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29/03/07 Timber DNA profiles reduce market for illegal logging, Philip Hopkins. The Age, Business Singapore ; Indonesia
28/03/07 Climate zones to disappear , James Randerson, London, Guardian; Andes, Indonesia ; Brazil; African Rift Mountains, Zambian and Angolan highlands, South African Cape region, south-east Australia, Himalayas and the Arctic.
Climate OS
15/03/07 Haze reaches 'danger' level in Thailand, AP Digital Climate OS; ThailandClimate OS
14/03/07 ENVIRONMENT-THAILAND:Smog Hits Emergency Levels, Marwaan Macan-Markar, IPS; Thailand10/03/07 LAST STAND IN SARAWAK, Paul Malone, Canberra -Your Guide; Sarawak- Malaysia
08/03/07 Warbler bird reappears after 140 years, London, Reuters ; INDIA ; Thailand; UK
07/03/07 Tanzania's high haven for endangered species, New York, Reuters ; Tanzania
Philip Hopkins. The Age, Business
March 29, 2007
ONE of Australia's largest timber importers has introduced technology that ensures that no wood it brings into Australia has been illegally logged.
Simmonds Lumber now conducts DNA testing of timber — a world first — that verifies the exact source of each tree being imported from Indonesia. The test is similar to DNA testing of humans.
The technology is expected to strengthen the fight against the estimated $400 million worth of illegally logged timber products now imported into Australia annually.
Simmonds, which has an annual turnover of $100 million, has invested more than $250,000 in the past five years to develop the technology with Singapore timber auditing company Certisource.
A genetic profile is taken of each tree while it is growing in legally allocated concession areas in Indonesia. Simmonds chief executive Paul Elsmore says a sample is also sent to Certisource in Singapore.
The genetic profile is then rematched with another genetic analysis once the logs have arrived at the production mill in Indonesia.
"This proves the log has come from the concession," Mr Elsmore said. "It's checked against the data in Singapore."
The approved timber is then processed through the mill, where it is audited by Certisource, before finally being exported to Australia.
Mr Elsmore said he was confident the technology would make Australia a world leader in the global fight against illegal logging.
Mr Elsmore said Indonesia was suffering one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, with more than 80 per cent of all wood produced and sold there thought to be illegal.
"In the past five years, though, the Government has made huge inroads into reducing this," he said. "It's improving every day."
Mr Elsmore said the legal concessions were probably in regrowth native forest areas.
Many auditing systems rely on a "certificate of origin" issued in the source country to prove the legality of the cargo. "However, these systems can be corrupted. Many log smugglers sidestep the authorities by providing false certificates," Mr Elsmore said.
About 150,000 cubic metres of sawn timber is imported into Australia from South-East Asia every year. Simmonds has imported about 10,000 cubic metres of DNA-tested merbau products into Australia in a test program.
Australia imports about $4 billion worth of forest products annually, but has a trade deficit of about $2 billion in forest products.
James Randerson, London, Guardian
March 28, 2007
UP TO two-fifths of the Earth will have a hotter climate by the end of the century, according to a study that predicts the effects of global warming.
The changes — which will have a devastating effect on biodiversity in areas such as the Amazon and Indonesian rainforests — will wipe out numerous animals that are unable to move to stay within their preferred climate range. They will have to evolve rapidly or die out.
Lead author John Williams, of the University of Wisconsin, said: "How do you conserve the biological diversity of these entire systems if the physical environment is changing and potentially disappearing?"
Studies already suggest that animals are shifting towards the poles at six kilometres a decade.
Professor Williams' team used emissions scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to predict changes in temperature and precipitation.
The team predicts that as the planet warms, climate zones will move towards the poles. To work out the significance of these changes, it compared them with the natural climate variation. It attached greater weight to changes in relatively stable areas. This suggests that some of the worst impacts will be in tropical and sub-tropical regions as they shift to new climatic conditions.
"The tropics have very little variability from year to year in temperature, they are a very stable climatic zone. So species that live in those climates expect a limited degree of variability," Professor Williams said.
