THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE NEWSWednesday, 8 August, 2007

UNEP and the Executive Director in the News

A catalyst, not a cure (International Herald Tribune ) Eau - Pollution de l'eau - Pollution de la mer – Sécheresse (Actualites News Environment) Au carrefour des énergies positives (L’Express) Steering to safety (The Guardian) Early 2007 saw record-breaking extreme weather (Grist Magazine)

Other Environment News

No change on climate at APEC: envoy (New Age (Australia) China Can Cut Emissions Without Hurting Growth (Reuters) Sénégal : "un élève, un arbre" (Xinhua) This time it's personal (The Guardian) Olympics - Pollution 'Biggest Issue' Says Australian Olympic Chief (Reuters) Early 2007 Saw Record-Breaking Extreme Weather – UN (Reuters)

Environmental News from the UNEP Regions

ROA RONA ROWA ROLAC

Other UN News

UN Daily News of 7 August 2007 S.G.’s Spokesman Daily Press Briefing of 7 August 2007

International Herald Tribune (IHT): A catalyst, not a cure

Communications and Public Information, P.O. Box 30552, Nairobi, Kenya Tel: (254-2) 623292/93, Fax: [254-2] 62 3927/623692, Email:unepmedia@unep.org, http://www.unep.org

By Jacques Rogge International Herald Tribune

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

A year from now the Summer Olympic Games will begin in Beijing. Athletes from over 200 nations will participate in an opening ceremony for Games that have come to symbolize China opening up to the world. Many observers will be as interested in judging China's overall performance in 2008 as they will be in the results of athletic competition.

From the moment Beijing's winning bid to host the Games was announced in 2001, expectations were established that the Games would help improve social development in China. Moreover, since then there has been an increasing tendency to expect that the Games can help influence a wide array of matters related to China's evolution that go far beyond sport.

The Olympic Movement does not exist in a vacuum. Sport is part of society. With Beijing, however, one of the great challenges will be to manage expectations that the Olympic Games can influence China's evolution to the extent many observers desire.

It is natural for human rights and other organizations to place their causes in the spotlight that the Beijing Olympic Games is casting on China, and to draw attention to reforms they advocate. However, the Games can only be a catalyst for change and not a panacea. Any expectations that the International Olympic Committee should apply pressure on the Chinese government beyond what is necessary for Games preparations are misplaced, especially concerning sovereign matters the IOC is not qualified to judge. That was not part of the bid agreement with Beijing when it was awarded the Games. It was not the case for previous Games, nor will it ever be the case for future host cities.

It is important to recognize that China's transformation began long before the Games were awarded to Beijing. Specialists are now observing more legislative progress as well as government acknowledgement that more changes are needed in China's society and economy. Much of this was unimaginable a short time ago.

It wasn't necessarily a deciding factor when the International Olympic Committee voted to award Beijing the Games for the first time in history, but it has since become clear that it is better to open a new door to China than to leave it closed at this point in its modern evolution. An open door approach will continue to benefit China, its citizens and its relationships with other nations long after the 2008 closing ceremony. In this sense, the IOC believes more than ever that the Beijing 2008 Games offer a great legacy for China to manage and sustain.

The committee must focus on ensuring that athletes can prove themselves to be the pinnacle of sport in 2008. But we are also making sure that China adheres to new legislation allowing necessary access for foreign journalists and that it implements beneficial environmental programs for the Games that will be reviewed by the UN Environmental Program.

All of the dialogue on issues related to China has shown the International Olympic Committee that it must continue to understand the role people expect the Olympic Games to play in an increasingly complex world. Such an understanding will help the Olympic Movement as it endeavors to bring the Games to more places in the world.

Bringing the Olympic Games to Beijing in 2008 is only one step toward fostering warmth between China and the world. This is the hope for all Olympic Games. If the benefits in Beijing have an effect beyond sport arenas, then everyone will win.

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<em>Jacques Rogge is president of the International Olympic Committee.</em>

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Actualites News Environment: Eau - Pollution de l'eau - Pollution de la mer - Sécheresse

Environnement, la marée noire n’en finit plus sur les plages du Liban 07/08/2007 16:22 (Par Pierre MELQUIOT)

Environnement, la marée noire n’en finit plus sur les plages du LibanEnvironnement, la marée noire n’en finit plus sur les plages du Liban

Alors que l’on croyait que la marée noire qui a eu lieu au Liban suite à l’attaque d’Israël de la centrale électrique de Jiyyeh située à 28 kilomètres au sud de Beyrouth, résolue, deux associations de protection de l’environnement, Green Line et Byblos Ecologia, affirment qu’il n’en est rien.

Selon elles, dans des propos rapportés par The Daily Star, la marée noire qui a fait suite à l'écoulement de quelque 15 000 tonnes de pétrole brut dans la Méditerranée, polluant toutes les plages du Liban, sur 120 kilomètres, jusqu'au rivage syrien, est loin d’être résolue.

Ces deux ONG de protection de l’environnement affirment en effet que la côte libanaise est toujours très polluée par la marée noire, alors que d'autres ONG dont le Programme des Nations unies pour l'environnement (PNUE) certifient de leurs côtés que les plages libanaises sont désormais sans danger et que la majeure partie du pétrole qui s'y est déversée pendant la guerre de juillet et d'août 2006 entre le Hezbollah et Israël, a été nettoyée. Fifi Kallab, présidente de Byblos Ecologia, et Ali Darwish, président de Green Line, dénoncent de leur côtés le « manque de responsabilité du gouvernement libanais », ajoutant que le nettoyage qui a été fait a mal été réalisé et, que dans de nombreux endroits, les hydrocarbures collectés s'amoncellent sur le bord des plages. « Il est dangereux de se baigner dans ces eaux et les gens ne sont même pas prévenus », ajoute Fifi Kallab.

Ce n’est pas l’avis du ministre libanais de l’environnement, Berge Hadjian, qui a cette annonce, a assuré qu’il « n’y avait pas de problème à nager dans la mer », et que 60 à 70% du pétrole avait été récupéré. » Pour Gaby Khalaf, directeur du développement du centre marin national, s’est dit « 100% sûr que les poissons péchés dans la Méditerranée étaient propres ». « Le niveau des agents dangereux trouvé dans les poissons que nous avons prélevés est loin en dessous du seuil de dangerosité internationalement fixé. »

Il a ajouté que le ministère de l’environnement, dans sa coordination avec « Electricite du Liban », était parvenu « à empêcher quelques autres 25.000 tonnes de carburant de se déverser dans la mer » en protégeant un réservoir de carburant sur le point d’exploser.

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L’Express: Au carrefour des énergies positives

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Plus d’un quart de siècle dans le domaine des énergies renouvelables ne l’a pas usé. Une carrière enviable à l’ONU après des études en Russie et un rôle de pionnier à l’Université. Aujourd’hui, installé en Floride et devenu son propre patron, le docteur Suresh Hurry reste à notre service.

Les sixties à Moscou : Kroutchev, Brejnev, Soljenitsyne… et la télévision russe. Pour le docteur Suresh Hurry, aujourd’hui directeur de IT Power US, Inc en Floride, une société de service-conseil en énergies renouvelables, pas plus tard qu’hier officiel aux Nations unies à New-York, le jour s’est définitivement levé à l’Est. En plein effort d’URSS, dont le seul nom terrorisait certains de ses compatriotes, mais qui ne lui faisait pas plus peur qu’à ces nombreux étudiants qui ont vu – très souvent avec raison – dans la Russie soviétique d’alors l’aubaine d’études abordables et de très haute qualité.

Au prix peut-être de quelques concessions avec la propagande, parfois. Mais notre Rosehillien de naissance, Curepipien le temps de ses royales années collégiennes, en tira le meilleur parti, apprenant puis maîtrisant non seulement le russe, mais aussi le moscovite (nous voulons dire : le russe parlé avec l’accent moscovite) avec une telle aisance qu’il finit par paraître à la télé russe en tant qu’étudiant étranger modèle.

Pas vraiment surprenant, si on s’approche de ce qu’a toujours été Suresh Hurry : un homme de science, avide d’apprendre, authentique cosmopolite et aimant la vie. C’est ainsi que rentré au pays en 1970 et intégrant l’Université de Maurice des temps héroïques, il repart en 1974, en congé avec solde (cela se pouvait), peaufiner son doctorat à l’Indian Institute of Technology, à Delhi. Lorsqu’il revient, c’est pour lancer, bien avant que le concept se soit imposé dans l’esprit des Mauriciens, un programme de recherches sur les énergies renouvelables.

Avec le soutien de l’Ademe (l’Agence française- de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Energie), alors connue comme le Commissariat à l’énergie solaire), il favorise l’installation des stations de mesure du potentiel éolien (énergie produite par le vent). Pour le détenteur de la chaire de technologies à l’Université, le recours aux énergies renouvelables ne serait donc pas qu’un joli préchi-précha : “Je me souviens encore de l’incrédulité du ministre de l’époque quand je lui ai parlé du chauffe-eau solaire installé chez moi. Et de son étonnement quand, répondant à mon invitation, il se rendit compte de lui-même des bienfaits d’un tel système.”

Comme quoi, rien ne vaut une visite sur le terrain. Nous sommes à la fin des années 70 : à Quatre-Bornes, à Maurice même, Suresh est un des rares à être équipé de la sorte, alors que le matériel vaut une petite fortune. “Ce qui est valable aujourd’hui l’était déjà hier : il faut voir au-delà des coûts immédiats, le coût du cycle de vie. Certes cela revient cher pour les premières années. Mais quand on sait qu’un chauffe-eau est efficace pendant 20 ans, vos kilowatts heures sont amortis en l’espace de cinq ans, mais encore vous avez l’eau chaude gratis pour très longtemps.”

C’est dans ce contexte presque militant que Suresh est recruté par l’Unesco et le PNUE comme consultant pour monter des projets d’implémentation de l’énergie solaire en Afrique. “Pour le poste de New-York, parmi les autres candidats, il y avait un Turc ainsi qu’un Sud-américain. En fait on me connaissait si bien à New-York qu’on m’a embauché sans même faire l’entretien téléphonique.” Suresh, un de ces valeureux intellectuels mauriciens à faire la fierté du pays sur le plan international, se retrouve donc fonctionnaire des Nations unies, premier secrétaire général de la Société de l’Energie Solaire d’Afrique.

