Overseas News - September 2006
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September 26, 2006 Roar of India's tigers close to being silenced Delhi, AP China India Links
September 26, 2006 Tigers learn the law of the jungle, Reuters our highlighting China Links
September 25, 2006 Zoo hopes for big cat litter Chris Evans, The Age our highlighting Australia Links
September 23, 2006 It's war on Christmas Island invaders , Jewel Topsfield, Canberra, The Age Christmas Island Australia Links
September 9, 2006 Kew boss: 'World must wake up to the dangers of biofuels', Independent (UK) UK
September 1, 2006 Brazil proposes fund to save rainforests, Reuters Brazil
Delhi, AP
September 29, 2006
INDIA'S tigers will vanish within just a few years, environmentalists have warned in a stinging indictment of the governments of India and China, which they say have done almost nothing to stem the decline of the big cats.
Trade in poached Indian tigers is flourishing across the border in Chinese-controlled Tibet, where organised crime groups sell them for use in traditional medicines, ceremonial clothing and as souvenirs, according to the Wildlife Protection Society of India and the international Environmental Investigation Agency.
"In China, the police have decided to turn a blind eye to the slaughter of tigers in India," said Belinda Wright, the director of WPSI. The inaction comes despite China's tough laws against trading in endangered animals, she noted.
Pictures secretly taken in Tibet and shown at a news conference yesterday showed dozens of tiger and leopard skins openly on sale. In some photos, Chinese police officers laughed and posed with people wearing costumes made of tiger skins.
In India, meanwhile, there is no effective force to combat tiger poaching despite years of talking about it, Ms Wright said. "It is the politics in India that is killing the tiger, the petty agendas and personal rivalries," she said.
Last year, officials were forced to acknowledge that poachers had wiped out every tiger in Sariska, one of India's premier tiger reserves, and that Indian wildlife officials had long been exaggerating the number of tigers across the country. But despite a loud public and official outcry, Ms Wright said tiger protection had not improved.
In 2001, the US National Geographic Society estimated that 5000 to 7000 Bengal — or Indian — tigers existed in the wild, about half in India. But conservationists say the true figure may be closer to 2000 — and possibly as few as several hundred.
The UN has banned trade in endangered species, but the high prices tiger parts can fetch has created a thriving illegal trade.
AP
Beijing
September 26, 2006, Reuters our highlighting
CHINA will train 620 endangered Siberian tigers to survive in the wild as part of a controversial effort to return them to the shrinking north-east forests.
The captive-bred tigers would be taken from enclosures in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, to a 15-hectare fenced patch of forest near the mountainous border with North Korea, Liu Dan, of the Siberian Tiger Artificial Propagation Base, said.
Mr Liu said a trial release of 12 tigers four years ago was promising, although 10 were back in captivity.
Other experts said the plan was doomed unless the forests of north-east China were better protected from logging and human encroachment.
The world's tigers are at an estimated 5000 to 7000, down from more than 100,000 in the 19th century.
Siberian tigers, native to northern China, southern Russia and parts of North Korea, are near extinction in the wild because of hunting and loss of habitat. Only a few hundred live in the wild.
REUTERS
Chris Evans
September 25, 2006, The Age our highlighting
Binjai, Melbourne Zoo's four-year-old Sumatran tiger.
Photo: James Boddington
DESPITE dark skies, a shower of hailstones and temperatures of a less-than-tropical 10 degrees, Melbourne Zoo yesterday observed its fourth International Tiger Day in honour of the critically endangered Sumatran tiger.
The zoo is home to two captive-bred Sumatran tigers. The male, Ramalon, was born in Sydney in 1995 and was brought to Melbourne in 1999. The female, Binjai, came to Melbourne in 2004 from Rotterdam Zoo in the Netherlands, where she was born in 2002.
They have not yet produced a litter, although the pair have mated in recent weeks. The tigers have a gestation period of 92 to 110 days, so zoo officials say it is still too early to tell if Binjai is expecting.