Other studies have suggested the Amazon basin will have an increased risk of forest fires because of its hotter, drier climate.
"One of the things that comes from our paper is that because the species that live in the tropics are adapted or have evolved for a reduced range of variability, it may be that a two to three-degree temperature change in the tropics may be more significant than say a five to eight-degree change in high latitudes," he said.
Up to now, much of the focus of the impact of global warming has been on polar regions because this is where the climate is changing fastest.
The climate model predicts climates will be lost mainly from tropical mountains and the edges of continents nearest the poles.
As the Earth warms, these climate regions have nowhere to go. Some of the losers are the tropical Andes, the African Rift Mountains, the Zambian and Angolan highlands, the South African Cape region, south-east Australia, parts of the Himalayas and the Arctic.
The team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that by 2100, 12 to 39 per cent of the land surface of the Earth will have a new climate, while the combination of climatic conditions on 10 to 48 per cent of the planet will have disappeared altogether. This is using one of the climate change panel's business-as-usual global development scenarios. Using a different scenario that assumes more environmentally friendly development, the corresponding predictions are 4 to 20 per cent.
GUARDIAN
SYMBOL OF DEFIANCE: Penan people at the flimsy blockade before it was destroyed near Long Benalih. Picture: PAUL MALONE
Paul Malone, Saturday, 10 March 2007 Canberra -Your Guide
THE BLOCKADE the Penan had erected looked pitiful in the rain, a few bamboo poles strung together across the muddy logging road that cuts through the rainforest near Long Benalih in the upper Baram River region of Malaysian Sarawak, near the Kalimantan border in Borneo.
No one was in sight to man the blockade, nor was there any sign of the police who had knocked it down days earlier, or the men from the giant multinational logging company, Samling, on whose behalf they had acted.
Just as well. My guides were worried, frightened that Samling men or the police might catch us looking at the site or taking photos.
This flimsy structure was never going to stop Samling, with its fleets of bulldozers and trucks, from entering the region. But for almost exactly three years, since February 2004, the barricade had stood at the end of the road, symbolically blocking entry to the last remaining stand of the Penan's ancestral rainforest land. Steadily the loggers have moved east from the Sarawak coast and now they are at the last blockade.
In October 1987 the Penan, Kayan and Kelabit communities erected their first barriers, shutting down roads at over 20 sites in the Baram and Limbang river districts, about 100km to the west of the current barrier. About 2500 Penan took part in the eight-month-long protests, enduring harsh conditions and harassment from the logging industry, but maintaining a peaceful campaign.
After a Kayan man charged with obstructing a public thoroughfare was acquitted because the magistrate ruled that the road was part of customary land, the Sarawak Government made it an offence for any person to obstruct the flow of traffic along any road. Nevertheless the protests continued, with many people, mostly Penan, being arrested. Steadily the blockades have been knocked down, and loggers have ripped into the forest. In the early 1970s about 70 per cent of Sarawak's total area was covered by relatively undisturbed rainforest. Now the coastal strip is largely oil-palm plantations; the next strip inland is being prepared for oil palms or looks like wasteland; and the third is a mix of previously logged areas, choked with creeper overgrowth, recently logged areas and areas about to be logged.
Samling controls a 70km-long road that cuts west through to the latest blockade site at Long Benalih. Loggers fan out from the road to feed the timber jinkers that run non-stop, taking huge trees to the staging post of Lapok on the Tinjar River. Bulldozers and graders try to maintain the road, which in parts is deeply rutted and periodically collapses into ravines.
Imported Samling workers now hunt in the forests, making it more difficult for the Penan to find their keenly sought wild boar and other game. Representatives of some tribes have accepted payments for their land along the way but the Penan the original forest nomads have refused any offers. Their last stand is a claim on the 30km by 20km stretch of pristine forest around the Selungo River, covering such settlements such as Long Kerong, Long Benalih and Long Sait.