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Les projets s’enchaînent, les offres aussi : en 1982, les Nations unies le pressentent pour un poste à New-York: de là il pilotera nombre d’initiatives, dont notre pays sera aussi bénéficiaire : la première éolienne à Rodrigues, c’est lui, notamment. “Elle produisait entre 40 et 80 kilowatts/h par jour, pour faire marcher une pompe dans un puits”. Parfois les résultats dépassent les espérances : “l’éolienne produisait un excédent d’énergie : on s’en est servi pour la fourniture d’une vingtaine de maisons”. A l’époque, avoir du courant à Rodrigues, c’est déjà être privilégié ; alors de l’énergie éolienne, vous pensez ! Voilà donc l’enfant adoptif de Moscou qui amène la révolution électrique à Anse-Quitor…

Et Maurice ? “Depuis le temps qu’on en parle ! Qui se souvient du projet d’éolienne de Grand-Bassin ?” 25 ans d’études, de dessins, on est passé de Bigara à des projets de coopération avortée avec des firmes étrangères… Et si on lui demandait son avis ? “Je pense qu’on ne peut se fier qu’aux seules sources renouvelables. Il faut certes un mélange. Le vent n’est pas constant, mais nous avons la bagasse, dont nous devrions faire une utilisation maximale.” Reste le diesel – “dans quelle proportion avoir recours à ce carburant pollueur?” – , le charbon, l’éthanol – “cher celui-là et qui a fait grimper dans une spirale les coûts du maïs et des engrais destinés à l’élevage de poulets. Des études ont aussi démontré que l’éthanol avait une valeur énergétique moindre de 24 à 27 % que l’essence”. Une sacré différence, sauf si on consent à faire des économies d’énergie ! .

Mais aller vers le renouvelable, ce n’est pas qu’une seule question économique. “A chaque fois qu’on utilise de l’énergie du soleil, du vent, on diminue l’émission du dioxyde de carbone (CO2).” Entre-temps, les exploitants du pétrole emplissent, dans les abysses de la terre, les poches vidées d’énergie fossile, le dioxyde de carbone. “Il paraît qu’elles sont des cavités étanches, mais on ne peut en avoir la certitude totale à l’heure”.

Si sa foi est demeurée intacte dans le potentiel du ciel, du soleil et de la mer, dans une version qui va au-delà d’une conception toute classique (héritée des classiques sixties), notre homme n’en a pas moins décidé, au terme d’une carrière bien remplie en plein Big Apple, de prendre ce qu’il appelle un parachute doré. Parti à la retraite, lui qui a toujours su trouver le temps, entre deux missions de manier sa raquette de tennis. Pour atterrir en douceur… dans son domaine de prédilection : la consultance en énergies renouvelables. Mais chez soi, en Floride, entre deux escapades à New-York, où travaille madame et où il est amené aussi à mener quelques missions ponctuelles. On le rencontre à Maurice en vacances, dans son Rose-Hill de toujours. Demain, vous pourriez le croiser aux Galapagos, où IT Power US, avec le soutien du PNUD, à participer à l’élaboration d’un plan stratégique pour une bonne utilisation de l’énergie, dans un contexte où saisonnièrement le petit archipel voit sa population tripler par l’afflux de touristes. Cela ne vous rappelle rien ?

Alors, Maurice ne vous intéresse plus pour le coup? “Je suis toujours disposé. Je suis toujours Mauricien. Après tout j’avais postulé pour le poste de Directeur général du CEB il y a bien des années”… _____________________________________________________________________________The Guardian: Steering to safetyThe FIA Foundation promotes higher road safety standards worldwide - following its own agenda, not corporate or commercial interests.

David J WardDavid J Ward August 7, 2007 8:30 AM

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The claim made by Professor Ian Roberts that the FIA Foundation is part of an attempted "corporate capture" of road safety by the automobile industry is false and absurd. The FIA Foundation has no relationship with automobile manufacturers whatsoever. It is entirely independent of industry and plays a leading role in promoting higher motor vehicle safety standards worldwide. For example, we support the work of the award-winning independent Euro NCAP consumer crash tests, which is the only such programme in the world that includes pedestrian protection rating.

The Commission for Global Road Safety, under the chairmanship of Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is urging recognition of road safety as an important issue for sustainable development. It is calling for a $300m action plan to support the implementation of the 2004 world report on road traffic injury prevention published by the WHO and the World Bank, which remains the primary source of well-designed road safety policies. The commission is also calling for a first ever global UN ministerial conference on road safety.

The commission is also concerned that each year the World Bank and other multilateral agencies are investing more than $4bn on roads in low- and middle-income countries without ensuring the highest levels of safety assessment and design. The importance of transport infrastructure to meet the millennium development goals was recognised by the G8 leaders at the Gleneagles Summit in 2005 and as a result aid for roads will increase through initiatives such as the Africa Infrastructure Consortium. However, the key question is will new roads in Africa increase exposure of children and pedestrians to traffic moving at higher speeds? We fervently hope not and that is why we are campaigning for safer road design that will better protect vulnerable road users. The commission has recommended that a minimum of 10% of all road projects be devoted to safety countermeasures.

The commission has 12 members coming from the G8 countries, Costa Rica, Kenya, India and Oman. They include a leading economist, a medical professor, a minister of transport, a head of road traffic police, a UN diplomat, a public health specialist, a road safety NGO, a former CEO of a tyre company and just one representative of a motor vehicle manufacturer. It is true that three members have links to their national automobile clubs.

The Make Roads Safe report, published last year by the commission, was supported by an Editorial Advisory Board that included the lead road safety experts of the WHO, the World Bank, the OECD, and the UN. All endorsed the report. The main purpose of the Make Roads Safe report has been to push policy makers on their resource commitment to road safety. For example at the moment, the UK Department for International Development spending on road safety has fallen from just £300,000 in 2001 to a paltry £126,000 in 2006, from a total aid budget of £4bn.

Professor Roberts also tries to link formula one with the allegation of so-called "corporate capture". This is also entirely false. The FIA Foundation was established as an independent charity with a $300m gift from the FIA, the non-profit association of automobile clubs and the governing body of motor sport. The donation came from the sale of its interest in the television rights to formula one. So in fact the sport has generated a remarkable charitable donation, which the FIA Foundation is now using to promote road safety and also the environment. We support, for example, the UN environment programme's campaign for a global ban on unleaded fuel by 2008 and the switch to low-sulphur fuels that are required for new emission control technologies.

Today there are 600m motor vehicles on the planet. This number is forecast to double by 2020. We can debate forever whether such an increase is sustainable or how to prevent it. I suspect

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that telling Africans, Indians and the Chinese that they should not have similar transport choices to our own will not be effective. The FIA Foundation's response to this challenge is to try to help ensure that growing levels of motorisation are much safer and more environmentally sustainable than before. This is our own agenda and not one determined, as Professor Roberts suggests, by any corporate or commercial interests.

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Grist Magazine: Grist Magazine: Early 2007 saw record-breaking extreme weatherEarly 2007 saw record-breaking extreme weather

Posted by Joseph Romm at 1:01 PM on 07 Aug 2007The weather is getting more extreme thanks to human-caused climate change (as I've pointed out many times, see here, here, and here).

Now the World Meteorological Organization reports more evidence:In January and April 2007 it is likely that global land surface temperatures ranked warmest since records began in 1880, 1.89°C warmer than average for January and 1.37°C warmer than average for April. Several regions have experienced extremely heavy precipitation, leading to severe floods. The Fourth Assessment Report of the WMO/UNEP Intergovernmental Group on Climate Change (IPCC) notes an increasing trend in extreme events observed during the last 50 years. IPCC further projects it to be very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.

"The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," said Omar Baddour of the WMO's World Climate Program. Here are some of the extremes that have been happening around the globe in 2007 as reported by Reuters and the WMO:South Asia's worst monsoon flooding in recent memory has affected 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, destroying croplands, livestock and property and raising fears of a health crisis in the densely-populated region ...

Cyclone Gonu, the first documented cyclone in the Arabian Sea, made landfall in Oman on 6 June with maximum sustained winds near 148 km/h. Gonu moved through the Persian Gulf making a second landfall in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Oman, the cyclone affected more than 20,000 people and was responsible for more than 50 fatalities.

Heavy rains during 6-10 June ravaged areas across southern China. Flooding affected over 13.5 million people with more than 120 fatalities due to floods and landslides.

In England and Wales the period May to July in 2007 was the wettest (406 mm) since records began in 1766, breaking the previous record of 349 mm in 1789. The extreme rainfall in June, with 103.1 mm of rain recorded in 24 hours during 24-25 June in northeast England, was followed by a similar event with 120.8 mm of rain on 20 July in central England. Both events resulted in extensive flooding across parts of England and Wales. At least nine people have died and damage is estimated at more than US$6.00 billion.

With 126 mm (normal for 1961-1990: 71 mm], Germany experienced its wettest May since country-wide observations started in 1901. In sharp contrast, the previous month was the driest April since 1901 with an average of 4 mm (7% of the 1961-1990 normal) ...

Two extreme heat waves affected south-eastern Europe in June and July, breaking the previous records with temperatures exceeding 40 °C. Dozens of people died and fire-fighters worked around the clock fighting blazes devastating thousands of hectares of land. On 23 July, temperatures hit 45°C in Bulgaria, setting a new record.

In May a heat wave affected areas across western and central Russia breaking several temperature records. In Moscow, temperatures on 28 May reached 32.9°C, the highest temperature recorded in May since 1891 ...

In India, a heat wave during mid-May produced temperatures as high as 45-50°C.

Many European countries had their warmest January on record. January temperatures in The Netherlands were the

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highest since measurements were first taken in 1706, averaging about 7.1°C (2.8°C above 1961-1990 average) while in Germany the temperatures were 4.6°C above the 1961-1990 average.

An increase in intense tropical cyclone activities in the North Atlantic since about 1970 has been observed.

We are changing the climate. And it will only get worse. Heck, if we're seeing this much extreme weather from a 0.8°C warming over the past century, imagine what will happen in the coming decades when we warm three to five times as much (or more).

And, for the deniers still out there, WMO threw in this:According to the most recent climate change scientific assessment reports of the joint WMO/UNEP Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the warming of the climate system is unequivocal. Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature. The 100-year trend (1906-2005) is 0.74°C. The linear warming trend over the last 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years. Paleoclimatic studies suggest that the average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in the past 1,300 years.

IPCC further notes that there has been an increasing trend in the extreme events observed during the last 50 years, particularly heavy precipitation events, hot days, hot nights and heat waves.

Climate change projections indicate it to be very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.

So, yes, it will get worse. The sooner we act, the more we can minimize the future damage.

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Other Environment News ____________________________________________________________________________

New Age (Australia): No change on climate at APEC: envoyKatharine MurphyAugust 8, 2007

PRIME Minister John Howard's hand-picked climate change envoy says APEC is unlikely to deliver big breakthroughs on global warming.

And he says the United States will not accept emissions trading until there is a new president.

Former Macquarie Bank deputy chairman Mark Johnson says APEC economies were "not at a level yet where there is a common aspiration" about how to reduce the risks of global warming.

