 45 percent of the marshland was rehabilitated.

However, the marshlands were not the same anymore. Lacking fresh water requires women to walk at least 10 miles back and forth more than once a day to collect water. As to food, the Marsh Arabs depend upon fishing and hunting for their livelihood.

More than 66 species of birds are considered at risk. Due to food shortage, the Marsh Arabs, who were once proud to fish by a trident, now they are fishing using the net or electricity.

This harsh and difficult environment means more work and more responsibilities for women. Before the destruction, fresh water was everywhere, now it is scarce. Women harvest water regardless of its smell and colour; sometimes families drink from the container even if their animals (that live with them) drank from it, one cup is used for the entire family. That caused water-borne diseases.

Q: You try to empower rural women through resource management in Basra, Maysan and Thi Qar. Could you please explain the underlying issues here you try to tackle? A: The main issues the organisation works to address is to train women to provide water, sanitation, and hygiene to meet the basic needs of their family.

Furthermore, we want to include women’s perspective in water policy. Oftentimes, policies forget to include the perspective of those who use water most of the time – which happens to be women. To that end, in August of 2010 Women and the Environment organised community meetings in the three provinces attended by government officials, private sector, NGOs, and rural women reviewing water policies, which led to the recommendation that women should be recognised as the primary users of water.

In the case of the Marsh Arabs, as additional example, we have trained women in more than 53 villages in the marshlands, building their capacity to provide water, sanitation and hygiene.

That included knowledge about how to preserve water, sanitation and hygiene, including boiling water, covering containers to keep the water clean, cleaning the cups that are used to drink water rather than having one cup for all family members to use and so forth.

Q: Did you make progress in supporting rural Iraqi women? A: When communities come together to address an issue, progress will be made. I feel that a great progress was made (in the case of the Mash Arab women) because it was a group effort including Iraqi professors who contributed their knowledge, time and effort, tribal leaders who supported these programmes and believe that training the women makes their communities safer – which it did – as well as international organisations, especially UNEP, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Victoria University, and the Waterloo University.

The survey conducted before the training shows that 90 percent of the surveyed women collected water regardless of its colour and smell. After the training, 80 percent of women cared about the colour and the smell of water, 80 percent identified areas where water is less polluted, 85 percent boiled water, 85 percent cleaned the container before using.

The only challenge we have to face is financial funding. Due to the lack of financial resources, we cannot expand training to other villages and cover more areas to provide a higher level of training.

Q: Empowering rural women needs cultural aspects to be understood and incorporated in gender mainstreaming, could you explain that? A: Empowering rural women needs to be done from within according to the norms and culture accepted by communities. The tribal community is an Islamic conservative community, thus, the language used in the training reflected that nature.

All the training materials were designed to coincide with the nature of the community. For example, well-known Muslim women who managed water resources were introduced as models. Local dialect was utilised, experts from the local areas were trained to train others.

Throughout the training, all experts utilised the local language, well known practices and traditions to introduce the idea that women are the primary users and managers of water resources.

Rather than referring to Western terminology or focusing on terms, the entire focus was on the culture itself and concepts. We utilised the Iraqi and Islamic culture to present case studies about women who managed water resources.

Excerpt:

"Do Not Throw Garbage or Rocks in the Lake", reads this hand-painted sign in Lagunas de Portobello National Park in Chiapas, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Mar 12 2012 (IPS)

It takes 1,600 litres of water to produce one kilo of bread. This is the type of calculation used to measure a water footprint, the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services consumed by people and communities.

A water footprint can be applied to countries as a whole, or to specific industries or economic activities, such as mining or agriculture. The countries of Mesoamerica, however, have made no attempt to calculate this indicator, beyond a few isolated initiatives.

The region, made up by the southern states of Mexico and the seven countries of Central America, is generally rich in freshwater, but is extremely vulnerable to changes which, in the medium to long term, could diminish its availability.

Waste, pollution and lack of governance pose serious threats to the supply of this precious resource, sources consulted in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador told Tierramérica.

Non-governmental organisations from the region plan to denounce this situation at the 6th World Water Forum, taking place Mar. 12-17 in Marseille, France.

In Mexico, poor water management “is reflected by pollution and inequality in its distribution between different uses, between urban and rural areas, and between cities,” said Claudia Campero, Latin American regional coordinator for the Blue Planet Project, a global initiative based in Canada that works with partners around the world to protect the right to water.

Some 500,000 agricultural irrigation users consume 32 million cubic metres of water annually in this country of 107 million people, according to the National Water Commission of Mexico.

At the same time, however, 30 percent of Mexican households do not have piped water and 15 percent receive water through other means only every three days, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

Access to drinking water is a basic human right, recognised by the United Nations through a General Assembly resolution in 2010. The UN has also declared it to be a legally binding right, which means that all member countries are obliged to incorporate it in their constitutions and national legislation.

Mexico must now reform the National Water Law in order to adapt it to the changes made in its constitution. Guatemala and El Salvador do not even have this type of legislation.

In Guatemala, agriculture accounts for 40 percent of the freshwater consumed, households use another nine percent, and other sectors, including industry, make up a combined share of three percent. The remaining 48 percent goes to so-called non-consumptive uses, primarily the generation of hydroelectric power, according to the Secretariat of Planning and Programming of the Presidency.

Although the country’s freshwater supply is sufficient in general, the Corredor Seco (Dry Corridor) area of central and eastern Guatemala is characterised by recurring droughts in the Northern hemisphere summer months and semi-arid soils with low crop yields. Unsurprisingly, the region has been repeatedly hit by food crises and suffers high rates of malnutrition, sometimes even fatal.

Some efforts have been made to improve water management in the country, said Ever Sánchez of the non-governmental Water and Sanitation Network of Guatemala.

“A specific government department was created to foster better interinstitutional coordination and develop a water policy,” he reported. Nevertheless, serious problems persist in the management of household and industrial wastewater and solid waste.

El Salvador is the only country in Central America with a shortage of water, according to the report “Situación de los recursos hídricos en Centroamérica: hacia una gestión integrada” (Water Resources Situation in Central America: Towards Integrated Management), published in April 2011 by the Global Water Partnership (GWP).

With access to 1,700 cubic metres of water per person per year, El Salvador is very close to the water security threshold of 1,500 cubic metres per capita.

Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of consumption, and no water-saving mechanisms have been established in the sector, says the Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES), an NGO that forms part of the National Forum for the Defense of Sustainability and the Right to Water.

The agricultural sector is also one of the biggest polluters of rivers and lakes, where the residues of chemical fertilisers and pesticides end up. In addition, only five percent of industrial wastewater undergoes any kind of treatment, said the president of UNES, Ángel Ibarra.

The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of El Salvador has not moved beyond the stage of formulating proposals, such as the National Water Resources Policy, which have yet to be followed up with any concrete measures.

Policies in the region tend to follow “a mercantile model that does not tackle environmental problems or inequality, and which promotes the entry of private enterprise in the construction of infrastructure, administration and management,” said Campero, who will be attending the World Water Forum in Marseille.

In the absence of an intergovernmental mechanism within the United Nations system, these international conferences organised every three years by the World Water Council have gained significant prominence, bringing together governments, multilateral agencies, NGOs and private companies.

The 12 priorities for action established for the 6th World Water Forum include guaranteeing access to water for all and the right to water; preventing and responding to water-related risks and crises; adjusting pressures and footprints of human activities on water; and promoting green growth and valuing ecosystem services.

An estimated 900 million people in the world do not have access to clean water.

“There are no public policies to protect the resource and to recover or treat it,” stressed Ibarra, who participates in an alternative forum of civil society organisations whose goal is “for the governments of Latin America to delegitimise the World Water Forum.”

They believe that the issue of water should be discussed instead at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, better known as Rio+20, taking place this June in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“We civil society organisations are going to call for the creation of a United Nations agency and an international convention aimed at the sustainability of water resources,” said Ibarra.

For his part, Rubén Pérez of the Guatemalan Association of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering hopes that the World Water Forum will address the need to treat wastewater and guarantee sanitation services.

In Guatemala, less than five percent of wastewater is treated. And the second leading cause of infant morbidity and mortality is contact with unsafe water.

The World Water Forum should also emphasise the urgent need to guarantee water resources in order to combat food insecurity in places like the Corredor Seco in Guatemala.

“How is it possible that more than 50 percent of the country’s children are malnourished? Food and water are inseparable,” declared Pérez.

* Additional reporting by Danilo Valladares (Guatemala City) and Edgardo Ayala (San Salvador). This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents and - -
MARSEILLE, Mar 12 2012 (IPS)

As non-governmental organisations question the relevance of the World Water Forum being held here this week and slam its “corporate” nature, the United Nations says that a coordinated approach to managing and allocating water is critical.

The fourth edition of the triennial World Water Development Report (WWDR), which brings together the work of 28 U.N.-Water members and partners is being officially launched Monday at the Forum. It stresses that water “underpins all aspects of development” and needs to be a key element in global policies and regulations.

Titled ‘Managing Water under Uncertainty and Risk’, the comprehensive report paints a somber picture of what could result from failure to deal with water issues. Experts warn of increased political conflicts over resources, the endangering of future availability and reduction in economic and social welfare.

“We want to be optimistic but there are increased pressures on water that could make it less available for normal consumption, and that’s the bleak picture,” said Dr. Olcay Ünver, coordinator of the UN World Water Assessment Programme which produced the report.

“The other side is that there’s a lot that leaders of government and civil society can do, especially by working together to ensure sustainability,” he told IPS.

The stakes are high as more than one billion people lack access to safe water, and about 1.4 billion lack access to electricity (which can be generated through hydropower). With the world’s population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, demand for water will surge over the next decades, experts say.

The U.N. estimates that this demand could increase by 50 percent in developing countries and that more than 40 percent of states, mostly low-income countries or those in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia, could experience severe freshwater scarcity by 2020.

The latest edition of the report coincides with the sixth World Water Forum, a meeting of “stakeholders” including water and energy companies that runs until Mar. 17 and comprises 400 sessions.

NGOs meanwhile are organising their own alternative forum (the Forum Alternatif Mondial de l’Eau, or FAME) here, set to begin Wednesday and aimed at highlighting what they say is water privatisation’s failure to serve communities around the world.

“The global water justice movement has been opposed to the World Water Forum for many years, since the first one was held in 1997, because we don’t believe that it is a legitimate space to speak about global water policy when it’s organised by corporations,” said Gabriella Zanzanaini, director of European affairs for Food and Water Europe.

“If you look at any other industry, usually policy is not set at a corporate trade show; it’s set by governments, or at the U.N. level, but somehow for water, we have something called the World Water Council which has been doing the World Water Forum every three years,” she told IPS in an interview.

“We’re doing our own forum because we want to show that another space is possible and that alternatives to privatisation and the solutions that are proposed inside the World Water Forum are also possible,” she added. “Water is not the same as other resources, water is essential to life. It cannot be replaced by anything else.”

Zanzanaini said that water justice advocates don’t believe that private companies should be “dictating” or deciding what global water policy should be. Instead they would like to see real community involvement in water management.