Samling has been accused in the past, by no less than the World Bank, of carrying out harvesting haphazardly and with unnecessary and excessive damage to the forest. Yet the company has been granted the Malaysian Timber Certification Council's sustainable-logging concessions over most of this claim, though the Penan have never given their consent to logging.
On the internet Samling proudly says that it has major interests in plantations and is involved in property development, rubber product manufacturing and quarrying. But its plantations cannot replace native rainforest.
In response to questions from The Canberra Times, Samling said it operated strictly within the law and subscribed to sustainable forestry management guidelines. In Malaysia it was subject to an annual allowable volume of logs and there were also restrictions on the minimum tree diameter the company was permitted to harvest. "We selectively harvest trees, leaving the younger ones to grow for the next cutting cycle," the statement said. "We harvest our forests in Sarawak according to a 25-year cutting cycle and harvesting plans approved by the Sarawak Forest Department."
The Penan are widely regarded as having the greatest knowledge of the forest's plants and animals. They recognise more than 100 fruiting trees, 50 medicinal plants and eight blowpipe dart poisons, including one that is far more potent than anything used by any other Borneo tribe.
Despite this, they have been the most peaceful of all Dayak peoples, choosing to withdraw further into the forest when confronted with new settlers. Nevertheless, they are feared by many members of the other tribes. When a blowpipe fell from behind the sun visor in my four-wheel-drive, the Kenya driver explained that he kept it to ward off thieves in the town of Miri. "I put two darts in it so that they think I'm Penan," he said.
The Penan are known for their ability to fire three darts in quick succession down the pipe, a skill members of the other tribes have not mastered.
The Penan have sought to use legal means to gain title to their land. In 1998 they filed a land-rights case in the Malaysian High Court to claim native customary rights. The claim was led by the headman of the Long Kerong hamlet, Kelesau Naan. It has been referred back to the native courts where it is still dragging on.
So far the Sarawak provincial Government has not recognised any Penan native customary rights, arguing that the Penan, who were forced into settlements in the 1960s, had previously roamed the forests and therefore did not "use" the land.
At his home in the tiny settlement of Long Kerong, Kelesau told The Canberra Times through an interpreter of their fight to gain land rights. "The Penan are like mushrooms," he said. "They come from the ground."
He said they had inhabited the forest land around him before other native peoples had arrived. He was adamant that the Penan did not want money in compensation for their homeland, as other tribes had accepted. They wanted the land to keep everything in it, the sago, the rattan, the medicines, the fruit and the animals. "We have to object [to the logging] because this is our area," he said.
The destruction of the blockade would not stop them and they would re-erect it, he said.
As the lead signatory to the 1998 land-rights case in the High Court, Kelesau is the Eddie Mabo of Malaysian indigenous land claims. Just as Mabo campaigned to overturn the legal fiction of terra nullius in Australia, Kelesau and the other six headmen who took the case to the High Court are campaigning to overturn the Malaysian fiction that, because they were nomads, they did not own and use the land. Samling says the High Court case is an ongoing dispute between the Government and "certain natives". The company had voluntarily ceased harvesting activities in the areas under dispute, pending the outcome of proceedings.
Because of where they work, some Penan cannot speak on the record but one said that if they did not stop the loggers now all the remaining forest in the Upper Baram area would be gone within two years.
One young man who spoke good English said they wanted the area to be saved from the loggers. They did not want it to be turned into a national park managed by the Government. They wanted it to be their land, which they would manage and where people could come and see the Penan's real way of life. Tourists would be able to see much wildlife and many beautiful waterfalls.
My first evening interview with Kelesau was not a great success. The local translators had limited English and my questions were too complex, or required details he could not recall. Kelesau recognised this as much as I did and the next morning decided to take me to meet another old man, Kelasih Payah, who had had long been involved in protests to save the forest and had been jailed in the past for his efforts.
Kelasih would add to the answers of the previous night, provide details on the history of the campaign and explain why the Penan were still trying to blockade the road near Long Benalih. After an hour-long trek through the rainforest we arrived at Kelasih's lean-too to find that he was not home. Whooping calls did not raise him.