"There will certainly be no targets (agreed in September). There's not that degree of commonality," Mr Johnson said in an interview in Canberra on Tuesday.

He said national environmental reforms now being considered by the US Congress were unlikely to yield change "until the next president".

"I think it will take a long time to get to emissions trading in the United States," he said.

But Mr Johnson said next month's meeting of APEC leaders in Sydney could deliver business some much-needed priorities in areas such as improving energy efficiency and support for new emissions reduction technology.

Mr Johnson met Mr Howard privately in Canberra late yesterday to outline business priorities for the APEC meeting.

Achieving progress on climate change and energy security is number one on the business wish list.

Mr Johnson was appointed by Mr Howard in June in a special outreach role to encourage regional economies to come up with a co-operative approach to climate change.

He is also chairman of APEC's high-powered business advisory council. In a new report to APEC leaders handed to Mr Howard yesterday, the business delegation calls for September to deliver transparent rules and incentives to deal with the challenges of global warming and energy security, and a bolder approach to free trade and investment liberalisation.

The wish list also flags business support for significant changes to allow the free movements of labour across APEC members.

Business is preparing a push to allow skilled labour and guest workers from countries such as Mexico and the Philippines freer movement into developed economies within APEC, to tackle looming changes in the labour market, including the retirement of the baby boomers.

Mr Howard has previously played up the importance of the APEC meeting for breakthroughs on climate change, but the focus of key international players, particularly the US, has shifted to a United Nations gathering in December, and a separate meeting of polluters being spearheaded by US President George Bush.

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Mr Johnson said business did not expect APEC to "change its nature", but corporations in the member economies were looking for action from their political leaders across a range of fronts.

He said business would view the September gathering as a success if issues such as climate change were "elevated as a discussion item" and if economies could deliver principles on issues such as transparency of rules and regulations, and government incentives.

Trade is also a significant agenda item. Yesterday's brief to Mr Howard calls for APEC leaders to consider a free trade area for the Asia-Pacific region.

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Reuters: China Can Cut Emissions Without Hurting Growth

August 07, 2007 — By Reuters

SINGAPORE -- China can cut its carbon emissions without jeopardising economic growth if it uses new technologies that do not emit greenhouse gases, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said Tuesday. Gore cited the mobile phone industry as an example of a business that does not need to burn fossil fuels such as oil and coal.

"There are ways to leap-frog the old, dirty technologies," said Gore, who was speaking at the Global Brand Forum in Singapore.

China, like other developing nations, is worried that plans to cut carbon emissions would cripple its economic development.

But Gore said the Chinese government needs to be more aggressive in fighting global warming because the country's chronic water shortage is tied to climate change.

"China has a great deal at risk," he said. "The water crisis is very closely related to the climate crisis." Millions of people in China, which is on course to overtake the United States as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, have no access to clean drinking water.

Chinese scientists said last month that rising temperatures are draining wetlands at the head of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, China's two longest rivers, choking their flow and reducing water supplies to hundreds of millions of people.

While top Chinese leaders have "expressed themselves forcefully" on global warming, the comments do not "necessarily lead to immediate changes in the region," Gore said.

CALL FOR CARBON TAX Gore, who became a climate crusader after he left the White House, also urged governments to impose carbon taxes because that would force businesses to think more carefully about their greenshouse gas emissions. "The single, most effective thing that governments can do to solve this crisis" is to have a CO2 tax, Gore said.

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He said that the introduction of the carbon tax in Norway has spurred businesses to develop the world's most advanced technology to bury heat-trapping greenhouse gases underground.

Gore said that he was embarrassed that as vice president, he had only managed to persuade one senator to vote for the Kyoto Treaty. While he feels that the majority of them would vote for it today, he stressed the need for people to have a greater "sense of urgency" about global warming.

Gore, who spearheaded last month's Live Earth concerts worldwide and whose documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar, has not ruled out another bid for the presidency. "I haven't ruled out the possibility of running again at some point, but I don't expect to do so." Source: Reuters Contact Info: Website :

=======================================================================Xinhua: Sénégal : "un élève, un arbre" 2007-08-08 10:23:01

DAKAR, 7 août (XINHUA) -- Le ministre de l'Environnement, de la Protection de la Nature , des Bassins de Rétention et des Lacs artificiels, Djibo Leity Ka, a émis, mardi, l'idée d'un programme de reboisement dénommé "un élève un arbre", pour faire en sorte que tout au long de son cursus scolaire chaque élève puisse planter un arbre et l'entretenir, apprend-on de source officielle.

"Monsieur le recteur, nous voulons que vous nous aidiez à pérenniser l'idée un élève un arbre", a dit M. Ka qui présidait la cérémonie de lancement des "Vacances citoyennes" devant le rectorat de l'Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (UCAD).

Ce programme fera en sorte que de la Case des tout-petits à l'université, en passant par les lycées et les collèges, l'élève et son arbre "grandissent ensemble". "Un élève, un arbre, mais avec son entretien", a encore précisé le ministre de l'Environnement.

Un comité de réflexion a été mis sur pied le même jour à l'université et sera "formalisé", pour que l'idée soit distillée " dans chaque région, chaque département, dans chaque village", et que chaque localité puisse choisir les espèces les plus adaptées à sa zone.

Cette idée est une "réponse aux changements climatiques" qui constituent un enjeu mondial sur lequel portera l'Assemblée des Nations unies en septembre prochain, a expliqué M. Ka, relevant qu'une rencontre est prévue au Brésil en prélude à cette assemblée.

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The Guardian (UK):This time it's personal

Will carbon allowances for individuals - with credits and penalties - cut carbon emissions? A growing movement thinks so Guy Shrubsole

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Wednesday August 8, 2007The Guardian

When Andy Ross takes a train journey, he does not just think about the cash he will have to spend, he also thinks about what it will cost him in carbon. That is because he's a "cragger" - a member of a Carbon Rationing Action Group (Crag), a growing network of community groups dedicated to cutting individuals' carbon emissions. "Personal CO2 emissions make up about half of the UK's total," says Ross, who lives in Glasgow. "Crags give us all an opportunity to start contributing our fair share to reducing them."

Government campaigns now call on individuals to switch off lights and turn down their heating, but Crags go further by rewarding those who live a low-carbon lifestyle with hard cash, and by penalising those who live a carbon-profligate lifestyle. The idea is to encourage people to set themselves targets and timetables to reduce the amount they fly, drive and burn fossil fuels to emit as little energy as they can in their everyday life.

"Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat humanity has faced," Ross says. "Turning your TV off standby feels somehow incommensurate to the challenge."

The vision is ambitious and comes in part from David Miliband, the former environment secretary, now foreign secretary. As one of the Labour party's leading thinkers he envisaged a Britain in the future where carbon - which is embedded in everything and almost every action - was a parallel currency, with the heavy users paying the light users. "Imagine a country where carbon becomes a new currency. We carry bank cards that store both pounds and carbon points. When we buy electricity, gas and fuel, we use our carbon points, as well as pounds," he said.

Interest in personal carbon allowances has taken off in the past 18 months. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) has launched a three-year research project, Carbon Limited, into the subject. And a report commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) at the end of last year suggested that a nationwide system could be developed within five years.

Crags are made up of people who cannot wait that long. When a group forms, its members first work out their own carbon footprints. They then agree on a reduction target for the year - with most groups picking 4.5 tonnes, which is a little less than the UK annual average per person. Periodically, the Crag members will meet and compare notes. Then, at the end of the year, there is a "settlement" meeting, where participants tot up their emissions - with low emitters being rewarded, and over-emitters penalised.

"This will strike some as radical, pretty hair-shirt," says David Bassendine, a cragger in Kent. "But we're just paying the true environmental cost of our actions. Those who come in under the target benefit."

It is early days but some people have already had to pay up to £100. The money is not kept by any central body; it is redistributed to the craggers who have met the target. Members spend their earnings however they wish, though most invest in carbon offsets or local environmental charities. "The key aim of each group is to remain within its agreed emissions budget," Ross says.

Fair share

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Small wonder, perhaps, that carbon allowances have found support among progressives. "Everyone gets the same - their fair share - of carbon credits," says Matt Prescott, director of the Carbon Limited project. "If you use up your share and need more, you can buy more credits. If you don't use all of yours, you can sell what's spare. Many people on lower incomes are also low emitters of carbon, so there are potentially big benefits here."

Crags are mainly small, mostly with 230 or fewer members for ease of operation and to build trust, but there are now nearly 30 operating around the UK. Groups are also being planned in France, Australia and the US.

Personal carbon allowances have also been taken up by NGOs and social enterprises. Cap and Share, run by economics thinktank Feasta, issues prototype "citizens' emissions entitlements". In the south-west of England, a Defra-funded initiative, Fair Shares, Fair Choice, has produced "the world's first personal carbon card" - albeit one printed on cardboard.

Others are more ambitious. The RSA has set up an online carbon trading platform, where 2,000 participants have logged their emissions and will soon have the chance to exchange credits. Economist Bernard Lietaer has set up a company in California, Carbon Systems, to come up with "the first genuinely personal consumer carbon tracking and trading scheme in the world". The company has a worldwide patent pending on the concept. Consultancy Design Stream has drawn up plans for "the emissary", a credit card that makes customers aware of the environmental impact of their shopping.

"Friends of the Earth had said that a carbon credits' system was years away," says Chaz Nandra, one of its designers. But credit card technology will advance to the point, he says, "that will be cheap enough to make this idea a commercial reality".

But not everyone is enamoured with the notion. Paul Monaghan, head of sustainability at the Co-operative Bank, has doubts: "The mechanics would be a nightmare. Think how hard it has been to get a meaningful EU emissions trading scheme." Others balk at the possible infringement of civil liberties in enforcing such a system. Then there is the timescale. "There is so much scope to cut carbon dioxide now without carbon credit cards," says Martyn Williams, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth. Why waste time trying to explain a new approach?

Yet perhaps the public will be ready sooner than some think. A recent spate of books on low-carbon living attests to the growing popular understanding of climate change. There are now carbon coaches and green lifestyle advisers, low-carbon diets and carbon footprint websites.

But the key, some claim, is to get people acting this way habitually. Gill Seyfang, senior research associate at the University of East Anglia's centre for social and economic research on the global environment, talks about effecting behaviour change on a "whole different level" through schemes that "get people to think about being ecological citizens".

Green pledge cards are one way that has been tried - getting signatories to commit to being greener - but participants are only bound by their word. The charity Global Action Plan goes further, working with households for months at a time to slowly entrench low-carbon habits.

Whether the government considers personal allowances feasible is another matter. Defra is developing a work programme over the next few months and the support of the Treasury will be crucial. Community initiatives are to be welcomed; yet a Defra study admits that "almost no one has asked the public what they think about the idea". Until the government does so, it's up to crags and their counterparts to blaze the carbon-cutting trail.

