International News - November 2007
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18/11/07 Experts warn of global disaster WASHINGTON POST , Doug Struck with STEPHEN CAUCHI, The Age UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
14/11/07 How we're destroying our habitat Sian Powell The Australian UN Environment Programme,
07/11/07 Timber baron acquitted over illegal logging, Mark Forbes, Jakarta The Age; Indonesia Singapore; China Australia UN Kyoto Protocol. Links
04/11/07 Bitter life of chocolate's child slaves Carmel Egan, The Age Ivory Coast and Ghana; United Nations Malaysia Indonesia Singapore Australia
01/11/07 Forests losing the ability to absorb man-made carbon, Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Independent, Canada, US
Doug Struck
November 18, 2007
GLOBAL warming is destroying species, raising sea levels and threatening millions of poor people, the United Nations' top scientific panel said in a report yesterday.
The report argues that only firm action, including a price on carbon dioxide emissions, will avoid more catastrophic events.
Those actions will take a small part of the world's economic growth and will be substantially less than the costs of doing nothing, the report will say.
The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be important ammunition when world leaders meet in Bali next month to decide what to do after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. The UN and many countries want strong mandatory reductions of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming.
The most stringent efforts to stabilise greenhouse gases would cost the world's economies 0.12% of their average annual growth to 2050, the report estimates.
The panel warned that the first to suffer from global warming would be the poor, who would face faltering water supplies, damage to crops, new diseases and encroaching oceans.
The report, by the panel who last month shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore, largely summarises findings released by the panel in reports earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the Australian-born Lord May — who has been chief scientific adviser to the British Government and president of the Royal Society, among other things — is touring Australia to reinforce the main points made by the panel and the United Nations about the state of the planet.
A guest of the foreign policy think tank, the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Lord May will spell out the need for humanity to cut consumption, look after the environment, and stabilise the population.
Or, as he put it when talking to The Sunday Age: "The continuing growth in human numbers multiplied by the growth in consumption per person has brought us to the point whereby human activities are on the same scale and scope as the natural biological, chemical and geophysical processes that built the biosphere. And that's never happened before."
Lord May said it was urgent that humanity constrained its population growth.
"It is clear you cannot have indefinitely sustained growth of population," he said. "There has to be a point in the history of any inhabited planet when the number of people multiplied by the impact per person does rival natural processes."
WASHINGTON POST with STEPHEN CAUCHI
How we're destroying our habitat
Sian Powell | November 14, 2007 The Australian
LIKE a recklessly profligate spendthrift, humanity has largely ignored ever shriller environmental warnings and continued on a destructive path that has already done extraordinary damage.
Climate change, air pollution, land degradation, overpopulation, increasing natural disasters: all these are the symptoms of a sick planet.
An extensive new audit of the Earth, written by 400 scientists and reviewed by 1000 experts under the aegis of the UN Environment Programme, contains an urgent call to action.
The fourth Global Environment Outlook report runs to more than 500 pages of detail on the world's woes.
The audit has found that each human being now requires one-third more land to supply their needs than the planet can provide. Humanity's footprint is 29.1ha a person, while the world's biological capacity is on average only 15.7ha a person. The result is net environmental degradation and loss.
Failing to address persistent atmosphere, land, water and biodiversity problems, UNEP says, "may threaten humanity's survival". The report's authors say there is no significant area dealt with in the report where the foreseeable trends are favourable.
More than 30 per cent of the world's amphibians, 23 per cent of mammals and 12per cent of birds are now threatened with extinction. More than 75 per cent of fish stocks are fully or overly exploited. Six in 10 of the world's leading rivers have been either dammed or diverted. One in 10 of these rivers no longer reaches the sea for part of the year. More than two million people die prematurely every year from indoor and outdoor pollution. Less than 1 per cent of the world's marine ecosystems are protected.
The report's foreword is written by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who warns that "issues of energy and climate change can have implications for peace and security". Competition for dwindling natural resources such as water, he notes, may become a trigger for conflict.
James Cook University's pro vice-chancellor Chris Cocklin went to a concept meeting at the UNEP headquarters in Nairobi two years ago, where he was invited to help frame the GEO-4 report.