For its part, the World Water Forum has created a new Grassroots and Citizenship Commission to “contribute to citizen’s solutions in favour of water”, and many of the concerns expressed by NGOs are reflected in the U.N. report, which recommends cooperation and coordination between “diverse stakeholders”.

The report says that even though the task of delivering water has traditionally been regarded as the responsibility of a certain sector, availability is now influenced by many factors, including climate change, that lie outside the direct control of water authorities.

“Ultimately, these issues can only be addressed in international forums,” the report states, adding that national governments need to work together to ensure the “effective implementation” of international policies at country level.

“Under global conditions of increasing uncertainty and risk, concerted action must now be taken by water managers, leaders in government, civil society and business at local, basin, national and global levels,” the report’s authors say.

A lack of coordination and agreement can lead to tensions when countries share rivers such as the Mekong in Asia, where the building of dams has affected wetlands and fisheries, says Alain Vidal, a French agricultural and environmental engineer who directs the Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF).

The group says that further dam construction in the Mekong basin could damage fish-dependent communities in the region and exacerbate the existing problem of saltwater intruding into farmlands in Vietnam.

“The challenge will be to make sure that dams don’t limit water and food security,” Vidal told IPS in an interview, ahead of participating in a high-level panel on a “nexus” approach to water management.

Organised in association with giant French electricity company EDF, experts on that panel Friday will discuss how projects that tap water resources can be “planned and executed with input from stakeholders in the food, water and energy sectors.”

“The world is now a very different place because addressing insecurities related to food, energy and water – particularly in the world’s least developed countries – is now at the forefront of development strategies around the globe,” Vidal said.

Food security is also a main concern in the U.N. report, which states that the global demand for food is expected to increase by 70 percent over the next four decades, putting additional stress on water resources needed for agriculture.

Excerpt:

By Amantha Perera and - -
WELIGAMA, Sri Lanka, Mar 10 2012 (IPS)

The gentle waves of Weligama bay that lap at the small, tight-knit fishing village of Kaparratota, 140 km south of Colombo, can be deceptive.

The waters of Weligama bay can prove deceptively calm for fishers. Credit: Indika Sriyan/IPS

A total of 29 people had died along Sri Lanka’s southern coast, and over 10,000 buildings damaged, though Weligama was the worst affected area. Many who faced the storm were left stunned by its ferocity as well as the suddenness with which it whipped up and died down.

“We never knew a storm was coming, no one told us…suddenly the sea just rose,” Lamahevage Chandana, a fisher told IPS. He survived by floating on the waves for seven hours, his small boat smashed.

Experts say the tragedy could have been avoided if ordinary folk like Chandana, as well as authorities, had paid better attention to changing weather patterns around this island country.

Of late, extreme weather events have increased in frequency, Mudalihamige Rathnayake, who heads the geography department at the Ruhuna University in southern Sri Lanka, told IPS.

“Gale-force winds hitting towns and villages are being reported as cyclones, or mini-cyclones, which they are not,” he said. “They are the creation of cooler air rushing in to fill the vacuum created by an extreme temperature rise in a small area.”

Gale-force winds are defined as those reaching a speed of up to 117 km per hour on the Beaufort scale and though not as strong as hurricanes, they create exceptionally high sea waves and are capable of uprooting trees.

Statistics show that there are now fewer rainy days, with the monsoon now dumping its water in a shorter time span. This was what happened between January and February 2011, when a year’s worth of rain fell on parts of the Eastern Province in one month, flooding hundreds of villages.

Nimal Dissanayake, who heads the Rice Research Institute of Sri Lanka, told IPS that the changing rain patterns have forced experts to develop quick maturing rice varieties. “We have developed them, but need a better understanding of the rain patterns to recommend them,” he told IPS.

Rathnayake recently carried out a survey of awareness levels among ordinary people in southern Sri Lanka of changing weather patterns and was disappointed with the results.

“There is hardly any knowledge of climate change or changing weather. No one is really interested in knowing how to cope with natural disasters,” he said.

Rathnayake found the lack of knowledge and the disinterest surprising given that the southern coast of Sri Lanka was pulverised by the 2004 Asian tsunami. Signboards that dot the coast do indicate higher, safer ground to run to in the event of a tsunami.

“Everybody knows that they have to run if a tsunami is coming, but they don’t know how to deal with a cyclone, or fast moving winds that come in short bursts. No one even thinks that a prolonged drought may have been caused by changing climate,” he said.

Only around 20 percent of Sri Lanka’s 1,520 km coast is prone to erosion, but the bulk of it is in the densely populated southern and western coasts that take the brunt of the monsoons.

The western and southern provinces account for over 40 percent of the population or around eight million people. Economically, these two provinces contribute around 47 percent of the GDP, with the western province serving as the island’s financial and administrative centre.

Much of the erosion-prone coast is protected by a sea wall of boulders, a solution that the Coast Conservation Department (CCD) has now found to be counter-productive.

Anil Premarathne, CCD director-general, told IPS that the barriers built of boulders limit economic activity and transfer the erosion from one part of the shore to another.

The CCD is now encouraging ‘softer solutions’ like wider beaches, sand filling, mangroves and strict zoning regulations. But with the coast thickly populated, Premarathne says it is difficult to even discuss these options.

“In Sri Lanka we need strict zoning measures,” Premarathne said. “But unless there are beaches where there are no houses or businesses nearby – which is hardly the case in the south and the west – it is not easy to implement.

“Because erosion takes place over many years, even decades, there is not much concern. People don’t seem to notice it happening nor are they worried,” he said. Already some coastal urban areas are at risk from rising sea levels.

Coastal districts like Gampaha, that lies just north of Colombo, meet at least 40 percent of water requirements by pumping out groundwater, increasing the risk of saline ingress.

“Salinity will rise in coastal areas if sea levels rise,” said Premarathne. “We have also seen that wave heights are tending to get higher during the monsoons,” he added.

Sri Lanka’s National Climate Change Adaption Strategy (NCCAS) has prioritised mainstreaming adaptation, healthier human settlements and minimisation of impacts on food security for the period between 2011 and 2016.

Since stopping climate change is unrealistic, the NCCAS focuses on preparing and understanding what needs to be done by way of preparation, economically and environmentally.

Yet, most ordinary people do not take climate change seriously. Chandana, even after his near death experience, says nonchalantly: “These incidents happen…we just have to live with them.”

Such indifference, says Rathnayake, is cause for concern. “These things are beyond our control, but we can be better prepared to face them and save lives.”

Excerpt:

Potworks Dam is the largest freshwater lake in Antigua, holding about one billion gallons of water. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ROSEAU, Dominica, Mar 9 2012 (IPS)

Two years after a severe drought wreaked havoc with a number of Caribbean countries, some are now adopting new strategies in a bid to prevent a repeat of a situation where countries were rationing water and imposing strict restrictions on residents.

“We have embarked on a programme geared towards management of the catchment areas, which includes preventing deforestation, agricultural activities and use of chemicals in protected areas and overall limiting human activities in protected areas,” said Bernard Ettinoffe, general manager of the Dominica Water and Sewage Company (Dowasco).

He told IPS, “We have also embarked on educational programmes at the schools and community levels aimed at raising awareness of the need for conservation of water resources and more recently have begun giving consideration to an Integrated Water Resource Management Approach to the management of land and water resources.”

Ettinoffe said Dominica, like many other countries, has seen some decline in water levels in rivers and streams, but that the island, also known as the nature isle, still boasts of an abundance of good quality fresh water.

“Whereas measures are being taken to preserve the resources for future generations, the risks of no water or even inadequate supplies for decades to come is minimal,” Ettinoffe said.

The neighbouring twin-island state of Antigua and Barbuda is reporting higher than normal rainfall over the past 12 months.

“Our surface water resources are at max capacity,” Ivan Rodrigues, water manager of the Antigua Public Utilities Authority (APUA), told IPS.

But in spite of the higher than normal rainfall, an Antiguan meteorologist has expressed concern that not enough rainwater is being caught.

“I have always believed that we need additional surface storage so that we can capture and keep more of the rainfall that we do get,” said Keithley Meade, director of the Antigua and Barbuda Meteorological Services.

“The rainfall mostly does not even get to the aquifers (water stored in the ground), since the runoff is pretty fast. This is one area where I think we should have improved and still need to do so,” he told IPS.

Even with their increased focus on water management, financial constraints will prevent representatives of the tiny islands in the Caribbean from attending a major gathering next week to discuss this vital commodity – the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille, France from Mar. 12-17.

Despite their absence though, Caribbean countries say they will be keeping a close eye on the meeting, which has set the ambitious target of going down in history as the forum that will bring solutions to water, based on openness and exchange.

“DOWASCO will certainly be keeping an eye on the meeting and will be looking forward to reviewing the findings and recommendations,” Ettinoffe said, noting particular attention would be paid to the issue of climate change.

“Climate change and climate variability is as real to Dominica as to many other countries. We are experiencing more intense rainfall and also occasional drier spells, both of which come with their own challenges which must be managed.

“More intense rainfalls result in siltation of streams and rivers and greater need for water treatment and even the need to shut the supply down at times. During drier periods, there is always need for caution and conservation,” he added.

Salinisation of fresh groundwater is yet another concern for Caribbean islands.

“Both Antigua and Barbuda are small islands. Our well fields are close to the coast, hence the salinisation of this resource (by over exploitation or rising sea levels) is a major concern,” Rodrigues said, noting “our plans include artificial recharge, reducing exploitation in some areas, seeking inland resources, and improving monitoring systems.

“We have also installed additional desalination capacity on Antigua and we are in the process of doing the same for Barbuda,” Rodrigues added.

But he said the additional desalination capacity will not meet present needs of a country which presently utilises 20 percent surface water and 10 percent groundwater.

Programme Director at the St. Lucia-based Caribbean Environmental Health Institute Professor Christopher Cox says sea level rise and salinisation is a concern in other parts of the Caribbean as well.

“We know in The Bahamas, in Barbados and in St. Kitts that the coastal aquifers, where you have over-abstraction, it sucks up the salt water component into the fresh water so the fresh water sits on top of the salt water,” he told IPS.

“What happens is that as you draw more fresh water it actually pulls in the salt water with it. If you get sea level rises, the saline interface with the fresh water will rise also, or move further inland so that means it’s more likely that your wells will be intruded with salt water.”

Cox said the Caribbean is very vulnerable in terms of its fresh water resources, noting that the human influences were to blame.

“It’s not only about clearing trees but you reduce water availability when you pollute the water. For example, in the case of Antigua, we’ve heard that there is a lot of land use conflicts and some of the reservoirs are receiving direct contamination from households and other types of activities whether it be agriculture or commercial enterprises.”

He also pointed to problems with water availability in rural areas of St. Lucia, Jamaica and Trinidad.

Cox said juxtaposing these situations with the climate change issues, where it is being forecast that the Caribbean region, particularly the Eastern Caribbean, could see declines in average annual rainfall by between 30-50 percent, the dry seasons will become more intense and result in problems with water supply.

He said Caribbean governments are slowly coming around to the whole concept of Integrated Water Resources Management, with Jamaica being the most advanced in this regard.

“Governments are slow to put in place strong polices for protection of water resources. The big problem is that people in the Caribbean think water is free.