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Reuters: Olympics - Pollution 'Biggest Issue' Says Australian Olympic Chief CHINA : August 8, 2007

BEIJING - Australian athletes have been advised to delay their arrival for the 2008 Olympic Games because of the poor air quality in Beijing, the country's Olympic chief, John Coates, said on Tuesday.

Cleaning up the air of the Chinese capital is one of the biggest hurdles facing organisers in the year remaining until the Games open on Aug. 8, 2008. "It's probably the biggest issue for us and our team," Coates told reporters on the sidelines of the briefing for the Chefs de Mission for 2008 Olympic delegations.

"The head coaches have gathered enough information to certainly confirm that we would not be recommending a long period in China before the Games," he added

"That only is going to increase the possibility of respiratory or gastro illness ... "

Coates said the athletes would to do their final preparations at home before going to the Olympic village, as the Australian athletes did for the Seoul Games in 1988.

"You won't be seeing too many of our athletes until four or five days before their competition," he said.

The Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) president said Beijing organisers had confirmed that they would take a large proportion of the city's 3 million cars off the road this month to test the effect on pollution and ease congestion.

"We were advised that cars will be coming off the road for a trial period in the next few weeks," he added.

"They're talking of a million cars coming off the roads and that's what I suspect will happen during the Games, and more if necessary."

CLOUD OF SMOG

Wang Wei, vice president of the Beijing organising committee (BOCOG), said on Monday that plans to take a million cars off the roads were still being studied and would only be carried out on a voluntary basis.

Although a cloud of smog blanketed Beijing early on Tuesday, the Beijing Meteorological Office categorised it as a "blue sky day" -- where pollution levels are "fairly good" or better.

"I haven't done any scientific tests but it certainly doesn't look too good in downtown Beijing," said Coates. "But there are steps being taken."

State media on Tuesday quoted a BOCOG traffic official as saying that some 200 km (125 miles) of roads would have special "Olympic Lanes" during the Games, and that banning cars with odd and even number plates on alternate days was being considered.

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A wave of health scandals over the last couple of months has focused international attention on the poor, and sometimes dangerous, quality of Chinese food.

Coates said the Australians would be taking precautions.

"The IOC pays very special attention to the quality of the food in the Olympic village, we don't expect that will be a problem," he said.

"But we will still be advising our athletes to eat in the village, not in the local food stalls if they go downtown after training or competition, be careful of bottled water and take every precaution."

Story by Nick Mulvenney

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Reuters: Early 2007 Saw Record-Breaking Extreme Weather - UNSWITZERLAND: August 8, 2007

GENEVA - The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months.

There have also been severe monsoon floods across South Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heatwaves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said.

"The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," Omar Baddour of the agency's World Climate Programme told journalists in Geneva.

While most scientists believe extreme weather events will be more frequent as heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions cause global temperatures to rise, Baddour said it was impossible to say with certainty what the second half of 2007 will bring.

"It is very difficult to make projections for the rest of the year," he said.

HEALTH CRISIS

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN umbrella group of hundreds of experts, has noted an increasing trend in extreme weather events over the past 50 years and said irregular patterns are likely to intensify.

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South Asia's worst monsoon flooding in recent memory has affected 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, destroying croplands, livestock and property and raising fears of a health crisis in the densely-populated region.

Heavy rains also doused southern China in June, with nearly 14 million people affected by floods and landslides that killed 120 people, the WMO said.

England and Wales this year had their wettest May and June since records began in 1766, resulting in extensive flooding and more than $6 billion in damage, as well as at least nine deaths. Germany swung from its driest April since country-wide observations started in 1901 to its wettest May on record.

Mozambique suffered its worst floods in six years in February, followed by a tropical cyclone the same month, and flooding of the Nile River in June caused damage in Sudan.

Uruguay had its worst flooding since 1959 in May.

Huge swell waves swamped some 68 islands in the Maldives in May, resulting in severe damage, and the Arabian Sea had its first documented cyclone in June, touching Oman and Iran.

Temperature records were broken in southeastern Europe in June and July, and in western and central Russia in May. In many European countries, April was the warmest ever recorded.

Argentina and Chile saw unusually cold winter temperatures in July while South Africa had its first significant snowfall since 1981 in June.

The WMO and its 188 member states are working to set up an early warning system for extreme weather events. The agency is also seeking to improve monitoring of the impacts of climate change, particularly in poorer countries which are expected to bear the brunt of floods, droughts and storms.

Story by Laura MacInnis

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REGIONAL OFFICE FOR AFRICA - NEWS UPDATE

8 August 2007General Environment News

Zimbabwe: Zinwa Taken to Task Over Raw Sewerage

The Herald (Harare): The Environmental Management Agency last week summoned the Zimbabwe National Water Authority to explain why it was discharging partially treated sewerage into Harare rivers. EMA spokesperson Mr Phillip Manyaza confirmed this, saying there was concern with the way Zinwa was managing raw sewerage. "They appeared before the board following an assessment we conducted and established heavy pollution in all our rivers in Harare, which feed into Lake Chivero," Mr Manyaza said. He said Zinwa was given time to work out their environmental management plan that might save mainly Manyame River, which aquatic health experts on Friday said was dying. A tour of Manyame River and the Mukuvisi-Manyame confluence showed that there was an environmental catastrophe owing to the negative impacts of poor waste-water management on Lake Chivero.http://allafrica.com/stories/200708060398.html

Nigeria: Ilaje Leader Seeks Compensation for Oil-Spill Areas

Daily Champion (Lagos): Former Special Assistant to the Ondo State Governor Olusegun Agagu on policy planning and implementation, Mr. Benson Enikuomehim has called on oil companies in the riverine areas of the State to pay compensation to communities suffering for oil spillage in the state. Enikuomehim, a lawyer, and a community leader of the oil producing community in the state, said that oil spillage in the riverine areas were caused by neglect and inadequate maintenance of equipment and pipeline by the oil companies. He said the communities in the area have suffered series of hardship that may not easily be quantified financially. "It should be made clear that compensation should be made available to the people whose rivers have been polluted, people who can no longer fish on their ocean, people who cannot get fresh water and people whose habitants had been destroyed and devastated", he stated.http://allafrica.com/stories/200708061044.html

Liberia: Hazardous Chemical Stk 2412 Shipped to France

The Inquirer (Monrovia): The final inspection and shipment of the Chemical STK 2414 that has been at Busrod Island site of Total Liberia Incorporated has taken place in Monrovia. The chemical, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has classified as been toxic has been at the site since 1990. EPA experts told the INQUIRER that the toxic chemical came about as a result of Ethylene brought for Jet Fuel, which was not used due to the 1990 war. Speaking at the ceremony marking the shipping of the chemical to France, Total Liberia's Deputy Managing Director, C. Damian Ohajunwa, lauded the effort of the EPA in collaboration with other stakeholders and TOTAL to have the chemical inspected and ship out of the country. He said TOTAL is an environmental friendly company that would do this ensuring that its operations are in line with Environmental Law. http://allafrica.com/stories/200708061230.html

Kenya: EU Donates Sh234 Million for Environmental Programmes

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East African Standard (Nairobi): The European Union (EU) will spend Sh324 million in supporting community groups involved in environmental management programmes to boost agro economic activities. The project manager, European Commission Delegation in Kenya, Mr Joseph Mathuva said the funds are part of Sh430 million grants from EU to address environmental challenges that contribute to poverty in the country. He said 35 community projects will benefit from the grant to be channeled through the Community Development Trust Fund (CDTF) - a joint Government of Kenya/ EU poverty alleviation programme. The environment rehabilitation programme will run for four years. Mathuva was speaking at Arijiju Primary School in Laikipia East District when he presented Sh23.7 million to officials of Makurian Group Ranch. Members of the ranch have undertaken a project to rehabilitate Oreteti Range, which has been degraded over the years due to overgrazing and human activities. Rehabilitation of the 16,000-acre land will involve zoning of some regions for grazing of livestock. The community's members will also engage in apiculture (bee-keeping), planting and processing of aloe vera and eco-tourism. http://allafrica.com/stories/200708060960.html

Uganda: Anywar Urges Govt to Preserve Wetlands

New Vision (Kampala): Opposition shadow minister for the environment Beatrice Anywar has called on the Government to preserve the wetlands. Addressing journalists at Parliament yesterday, Anywar said the wetlands should be preserved instead of being allocated to investors for industrial purposes and hotel construction. "The wetlands have been degraded and destroyed, yet they act as natural filters to our water sources," she stated. The Nakivubo Channel pours dirty water directly into Lake Vistoria in Kampala. The floods wash the top dirt into the lake. All these contaminate the water in Kampala." She called upon the National Environment Management Authority to save the wetlands. "This should not be done selectively but should include all the big shots of the Government." http://allafrica.com/stories/200708070297.html

Rwanda: Country Hosts Desertification Meet

East African Business Week (Kampala): 42 African countries converged in Kigali to focus on desertification as a major cause of climatic change on the African continent. The African Regional Conference preparatory to the 8th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP8) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) was held in Kigali at Hotel des Mille Collines from July 11 to 13. The UNCCD chief, Mr. Melchiade Bukuru said 42 African countries met in Rwanda to discuss and come up with a common position on various issues that will dominate the agenda of the 8th Conference of the Parties (COP8), in an effort to shape the future of the convention in Africa's favour.http://allafrica.com/stories/200708070473.html

Central Africa: US$360,000 for Great Lakes First Polythene Bag Recycling Plant

East African Business Week (Kampala): The co-operative for environment and development (COOPED) has put in place US$360,000 for the first polythene bag recycling plant in the Great Lakes Region (GLR). Funds were obtained from the World Bank through the Private Sector Federation (PSF) to the tune of $20,000, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) $50,000, and $190,909 from the Rwanda Development Bank (BRD). COOPED sourced $36,363 from its investment operations. This was revealed to East African Business Week by the coordinator of COOPED, Mr. Paulin Buregeya in an excusive interview held at his offices in Kigali on July 12. Buregeya disclosed that the industry is under construction in Kigali and

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will be fully operational in October this year. "We shall be using polythene bags to process recyclable polythene garbage bags, tubing for nursery beds and sheets for covering purposes," the coordinator of COOPED said. http://allafrica.com/stories/200708070501.html