There had been some dissatisfaction with previous GEO reports, he says, and there was concern the reports had lacked the level of peer review required by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That shortcoming has been remedied in part and Cocklin, an environmental scientist, considers the latest report credible. "I think the UN does have a degree of distance; they are reading the evidence and presenting the report around the evidence, rather than making ambit claims."
Cocklin, though, takes issue with the notion that humanity's survival is at risk. "We're a bit like cockroaches, really: we can survive quite a lot," he says. "But the quality of life is absolutely at stake; that's under serious threat, if you like looking at green trees and seeing animals and birds."
He says biodiversity is at an important point where action is needed to maintain the balance, and there isn't much room for delay.
The GEO-4 report notes that the accelerating loss of biodiversity is linked to humanity's increasing use of energy, and warns changes in biodiversity and ecosystems can lead to changes in disease patterns and human exposure to disease outbreaks.
Maintaining present biodiversity levels, the report says, is critical. Functioning ecosystems provide buffers to extreme climate events, filters for waterborne and airborne pollutants, and carbon sinks.
Cocklin says that at the rate we're going, the survival of certain parts of the globe will soon come into question. "Some of the world's leading experts in biodiversity are warning of a mass extinction of plant and animal species," he says.
The report elaborates on the theory that the available evidence points to a sixth "major extinction event" now under way. Unlike the previous five extinction events, which were the result of natural disasters and planetary change, the present loss of biodiversity can mostly be sheeted home to human activity.
The Australian Museum's principal research scientist Daniel Faith says he reviewed part of the GEO-4 report, and although he largely agrees with its conclusions, he took exception to one measure of biodiversity - mean species abundance - which he believes can distort the real picture. For instance, mean species abundance in a specific place can be quite high, but certain species can still be depleted.
"But overall I think it's a very good study," says the biodiversity specialist. "It's really difficult to work with a broad brush at a global perspective."
As well as assessing the planet's health, the report focuses on human wellbeing: essentially two indivisible elements making up the world picture.
Humans affect, and are affected by, the environment to an enormous degree. The GEO-4 report includes a number of disquieting statistics on humanity. The global population has grown by 1.7 billion in the 20 years since 1987, to a grand total of 6.7 billion. And these 6.7 billion humans consume like a plague of ravenous insects. One small example noted in the report: every year, 1.1million to 3.4million tonnes of undressed wild animal meat, or bushmeat, is eaten by people living in the Congo basin.
And people are flocking to the cities. By the end of this year, more people will be living in cities than in rural areas for the first time in history. Already, more than one billion people live in slums across the world. Water-related diseases, such as cholera and diarrhoeal infections, kill about three million people a year. Ten million children under five die every year - 98 per cent of them in developing countries - and three million of these deaths are the result of unhealthy environments.
The report considers seven distinct regions and Australia slots into the category of Asia and the Pacific. Home to 60 per cent of the world's population, the region has seen some solid gains, the report says, including improvement in environment protection, energy efficiency and the provision of clean drinking water. Yet vastly increased consumption and its associated waste have accelerated existing environmental problems and contributed to some of the worst urban air quality in the world. The World Health Organisation estimates that more than one billion Asians are exposed to excessive air pollution.
The report says climate change is likely to cause more severe droughts and floods in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as soil degradation, coastal inundation and saltwater incursions caused by rising sea levels. Agricultural productivity, it warns, is likely to decline substantially because of warmer temperatures and shifting rainfall.
Murdoch University's Frank Murray, one of the GEO-4 report's authors, says one of the broad themes concerns the relationship between humanity's wellbeing and economic development, and how they largely depend on the health of the environment. Murray, an environmental scientist, was on the team that wrote the chapter on atmosphere, including climate change, air pollution and ozone depletion.
Murray used the Kuznets curve - devised by the Nobel prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets - to explain how the environment degrades as development proceeds. This continues until a certain level of development is reached and the general public - now mostly richer and better educated - begins to agitate against air pollution or water pollution. Agencies are then established to control development and pollution. "Air pollution and water pollution in the US is much lower than it used to be," he says. "China is trying to clean up Beijing, with (next year's) Olympics in mind."
Murray says the GEO-4 report is a flagship UNEP publication that has taken a number of years to research, write and edit. Various governments, he says, did remove certain elements they didn't like, but that simply meant the assessment was moved to a broader regional level rather than an individual national level. "Rarely is any individual government criticised in this report," he says. "Countries are very sensitive about being named adversely."