“But there is a cost to get it to the stage where it does not constitute a health risk. In the Caribbean, water is not given the level of importance it deserves,” he told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Marwaan Macan-Markar and - -
BAAN LOONG SUMLAN, Thailand, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

As fingers of morning light slip through the mango and banana orchards of his village, Suchin Utanarat heads out in a boat to net a fresh catch from the nearby canals teeming with shrimp.

But there is more to this idyllic, riverine scene. By stirring the waters through his daily routine, this 40-year-old fisher is showing the advantages of a sustainable local economy that is small, simple and green.

A few hours in the brackish waters and Suchin has netted catches worth 1,000 baht (33 dollars). “This is my main income and it is enough for our family,” he says, sorting the shrimp, seated in his boat of carved teak. “This shrimp goes to seafood restaurants, even in Bangkok.

“Most of the families in our village catch shrimp in the canals all year and depend on it for a livelihood,” he adds. “It is a small economy but it is a safe one. And we want to keep it that way,” he says.

Suchin’s sentiments are shared by many who live in Baan Loong Sumlan and other villages spread across a province bountiful with fruit orchards and crisscrossed by a network of canals.

What has steeled the determination of people like Suchin was Samut Songhkram province’s disastrous experiment with industrial-scale shrimp farming.

Large swathes of mangroves were levelled to make way for the big shrimp farms, and a province that had 8,000 hectares of mangroves in 1986 now has only 256 hectares of the protective vegetation.

Samut Songkhram’s aquaculture ambitions took a when a virus, first detected in 1992, swept through shrimp farms across this marshy delta. Fear of the virus has kept the villagers from going back to industrial shrimp farming of the type that dot other southern provinces.

It is a choice that makes villagers like Wong Takrudthong, 70, beam with an air of community pride, knowing that it sets communities here apart from those making a killing from the large shrimp farms.

In 2011, the southern provinces produced over 600,000 tonnes of shrimp, guaranteeing Thailand’s place as the world’s largest shrimp exporter.

“We learnt our lesson once. Families lost a lot. And we will not take another risk,” says Wong, a respected village elder. “People would like to see Samut Songkhram remain a small place with a sustainable economy.”

But the province’s location 63 km south of Bangkok has brought new challenges. Investors want to covert some of the barren tracts into industrial zones like the Map Ta Phut industrial estate in the nearby province of Rayong.

“A lot of land was bought up after the shrimp farms closed and now these new landowners want to convert them into industrial zones,” says Amonsak Chatratin, deputy chairman of a village council. “We are against it because of the pollution.

“We have learnt lessons from the industrial parks in the neighbouring provinces,” he told IPS. “We do not want another Map Ta Phut here.”

Map Ta Phut, home to 117 industrial plants that include 45 petrochemical factories, eight coal-fired power plants and 12 chemical factories, dominated the national news in 2009 and 2010 following a successful court case by a local environmentalist to shut the estate.

Community-based small-scale tourism, a new money-spinner for the province, will be affected if big industries move in, warns Surajit Chirawet, former head of the province’s chamber of commerce. “This has become an important lifeline for us. Many families drive down here from Bangkok for the weekends.”

The riverine lifestyle offers a welcome contrast to Thailand’s sprawling modern capital. Among the reminders of quieter, less bustling times are scenes of Buddhist monks paddling in boats at dawn on their daily rounds to collect food.

Consequently, local concerns have seen the emergence of a grassroots movement rallying around twin causes – respecting the local sentiment for small, environment-friendly economic policies and keeping away large-scale, polluting industries.

“Local people are against the big projects and are applying pressure on the provincial authorities to have public hearings,” revealed Manop Yanpisitkul, environmentalist at the provincial office of resources and environment. “They only support eco-friendly projects”.

This eco-friendly initiative is supported by the United Nations Development Programe (UNDP) and the U.N. Environment Programme. “We are helping the local communities to make their case to the provincial and national government,” says Sutharin Koonphol, programme analyst at the UNDP’s environment division.

Assistance under the Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) of the U.N. agencies helps lobby the grassroots cause with Thailand’s powerful interior ministry, which controls Thailand’s development planning.

“We are trying to convince the ministry to strengthen the public participation process and see the merits of a bottom-up development approach,” Sutharin told IPS. “The green growth vision of Samut Songkhram is particularly important for Thailand.”

Suchin, the shrimp fisher, will settle for no other. “They may like industrialisation in other provinces, but we prefer to make a living from fishing in the canals, our fruit orchards and home-stay tourism.”

Excerpt:

By Ignatius Banda
PLUMTREE, Zimbabwe, Mar 2 2012 (IPS)

Beauty Moyo’s desire for access to water has finally been met. The rains that fell in the past week after a long dry patch have awakened this small-holder farmer deep in rural Plumtree, Zimbabwe on the border with Botswana to the reality of sparse rainfall, climate change and how she and her fellow villagers can respond.

Women in rural Zimbabwe are coming up with solutions to water shortages aggravated by climate change. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

Plumtree, like most parts of southwestern Zimbabwe, is notorious for low rainfall. But millions of farmers in the country rely on rain-fed agriculture and food they grow themselves, which presents villagers like Moyo with tough choices.

“The rains that fell this week have been able to bring back hope as we had sunk our own reservoir to trap the water,” Moyo said.

She says she teamed up with other neighbours during the course of the year, and they invested their energies in digging what looks like a miniature golf-course waterway.

“This idea came after people realised we have been complaining each year about poor rainfall and harvests,” Moyo told IPS.

This reservoir water is used in farming activities where the subsistence farmers say instead of spraying the whole field with water, they now water individual plants.

“It’s a lot of work, but it helps conserve our water,” said Susan Mathebula, another villager working on the project with Moyo.

“We had heavy rains that we had not seen in a long time, with ice falling, and we were able to trap the water in this small catchment we set up ourselves,” Mathebula told IPS in mid-February.

While drinking water is available from such sources as boreholes, Mathebula says their major concern is water for irrigation purposes, as they plant their own food and cannot rely on rainfall alone for the maize and groundnuts they grow in their small fields.

Plumtree is one of the areas lying on the southwestern belt that experienced localised heavy downpours in the last week of February, with the Zimbabwe Meteorological Service Department announcing that the nation should expect more rainfall in the next two months.

Hope is returning that the water they have will ensure adequate household food security at a time when humanitarian agencies such as the Famine Early Warning System – Network (FEWS-NET) announced early this year that millions of Zimbabweans will require food aid.

Climate change that has pushed rains in Zimbabwe far into the new year. Credit: Busani Bafana/ IPS

Climate change and water shortages are among the issues being debated at a two-week session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) Feb. 25 through Mar. 7 at U.N. headquarters in New York, which is focusing on the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication and sustainable development.

Aid agencies have tied food insecurity to climate change that has pushed rains in Zimbabwe far into the new year, when many farmers had prepared the land for the planting season in the last quarter of last year.

The rains began to fall in February, and the meteorological department announced that farmers can expect more rains in the next two months.

According the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), women remain in the vanguard of farming in rural areas, which are home to 70 percent of Zimbabweans, and community-based initiatives such as the creation of reservoirs by Moyo, Mathebula and other villagers only highlight the dire circumstances these women find themselves in, with little assistance from government and nongovernmental organisations.

Josephine Conjwayo, an agricultural field officer from the Ministry of Agriculture who works with small-holder farmers, said harnessing water for agriculture by rural communities in response to climate change challenges has been limited by the absence of experts in rural areas.

“Every area (in Matebeleland) we have visited to assess farming activities, the issue of low rainfall and suffering crops is typical. Trapping rainwater is one of the measures we have encouraged for these women, but this water tends to be exhausted quickly as people use it for purposes other than farming,” Conjwayo said.

What has exacerbated the challenges faced by small-holders such as Mathebula is the inability by government and farming organisations to set up strategies for small-holders to respond to climate change, resulting in villagers coming up with their own initiatives.

The Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union says rural small-holder farmers are providing the bulk of maize consumed in urban areas, as these farmers do not sell their produce at the Grain Marketing Board, and laments the lack of government support for farmers.

Last year, the Climate and Development Knowledge Network partnered with the Zimbabwean government to map climate change policy, and according to preliminary research, changing rainfall patterns are expected, as well as temperature increases and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.

It is these circumstances villagers in Plumtree are experiencing, and Mathebula, Moyo and many others respond the only way they know how: thinking on their feet.

“There is very little we can do here,” Moyo told IPS. “But we hope the water we trap will last us long enough to see our crops grow,” she said as she tended the small maize crop that is beginning to sprout after the recent downpours.

Excerpt:

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Mar 2 2012 (IPS)

The arrest and release of a Dutch activist in Japan has put in bad light this country’s refusal to heed international calls to limit traditional dolphin and whale hunting practices in favour of conservation.

“The arrest (of Erwin Vermeulen) was intended to intimidate us to leave Taiji (a fishing town where dolphins are corralled for mass slaughter),” said Scott West, director for investigations with the United States-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS).

“But the effect is the opposite as more volunteers are signing up to join our activities to stop dolphin and whale killing,” said West.

By sending foreign volunteers like Vermeulen to Taiji, SSCS has raised hackles in Japan, especially after it took a confrontational stance by publishing footage of bloody dolphin hunts in the southern Japan fishing town.

Taiji’s dolphin slaughters came under international glare in 2010 after a film on the annual ritual, titled ‘The Cove’, claimed the Academy Award for best documentary in that year.

While Vermeulen’s release on Feb. 22 proved that he had not pushed a guard on Dec. 16 as charged, activists say it did nothing to change deep-rooted attitudes to cetacean hunting in this country.

“Vermeulen won his case because he did not break the law. That does not mean anti-whalers have gained respect in Japan. The real test is whether the activists can stop Taiji from killing whales and dolphins,” said Kazue Suzuki, spokesperson for Greenpeace Japan.

While it is also opposed to whaling, Greenpeace Japan has distanced itself from Sea Shepherd’s confrontational approach, preferring to focus its campaign on issues such as mercury contamination of whale meat.

The local media portrays SSCS as an aggressive organisation, citing its use of laser beams and drones to harass whalers.

In a January editorial, ‘Japan Times’, a leading English language daily, accused the organisation of “crossing the line from peaceful protest and reasonable monitoring to violent confrontation that could harm a crew member on either side.”

But the controversy appears to be playing out in Sea Shepherd’s favour.

On Feb. 21 a federal court in Seattle denied an injunction sought by the Japanese Institute for Cetacean Research to restrain Sea Shepherd from carrying on its anti-whaling activities in the Antarctic Ocean.

Western countries, including the U.S. and Australia, that respect an International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium on whaling, want Japan to stop its ‘scientific expeditions’.

While the IWC, under a 1987 decision, allows the killing of 1,000 whales in the Antarctic Ocean for research purposes, annually, much of the meat ends up being sold commercially.

Activists have, over many years, accused Japan of taking advantage of the IWC quota to persist with commercial whaling, endangering the mammals.

Japan is also being accused of spending billions of dollars to prop up aging whalers and insisting on its right to carry on traditional whaling, much like Norway, another major whaling nation.

Sea Shepherd tactics have highlighted wasteful public funding to support an industry that is fast becoming obsolete. The organisation’s campaign forced Japan to call off its scientific whaling in the Antarctic last March.