South Africa: University Plan Threatens Endangered Fynbos

Cape Argus (Cape Town): The University of the Western Cape has been given permission to build a new Life Science Center on a piece of property containing critically endangered indigenous vegetation, against the recommendation of conservation authorities and to the dismay of several fynbos botanists. The go-ahead by the provincial government, which is still subject to an appeal process, will destroy close to one hectare of Cape Flats Sand Fynbos - one of South Africa's most critically endangered vegetation types of which just 1% is formally conserved. The proposed complex will support research in bioinformatics, biotechnology, water studies and indigenous herbal medicine. The property is currently managed as part of the university's proclaimed Cape Flats Nature Reserve. The province's approval, granted last week, states that mitigation and rehabilitation measures must be applied, including the transfer of another part of the UWC property - 2 9115ha - to the nature reserve as an "offset", and the removal of topsoil to a depth of 20cm from the development site to degraded areas in the reserve. http://allafrica.com/stories/200708070792.html

Tanzania: Dar to Do Environmental Study On Kabanga Nickel Project

East African (Nairobi): The Tanzanian government will undertake an environmental impact assessment (EIA) on the proposed nickel project on its border with Burundi. According to the National Environmental Management Council (NEMC) and Kabanga Nickel Company Ltd, the study will prescribe measures to enhance the benefits and mitigate the negative impact of the project. Kabanga is an incorporated Tanzanian company owned equally by Xstrata Plc and Barrick Gold Corporation. The company wants to establish the Kabanga Nickel Project at Bugarama in Ngara district of Kagera region. The project will include an underground mine, ore processing facilities and waste rock disposal and water supply. Other features are access roads and an accommodation complex. A joint statement by NEMC and Kabanga released last week said that, in addition, power supply from the national grid and transport handling facilities at Isaka and Dar es Salaam port will be required. http://allafrica.com/stories/200708070932.html

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RONA MEDIA UPDATETuesday, 07 August 2007

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Jack Bauer's Next Mission: Fighting Global Warming

Eviana HartmanThe Washington PostFrom "An Inconvenient Truth" to popularizing the Prius, Hollywood has helped lead the way on some environmental issues. One of the latest initiatives: Cool Change, Fox's company-wide program to reduce the network's impact on global warming. As part of that effort, the seventh season of "24" will take steps to reduce and offset the carbon emissions from the show's production, with the goal of having the season finale be entirely carbon-neutral.

It may sound like a publicity stunt, but Fox spokesman Chris Anderson says the network isn't after bigger ratings. "We are publicizing '24's' commitment to climate change for two reasons and two reasons only: to inspire the public to take global warming seriously and hopefully to motivate other studios to make changes to their production practices as well," he says.

After all, shooting on soundstages requires energy-hungry lighting and gear, and going on location means using portable generators and driving trucks, vans and cars loaded with equipment, costumes and people. When production on Season 7 begins this month, the show's 26 diesel vehicles and five generators will run on a more planet-friendly biodiesel blend, which will start at 5 percent biodiesel and gradually increase, barring any problems, according to executive producer Howard Gordon.

The show's electricity bills will go toward renewable-energy credits that will bring a share of wind, solar and water power to Los Angeles's grid. A diesel-powered soundstage will be converted to electricity, thus lessening the show's contribution to the local air pollution problem, and the show's five location scouts will be given Priuses to drive. Scripts, schedules and memos -- which used to be hand-delivered by car -- will be sent via e-mail.

The "24" page at Fox.com now features energy conservation tips and a public service announcement about global warming featuring Kiefer Sutherland; more information will be posted when the show airs in January. Plus, climate change will be incorporated into the series' plot (which just might scare some viewers into taking action).

The extent to which the plan will reduce the show's imprint on Earth is difficult to calculate, but the measures certainly won't hurt; more shows and films aiming to reduce their carbon footprints could have a considerable impact. Some productions before "24" were green -- films

General Environment NewsThe Washington Post – Jack Bauer's Next Mission: Fighting Global WarmingThe Washington Post – House OKs New Taxes on Oil CompaniesThe New York Times – Judge Limits Navy Sonar, Citing a Threat to Wildlife Newsweek – Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded MachineThe Chicago Tribune – EPA cites coal plants; Utility's 6 Illinois sites release too much soot, U.S. saysSun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)– Act Saving More Than Florida’s Bald EaglesThe Toronto Star– Durham leads on trash incinerationGlobe and Mail – Wave of protest swelling over Lake Simcoe resortGlobe and Mail – What's happening to Canada's belugas?

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such as "Syriana" and "An Inconvenient Truth" were carbon-neutral, as was Comedy Central's recent roast of Flavor Flav. But "24's" weekly visibility might spark a domino effect -- in Hollywood, Bollywood and beyond.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/02/AR2007080202057_pf.html

House OKs New Taxes on Oil Companies

By H. Josef HebertThe Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Declaring a new direction in energy policy, the House on Saturday approved $16 billion in taxes on oil companies, while providing billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives for renewable energy and conservation efforts.Republican opponents said the legislation ignored the need to produce more domestic oil, natural gas and coal. One GOP lawmaker bemoaned "the pure venom ... against the oil and gas industry."

The House passed the tax provisions by a vote of 221-189. Earlier it had approved, 241-172, a companion energy package aimed at boosting energy efficiency and expanding use of biofuels, wind power and other renewable energy sources.

"We are turning to the future," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The two bills, passed at an unusual Saturday session as lawmakers prepared to leave town for their monthlong summer recess, will be merged with legislation passed by the Senate in June.

On one of the most contentious and heavily lobbied issues, the House voted to require investor-owned electric utilities nationwide to generate at least 15 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind or biofuels.

The utilities and business interests had argued aggressively against the federal renewables mandate, saying it would raise electricity prices in regions of the country that do not have abundant wind energy. But environmentalists said the requirement will spur investments in renewable fuels and help address global warming as utilities use less coal.

"This will save consumers money," said Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., the provision's co-sponsor, maintaining utilities will have to use less high-priced natural gas. He noted that nearly half the states already have a renewable energy mandate for utilities, and if utilities can't find enough renewable they can meet part of the requirement through power conservation measures.

The bill also calls for more stringent energy efficiency standards for appliances and lighting and incentives for building more energy-efficient "green" buildings. It would authorize special bonds for cities and counties to reduce energy demand.

Pelosi, D-Calif., said it was essential to commit to renewable energy while reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Doing so, she said, will help address global warming and make the country more energy-independent.

"It's about our children, about our future, the world in which they live," Pelosi said.

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Democrats avoided a nasty fight by ignoring _ at least for the time being _ calls for automakers to make vehicles more fuel-efficient. Cars, sport utility vehicles and small trucks use most of the country's oil and produce almost one-third of the carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming.

That issue, as well as whether to require huge increases in the use of corn-based ethanol as a substitute for gasoline, were left to be thrashed out when the House bill is merged with energy legislation the Senate passed in June.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said he was confident the final bill that will go to President Bush will contain a significant increase in automobile fuel economy requirements.

"This is a historic turn away from a fossil fuel agenda toward renewable energy. It's been a long time in coming," said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., in an interview. Markey abandoned efforts to get an auto mileage provision into the bill, but also expressed confidence one will be added during negotiations with the Senate. The Senate in passing energy legislation in June called for a 40 percent increase auto mileage to 35 mpg by 2020.

Republicans said the House bill did nothing to increase domestic oil and natural gas production or take further advantage of coal, the country's most abundant domestic energy resource.

"There's a war going on against energy from fossil fuels," said Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas. "I can't understand the pure venom felt against the oil and gas industry."

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said the bill was "a political exercise" to promote "pet projects, ... pet ideas." He predicted it "isn't going anywhere" because President Bush will veto it if it gets to his desk.

The White House indicated President Bush might veto the bill if he gets it saying it makes "no serious attempts to increase our energy security or address high energy costs" and would harm domestic oil and gas production.

The bill would repeal for oil companies a tax breaks given in 2004 to help domestic manufacturers compete against foreign companies, and another tax break pertaining to income from foreign oil production. Critics of the two tax provisions called them loopholes that the industry had taken advantage of.

The House-passed bill also includes an array of loan guarantees, federal grants and tax breaks for alternative energy programs. They include building biomass factories, research into making ethanol from wood chips and prairie grasses and producing better batteries for hybrid gas-electric automobiles.

The legislation would end a tax break for buying large SUVs, known as the "Hummer tax loophole" because it allows people who buy some of the most expensive SUVs to write off much of the cost.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080500172_pf.html

Judge Limits Navy Sonar, Citing a Threat to Wildlife By Felicity BarringerThe New York Times

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SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 6 — A federal judge on Monday ordered the Navy to stop using medium-range sonar in training exercises off Southern California, saying that the Navy’s own assessments predicted that dozens of marine mammals, particularly deep-diving whales, could be harmed by the intense sound waves.

Beaked whales, in particular, have shown great sensitivity to such sonar. Even without the tests, their numbers in the waters off the West Coast are dwindling.

The judge, Florence-Marie Cooper of Federal District Court in Los Angeles, granted a preliminary injunction sought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, noting in a draft order that “mass strandings of whales following naval exercises have been documented” from the Bahamas and the Canary Islands to Greece and Taiwan. The strandings occurred after use of military sonar.

The judge also criticized the Navy for curbing its efforts to mitigate the impact of the sonar exercises, adding, “What few mitigation measures remain continue to be ineffective.”

The Navy has argued that without training on this widely used system, sailors’ ability to detect enemy vessels is severely hampered. Active sonar, at various frequencies, has been developed over the past two decades as diesel engines on military craft became quieter and harder to detect with passive sonar.

Donald R. Schregardus, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for the environment, said, “The decision puts sailors and marines at risk by ordering the Navy to stop critical antisubmarine warfare training while we complete environmental impact statements on our training ranges.”

Joel Reynolds, a senior lawyer and head of marine mammal protection for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, “Whales and other marine life shouldn’t have to die for practice.”http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/earth/07sonar.html?n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fEnvironment&_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1186492444-NL3Nq7c8YhGE3mwU1wUU8Q&pagewanted=print

Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine

By Sharon BegleyNewsweekAug. 13, 2007 issue - Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate's Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered." As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the

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new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. "I realized," says Boxer, "there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."

If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again. Yes, 19 million people watched the "Live Earth" concerts last month, titans of corporate America are calling for laws mandating greenhouse cuts, "green" magazines fill newsstands, and the film based on Al Gore's best-selling book, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Oscar. But outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle—and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."

Just last year, polls found that 64 percent of Americans thought there was "a lot" of scientific disagreement on climate change; only one third thought planetary warming was "mainly caused by things people do." In contrast, majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts that greenhouse gases—mostly from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to power the world's economies—are altering climate. A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong. Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, 39 percent of those asked say there is "a lot of disagreement among climate scientists" on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today.