One of the big issues in the report, which has been comprehensively addressed by other organisations, is climate change. "Climate change is a major global challenge," the report says. "Impacts are already evident, and changes in water availability, food security and sea-level rises are projected to dramatically affect many millions of people. Drastic steps are necessary."
The report ranks climate change as a global priority, yet the authors note a "remarkable lack of urgency" and a "woefully inadequate" global response.
Murray says change is on the way. Although very little happened for many years, climate change has now been recognised as a fact of life by ordinary people in developed nations, and governments are responding to community pressure. Remedies are possible, he says. Ozone depletion, for instance, has been halted by global action to ban chlorofluorocarbons.
Cocklin is less sanguine and he is doubts whether relying on governments to effect change is a good idea. "We certainly can't look to politicians for leadership on climate change," he says. "The leadership, if it's anywhere, has come from the private sector."
Ominously, UNEP warns that some of the damage resulting from the world's most persistent problems could be irreversible. Tackling the underlying causes of environmental problems, the GEO-4 report says, often means dealing with the vested interests of powerful groups that can influence policy decisions.
"Our common future," the report says, "depends on our actions today, not tomorrow or some time in the future."
Timber baron acquitted over illegal logging
Mark Forbes, Jakarta , The Age
November 7, 2007
IN THE latest and most significant case in a string of controversial acquittals, an Indonesian timber baron has walked away from illegal logging charges, prompting an outcry from environmentalists.
The release of Adelin Lis undermines Indonesia's bid to have December's United Nations climate change conference in Bali support a multibillion-dollar program to prevent deforestation.
Because of logging, land clearing and forest degradation, Indonesia is the world's third-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It wants the Bali meeting to endorse Indonesia piloting the new program to become part of a renegotiated Kyoto Protocol.
Forest Minister Malam Kaban
, who this week urged governments and international organisations to support the program, had tried to intervene in the police investigation of Mr Lis.A letter from Mr Kaban presented to Mr Lis' trial claimed that the logging by Mr Lis' companies was not a crime but "a mere administrative violation".
Police have seized millions of logs cut illegally in Sumatra, but Mr Kaban has complained that this is harming the province's large pulp and paper industry.
Mr Lis fled police investigators for six months before being arrested while trying to renew a visa at Indonesia's Beijing embassy last year. At the time, the Government described Mr Lis as an "environmental destroyer". When Mr Lis was escorted to a Beijing hospital for treatment a gang of 20 thugs tried to free him.
Companies connected to Mr Lis allegedly logged timber worth more than $30 billion outside concession areas in Sumatra between 1998 and 2005. Prosecutors requested that he receive a 10-year jail sentence.
Chief judge Arwin Birin rejected the corruption charges on a technicality, stating they were not valid because Mr Lis' private company had not used state money. He also dismissed illegal logging charges as the companies held forest concession permits. The firms are among dozens accused of illegal logging across North Sumatra.
Earlier this year, North Sumatra police chief Nurudin Usman said he was puzzled by acquittals of numerous illegal logging suspects. He feared that Mr Lis would also be freed.
Environmental groups have condemned Mr Lis' acquittal and demanded an investigation. "The judges have been bribed," their statement claimed.
Prosecutors said they would appeal to the Supreme Court against the Medan District Court decision.
Corruption within the judiciary, police and the forestry ministry is widely acknowledged to contribute to massive illegal logging in Indonesia
.Mr Kaban presided over a workshop this week, funded by Australia and the World Bank, to produce a forest protection plan as part of new Kyoto Protocol negotiations in Bali.
Mr Kaban said that illegal logging should be eradicated to help counter climate change, but the timber industry should not be hampered.
The workshop is fine-tuning plans for Indonesia to pilot the international program to protect forests. Environmental groups support the protection plan, but question Indonesia's will and capacity to enforce it by cracking down on powerful timber interests.
Related
21/09/07 Indonesia leads call for scheme to save forests, Mark Forbes, The Age; Jakarta,Indonesia
29/03/07 Indonesia welcomes forest fund Geoff Thompson ABC news On-line Australia Indonesia
Carmel Egan, The Age
November 4, 200
CHOCOLATE: it's the most popular treat used as a reward for our kids, but what most Australians don't realise is that every time they indulge their children with a chocolate snack, they could be unwittingly supporting the enslavement of thousands of abused children in West Africa.