In his book “How to Catch Dolphins,” released in 2010, Prof. Yusuke Sekiguchi, a whaling researcher, says Japan’s dolphin catches are based on a culture where animals are caught, killed and eaten with gratitude to providence.

Naoko Koyama of the Institute of Biodiversity in Japan, a Kyoto-based non-government oganisation which is working to stop dolphins from being captured alive for aquariums, said the clash over Japanese culling has overtones of a clash between Japanese and Western cultures.

“As protestors we need to be able to avoid getting into this narrow debate,” she said.

Koyama’s small organisation of 15 members bases its campaign on spreading facts about the negative impact on wild mammals when imprisoned in aquariums for commercial profits.

“The results have been encouraging as the people who listen to us become supporters of our organisation,” she said.

Iwao Takayama, defence attorney for Vermeulen, said “foreign activists are talking of respecting the law, the basis for the victory in the lawsuit. But to buy respect in Japan, it is important to try to talk it out, preferably in Japanese.”

Takayama said prosecutors tried hard to present the case against Vermeulen as one between SSCS and the Japanese government. “It was obvious they resorted to this to appeal to Japanese sentiments,” he said.

Excerpt:

Caudalosa workers clean up mining tailings in Peru's Opamayo River. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

A global scramble for land and mineral resources fuelled by billions of investment dollars is threatening the last remaining wilderness and critical ecosystems, destroying communities and contaminating huge volumes of fresh water, warned environmental groups in London Wednesday.

No national park, delicate ecosystem or community is off limits in the voracious hunt for valuable metals, minerals and fossil fuels, said the Gaia Foundation’s report, “Opening Pandora’s Box“. The intensity of the hunt and exploitation is building to a fever pitch despite the fact the Earth is already overheated and humanity is using more than can be sustained, the 56-page report warns.

“We’re calling for a global moratorium on large-scale new mining, extraction and prospecting,” said Teresa Anderson of The Gaia Foundation, an international NGO headquartered in London, UK that works with local communities.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recently warned of the threats to World Heritage Sites from planned mining and oil and gas projects. One in four iconic natural areas in Africa is negatively affected, the report notes.

“No matter where you live, land acquisitions for mining, oil or gas are coming,” Anderson told IPS following the report’s launch in London.

The easy-to-get resources are gone. Now the extractive industries, funded by pension funds and commodities speculators, are using new technologies like fracking for natural gas to get at previously unprofitable resources.

At the same time, these industries use far more raw material and have a much larger destructive footprint than in the past. Canada’s tar sands are one example, where two to four tonnes of earth are dug up and a similar amount of fresh water is needed to produce one barrel of oil.

It’s a similar story for copper, requiring 10 times the ore it once did to get the same volume, said Anderson.

“No one is looking at the big picture of all this,” she said.

This is just the latest trend in global land grabbing, said Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, a small NGO working with small farmers and farming communities. GRAIN first brought the world’s attention to the fact that millions of hectares of land in Africa, Asia and South America were being leased or purchased by foreign investors for food and biofuel production.

GRAIN has now documented more than 400 large land deals totalling nearly 35 million hectares, roughly the size of The Netherlands.

Land grabs for mining and fossil fuels are part of a larger attack on land, territories and resources, Hobbelink told IPS from London.

“It is driven by foreign capital and speculators to gain control over land,” he said.

This is “turning communities into refugees on their own land”. And people have been been targeted and killed if they resist, he said.

“This new wave of land grabbing is putting profit above people and planet,” said Polly Higgins, a barrister and author of “Eradicating Ecocide”.

States are obligated to “close down the extractive industries that cause risk of loss or injury to life” and can no longer claim they have no knowledge of the damage done, Higgins said in a release.

“The extractive industries have become bigger and much more aggressive,” based on the data collected over the past year for the report, said Anderson.

“Operations like shale gas aren’t in remote areas – they are coming to your backyard,” she added.

Shale gas “fracking” that involves high pressure injection of chemicals underground is already in backyards in the US, Canada, and Australia. The UK, China, South Africa, Poland and other countries are looking to begin commercial operations.

The explosive growth of shale gas fracking is mirrored by other extractive industries. Globally, in just the last 10 years, mining for iron ore has increased 180 percent, cobalt by 165 percent and lithium by 125 percent. China’s mining sector grew 30 percent in just five years. Peru’s mining exports increased by one-third in 2011 alone.

Coal mining has increased by 44 percent in the past 10 years despite international agreement on the need to reduce carbon emissions to avoid dangerous climate change.

“The changes needed to move from fossil fuels aren’t being made,” said Anderson.

Instead, major investments are going into the search for fossil fuels in remote regions like the Arctic and into “extreme energy sources” like shale gas and tar sands that have big environmental impacts.

It also takes enormous amounts of water to extract minerals, metals and fossil fuels. And then there is the staggering amount of waste that results. Canada’s tar sands have 130,000 hectares of tailings ponds full of toxic wastes behind some of the largest earthen dams ever constructed.

Mining companies dump more than 180 million tonnes of hazardous mine waste into rivers, lakes and oceans worldwide every year, according an investigation released Tuesday by two mining reform NGOs .

Mining enough gold for just a single wedding band generates, on average, 20 tonnes of contaminated mine waste.

“Polluting the world’s waters with mine tailings is unconscionable, and the damage it causes is largely irreversible,” said Payal Sampat, international programme director for Washington, DC-based Earthworks.

“Our rivers run red, our houses have become unstable, we have lost fresh drinking water,” said Mark Ekepa, a local landowner in West Papua, Indonesia where millions of tonnes of goldmine waste are dumped by Canada’s Barrick Gold Corporation, the world’s biggest gold company, from its Grasberg mine.

Rising prices, increasing material consumption and a huge flood of investment have triggered this global boom, the report found. Following the 2008 collapse of financial markets, hedge and pension fund investors dramatically increased investments in metal, mineral, oil and gas commodities.

As a direct result, exploration budgets have reached record levels – 18.2 billion dollars in 2011 for non-ferrous metals alone. That’s six times the 1994 budget.

Escalating material consumption underlies all of this, with the average U.S. citizen using an astonishing 22,000 times their weight in minerals, metals and fuels in their lifetime (1,343 metric tonnes). Even switching to “greener” technologies will not reduce this substantially. Major improvements in resource-use efficiency and reuse are needed along with less consumptive lifestyles, the report concludes.

“This report (Opening Pandora’s Box) shows clearly how the game has changed over the last decade: the grabbing of land and resources is penetrating ever more deeply into the body of the Earth,” said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, in a release.

“The devastating impact being inflicted on ecosystems and communities must be recognised as international crimes and punished accordingly,” Bassey said.

Excerpt:

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
JERUSALEM, Feb 21 2012 (IPS)

After a recent Israeli Supreme Court decision allowed Israeli companies to maintain quarrying and mining activities in the occupied West Bank, local human rights groups and activists say the decision has opened the door dangerously to Israel’s pillaging of other Palestinian resources.

“On its face, the new rule allows the occupier (in a long-term occupation) to make endless use of the variety of objects found in the occupied territory,” Israeli human rights group Yesh Din stated. “To pump its water sources, to transfer its archeological artifacts to elsewhere outside the territory, to use areas within it for garbage disposal, to sell public real estate, and more.”

In late December of last year, the Israeli Supreme Court dismissed a petition put forth by Yesh Din, challenging the legality of Israeli mining and quarrying operations taking place in the occupied West Bank.

The court argued that the laws of occupation change when the occupation is long-term; in other words, the powers of an occupying power can expand, while the prohibitions against it become increasingly flexible, in a long-standing occupation.

The court also inferred that the Palestinian Authority (PA) had consented to the quarries’ operation, since the Israeli-Palestinian interim agreement, which was meant to expire in 1999, left the quarries under complete Israeli control in Area C of the West Bank. Shutting down Israeli quarrying activities would harm the local Palestinian population, the court added, since the industry employs Palestinian workers.

On the ground, however, the ruling has left Palestinians concerned that Israel’s illegal exploitation of other resources in the West Bank, including water, will now be viewed as legitimate.

“This law is dangerous. We are talking about one of the main humanitarian needs: water. I don’t think that anybody, any law, any state, has the right to steal one of the main necessary needs for people,” said Fathy Khdirat, a Palestinian resident of Jordan Valley and coordinator of the Jordan Valley Solidarity campaign.

“When they say that the occupation is long-term, that means that Israel is planning to continue its occupation of our land, to continue to make this kind of open-air prison for the Palestinians who managed to stay in their land,” he added.

In Jordan Valley, Israel has taken control of most of the area’s water sources for the near-exclusive use of the 9,400 Israeli settlers living there. These settlers consume approximately 6.6 times more water per capita annually than the 56,000 Palestinian residents of the Jordan Valley.

While some Bedouin communities in the area have water consumption levels comparable to humanitarian-disaster areas, it is estimated that Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley use almost one-third the quantity of water – for household and agricultural use – that is accessible to the 2.5 million Palestinians living in the entire West Bank.

“Now there are just a few (Palestinian) communities, maybe 13 communities, that have the right to buy a limited amount of water from the Israeli (water) company, Mekorot. More than this, Israel confiscated water tanks which are pulled by the farmers’ tractors and bring water from outside the Jordan Valley,” Khdirat told IPS.

“Palestinians can hear the water running in the pipes but they are not allowed to drink from them.

According to Yesh Din, the Supreme Court’s ruling not only violates international law, but dangerously “creates a licence for pillage” in the occupied Palestinian territories. The organisation applied to the High Court in January for a new hearing on the issue in front of a broader panel of judges.

“Manipulation of the rule prohibiting the harming of property in occupied territory creates a legal basis for irreparable economic exploitation of occupied territory by the occupying power, despite the fact that the prohibition on such exploitation is one of the overriding principles of the laws of occupation,” Yesh Din stated.

Israeli quarry operations in the West Bank began in the mid-1970s. It is estimated that there are ten Israeli-owned quarries in the West Bank, of which eight are operational. These facilities produce approximately 12 million tons of mined material annually, and the vast majority of these materials – up to 94 percent in some quarries – are transferred for use in the Israeli construction market.

A September 2011 report released by the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy and the Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem found that the total costs imposed on the Palestinian economy as a result of the Israeli occupation amounted to 6.897 billion dollars in 2010, or approximately 84.9 percent of the total Palestinian GDP.

“The majority of these costs do not have any relationship with security concerns but, rather, come from the heavy restrictions imposed on the Palestinians in the access to their own natural resources, many of which are exploited by Israel itself, including water, minerals, salts, stones and land,” it stated.

The inability of Palestinians to access their own natural resources – which, by extension, causes them to lose revenues and pay higher costs for raw materials – amounts to 4.5 billion dollars annually, 56 percent of the Palestinian GDP, the report found.

According to Fathy Khdirat, this strain on the Palestinian economy has a clear purpose: to get Palestinians to leave their lands.

“Destroying their economy and making people poor means that they are pushing them to leave,” Khdirat said. “But in spite of this kind of law, in spite of all this kind of pressure, we are still there. The Palestinians are still there. Very simply, there is nowhere to go. We don’t have choices. Our choice is to exist.” (END/IPS/MM/IP/HD/PI/TW/JK/SS/12)

Lower water levels and increasing pressure from overfishing in the Paraná river are causing an unprecedented decline in fish stocks in the river that is regarded as the second most biodiverse in South America after the Amazon river.