As a result of the undermining of the science, all the recent talk about addressing climate change has produced little in the way of actual action. Yes, last September Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a landmark law committing California to reduce statewide emissions of carbon dioxide to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent more by 2050. And this year both Minnesota and New Jersey passed laws requiring their states to reduce greenhouse emissions 80 percent below recent levels by 2050. In January, nine leading corporations—including Alcoa, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, Du Pont and General Electric—called on Congress to "enact strong national legislation" to reduce greenhouse gases. But although at least eight bills to require reductions in greenhouse gases have been introduced in Congress, their fate is decidedly murky. The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives decided last week not even to bring to a vote a requirement that automakers improve vehicle mileage, an obvious step toward reducing greenhouse emissions. Nor has there been much public pressure to do so. Instead, every time the scientific case got stronger, "the American public yawned and bought bigger cars," Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey congressman and physicist, recently wrote in the journal Science; politicians "shrugged, said there is too much doubt among scientists, and did nothing."

It was 98 degrees in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 1988, and climate change was bursting into public consciousness. The Amazon was burning, wildfires raged in the United States, crops

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in the Midwest were scorched and it was shaping up to be the hottest year on record worldwide. A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now."

The reaction from industries most responsible for greenhouse emissions was immediate. "As soon as the scientific community began to come together on the science of climate change, the pushback began," says historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. Individual companies and industry associations—representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, for instance—formed lobbying groups with names like the Global Climate Coalition and the Information Council on the Environment. ICE's game plan called for enlisting greenhouse doubters to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," and to sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research. ICE ads asked, "If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis [or Kentucky, or some other site] getting colder?" This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.

Shaping public opinion was only one goal of the industry groups, for soon after Hansen's sweat-drenched testimony they faced a more tangible threat: international proposals to address global warming. The United Nations had scheduled an "Earth Summit" for 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and climate change was high on an agenda that included saving endangered species and rain forests. ICE and the Global Climate Coalition lobbied hard against a global treaty to curb greenhouse gases, and were joined by a central cog in the denial machine: the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank. Barely two months before Rio, it released a study concluding that models of the greenhouse effect had "substantially exaggerated its importance." The small amount of global warming that might be occurring, it argued, actually reflected a simple fact: the Sun is putting out more energy. The idea of a "variable Sun" has remained a constant in the naysayers' arsenal to this day, even though the tiny increase in solar output over recent decades falls far short of explaining the extent or details of the observed warming.

In what would become a key tactic of the denial machine—think tanks linking up with like-minded, contrarian researchers—the report was endorsed in a letter to President George H.W. Bush by MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. Lindzen, whose parents had fled Hitler's Germany, is described by old friends as the kind of man who, if you're in the minority, opts to be with you. "I thought it was important to make it clear that the science was at an early and primitive stage and that there was little basis for consensus and much reason for skepticism," he told Scientific American magazine. "I did feel a moral obligation."

Bush was torn. The head of his Environmental Protection Agency, William Reilly, supported binding cuts in greenhouse emissions. Political advisers insisted on nothing more than voluntary cuts. Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, had a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT and "knew computers," recalls Reilly. Sununu frequently logged on to a computer model of climate, Reilly says, and "vigorously critiqued" its assumptions and projections.

Sununu's side won. The Rio treaty called for countries to voluntarily stabilize their greenhouse emissions by returning them to 1990 levels by 2000. (As it turned out, U.S. emissions in 2000 were 14 percent higher than in 1990.) Avoiding mandatory cuts was a huge victory for industry.

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But Rio was also a setback for climate contrarians, says UCSD's Oreskes: "It was one thing when Al Gore said there's global warming, but quite another when George Bush signed a convention saying so." And the doubters faced a newly powerful nemesis. Just months after he signed the Rio pact, Bush lost to Bill Clinton—whose vice president, Gore, had made climate change his signature issue.

Groups that opposed greenhouse curbs ramped up. They "settled on the 'science isn't there' argument because they didn't believe they'd be able to convince the public to do nothing if climate change were real," says David Goldston, who served as Republican chief of staff for the House of Representatives science committee until 2006. Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a reporter, is "anything severe." Michaels had written several popular articles on climate change, including an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1989 warning of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which he called "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than $165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry funding, asking, "What is this, a hatchet job?")

The road from Rio led to an international meeting in Kyoto, Japan, where more than 100 nations would negotiate a treaty on making Rio's voluntary—and largely ignored—greenhouse curbs mandatory. The coal and oil industries, worried that Kyoto could lead to binding greenhouse cuts that would imperil their profits, ramped up their message that there was too much scientific uncertainty to justify any such cuts. There was just one little problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC—the international body that periodically assesses climate research—had just issued its second report, and the conclusion of its 2,500 scientists looked devastating for greenhouse doubters. Although both natural swings and changes in the Sun's output might be contributing to climate change, it concluded, "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate."

Faced with this emerging consensus, the denial machine hardly blinked. There is too much "scientific uncertainty" to justify curbs on greenhouse emissions, William O'Keefe, then a vice president of the American Petroleum Institute and leader of the Global Climate Coalition, suggested in 1996. Virginia's Michaels echoed that idea in a 1997 op-ed in The Washington Post, describing "a growing contingent of scientists who are increasingly unhappy with the glib forecasts of gloom and doom." To reinforce the appearance of uncertainty and disagreement, the denial machine churned out white papers and "studies" (not empirical research, but critiques of others' work). The Marshall Institute, for instance, issued reports by a Harvard University astrophysicist it supported pointing to satellite data showing "no significant warming" of the atmosphere, contrary to the surface warming. The predicted warming, she wrote, "simply isn't happening according to the satellite[s]." At the time, there was a legitimate case that satellites were more accurate than ground stations, which might be skewed by the unusual warmth of cities where many are sited.

"There was an extraordinary campaign by the denial machine to find and hire scientists to sow dissent and make it appear that the research community was deeply divided," says Dan Becker of the Sierra Club. Those recruits blitzed the media. Driven by notions of fairness and objectivity, the press "qualified every mention of human influence on climate change with 'some scientists believe,' where the reality is that the vast preponderance of scientific opinion accepts that human-caused [greenhouse] emissions are contributing to warming," says Reilly, the

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former EPA chief. "The pursuit of balance has not done justice" to the science. Talk radio goes further, with Rush Limbaugh telling listeners this year that "more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not likely to significantly contribute to the greenhouse effect. It's just all part of the hoax." In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 42 percent said the press "exaggerates the threat of climate change."

Now naysayers tried a new tactic: lists and petitions meant to portray science as hopelessly divided. Just before Kyoto, S. Fred Singer released the "Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change." Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria as a boy, had run the U.S. weather-satellite program in the early 1960s. In the Leipzig petition, just over 100 scientists and others, including TV weathermen, said they "cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes." Unfortunately, few of the Leipzig signers actually did climate research; they just kibitzed about other people's. Scientific truth is not decided by majority vote, of course (ask Galileo), but the number of researchers whose empirical studies find that the world is warming and that human activity is partly responsible numbered in the thousands even then. The IPCC report issued this year, for instance, was written by more than 800 climate researchers and vetted by 2,500 scientists from 130 nations.

Although Clinton did not even try to get the Senate to ratify the Kyoto treaty (he knew a hopeless cause when he saw one), industry was taking no chances. In April 1998 a dozen people from the denial machine—including the Marshall Institute, Fred Singer's group and Exxon—met at the American Petroleum Institute's Washington headquarters. They proposed a $5 million campaign, according to a leaked eight-page memo, to convince the public that the science of global warming is riddled with controversy and uncertainty. The plan was to train up to 20 "respected climate scientists" on media—and public—outreach with the aim of "raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom' " and, in particular, "the Kyoto treaty's scientific underpinnings" so that elected officials "will seek to prevent progress toward implementation." The plan, once exposed in the press, "was never implemented as policy," says Marshall's William O'Keefe, who was then at API.

The GOP control of Congress for six of Clinton's eight years in office meant the denial machine had a receptive audience. Although Republicans such as Sens. John McCain, Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee spurned the denial camp, and Democrats such as Congressman John Dingell adamantly oppose greenhouse curbs that might hurt the auto and other industries, for the most part climate change has been a bitterly partisan issue. Republicans have also received significantly more campaign cash from the energy and other industries that dispute climate science. Every proposed climate bill "ran into a buzz saw of denialism," says Manik Roy of the Pew Center on Climate Change, a research and advocacy group, who was a Senate staffer at the time. "There was no rational debate in Congress on climate change."

The reason for the inaction was clear. "The questioning of the science made it to the Hill through senators who parroted reports funded by the American Petroleum Institute and other advocacy groups whose entire purpose was to confuse people on the science of global warming," says Sen. John Kerry. "There would be ads challenging the science right around the time we were trying to pass legislation. It was pure, raw pressure combined with false facts." Nor were states stepping where Washington feared to tread. "I did a lot of testifying before state legislatures—in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Alaska—that thought about taking action," says Singer. "I said that the observed warming was and would be much, much less than climate models calculated, and therefore nothing to worry about."

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But the science was shifting under the denial machine. In January 2000, the National Academy of Sciences skewered its strongest argument. Contrary to the claim that satellites finding no warming are right and ground stations showing warming are wrong, it turns out that the satellites are off. (Basically, engineers failed to properly correct for changes in their orbit.) The planet is indeed warming, and at a rate since 1980 much greater than in the past.

Just months after the Academy report, Singer told a Senate panel that "the Earth's atmosphere is not warming and fears about human-induced storms, sea-level rise and other disasters are misplaced." And as studies fingering humans as a cause of climate change piled up, he had a new argument: a cabal was silencing good scientists who disagreed with the "alarmist" reports. "Global warming has become an article of faith for many, with its own theology and orthodoxy," Singer wrote in The Washington Times. "Its believers are quite fearful of any scientific dissent."

With the Inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001, the denial machine expected to have friends in the White House. But despite Bush's oil-patch roots, naysayers weren't sure they could count on him: as a candidate, he had pledged to cap carbon dioxide emissions. Just weeks into his term, the Competitive Enterprise Institute heard rumors that the draft of a speech Bush was preparing included a passage reiterating that pledge. CEI's Myron Ebell called conservative pundit Robert Novak, who had booked Bush's EPA chief, Christie Todd Whitman, on CNN's "Crossfire." He asked her about the line, and within hours the possibility of a carbon cap was the talk of the Beltway. "We alerted anyone we thought could have influence and get the line, if it was in the speech, out," says CEI president Fred Smith, who counts this as another notch in CEI's belt. The White House declines to comment.

Bush not only disavowed his campaign pledge. In March, he withdrew from the Kyoto treaty. After the about-face, MIT's Lindzen told NEWSWEEK in 2001, he was summoned to the White House. He told Bush he'd done the right thing. Even if you accept the doomsday forecasts, Lindzen said, Kyoto would hardly touch the rise in temperatures. The treaty, he said, would "do nothing, at great expense."