After we had eaten, Kelesau cut a sapling down and slashed it in a number of places and stuck it in the ground. He placed a stick at the base, four small twigs in one slash, a folded sago leaf in another and various other items along the pole, topping it with a partly stripped fern leaf pointing like an arrow.
The stick read, "Don't be afraid. We are your friends. We came to visit you. We were hungry. We cooked your sago. We have gone off in the direction of the arrow."
On the way back, Kelesau, who must be in his 70s, quickly left me and my guide well behind. When we caught up with him he was high in a rambutan tree. I could not see how he had managed to get up there. There were no branches, or anything to grip on to for well over 15m. My guide explained that he had gone up a smaller tree also with no branches lower than 15m and had crossed at the canopy. Fruit-laden rambutan branches rained down on us.
In the evening Kelasih Payah arrived, and a long boat which had been sent down the river returned with a new interpreter. Kelasih said they wanted to have authority in their land to follow their own rules. They didn't want other people coming and telling them what to do in their land.
Even though the Penan now lived in villages and hamlets they were not the same as people who had always been settled, such as the Kenya and Iban. The Kenya, Kayan and Iban wanted money from the logging company in exchange for land. But the Penan just wanted their own area, away from the Kayan or the Kenya, who always wanted to fight.
The Penan did not want to be located with them because they were not the same and did not want to fight. The Kenya and Kayan did not walk in the jungle, as the Penan did. The Penan always went to the jungle and picked things that were important to them.
Communication across the Penan region, and with the outside world, is difficult, making it hard for the Penan to make their views known and respond to allegations made against them. The official Malaysian media did not report any comment from the supporters of the blockade in their accounts of the police action in knocking it down.
One hamlet has a satellite phone but that does not even help within the region where it can take a 112-day walk through jungle to reach another village. The poor communication makes it well nigh impossible for the Penan to respond to sometimes wild allegations made against them such as that they are anti-education or opposed to the use of electricity.
At Long Kerong the Penan I interviewed, who were staunchly opposed to logging, were equally keen to see their children educated and happily used electricity one electric light bulb lit the room in which I interviewed leaders and, during the day, I observed one man using an electric power tool.
More seriously there have been complaints from the Kelabit community at Long Lellang, that the blockade has prevented them from getting essential supplies. When asked about this, Kelesau said the forest land was Penan land. The Kelabit were more recent arrivals from Indonesia who were willing to accept payment from the loggers for the land.
The difficulties faced by nomadic people claiming an area is illustrated by the fact that Kelabit say that the settlements established by the Penans are on land opened and worked by Kelabits.
Interestingly there is another logging road into Long Lellang which could have been used to supply the village, but according to a statement provided by Samling this road is now unusable and is not maintained "because logging operations have ceased".
The travel agent in Miri had challenged me, "Why would you want to go up the Baram River? There's nothing there to see."
Nothing to see? In 1974 when I first went up the river it was a tourist paradise a huge river with banks of tropical rainforests and a huge variety of bird life. Beyond Marudi you could travel by longboat, periodically forced to walk around the rapids as the boatmen gunned their Mercury outboard motors, and Penan, Kenya or Kayan men poled or pulled the boat upstream.
Longhouses still held bags of shrunken heads from the warlike days of the Dayak tribes and some had ancient narrow-necked 1m-long cannon tied to their posts.
You won't find any cannon now, my guide told me as I instead went up the Limbang River. Chinese traders have been up and down the rivers and bought them all. Sure enough, at the very first longhouse we visited the headman told us that he once had had a cannon but he had sold it some years back. This was something he now very much regretted.
And in the lower Baram I wouldn't find any forest either. There the loggers had been through, changing the life of the longhouse people forever.
It is only in the upper Baram, where the Penan still hold out, that the forest, and a unique lifestyle that goes with it, still survives.
London, Reuters
March 8, 2007
The large-billed reed-warbler
Photo: AP
A BIRD species that has not been seen since the remains of one were found in India 140 years ago is alive in Thailand.