Fisherman on the Paraná river near the port of Antequera. Credit: Fundación Proteger

The problems faced by the Paraná river were described to IPS by experts studying this nearly 4,000-km river, which rises in southern Brazil at the confluence of the Grande and Paranaíba rivers, forms Argentina’s northern border with Paraguay, then flows south though Argentina until it empties through a delta into the Río de la Plata (River Plate).

Until the mid-1990s, Argentina had no quotas to limit exports of freshwater fish. Since then, and with greater urgency after the devaluation of the local currency, the peso, against the dollar in early 2002, the authorities have seen the need to set restrictions.

Fish processing plants mushroomed, buying vast quantities of shad, a herring-like fish, for export. In 2003, 45,000 tonnes were exported, and it was necessary to introduce a quota, which for the present season is 16,000 tonnes.

This limit was established by the national government, to be distributed among the eastern provinces of Santa Fe, Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires, through which the Paraná river flows.

Santa Fe was allocated an export quota of 7,000 tonnes out of the 16,000. But the provincial government, aware of the risk of overfishing to which NGOs have called attention, set a maximum of 4,500 tonnes.

Even so, experts consider that the pressure on the fishery is “enormous.”

“More shad is being exported than the ecosystem can replenish. This year, for the first time, the species has practically not reproduced. This has never happened before,” biologist Norberto Oldani from the province of Santa Fe told IPS.

Shad is the most important commercial species in the Paraná, and heads the list of freshwater fish for export. But it is also an important part of the food chain, as its eggs and larvae are eaten by predatory fish like the surubí (a type of catfish) and the golden dorado.

“For breeding to occur, there must be reproductively fit adults. Some time ago the specimens caught would be seven or eight years old, but now fishers are harvesting two-year-olds, that are just starting to lay their eggs,” the biologist complained.

Oldani is a researcher at the Universidad del Litoral, a public university, and the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICYT). He has monitored the fishery continuously since 1976 from the riverbank of the city of Paraná, in Entre Ríos.

“Year after year, resources are being depleted, species are disappearing, and catch specimens are smaller in size and lower in weight; in other words there is a loss of biomass,” he said.

Oldani pointed out that this is not only occurring with shad. “What is happening to the surubí is catastrophic. It’s an iconic Paraná species for both sport and commercial fishing. It can weigh up to 20 kg, and everyone wants to catch one, but evidently it cannot cope with the pressure,” he said.

He explained that shad populations need 80 percent of their biomass to be reproductive-age individuals in order to sustain fish numbers, but at present only eight percent are fit to breed. “Stocks must be managed sensibly, because it makes good business sense for there to be plenty of fish in the river,” he said.

The Amazon river harbours some 2,000 species, whereas the Paraná river has about 400, Oldani said. However, the Paraná is more productive per unit area than the Amazon.

“Fishing is the mainstay and food source for thousands of fisherfolk, and the system has good regenerative powers, but the present pattern of use is not working,” Oldani said.

In contrast, biologist Claudio Baigún claims to be “rather pessimistic, because there is a combination of several factors, some of which can be controlled and some that cannot.”

“The hydrological regime (daily, seasonal and annual fluctuations in water level and flow rate) has been unfavourable since 1998, and this is something that cannot be controlled,” Baigún told IPS, referring to a long period of scant rainfall during which dams on the upper Paraná have retained water, keeping water levels below normal downstream.

Normally, water levels in the river start rising in November and reach maximum levels in March. But since November 2011 water levels in the Paraná have not risen, and they may not rise at all this year. “When there is less flow, the dams upstream store water and let only the minimum essential amount through, and this has a big impact downstream,” he said.

Baigún, a researcher at the Laboratory of Ecology and Fisheries Production at the Chascomús Technological Institute in Buenos Aires province, said that from the environmental point of view, it is a good thing for a river to overflow its banks periodically.

“The people who live in these areas know that, except in extraordinary circumstances, flooding is not a tragic event. They coexist with the natural cycle, and if it fails, there is an impact on fishing yields,” he said.

As the Paraná has not flooded for a considerable period, under pressure from the expansion of soybean monoculture, cattle have been moved into the Paraná delta, close to its junction with the Rio de la Plata, where they graze in regrowth forests, destroy the river banks and pollute the water, he said.

“The cattle herd in this region has grown from 30,000 to 700,000 head,” said Baigún, who added that cattle farmers illegally build embankments to protect their animals, cutting off the connection between the river and the alluvial valleys where shad fry and other species shelter and grow.

“These isolated nursery lagoons are being lost to the species as a habitat,” said Baigún, who is also coordinator of the freshwater fish programme for the environmental organisation Wetlands International, which has its Latin American regional office in Buenos Aires.

Baigún pointed out that this problem is linked to a string of others, such as poor management of the fishery itself. “I am not in favour of exporting freshwater fish, because this benefits neither the fisherfolk nor the environment,” he said.

The fish processing plants pay miserably low prices to artisanal fishers, who are forced to increase their catch, putting more pressure on the fish population, he complained. “It would probably be better if they caught fewer fish and were paid more,” he said.

Regarding the export quota of 16,000 tonnes, Baigún said he was pleased that the government of Santa Fe has decided to be more cautious, although he questioned the way the limits are set. “What justification is there for such a quantity? No one knows, because there is no official report,” he said.

Baigún said some of the existing laws and regulations are good, others could be improved and others are outdated. “The Paraná is not the river it was in the 1980s or 1990s, when high-water levels and floods were regular and commercial and recreational fishing were in harmony,” he said.

For over a decade, there have been low water levels, fish scarcity, small-sized fish and a low reproductive rate, he said. Moreover, there are deepening conflicts between fishers, who blame each other for their ever decreasing catches.

An alteration of the relationship between the Amazon rainforest and the billions of cubic metres of water transported by air from the equatorial Atlantic Ocean to the Andes Mountains could endanger the resilience of a biome that is crucial for the global climate, warns a recently concluded two-decade research project.

Scientific observation tower in Boa Vista, capital of the Brazilian state of Roraima, which borders with Venezuela. Credit: Courtesy of Mario Bentes

In order to more fully understand this complex ecosystem, scientists from Brazil and around the world created the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA).

After 20 years of research, the conclusions reached from the data collected warn of numerous potential threats.

According to the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE), one of the agencies participating in the experiment, unless effective policies are implemented in the coming years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by the end of the 21st century there will be 40 percent less rainfall and average temperatures of up to eight degrees higher than normal in the Amazon.

This would convert the rainforest into a source of carbon dioxide emissions instead of a “sink” that contributes to carbon sequestration and storage.

The International Energy Agency estimates that in 2010 the world’s population released a record amount of 30.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels.

“The research shows us that the rainforest has a great power of resilience, but also that this power has limits,” physicist Paulo Artaxo, chair of the LBA International Scientific Steering Committee, told Tierramérica.

“If we continue burning so much carbon, the climate scenario for the region will be considerably unfavorable for any resilience that the rainforest could develop. It would be difficult for it to survive such enormous climate stress,” he added.

To gather data for its research, the LBA used, among other instruments, 13 towers measuring between 40 and 55 metres in height, set up in different points throughout the rainforest to measure the flow of gases, the functioning of basic properties of the ecosystem, and many other environmental parameters.

The information collected was analysed by scientists from various fields in order to understand the rainforest as an interrelated system.

“The perception in the scientific community was that studies carried out in individual disciplines were not sufficiently able to explain the Amazon, and this led to the LBA. It was felt that an integrated effort was needed to explain the rainforest from the viewpoint of the physical, chemical, biological and human sciences, and the relationship between them,” explained Brazilian climate expert Antônio Nobre, another participant in the research initiative.

“When I began my studies in the LBA, my part in the project was mainly about carbon. But carbon without water dries out and the forest catches fire. Without transpiration, there is no carbon sequestration, because there is no photosynthesis. I realised that the water and carbon cycles are inseparable,” Nobre told Tierramérica.

This integrated analysis demonstrated that the Amazon rainforest absorbs a small amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, estimated at half a ton per hectare per year.

But the amount of carbon absorbed varies considerably from region to region, depending on environmental alterations. In areas near places where human activity has caused significant degradation, the rate of absorption is reduced, and the Amazon, instead of storing carbon dioxide, is releasing it.

In addition, the rainforest’s absorption of carbon dioxide is counteracted by emissions from deforestation and queimadas, fires intentionally set to clear forested land in order to expand agriculture, stressed Artaxo.

Since the latter practice has declined drastically in recent years, from 27,000 sq km in 2005 to around 7,000 sq km in 2010, “the characteristic feature of the rainforest today is that it absorbs carbon,” he said.

But the changes brought about by the greenhouse effect and rising temperatures in the rainforest have led to a situation where the dry season tends to last longer, creating the conditions for the outbreak of more fires and more carbon dioxide emissions.

“The solid particles released into the atmosphere by queimadas alter the microphysics of clouds and the rainfall regimes,” added Artaxo.

In one of the experiment’s studies, it was observed that the increase in queimadas in the northern state of Rondônia extended the dry season by between two and three weeks, which in turn increased the incidence of fires and even further aggravated their effect on the functioning of the ecosystem, he explained.

During a very severe drought in 2005, “the Amazon lost a lot of carbon,” he said. In the event that serious droughts become more frequent, the rainforest could become “an emitter of carbon dioxide and cease to provide an important environmental service,” he warned.

The lengthening of the dry season causes another phenomenon that was also studied in the LBA: the emission of carbon by rivers.

“Small and medium-sized waterways emit significant amounts of gas. This leads to what is called carbon dioxide evasion from bodies of water, and it happens because most of these rivers are saturated with carbon dissolved in their water,” said Ataxo.

As time passes, this carbon “is released into the atmosphere in rather significant quantities. All of the phenomena that alter the Amazon ecosystem have a strong impact on the evasion of gases from the rivers. When the temperature rises, the emission of gases rises as well,” he added.

To illustrate the potential consequences of a lack of equilibrium in the Amazon on the global climate, Nobre referred to the so-called “flying rivers” research that begun in the 1970s and was consolidated in the Flying Rivers Project in 2007.

“We discovered that the sun’s action on the equatorial region of the Atlantic Ocean evaporates a large amount of water. This humidity is transported by the wind to the north of Brazil. Around 10 billion cubic metres of water arrive in the Amazon every year in the form of water vapor. Some of it falls as rain, and the rest continues to flow until it runs into the wall of the Andes mountain range,” explained Nobre.

In the Andean region it falls as snow, and when the snow melts, “it feeds the rivers of the Amazon basin. Most of the rain that falls on the rainforest is evaporated again,” he added.

This humidity fluctuates over Bolivia, Paraguay and the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, in the west, Minas Gerais and São Paulo, in the east and southeast, and even the southern states of Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. “And it brings most of the rain to all of these regions,” he stressed.

A drought in the Amazon would have a serious impact on these invisible airborne rivers and on the rainfall patterns in these regions, which are very rich in agriculture, Nobre warned.