Few more than 400 Sumatran tigers survive in the wild. Melbourne Zoo is one of more than 70 fauna conservation organisations worldwide which are co-operating in an international breeding program.
Zoo spokeswoman Judith Henke said a third of all tiger habitats worldwide had been lost.
"Big companies are now clearing hundreds and even thousands of hectares of tropical rainforest to make way for commercial palm oil plantations," Ms Henke said.
"The clearing of Sumatra's lowland forests — prime tiger territory — has resulted in tigers roaming into villages where they are sometimes captured and killed … Tigers have been killed in retaliation for the loss of both livestock and human lives."
The other threat to tiger numbers is poaching. Ms Henke said the illegal trade in animal parts is the third-biggest after the armament and drug trades.
"We work very closely with Australian Customs to educate the public to not buy anything … made from the body parts of endangered species, especially tigers," Ms Henke said.
The Zoological Board of Victoria, which runs Melbourne Zoo, is also involved in two tiger conservation projects in South-East Asia.
Links
A yellow crazy ant and a red crab.
Jewel Topsfield, Canberra, The Age
September 23, 2006
CHRISTMAS Island's world-famous red crabs and unique rainforest are under threat from the invasive yellow crazy ant, which is being blamed for an "ecological melt-down" on the remote Australian territory.
Federal parliamentary secretary for the environment Greg Hunt yesterday pledged an extra $400,000 to help control the marauding ants. He said: "The emergence of new super-colonies has underlined the urgency of a full-on attack on the island's biggest environmental threat."
The money would be spent on poisoning 300 hectares of ant super-colonies and setting up a research program to develop a biological control agent.
"After a highly successful baiting program in 2002, yellow crazy ants are on the march again, threatening the rich diversity of Christmas Island and its world-famous red crabs," Mr Hunt said.
Naturalist Sir David Attenborough has described the crabs' annual march to the ocean as one of the most spectacular animal migrations in the world.
But since the late 1990s, the non-native yellow crazy ants have severely damaged the environment, killing between 15 and 20 million crabs, about a third of the island's population.
The ants spray formic acid to protect their nests, which blinds and suffocates the crabs. CSIRO ecologist Ben Hoffmann said the crabs were key to the health of the unique rainforest ecology because they ate young seedlings and leaf litter on the forest floor.
The ants were first spotted on the island in the 1930s but did not become a problem until they started forming super-colonies in 1989. They have also led to a decline in native reptiles and insects and the near extinction of the seabird Abbott's booby.
Dr Hoffmann said the ants fed on a secretion exuded from a tree insect called a scale.
"The populations of the ant have gone through the roof, the populations of the scale have gone through the roof, so the ecological impacts have gone through the roof, resulting in a complete collapse of eco-systems," Dr Hoffmann said.
"It has been described as an ecological meltdown." He said that while baiting was the only control method, scientists were looking at biological control such as a wasp, fly or fungus to get rid of the scales. "Everybody throughout the world is watching what's happening on Christmas Island," he said.
Links
29th May 2006 - Christmas Island Christmas Island space plan 'not dead', - The Age
Detailed Background - including maps and better pictures see Teachers for Forests OSnews10Dec2005
The world should wake up to the dangers of the mass production of biofuels, which are increasingly seen as a major solution to global warming, according to Professor Sir Peter Crane, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Extensive production of biofuel crops, such as oil palms, could destroy remaining areas of rainforest and bring about a new cycle of worldwide intensive agriculture involving vast applications of artificial fertilisers and pesticides, and requiring enormous water resources, said Professor Crane, who as the head of Kew Gardens is the world's leading plant scientist.
"There are big opportunities with biofuels, but there are big problems too," he said. "It's not a free lunch."
Professor Crane, 52, is retiring from Kew after seven very successful years to take up a chair at the University of Chicago, and gave his biofuels warning as part of a valedictory interview with The Independent.
It comes at a critical moment. The production of road transport fuels made from crops, which do not add to the greenhouse gases causing global warming, is now starting to take off around the globe, and is likely to grow vastly. It will be one of the main agricultural developments of the 21st century.