Bush's reversal came just weeks after the IPCC released its third assessment of the burgeoning studies of climate change. Its conclusion: the 1990s were very likely the warmest decade on record, and recent climate change is partly "attributable to human activities." The weather itself seemed to be conspiring against the skeptics. The early years of the new millennium were setting heat records. The summer of 2003 was especially brutal, with a heat wave in Europe killing tens of thousands of people. Consultant Frank Luntz, who had been instrumental in the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, suggested a solution to the PR mess. In a memo to his GOP clients, he advised them that to deal with global warming, "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." They should "challenge the science," he wrote, by "recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view." Although few of the experts did empirical research of their own (MIT's Lindzen was an exception), the public didn't notice. To most civilians, a scientist is a scientist.

Challenging the science wasn't a hard sell on Capitol Hill. "In the House, the leadership generally viewed it as impermissible to go along with anything that would even imply that climate change was genuine," says Goldston, the former Republican staffer. "There was a belief on the part of many members that the science was fraudulent, even a Democratic fantasy. A lot of the information they got was from conservative think tanks and industry." When in 2003 the Senate called for a national strategy to cut greenhouse gases, for instance, climate naysayers were "giving briefings and talking to staff," says Goldston. "There was a constant flow of

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information—largely misinformation." Since the House version of that bill included no climate provisions, the two had to be reconciled. "The House leadership staff basically said, 'You know we're not going to accept this,' and [Senate staffers] said, 'Yeah, we know,' and the whole thing disappeared relatively jovially without much notice," says Goldston. "It was such a foregone conclusion."

Especially when the denial machine had a new friend in a powerful place. In 2003 James Inhofe of Oklahoma took over as chairman of the environment committee. That summer he took to the Senate floor and, in a two-hour speech, disputed the claim of scientific consensus on climate change. Despite the discovery that satellite data showing no warming were wrong, he argued that "satellites, widely considered the most accurate measure of global temperatures, have confirmed" the absence of atmospheric warming. Might global warming, he asked, be "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?" Inhofe made his mark holding hearing after hearing to suggest that the answer is yes. For one, on a study finding a dramatic increase in global temperatures unprecedented in the last 1,000 years, he invited a scientist who challenged that conclusion (in a study partly underwritten with $53,000 from the American Petroleum Institute), one other doubter and the scientist who concluded that recent global temperatures were spiking. Just as Luntz had suggested, the witness table presented a tableau of scientific disagreement.

Every effort to pass climate legislation during the George W. Bush years was stopped in its tracks. When Senators McCain and Joe Lieberman were fishing for votes for their bipartisan effort in 2003, a staff member for Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska explained to her counterpart in Lieberman's office that Stevens "is aware there is warming in Alaska, but he's not sure how much it's caused by human activity or natural cycles," recalls Tim Profeta, now director of an environmental-policy institute at Duke University. "I was hearing the basic argument of the skeptics—a brilliant strategy to go after the science. And it was working." Stevens voted against the bill, which failed 43-55. When the bill came up again the next year, "we were contacted by a lot of lobbyists from API and Exxon-Mobil," says Mark Helmke, the climate aide to GOP Sen. Richard Lugar. "They'd bring up how the science wasn't certain, how there were a lot of skeptics out there." It went down to defeat again.

Killing bills in Congress was only one prong of the denial machine's campaign. It also had to keep public opinion from demanding action on greenhouse emissions, and that meant careful management of what federal scientists and officials wrote and said. "If they presented the science honestly, it would have brought public pressure for action," says Rick Piltz, who joined the federal Climate Science Program in 1995. By appointing former coal and oil lobbyists to key jobs overseeing climate policy, he found, the administration made sure that didn't happen. Following the playbook laid out at the 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, officials made sure that every report and speech cast climate science as dodgy, uncertain, controversial—and therefore no basis for making policy. Ex-oil lobbyist Philip Cooney, working for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, edited a 2002 report on climate science by sprinkling it with phrases such as "lack of understanding" and "considerable uncertainty." A short section on climate in another report was cut entirely. The White House "directed us to remove all mentions of it," says Piltz, who resigned in protest. An oil lobbyist faxed Cooney, "You are doing a great job."

The response to the international climate panel's latest report, in February, showed that greenhouse doubters have a lot of fight left in them. In addition to offering $10,000 to scientists willing to attack the report, which so angered Boxer, they are emphasizing a new theme. Even if the world is warming now, and even if that warming is due in part to the greenhouse gases

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emitted by burning fossil fuels, there's nothing to worry about. As Lindzen wrote in a guest editorial in NEWSWEEK International in April, "There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe."

To some extent, greenhouse denial is now running on automatic pilot. "Some members of Congress have completely internalized this," says Pew's Roy, and therefore need no coaching from the think tanks and contrarian scientists who for 20 years kept them stoked with arguments. At a hearing last month on the Kyoto treaty, GOP Congressman Dana Rohrabacher asked whether "changes in the Earth's temperature in the past—all of these glaciers moving back and forth—and the changes that we see now" might be "a natural occurrence." (Hundreds of studies have ruled that out.) "I think it's a bit grandiose for us to believe ... that [human activities are] going to change some major climate cycle that's going on." Inhofe has told allies he will filibuster any climate bill that mandates greenhouse cuts.

Still, like a great beast that has been wounded, the denial machine is not what it once was. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 38 percent of those surveyed identified climate change as the nation's gravest environmental threat, three times the number in 2000. After ExxonMobil was chastised by senators for giving $19 million over the years to the Competitive Enterprise Institute and others who are "producing very questionable data" on climate change, as Sen. Jay Rockefeller said, the company has cut back its support for such groups. In June, a spokesman said ExxonMobil did not doubt the risks posed by climate change, telling reporters, "We're very much not a denier." In yet another shock, Bush announced at the weekend that he would convene a global-warming summit next month, with a 2008 goal of cutting greenhouse emissions. That astonished the remaining naysayers. "I just can't imagine the administration would look to mandatory [emissions caps] after what we had with Kyoto," said a GOP Senate staffer, who did not want to be named criticizing the president. "I mean, what a disaster!"

With its change of heart, ExxonMobil is more likely to win a place at the negotiating table as Congress debates climate legislation. That will be crucially important to industry especially in 2009, when naysayers may no longer be able to count on a friend in the White House nixing man-datory greenhouse curbs. All the Democratic presidential contenders have called global warming a real threat, and promise to push for cuts similar to those being passed by California and other states. In the GOP field, only McCain—long a leader on the issue—supports that policy. Fred Thompson belittles findings that human activities are changing the climate, and Rudy Giuliani backs the all-volunteer greenhouse curbs of (both) Presidents Bush.

Look for the next round of debate to center on what Americans are willing to pay and do to stave off the worst of global warming. So far the answer seems to be, not much. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds less than half in favor of requiring high-mileage cars or energy-efficient appliances and buildings. No amount of white papers, reports and studies is likely to change that. If anything can, it will be the climate itself. This summer, Texas was hit by exactly the kind of downpours and flooding expected in a greenhouse world, and Las Vegas and other cities broiled in record triple-digit temperatures. Just last week the most accurate study to date concluded that the length of heat waves in Europe has doubled, and their frequency nearly tripled, in the past century. The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century. Snowpack whose water is crucial to both cities and farms is diminishing. It's enough to make you wish that climate change were a hoax, rather than the reality it is.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20122975/site/newsweek/

EPA cites coal plants; Utility's 6 Illinois sites release too much soot, U.S. says

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By Michael HawthorneThe Chicago Tribune

After years of declining to act on complaints from elected officials and neighborhood activists, federal regulators are cracking down on six coal-fired power plants that are some of the biggest contributors to dirty air in the Chicago area.

In documents made public Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accused Midwest Generation of extending the life of its aging power plants, including five in Chicago and the suburbs, without installing pollution controls required under the Clean Air Act.

The agency also cited the company, a subsidiary of California-based Edison International, with releasing too much soot, or microscopic air pollution that can trigger asthma attacks and cause lung disease, heart problems and early deaths.

Coal plants are major sources of soot and other forms of air pollution that combine to create smog, which lingers over the Chicago area during the summer. But older plants like those owned by Midwest Generation, most of which were built in the 1940s and 1950s, were exempted for years from pollution laws.

Regulators gradually realized many of these older plants had been updated, modified and expanded so many times that they should be considered new plants and forced to comply with tough pollution standards.

Several companies around the nation have settled federal lawsuits by agreeing to spend millions on new pollution controls. Environmental groups have been urging the EPA for more than a decade to take similar action against the Chicago-area power plants.

"This is long overdue but very welcome news," said Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's Midwest Clean Air Campaign.

Midwest Generation owns two coal plants in Chicago (in Pilsen and Little Village), two in Will County (in Joliet and Romeoville), one in Waukegan and one outside Peoria. All of the power plants formerly were owned by ComEd, which also is cited in the federal complaint.

The current owners noted they already have cut a deal with Gov. Rod Blagojevich's administration to dramatically clean up the coal plants by 2018 or close them. The federal complaint is a separate action that could force Midwest Generation to upgrade its plants faster.

"We have a long-range compliance plan to address the issues raised by the EPA," said Doug McFarlan, a company spokesman.

A ComEd spokeswoman, meanwhile, said the utility is reviewing the complaint but stressed that it sold the coal plants years ago.

Illinois ratepayers won't absorb Midwest Generation's costs to settle either the federal complaint or the state agreement because the company sells electricity on the open market, rather than to a defined service area like ComEd.

Dated July 31, the complaint comes two years after Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan wrote a scathing letter to state regulators documenting more than 7,600 pollution violations at the six power plants since 1999, the year Midwest Generation bought them from ComEd.

At the time, the Illinois EPA agreed with Midwest Generation executives who argued that occasional bursts of soot from the plants were normal and nothing to worry about. Federal regulators also declined to get involved, though they later cited the Blommer Chocolate factory in the West Loop with similar violations involving cocoa powder pollution.

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The Chicago area has suffered from chronic dirty-air problems for years. Monitoring data indicates Cook County and surrounding counties have violated the federal standard for ground-level ozone, or smog, on eight days since May 22. On Wednesday, air pollution was so bad that the region exceeded limits for both smog and soot.

In an interview Monday, top officials in the EPA's Chicago office said they have been investigating the Midwest Generation plants since 2003. The agency demanded information about construction and maintenance projects dating to when ComEd owned the plants. But the EPA blacked out the details in the public version of its complaint after Midwest Generation and ComEd said they involved confidential business information.

"It took us some time to process and analyze this information," said George Czerniak, chief of the EPA's regional air-enforcement branch.

Midwest Generation officials now will be called into the EPA's offices to discuss the case. Mary Gade, the agency's regional administrator, formerly worked for a law firm that represented the company and has recused herself from any involvement, a spokeswoman said.