The LBA is currently a program of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, coordinated by the National Institute of Amazonian Research, with the support of other agencies.

Its researchers are expanding the initiative into other areas, including agro-pastoral systems and the behavior of carbon dioxide in soybean plantations.

“We have a great deal of work ahead of us to understand the natural processes and the effects of what humans do in terms of the alteration of ecosystems,” concluded Artaxo.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Spain’s new conservative government has announced changes in environmental policy that are a significant step backwards for environmental protection in the country, provoking an immediate, harsh reaction from the opposition and civil society.

Mario Rodríguez, head of the Spanish chapter of the environmental NGO Greenpeace, told IPS that the only fit response to the government’s announcement is “citizens’ protests to demand that the achievements for the defence of the environment over the past two decades are not all torn down.”

In Rodríguez’s view, environmental organisations and affected communities should “be ready to take legal action”.

Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Environment Miguel Arias Cañete informed the lower house of parliament that the government led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy since Dec. 21, 2011 will propose a “thorough” reform of the 1988 Coastal Law to “harmonise protection of the coastline with the development of non-detrimental economic activities.”

Rodríguez says that if what the minister announced comes to pass, “pro-environment legislation achieved over the last 20 years will be demolished.”

Presenting the government’s plans to his parliamentary party, Arias Cañete defended the proposed reform of the Coastal Law, arguing that it would contribute to the improvement of legal security for owners of land rights on the coast.

In his opinion, it would also allow economic resurgence in “zones that are already degraded and lacking in environmental value”, and foment a proper ordering of economic activity on the Spanish coast, where anarchic development and unrestrained urbanisation has already drawn reprimands from the European Union.

The governing People’s Party has an absolute majority in both houses of parliament, and can therefore approve the reform without legislative hindrance.

Several organisations stress that the reform will allow new land uses on pristine coastlines, so large areas that are currently protected will lose that protection.

Minister Arias Cañete made some other announcements that alarmed environmentalists. He said the legal framework for the protection of the natural environment will be revised, measures will be taken to improve management of the network of national parks and the Red Natura 2000 (an EU biodiversity conservation scheme), and there will be a reform of the National Hydrological Plan.

“The grey economy is back,” after all the progress the country had made towards a green economy, said José Díaz Trillo, the regional environment minister for the government (Junta) of Andalusia, the largest and most populous region in Spain, governed by the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE).

Rodríguez gave IPS an indication of how Greenpeace will respond to the measures announced. “When these measures begin to come into effect, we will decide what response to make, but no doubt it will include organising demonstrations and analysing the legal situation to see if the changes to the laws can be appealed,” he said.

Greenpeace issued a communiqué on Feb. 1, just after the minister announced the new policy, expressing its fears that Spain would return to the bad old water management policies, and that lower standards would be applied to environmental impact assessments for future development projects.

“After the minister’s speech, it is clear that the present government regards environmental policies as an obstacle to economic development, and not as an opportunity to overcome the crisis,” Rodríguez said.

“While we wait for the details of the ministry’s strategy to emerge, Greenpeace will vigorously oppose any measure that would lead to lower levels of environmental protection than those that have been achieved so far, especially if they involve the Coastal Law, the fight against climate change or regulation and control of overfishing.”

According to Greenpeace, the Rajoy government’s stated intentions strike at the basic principles of the defence of the Mediterranean coastline, and of public use of the coast.

This interpretation is based on the premise that increasing the number of coastal concessions and relaxing their conditions, especially in the tourism industry, “will accelerate the loss of the land-sea public domain and open the door to new forms of land use on the coast, leaving the Coastal Law without effect.”

Greenpeace particularly criticises the ambiguity and vagueness in the minister’s speech; “when he said ‘curbing economic activity on the coast does not guarantee conservation,’ he is opening the door to new urbanisation projects,” Rodríguez said.

In Greenpeace’s view, such a prospect would affect the environmental health of the “saturated” Spanish coastline.

The NGO also complains that the minister did not clarify whether he supports a 30 percent reduction in European greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, as a way of mitigating climate change.

“This omission is striking when, two days before the minister’s speech to parliament, the European Commission published a study showing clear economic benefits for each of the EU member states from intensifying the fight against climate change,” Rodríguez said.

That is why Greenpeace is calling on the government to end public subsidies to dirty industries, and to commit itself to ensuring that new emissions rights granted to the electricity sector after 2012, are all allocated by auction.

In 2009 it was determined that electricity companies would cease to have free emissions rights from 2013. Spanish electricity generating companies will need to buy emissions rights for an estimated 104 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) next year, at a cost of some 2.8 billion dollars.

The PSOE environment secretary, Hugo Morán, said “the minister’s strategy of demolishing all current environmental legislation poses the greatest risk to the future viability of our country’s principal economic pillars: agriculture and tourism.”

Meanwhile, the regional environment minister for Andalusia, José Díaz, said that if the government’s reform package goes through, it will “set Spain back 40 years in terms of environmental policy.”

“In the Andes, and all over the world, mining on mountains should be banned. Distinguished scientists and papers in the most prestigious journals are saying this,” a regional planning expert in Colombia told IPS.

Engineer Fernando Mauricio Castro illustrates the regional impact of mining using a map of Tolima. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

The expert in question is forestry engineer Fernando Mauricio Castro, in charge of planning for CORTOLIMA, the top environmental agency overseeing natural resources and their sustainable use in the central Andean province of Tolima, with its capital, Ibagué, located 202 km southwest of Bogotá.

Castro’s criticism was aimed at the South African mining company AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) which has been prospecting and exploring in this mountainous area since 2006.

The company’s gold mining operations were authorised by the state Colombian Institute of Geology and Mining during the administration of rightwing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), which has been criticised for issuing mining licenses even in national parks and other protected or especially fragile areas.

The mining concession granted to the South African corporation, which is the world’s third largest producer of gold, is one of 9,011 legal mining permits listed in the Office of the Comptroller General’s report “Estado de los Recursos Naturales y del Ambiente 2010-2011” (State of Natural Resources and the Environment 2010-2011).

In addition, the report says, there are another 9,420 illegal mining operations, or 409 more than those formally approved.

Uribe’s successor, moderate rightwing President Juan Manuel Santos, has described mining as the chief among five engines driving Colombian economic development, termed by the government “development locomotives”.

“I agree with fighting the illegal mining outfits that use chemicals like cyanide and mercury, because they are a menace,” geologist and analyst Julio Fierro told IPS. “But well-organised, legal mining can also have a high impact. And AGA is among the largest and most irresponsible companies. It is not at all right to open up holes in the high mountains.”

Colombia is Latin America’s top coal producer and also has large deposits of gold, ferronickel and other minerals and precious stones. The mining sector, like the fossil fuel extraction industry, has grown to record levels in recent years.

Official forecasts indicate that mining output will grow at 8.5 percent a year over the period 2011-2014, and 40 transnational corporations are in-country for a slice of the action. AngloGold came to Tolima over a decade ago to conduct exploratory studies in the municipality of Cajamarca, with a population of 23,000, located 35 km west of Ibagué.

Cajamarca is situated at 1,814 metres above sea level, and is nicknamed “Colombia’s agricultural larder” because of the abundance of its farm produce. The area holds important water resources, with a cluster of at least 160 springs of water and the Coello River basin, as well as high moorlands, cloud forests, and forestry reserves for protective and productive purposes.

But in a protected area close to Cajamarca there is also the La Colosa gold deposit, with reserves estimated at 12 million ounces, one of the largest gold deposits in the world. The government and AGA are promoting what will be South America’s largest opencast mine, unless the project is halted.

La Colosa is a bone of contention between environmentalists and those who support mining development, and is seen as a test case for the kind of mining Colombia will have in the future, as well as for whether the government will honour its promise to revoke mining licenses in environmentally protected areas, granted by the previous administration.

Meanwhile, AGA has started to add to the area of land it owns by buying up plots from small farmers, so that in practice it has expanded its concession right up to the location of water supply pipelines that are vital to the local population.

AGA has kept a low profile in its activities and the regional media have maintained silence. “They do not publish information, neither do they promote needed debate. On the contrary, they highlight the resources that AngloGold will supposedly contribute” to the area, said Castro.

The engineer has been part of CORTOLIMA’s working group since it carried out an analysis of mining concessions in the region, which resulted in some unpleasant surprises.

“We found that both inlets of the aqueduct that serves Ibagué are situated in part of the mining concession,” he said. The city is home to 600,000 people.

“And that is not all. Since the capacity of the aqueduct is dwindling, we made great efforts to obtain the resources to build another aqueduct,” he added.

Some 900,000 dollars have already been invested in the project, out of 37 million dollars approved from national and regional funds. “But a mining concession covering the river has already been granted,” which could prevent construction of the new water supply system, complained Castro.

“It’s extremely worrying. Private interests are being given priority over the common good. It won’t be possible to acquire strategic grounds to protect and guarantee water to supply present and future populations because of the cost involved,” he said.

Some entire rural villages like San Cayetano, Buena Vista and Santa Teresa are situated within mining concessions, as well as the piped water supplies for many of the population centres in the area around Ibagué.

The social protest movement against the mine, made up of students, social leaders and over 25 social organisations, is still active, but “it is David fighting Goliath,” Castro said.

“It is true that valuable work is being done by those who do not agree with mining exploration in such fragile ecosystems,” he said.

“Sadly, though, it must be said that AngloGold’s large investments here indicate that it intends to stay, with no plans to leave. Therefore the most likely scenario is that in a few months’ time the ministry will issue the mining company an exploitation license,” he added.

To make matters worse, the mine will extract ore by the opencast method. “The mountains will have to be ground to pieces and whole layers of rock be removed to extract low quantities of gold. Then at an altitude of 3,000 metres, tanks and dams must be built to treat the ore with cyanide and so separate the gold from other metals,” Castro described.

The proposed mine site is “very close to the Machín volcano, which is in constant activity,” he said.

CORTOLIMA “is calling attention to the serious environmental impacts that (the mine) will have on the region, and insists that this project is incompatible with sustainable development. But the decision is up to the ministry,” he said.

All the environmental damage will only produce materials for luxury industries, experts and activists complain. “A study by the Environment ministry states that 90 percent of the gold is used for items of luxury consumption,” geologist Fierro commented.

President Santos, for his part, insists on the importance of legalising mining and protecting water resources.

“It is deeply distressing to see water sources and rivers become polluted. That is why we are going to put an immediate stop to illegal mining, and that is why I have come to tell you that the government is on your side,” the president said Jan. 6 in the mining community of Norosí, in the northern province of Bolívar.

But his statement has come under fire in Tolima, where exploration activities by AGA would damage the region’s greatest cluster of pristine water sources beyond recovery.

“Neoclassical economists always end up justifying environmental destruction. It’s happening now in Latin America, under governments of different political stripes. Therefore it is increasingly clear that there is an urgent need to develop resistance on a regional basis,” Fierro concluded.

The government of Philippines President Benigno Aquino may be wading into choppy diplomatic waters by turning to the United States to counter China’s aggressiveness in the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

A protest outside the U.S. embassy in Manila over the weekend by local leftwing and indigenous groups is an indication of what can be expected in the run-up to planned combat drills involving U.S. and Filipino forces in the troubled waters of the South China Sea.