The attraction of biofuels in the fight against climate change is that they are "carbon neutral". Unlike the fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal, which when burnt add to the net amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the CO2 which biofuels produce when ignited has been absorbed from the atmosphere by the crops used to make them, and so the net atmospheric amount is not increased.
The best known biofuels are ethanol, a petrol substitute made from sugar cane, sugar beet or maize, widely used in Brazil and coming into use in many other countries, and biodiesel, which is made from oil palms, oilseed rape or recycled vegetable oil.
American output of ethanol from maize is now rising at 30 per cent a year; Germany is raising output of biodiesel by nearly 50 per cent a year and China has built the world's biggest ethanol plant. Britain jumped on to the biofuels bandwagon this year with an obligation on British petrol companies to blend a fixed proportion of biofuels with all the petrol and diesel that they sell on garage forecourts. But Sir Peter sounded a strongly cautionary note about the new developments. "If we're serious about biofuels, we're going to have to produce them in a much more sustainable way than intensive agriculture has given us in the past," he said.
He voiced a concern which has already been highlighted by some environmental groups - that mass expansion of biofuel production might lead to a new round of rainforest destruction, especially with crops such as oil palm. Oil palm needs warm humid conditions and is largely grown in south-east Asia on land from which rainforest has been cleared. "Expansion of oil palm production is going to have to be handled extremely carefully to ensure that it doesn't start to eat into the remaining pieces of rainforest that still exist," Professor Crane said.
He went on: "We're going to have to get biofuels off land that's already degraded, perhaps land that's not valuable for other purposes, for conservation or for agriculture. And we've got to do it without creating other problems with the kinds of inputs that in the past have gone into intensive agriculture."
It was possible that intensive biofuel production might involve too much nitrogen-based fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides, in order to get the desired level of production, he said, as well as taking up enormous amounts of scarce water in irrigation.
Sir Peter will be succeeded as director at Kew by Professor Stephen Hopper from the University of Western Australia. In his timeat the Royal Botanic Gardens he has been one of the leading figures in world plant conservation, and was a principal architect of the UN's Global Plant Conservation Strategy.
Under his direction, Kew has been leading the way in one of the strategy's first aims - to provide a working checklist of all the plants of the world.
September 1, 2006 - 7:44AM, Reuters
Brazil has proposed that a fund be established to compensate developing countries that slow the destruction of their rainforests, a move that could help lower emissions of gases blamed for rising world temperatures.
The Brazilian initiative, presented on Thursday at a planning meeting for upcoming global climate talks in Rome, calls for creating a fund that countries could tap into if they prove they had reduced deforestation to levels below rates in the 1990s.
"Once again Brazil is acting as a protagonist ... in presenting an innovative proposal," Environment Minister Marina Silva told Reuters at a conference in Sao Paulo.
Disagreements over how to address deforestation have hurt global efforts to cap emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and create markets for trading in carbon and credits.
Most emissions come from burning oil and coal, but deforestation is responsible for about 20 per cent because trees store carbon dioxide when they grow and release it into the atmosphere when they die.
Global agreements allow credit for planting trees where forests have already been cleared but offer no incentives for preventing cutting in areas like Brazil's Amazon, home to almost a third of all species and a quarter of the earth's fresh water.
Critics say developing countries want cash for preserving their forests.
Brazil has long objected to granting tradable emission credits for preserving forests because heavy oil and coal users like the US might buy up credits instead of reducing their own emissions.
Silva said Brazil's proposal was a draft but it should serve as the basis for discussion at the next round of global climate talks in November.
She also said Brazil was working with Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, who backed an earlier proposal to grant tradable credits to countries who reduce deforestation rates.
Brazil slowed deforestation by 30 per cent last year and will do the same or better this year, Silva said. Deforestation in Brazil hit its highest level in 2004.
Paulo Mountinho of the Brazilian environmental studies institute, IPAM, said the proposal was well received in Rome.
"People cut down trees because they're not worth anything standing," Mountinho said by telephone from Rome. "Addressing deforestation is fundamental because it's going to take 40 years to change global energy use."
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