The live large-billed reed-warbler was found by chance by ornithologist Philip Round as he was putting identification tags on wild birds at a water treatment plant near Bangkok last year.
"Although reed-warblers are generally drab and look very similar, one of the birds I caught struck me as very odd … it had a long beak and short wings," he said in a statement yesterday.
"Then it dawned on me — I was probably holding a large-billed reed-warbler."
The remains of a second warbler has also been found during examination of specimens of another species at a branch of the Natural History Museum in England.
Both the living and the dead were matched to the one original sample by DNA.
Because only one sample had been known for so long — it was collected in the Sutlej Valley in India in 1867 — there had been serious doubts over whether it was a sample of a distinct species or simply an aberration.
"A priority now is to find out where the large-billed reed-warbler's main population lives, whether it is threatened, and if so, how these threats can be addressed," said BirdLife International's Dr Stuart Butchart.
"Myanmar or Bangladesh are possibilities, but this species has proved so elusive it could produce another surprise."
REUTERS
Facing pressure to survive: an Eastern Arc butterfly, one of 43 butterfly species endemic to the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania.
Photo: The New York Times
New York, Reuters
March 7, 2007
THE Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania may not be terribly tall — only half the height of their famous neighbour, Mount Kilimanjaro (5889 metres).
But to scientists who tally the planet's biodiversity, they tower over the rest of the world. The forests that cover their flanks contain the highest density of endangered animals anywhere on earth.
"This is a really important place," said Neil Burgess, an expert on the Eastern Arc Mountains at the University of Cambridge and the World Wildlife Fund. "Biologists who go there just keep finding more and more species."
Many species that live on the mountains live nowhere else in the world. (Scientists call them endemic.)
So far, researchers have identified 96 endemic species of vertebrates in the Eastern Arc Mountains, including sunbirds, chameleons and the wide-eyed primates called bushbabies.
Many insects are also endemic to the Eastern Arc, including 43 species of butterflies. Some of the most popular house plants in the world come from its forests, including African violets, and the mountains are home to at least 800 other endemic species of plants.
All of these species are crammed into 13 patches of forest that, put together, would be barely bigger than Rhode Island.
Only a few places on earth, including New Zealand and Madagascar, have comparable densities of endangered endemic species. Scientists call them biodiversity hot spots.
Geography plays a big role in the making of a hot spot. The Eastern Arc has been around for 30 million years. "They've probably had forests on them for all of that time," said Dr Burgess, lead author of the new reports. "Even during very dry periods, the forests have survived."
Lineages that became extinct elsewhere in East Africa have been able to survive in the Eastern Arc. Studies of the DNA of birds and primates reveal that many species belong to ancient lineages. In some cases, their closest living relatives are found hundreds or thousands of miles away. As the old lineages endure, new species also evolve. "You've got these ancient things that are collected in the mountains, and then you've got newly evolved species on the mountains as well," Dr Burgess said.
The diversity of the Eastern Arc is all the more impressive because 70 per cent of the original forest cover is gone. Farmers and loggers have cleared many of the trees, and hunters have eliminated many mammals, like elephants and buffalo. Many of the remaining species are endangered, including 71 of the 96 known endemic vertebrates.
The destruction of the forests may prove harmful to Tanzania's economy as well. The rivers that flow from the mountains power the dams that supply half the nation's energy. Deforestation may make the water supply less reliable during dry months. The Tanzanian Government and conservation organisations are working on ways to preserve the remaining forests.
With money from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, scientists are continuing to explore the Eastern Arc forests in search of new species — and are finding them. While many are small amphibians and reptiles, some are surprisingly big.
In 2005, for example, scientists discovered a new species of monkey, a slender, tree-dwelling primate called the kipunji. At first it appeared to belong to a group of monkeys called mangabeys. But last year scientists studying its DNA were surprised to discover that it was not a mangabey at all; its closest kin are actually baboons.
Dr Burgess said he expected still more discoveries in the next few years. "There will be plenty of new and fun things for people to find out about," he said.
NEW YORK TIMES