“The combat drills with U.S. and Philippines marines have certainly worried many sectors here,” noted Walden Bello, a first-term congressman from the Citizens’ Action Party, which is part of the Aquino administration’s coalition in the national legislature.

“The Philippines is unfortunately playing a dangerous game in entertaining a U.S. military presence,” he added in a telephone interview from Manila.

Giving Washington a military foothold will “convert a territorial dispute, where the Philippines has a stake, into a superpower conflict,” Bello said. “We should rely on regional and multilateral mechanisms.”

A verbal volley fired by an ultra-nationalist Chinese newspaper brings such warnings into relief. The Philippines should be targeted with “countermeasures” and “punishment” for offering the U.S. military an expanded role in the South China Sea, raged the English-language ‘Global Times’ in a commentary last week.

“A reasonable yet powerful enough sanction can be considered,” added the paper. “It should show China’s neighbouring area that balancing China by siding with the U.S. is not a good choice.”

The planned military drills off the Philippines coast, scheduled for late March or early April, will be staged near an oil rig in the South China Sea. This news, following a mid-January bilateral defence dialogue, came after the Philippines got another boost from U.S. foreign policy heavyweights to contain China.

“What we’re talking about is maritime security,” U.S. Senator Joseph Liberman said at the end of a trip to the Philippines capital with three other senators last month. “We simply cannot allow one nation, in this case China, to exercise disproportionate control over these waterways.”

This body of water has increasingly become a flashpoint following China’s strident assertion in 2009 that it had control over a stretch of ocean that has a spread of reefs, coral atolls and slivers of land that are hardly habitable.

Yet, what has raised stakes in the South China Sea, whose waters are shared by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines, are reports that its bed contains huge deposits of oil and gas – in addition to supplying nearly one-tenth of the world’s seafood catch.

The Parcels Islands archipelago and the Spratly Islands have, consequently, become important for energy security.

China controls the Parcels, having edged out Vietnam in a 1974 battle that left 18 people dead. And, Manila fell victim to Beijing’s bullying when the Asian giant occupied the Mischief Reef in 1995, once part of the Philippines.

The dispute led to the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DoC), the first political agreement between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc that includes Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Indonesia and South China Sea littorals – the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia.

Neither the 10-year-old declaration, nor the diplomatic breakthrough in July last year to create “guidelines for implementing” the DoC, has done enough to ease the tension through 2011. Both Vietnam and the Philippines accused China of asserting its territorial claims by sending fleets of vessels into disputed areas.

“The Philippines has become the most outspoken on this issue with the ASEAN members,” says Kavi Chongkittavorn, a regional affairs commentator, in ‘The Nation’, an English daily in Thailand. “It has been boosted by the defence treaty it has with the U.S.”

But efforts by Manila to raise the diplomatic stakes against China “will not have wide support in ASEAN,” Kavi told IPS. “ASEAN will not want to be dragged into a conflict with China.”

The imminent diplomatic challenge Manila faces comes nearly a year after the Philippines government turned to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLoS) to resolve its territorial disputes.

“The Philippines has called on ASEAN to support the idea that the issue must be resolved on the basis of the rule of law, particularly UNCLoS,” reveals Herman Kraft, associate professor of political science at the University of the Philippines.

“Using UNCLoS to advance its argument allows the Philippines to take the moral high ground and hopefully (win) the sympathy of the international public,” he explained in an interview. “(China’s push to resolve the problem bilaterally) is a non-starter for a small state dealing with a larger and more powerful state.”

There is an international treaty which can help “break the deadlock between China and other countries over territorial disputes in the South China Sea,” says Kumar Chitty, a former senior U.N. official at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a Hamburg-based judicial body created to resolve disputes between countries about the oceans and their resources. “This is how Australia and East Timor resolved their dispute,” Chitty said.

But China is avoiding such an international judicial route, preferring the ASEAN-led DoC resolution.

“China will seize this opportunity of making efforts with ASEAN countries to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea and bring benefits to the people in the region,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Weimin said following last month’s ministerial meeting in China to reduce tensions in the South China Sea.

An accident at an ultra-deepwater drilling platform spilled 160 barrels of crude off the coast of Brazil this week, deepening fears about safety in this new frontier of oil and gas production.

According to the state oil company Petrobras, the oil spill is small in volume, and was caused by a rupture in the production column on the Dynamic Producer, a floating production, storage and offloading vessel conducting tests in the Carioca oil field.

The spill occurred 300 km off the coast of the southern state of São Paulo, at a depth of 2,140 metres in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Santos basin. There is no possibility of the oil reaching the shore, Petrobras said in a communiqué. The well “remains closed and in safe condition,” it said.

The undersea oil deposits found in rock layers rich in fossil fuels located beneath a thick layer of salt are known as “pre-salt” reserves, and may be as much as 7,000 metres below sea level.

“After the rupture the safety systems automatically shut down the well, which remains closed and in safe condition,” the Petrobras communiqué said. “Emergency plans were immediately activated and the necessary resources mobilised to contain the oil spill at sea and clean up residual crude in the upper part of the column,” it added.

In the view of Adriano Pires, the head of the Brazilian Infrastructure Centre, an energy industry consulting firm, the issue “is not whether it was serious,” but that “it made it abundantly clear to the government and Brazilian society that oil spills do occur, and extraction is a high-risk activity,” something that appears obvious but is not always appreciated.

“This is the first time there has been an oil spill in a pre-salt field. It’s yet another alarm call for policies to be adopted to prevent and mitigate accidents, to assess whether our legislation is adequate, whether regulating bodies are equipped for their work and to create a centre for oil spill prevention, supervision and control,” Pires told IPS.

The discovery in 2007 of the pre-salt deposits, hailed by Petrobras as “a new frontier for oil exploitation”, fanned expectations that Brazil will become an energy power. The reserves are estimated to contain at least 50 billion barrels of crude.

Leandra Gonçalves, coordinator of Greenpeace Brazil’s climate and energy campaign, fears that the incident, detected Tuesday Jan. 31, is only the first indication of a future scenario with “beaches covered in oil because of the absence of safety measures.”

“The government has not yet tabled an agenda to discuss a general emergency plan for potential spills,” Gonçalves told IPS.

Such a plan, involving several ministries, was announced with great fanfare in 2010, after the disastrous spill of five million barrels of crude in the Gulf of Mexico in April of that year.

As over 90 percent of Brazil’s oil is extracted from undersea deposits, the plan was aimed at reinforcing safety provisions for maritime operations, especially drilling. But according to Gonçalves, “it never got off the drawing board.”

Greenpeace criticises the government’s investment in exorbitantly expensive technology for pre-salt extraction when the country “has the potential to develop 100 percent clean energy sources” like wind and solar energy and biomass.

“The government needs to ensure that there are adequate structures for exploiting the pre-salt reserves, and it needs to seek cheaper alternatives using renewable sources,” Gonçalves said.

According to Pires, the deeper the undersea drilling, the higher the likelihood of oil leaks. Therefore the authorities must urge state and private companies to reduce the “gap between the technology used for production and that used for accident prevention,” as the latter is “very backward” in comparison with the former.

The accident happened a few days after Transpetro, a subsidiary of Petrobras, acknowledged responsibility for a spill of 1,200 litres of oil on the shores of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, during the transfer of crude to a terminal. The oil slick reached the beach.

In November the U.S. company Chevron spilled 2,400 barrels of crude in the Frade field, off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state.

Engineer and oceanographer Segen Estefen, head of technology and innovation at the Alberto Luiz Coimbra Institute for Postgraduate Studies and Research in Engineering (COPPE) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, says the pre-salt reserves “are a wealth that Brazil simply cannot forgo.

“But at the same time, we have to protect the environment. This is the big challenge, to produce pre-salt oil safely and with an excellent level of environmental protection,” he told IPS. The newly discovered oil fields mean that Brazil will triple its undersea oil production in 15 years, Estefen said.

To attain that excellence, COPPE is negotiating with the Ministry of Science and Technology to create a centre for safety regulation and accident prevention at sea.

Estefen said Brazil is a leader in deepwater oil exploration and production, and because of this, “no excessive risks are currently being taken” in extracting oil from the “pre-salt” reserves. However, it is necessary to “seek to continually improve our procedures for minimising spills and dealing with them as quickly as possible.”

“The level of activity is going to increase, and the frontier is a great challenge because we will be working further from the coast, at greater depths, and the drilling conditions mean that it will take longer,” he said.

The centre proposed by COPPE, which has a number of excellent oil research laboratories, would have the goal of boosting safety through procedures that include satellite monitoring – which has already been developed – and continuous sea monitoring to detect leaks.

The causes of accidents will also be investigated, as “various scenarios are possible,” and procedures for containing spills and determining where oil slicks are heading will be optimised.

“We have to work at improving the safety of equipment and operations,” Estefen stressed.

Ignacia Matute looks back nostalgically on the days when the hills around her home in northwestern Nicaragua were blanketed in green, and she woke every morning to the sounds of birds singing in the treetops and the rushing waters of the nearly Coco River.

Local residents continue to use water from the depleted Coco River, despite the signs prohibiting it. Credit: Courtesy of UNOPS

Her present day surroundings are a far cry from this idyllic memory: the river is severely depleted and its waters are dangerously polluted along some stretches of its original course, while the forests have been decimated by fires and years of indiscriminate logging to supply furniture manufacturers and provide firewood for local homes.

But the future holds new promise for Matute, deputy mayor of Ocotal, the capital of the department of Nueva Segovia. She and the other residents of her community have learned that it is possible to restore the river to its former levels through responsible and integrated management of the watershed area along the border with Honduras.

Matute is participating in a binational project for the recovery and sustainable use of natural resources and the waterways that feed the Coco River, the longest in Central America, which winds along the border between Nicaragua and Honduras.

The river flows northeast along a stretch of 822 km until flowing into the Caribbean Sea, and forms a natural border between the two countries

The project, “Strengthening local capacities for integrated management of water resources from the Coco River Basin between Honduras and Nicaragua”, is being implemented by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) with funding from the European Union, in collaboration with local government authorities, civil society organizations, national authorities and other UN agencies.

Based in the area around the upper middle stretch of the river basin, specifically in the municipalities that make up Nueva Segovia in Nicaragua and El Paraíso in Honduras, the project is aimed at teaching local communities and authorities how to best cultivate and manage this watershed area, subjected to uncontrolled depredation over the last two decades.

The coordinator of the project in Nicaragua, Lucio Rossini, told Tierramérica that it also included a review of the laws governing natural resources in both countries, in order to develop cross-border environmental arrangements which, after three years of studies and analysis, culminated in a series of binational and local programs.

“We have nine watershed management plans underway, which will cover an area of approximately 5,200 sq km, where around 170,000 people live,” he reported.

Through the investment of 1.7 million dollars, the project’s objectives include ensuring the supply of drinking water and its use for food production, the conservation of forests, the sustainable use of natural resources, the production of renewable energy, and the development of tourism activities, Rossini added.

The project has been underway since April 2009, with the support of the United Nations Development Programme, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the United Nations Environment Programme, Giusseppe Mancinelli, the UNOPS deputy regional director in Panama for Latin America and the Caribbean, told Tierramérica.