The world's largest cocoa producers — the Ivory Coast and Ghana — have been found guilty by the United Nations and US Congress of exporting cocoa made by trafficked and enslaved children.
It is estimated more than 100,000 children work in the Ivory Coast's cocoa industry under "the worst forms of child labor," and that about 10,000 are slaves.
As the Ivory Coast produces 43 per cent of the world's cocoa, it is likely almost half the chocolate products sold in Australia could be linked to child slavery.
In the last financial year, Victorian chocolate manufacturers alone imported 3 million kilograms of Ivory Coast cocoa paste.
The Confectionary Manufacturers Association — of which Nestle, Cadbury Schweppes and Mars Confectionery are members — cannot confirm if chocolate sold here has passed through the hands of child slaves. But they can offer no guarantees that the chocolate coating Australia's three biggest-selling bars — Cherry Ripe, Kit Kat and Mars — does not contain slave-tainted cocoa.
Association spokesman David Greenwood said it was notoriously difficult to identify children held as slaves or bonded workers because most plantations were family businesses in which children have traditionally laboured alongside their parents.
Adding to the confusion were large numbers of children moving to the Ivory Coast to escape the desperate poverty in neighbouring Mali, he said.
But the Salvation Army's anti-slavery co-ordinator, social justice director Captain Danielle Strickland, says this approach is not good enough. She believes manufacturers have a responsibility to urgently find out who produces their cocoa.
"Given that Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) produces 43 per cent of the world's cocoa you could say there is a 43 per cent chance your favourite chocolate bar has some beans produced by child slaves," she said.
"There is no doubt the issue is complex, but if you are producing something you have a responsibility to find out what you are buying."
The Australian Fair Trade Association and welfare organisations such as Oxfam and World Vision also want Australian chocolate lovers to start thinking about the suffering behind the indulgent treat.
Australians are the world's fourth highest consumers of chocolate, gobbling down an average 10 Easter eggs and between nine and 11 kilograms of chocolate per person a year.
But in the Ivory Coast, farmers earn less for a kilo of cocoa beans than we pay for a Snickers bar.
"Chocolate is the perfect case study for urban awareness of our connection to food producers," said Anne Lanyon, co-ordinator of the Columban Centre for Peace, Ecology and Justice, which promotes consumer awareness to schoolchildren. "It is our responsibility to be aware."
Australian Bureau of Statistics and Customs documents confirm that Australians are among the world's biggest consumers of Ivory Coast and Ghanaian-based chocolate directly imported as cocoa beans, paste, powder, butter and liquor. Additional millions of dollars worth of Ivory Coast, Ghanaian, other West African, Malaysian and Indonesian cocoa is imported via Singapore, the cocoa processing hub of South-East Asia.
In 2001, the international news agency Knight Ridder exposed the use of child slaves on Ivory Coast and Ghana cocoa farms.
It led the US Congress to draft legislation in which the chocolate manufacturing industry agreed to a voluntary protocol to end abusive and forced child labour on cocoa farms by July 2005. But little has changed, says the US-based International Labor Rights Fund.
"The cocoa companies trumpeted a few pilot programs, but continue to purchase and reap profits from child labour cocoa," the fund reports.
"These child workers labour for long, punishing hours, using dangerous tools and facing frequent exposure to dangerous pesticides as they travel great distances in the gruelling heat.
"Those who labour as slaves must also suffer frequent beatings and other cruel treatment."
A recent Pilot Labour Survey in Cocoa Production in Ghana found 2.47 million children aged between five and seven are being used in economic activities across 600,000 small farming communities.
But solving the issue of child slavery will not be simple, according to Mr Greenwood. "(Slavery) is a very emotive issue, so there is a perception that everybody is in an abusive situation," he said.
"It is a matter of a few thousand slaves — which is abhorrent and should not exist — but that is on a scale of 1.5 to 2 million farms.
"Boycotts will not help anybody. Hand-outs to people without change will achieve nothing."
International chocolate manufacturers have pledged to introduce a form of approved labour certification for cocoa farmers from mid-2008.
The Ivory Coast Government has pledged to reform its cocoa sector before the end of March 2008 and last month froze the bank account of the Coffee and Cocoa Farmers' Development Fund, citing corruption and embezzlement of money meant for growers.
Forests losing the ability to absorb man-made carbon