For his part, Nazario Espósito, a representative of UNOPS-Nicaragua, highlighted the fact that the project will help the two countries adopt initiatives for the achievement of environmental targets and objectives established at UN summits and conferences with relation to water resources and coastal areas.

“Our goals are environmental sustainability and adaptation to climate change in the region, and improvement of the socioeconomic conditions and quality of life of the 1,200 families living in the upper and lower micro-basins of the Coco River, in the two countries involved,” Espósito told Tierramérica.

The severe deterioration of the Coco River and the surrounding area is partially the result of the conditions of extreme poverty faced by local communities, said Domingo Rivas, a specialist in watershed and soil management at the National Agrarian University of Nicaragua, who carried out the socio-environmental diagnostic assessment for the project.

“There is a sufficient amount of water despite a decrease in the river’s flow due to the effects of deforestation, but in some of its sources there is a high level of fecal coliform contamination because of a lack of adequate hygienic conditions and education among the local population,” he explained to Tierramérica.

His study confirmed the degradation of natural resources in large stretches of the river basin, a lack of planning and integrated resource management, water pollution, soil erosion, and deforestation of pine and broadleaf forests.

Rivas noted that the average income of the population in the region ranges between 600 and 800 dollars annually per family.

Socioeconomic conditions are alarming in the department of Nueva Segovia: 78 percent of its inhabitants live below the poverty line, 50 percent have no access to safe drinking water, and 27 percent are illiterate, according to the executive director of the Association of Municipalities of Nueva Segovia, Oscar Mendoza Bustamante.

“These statistics help explain the degradation of natural resources,” he commented to Tierramérica.

For Matute, although the dream of seeing the river of her childhood restored to its former splendor is perhaps not fully realistic, there is still good reason to feel enthusiastic about the project.

“The most important thing about this effort is the struggle for the good use and protection of the river, because without water, all of our activities would come to a standstill,” she observed.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Only days ago, turning on the tap was cause for concern. Would there be running water? Now, it’s reason for celebration.

Water supply for the Bedouin village. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

“Thank God, the installation works!” rejoices Muhammad Dakka, the village Imam. “For the first time in our lives there’s running water!” his mother Rasmiyeh, 71, revels, serving sage tea and nut-filled dates to a party of Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegates.

In association with both organisations, the villagers recently inaugurated a unique water project. ICRC engineer Abed Al-Jalil Rimawi explains: “The village wasn’t connected to any network. Our objective was to build an integrated system by installing connections to each household, thus making water available to everyone.”

A painted jar adorns the Dakkas’ door. Symbols are often a measure of what’s lacking and most in need. As far as daily life is concerned, for the people of Bir El-Basha, there’s ‘before’ the arrival of running water and ‘after’. And, with it, saving money.

Until now, trucks supplied water to the villagers. The essential utility was pumped electrically at a cost into private wells up into rooftop reservoirs. “You’d order a tanker two-to-three days in advance. It was expensive,” recalls Abdullah Qawadri.

“Before, water cost 4.20 dollars per cubic metre. With the network, the fee is cut by four,” notes Hosni Al- Qadri, the village council head.

Water is a precious commodity here. The rainy season lasts three months, if there’s no drought. In a nearby field, boys puncture lines of plastic sheets covering zucchini buds that evoke water-filled trenches glistening under the sun.

“From rains only!” exclaims a farmer watching his sons. The villagers don’t own the land they work on. Fields are leased from wealthier landowners.

Here, water isn’t only the water of life. Use of it, access to it, is source of pressure. A French parliamentary committee recently reported that Israel’s water policies in the Palestinian territories are like “apartheid” for they discriminate Palestinians from Israeli settlers.

Brothers Kifah and Hussein Ghawadri would have bitter arguments over water consumption and how much their respective households should pay. “We’d suffer from family tensions,” recalls Kifah. “It’s over. Now each household has its water meter,” adds Hussein.

Bir El-Basha was founded by Bedouin Palestinians. Refugees of the 1948 war belonging to the same extended family, they settled here, living in tents for over a decade.

The now dried Hafira well was their only available source of water. According to tradition, it’s the pit into which the sons of Jacob, the Biblical patriarch, threw their brother Joseph. “Life was tough,” Jihad Ghawadri reminisces. “We’d walk two kilometres to the village with water carried on donkeys.”

Though the villagers are modest, it isn’t poverty per se which has hindered them from having direct right to water, but who rules the land, and who controls its resources, its sources. In the early 1960s, the Qawadris built their dwellings with neither master plan nor permits. Temporary to this day, the village exudes a sense of everlasting.

During the 1990s, territorial agreements divided the West Bank into three zones: “Area A” (under Palestinian Authority); “Area B” (under Israeli security control and Palestinian municipal authority); and “Area C” (under full Israeli rule).

Dug by Israel in the 1970s deep into the aquifer, connected to the regional transmission pipeline, the Arrabeh well is monitored by the PWA. It feeds over 20,000 people living in three neighbouring villages in “Area A”.

Eleven kilometres away from the well, adjacent to the water pipeline, the 1,700 Bir El-Basha residents were left without running water, enclosed in limbo in “Area C”.

Seven years ago, the village applied to the Israeli authorities for authorisation to be connected to the network. Then, it contacted the PWA, presented the project to Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad. “Everyone helped,” says Al-Qadri.

“The PWA investigated the village’s needs, created a filling point operated by the council. Afterwards, it contacted the ICRC,” explains PWA project manager Ziad Drameh.

“Giving services in general – water, electricity, waste collection – is a way for the Palestinian Authority of asserting responsibility for their people’s lives,” notes ICRC geologist Jean-Marc Burri.

But the project lingered. “We had to obtain Israeli permits to proceed with laying the network lines inside the village,” says Drameh.

“Our role was to understand why the project wasn’t implemented. There was an authorisation. We realised politics didn’t interfere. Yet, nobody really pushed, we still needed to bring everybody together,” Burri stresses. “We acted as catalyst,” chimes in the head of the ICRC Water and Habitat, Ikhtiyar Aslanov.

Partnership and cooperation were keys for success. The PWA contributed with expertise and design. The ICRC donated 400,000 dollars. The beneficiaries themselves demonstrated rare ownership.

“Usually, we explain to people what to do to implement a project. Here, the village council told us what their needs were. If the population’s involved, it works; if not, you’re blocked by a judicial process. Here, all decisions were taken at village level.”

Each resident was required to contribute 130 dollars to the PWA. Everyone paid. More than 25,000 dollars was collected. “When you pay for a service, you expect quality to meet your requirements,” says Aslanov.

Once Israel gave its final approval, connecting people with water took less than four months. “People, authorities, can get together to respond to the needs of the people,” concludes Aslanov. The local filling point connects the 257 homes with 11 kilometres of pipes. Bir El-Basha enjoys three cubic metres of running water per hour for 12 hours three days a week – no miracle. Still, it dramatically improves the villagers’ lives. “This model could be applied to other villages,” confidently foresees PWA engineer Ala El-Masri.

In 2011, PWA water infrastructure projects funded by the ICRC benefited 775,000 Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the West Bank only, 72,000 people benefited from such projects, including the people of Bir El-Basha.

Humanity is driving Earth’s climate and ecosystems towards dangerous tipping points, requiring radical new forms of international cooperation and governance, experts say.

Melting ice on Pico de Orizaba mountain in Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

“We’re facing a planetary emergency,” said Owen Gaffney of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme based in Stockholm.

“We need to have a ‘constitutional moment’ in world politics, akin to the major transformative shift in governance after 1945 that led to the establishment of the United Nations and numerous other international organisations,” said Frank Biermann of VU University Amsterdam and director of the Earth System Governance Project.

“Humanity is facing major challenges…urgent actions are needed,” Biermann told IPS.

Those challenges include, but are not limited to, increasing poverty, food, water and energy security, the financial crisis, climate change, ocean acidification, the loss of biodiversity. All of these challenges and their solutions are interconnected.

Normally, the complex, mutually dependent systems of the Earth can self-correct and are remarkably stable. However, they can reach thresholds or tipping points and then unexpectedly and abruptly shift, Gaffney said in an interview.

“We need only recall how the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis nearly collapsed the global financial system,” he said.

The upcoming Rio+20 conference on sustainable development needs to be the moment in human history when the nations of the world come together to find ways to ensure “the very survival of humanity”, he said.

The Rio+20 conference marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, and the 10th anniversary of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. It will to be held in Rio de Janeiro Jun. 20-22.

There have been a lot of changes since the 1992 Rio meeting that is also known as the Earth Summit. More than 90 percent of world’s seven billion people now have access to mobile phones, and one-third has access to the internet, Gaffney said. Since 1992, civil society organszations have spread all over the world and become a global force.

“These are very profound differences from 1992. Today more and more people think of themselves as ‘global or planetary citizens’,” he said.

Prior to Rio+20, the world’s scientific community will provide a comprehensive “state of the planet” assessment at the “Planet Under Pressure” conference in London Mar. 26-29. Nearly 3,000 experts from around the world will provide a vital report card on the health and threats to the Earth and, for the first time, make comprehensive recommendations on what must be done to avoid disaster.

One of the first things a maturing human community must do is solve its international governance problems. Nearly 20 years of international climate change negotiations have failed to lead to significant reductions in emissions of climate-disrupting greenhouse gases. Preventing dangerous climate change requires urgent action this decade, scientists have warned.

Climate negotiations are just one example among many. Thirty of the leading experts on international governance are unanimous regarding the failure of the current United Nations approach of one country, one vote and the requirement of consensus before taking action or making significant decisions, said Biermann.

“One country can hold the entire world hostage,” he said.

The Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer is considered the world’s most successful environmental treaty. It doesn’t use the traditional U.N. system. Decisions are made only when the majority of the industrialised nations and a majority of developing nations agree.

The U.N. climate negotiations need to change to some kind of majority system based on “qualified voting”, Biermann said. “My personal suggestion is for countries in the G20 to receive 50 percent of the votes, other countries have 25 percent, with the other 25 percent for civil society organisations.”

Climate is just one of “planetary boundaries” humanity is ignoring at its peril, the Planet Under Pressure conference will document. Another is the ongoing decline of biodiversity, where so many plants and animals are going extinct that the Earth’s living systems on which humanity depends are unraveling.

Fresh water is another planetary boundary humanity is pushing up against. Water is a limited resource, but water use has increased six-fold in the past century. In many places the quality of water resources has been degraded at a time when there is a pressing need for ever more water as economies and populations grow.

In 2010, the International Council for Science (ICUS) warned that “the continued functioning of the Earth system as we know it is at risk.” The ICUS was founded in 1931 and is a coalition of the national scientific bodies and international scientific unions from 141 countries. The organisation is the chief sponsor of the Planet Under Pressure meeting.

“Societies must change course to steer away from critical tipping points that lead to rapid and irreversible change. The international governance system must change,” said Biermann

Transforming international governance will be challenging since nation-states are almost entirely concerned with their own short-term interests, he acknowledges. However, countries give up some of their power when they join the World Trade Organisation.

“We ought to be able to do this for the protection of the planet and act as a community of nations,” he said.