Critics wondered about the timing of the complaint. Madigan and environmental groups have argued that the pollution problems should have been addressed last year, before state and federal regulators awarded Midwest Generation a new permit for the coal plants.

The allegations against the company involve a provision of the Clean Air Act known as New Source Review, which requires power plants to be retrofitted with pollution controls if they undergo major modifications.

Bush administration officials have tried several times to rewrite the law to make it easier for utilities to upgrade aging coal plants.

They continued to pursue a handful of lawsuits against polluters that were filed by the Clinton administration but generally have shied away from filing new cases.

In December, Midwest Generation agreed to make deep cuts in smog, soot and mercury pollution from the six plants by 2018. It also raised the possibility of shutting down the Pilsen, Little Village and Waukegan plants if improving them proves too expensive.

Brokered by the Blagojevich administration, the deal promises steady improvements in air quality throughout the Chicago area.

But environmental groups grumbled that it gave Midwest Generation too long to meet tougher limits.

"We never thought the federal EPA would step up to the plate and do what's right," said Ann Alexander, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who formerly worked as Madigan's top assistant for environmental issues. "But Midwest Gen needed more pressure to clean up and this might provide that pressure."

Act Saving More Than Florida’s Bald Eagles

By Will HodgesSun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)

Florida played a leading role in the bald eagle's recovery, with intensive aerial surveys and nest monitoring. The state now has 1,166 breeding pairs, the most of any state in the contiguous United States. With its rich biological and ecological diversity and rapid development, Florida has a high number of endangered species. As the nation celebrates the bald eagle's success, it is worth reviewing other state species saved by the Endangered Species Act.

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The American crocodile declined to 100 to 200 individuals and just 20 nesting females in Florida Bay. It was listed as endangered in 1975. With hunting restrictions and habitat protections, its numbers increased to 1,000 in 2003 and expanded to parts of Biscayne Bay, Key Largo, the southwestern coast and Marco Island. The American alligator also suffered from hunting and habitat loss. Listed in 1967, it has been downlisted to "threatened" but remains protected from shooting due to its resemblance to the crocodile.

The Florida panther once roamed from east Texas into parts of Tennessee and Florida. Hunting, predator eradication programs and habitat destruction cut their numbers to 30 to 50 cats in Hendry and Collier counties. Panthers joined the first Endangered Species Act class of 1967. Intensive monitoring with radio collars began in 1981, and eight females from Texas were imported to prevent inbreeding. The population grew to around 100 by 2007. Yet 14 panthers have been killed by cars already this year, indicating that far more remains to be done.

The Florida manatee was listed in 1967, threatened by boat collisions, water control structures and coastal development. Recovery plans have implemented speed zones for motorcraft and limited protection and no-entry rules at manatee high-use areas, though only one 24-square-kilometer area in upper Banana River prohibits motorized use. Though no one would claim the mammal is out of harm's way, it has improved from 1,478 in 1991 to 2,812 in 2007.

There are five endangered sea turtles that forage in Florida waters and nest on its beaches: the green, hawksbill, Kemps Ridley, loggerhead and leatherback. Sea turtles are some of the most sensitive and threatened species in the world, with naturally low rates of reproductive success, even without the loss of nesting beaches, egg poaching, water pollution and fishing nets. Sea turtles continue to decline throughout the world's oceans, but all five are improving along the Atlantic coast due to strong federal protection. Much is owed to the many volunteers who have worked to rescue, rehabilitate and release turtles.

Of course, the brown pelican and arctic and American peregrine falcon all similarly recovered after the ban on DDT and were delisted. Other species benefiting from the Endangered Species Act include: the Atlantic piping plover, Everglades snail kite, key deer, whooping crane, red wolf, short-nosed sturgeon, fin whale, humpback whale, gray bat, red-cockaded woodpecker and U.S. wood stork.

A catalog of Florida's endangered species is like a walk through its diverse array of ecological communities. If the landscapes go, so too will their inhabitants. As charismatic as the bald eagle and alligator are, every one of the species discussed is as varied and unique as the landforms in which they are found. Each creature is a part of the whole. As in any system, diversity preserves strengthand resilience, whether it is a population, species, ecosystem or the biological web of life intricately woven over the planet, irreducibly complex and evolved over millennia. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act, these creatures may yet have a chance.

Durham leads on trash incineration

The Toronto Star

Continued skepticism from environmentalists, along with new landfill capacity in southern Ontario, have unfortunately dampened support for incineration as a way of ridding the Greater Toronto Area of some of its trash. Luckily, that short-sighted trend is being resisted in Durham Region where officials are committed to building a new garbage incinerator by 2011. They deserve support, not criticism.

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Modern incineration technology is remarkably clean and each plant can be put to use generating electricity for thousands of homes. This approach is widely used across much of Western Europe and Japan, where tight environmental regulations do an excellent job of protecting the public. And it offers a way for a municipality to process at least part of its rubbish locally instead of having it all trucked away to Michigan, or to someone else's backyard.

Despite these benefits, efforts to produce more energy from waste within the GTA have begun to wane.

Halton Region has shelved an ambitious proposal to turn trash into electricity, one with possibilities that had ranged from a $250-million facility that would meet Halton's needs to a $700-million plant big enough to process waste from nearby cities.

York Region has dramatically reduced its involvement in Durham's planned incinerator. York was to pay for half of the $250-million facility, but recently slashed its commitment to just 12 per cent of the cost.

Unlike other jurisdictions in the GTA, which have at least contemplated incineration, Toronto City Council has long opposed the idea. But that hostility has been reinforced by the city's purchase of the massive Green Lane landfill near St. Thomas. That dump site has the capacity to handle Toronto's waste for years, easing what pressure there may have been to find local solutions, such as incineration.

Despite the retreat or inaction evident in other GTA municipalities, Durham appears to be forging ahead with its facility. "The business case we ran shows it will work even if Durham has to go it alone," Cliff Curtis, the region's works commissioner, says. Given York's reduced involvement, Durham's planned incinerator is being scaled down to one capable of burning 200,000 tonnes, rather than 250,000 tonnes.

A tender call for the plant is to go out within months, with construction to start soon after that on the GTA's first garbage incinerator in 15 years. Hopefully it will be built without any more snags.

A garbage-burning plant has been successfully working in Brampton since 1992, powering several thousand homes. If that example were backed by a new, super-efficient and ultra-clean facility in Durham, it might make more people aware of the huge potential in waste-to-energy technology. It might even win converts in Toronto.

Wave of protest swelling over Lake Simcoe resort; Coalition of residents, environmentalists take fight against a planned marina and golf course to the Ontario Municipal Board

By James RuskGlobe and Mail One of the most controversial development applications in Southern Ontario - a proposal to build Big Bay Point Resort, a 569-acre marina and golf course on Lake Simcoe east of Barrie, comes before the Ontario Municipal Board tomorrow.

The proposal has stimulated growing activism over the fate of Lake Simcoe, produced something of a competition in which the developer argues that a project opposed by some environmentalists will benefit the environment, and become a hot potato for provincial leaders seeking local votes.

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The battle pits a company owned by developer Earl Rumm, whose summer home is one of the largest at Big Bay Point, against his neighbours in the century-old summer settlement where the south shore of Kempenfelt Bay meets Lake Simcoe.

The community is made up of an egalitarian summer-colony mix of ordinary folk alongside wealthy and powerful individuals, such as Peter Godsoe, former chairman of the Bank of Nova Scotia, and Ron Brenneman, president and chief executive officer of Petro-Canada.

Most of the residents belong to the Innisfil District Association.

IDA president Don Avery, a year-round resident, has led the fight against the planned resort since 2002, when Mr. Rumm's company, Kimvar Enterprises Inc., bought a failing marina and a block of adjacent land and began to take his project on the tortuous trek through the planning process.

"It's too big, particularly the marina. It's bad for the lake," said Mr. Avery in an interview in the kitchen of the home built on the site of the cottage his family has owned for two generations.

The resort has only 200 feet of lake frontage, and with a planned 1,000-slip marina, Mr. Avery predicts that boats will be lined up off the point trying to get into the marina.

Mr. Rumm counters that the resort will actually improve water quality in Lake Simcoe, since his company, Geranium Corp., will pay for a sewer line from an existing water-treatment plant to the resort, thereby allowing 1,600 cottages to get off septic tanks.

Although the project is just now getting to the OMB, the fight has been bruising.

Mr. Rumm has launched lawsuits against various parties, including Mr. Avery and the IDA, a local law firm, and Ned Goodman and Murray Brasseur, two prominent Toronto businessmen who have large estates in the area and belong to the Big Bay Point Golf and Country Club, a nine-hole course developed in 1924.

Many of those who live at Big Bay are shareholders of the golf club, which wants to expand by adding two properties, adjacent to both the golf club and the proposed resort.

These properties are owned by two companies - Nextnine Ltd. and 2025890 Ontario - which have joined with the IDA to fight the resort in front of the OMB.

The environmental record of the existing golf course could be an issue in the hearing.

At the request of Mr. Rumm's law firm, Davies Howe Partners, a Toronto environmental consulting firm, took water samples from the ditch adjacent to the course this spring. The consultants, Gartner Lee Ltd., found evidence of golf-course pesticides and phosphorus in the runoff water.

Jeff Davies said that, since the IDA's then-lawyer, Jane Pepino, wrote him last year that the development's impact on the resort site and the surrounding environment was an issue for the OMB, his client needed to obtain data on existing sources of pollution around the proposed resort, including the golf course.

Ms. Pepino, one of the province's most skilled development lawyers, acted for the resort's opponents until late May, when they shifted strategic gears by retaining prominent environmental activist and lawyer David Donnelly. His law partner, Tim Gilbert, will argue the case at the OMB.

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In the five years, since the project was first proposed, development on the Lake Simcoe shore has become a political issue - a change that was underlined by Mr. Donnelly's hiring in late May.

Mr. Donnelly came to the IDA's attention through Environmental Defence Canada, a group with which Mr. Donnelly has long been associated and which spearheaded the environmental movement's efforts to create the protected areas of the Oak Ridges Moraine and the Greenbelt.

Environmental Defence, Ontario Nature and the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition, a group in which Mr. Avery was an active member, came together under the banner Campaign Lake Simcoe to press for changes in the way development is managed around the lake.

For the campaigners, the Big Bay Point Resort was a perfect example of what the coalition's well-heeled supporters around the lake saw as inappropriate development.

A month ago, the campaign got a boost when Premier Dalton McGuinty went to a coalition meeting in Barrie to announce that, if his government is re-elected in October, it would introduce a Lake Simcoe Preservation Act.

A few weeks later, Opposition Leader John Tory weighed in with his Lake Simcoe plan, which includes a Lake Simcoe charter, a regional governance structure for the lake and increased funding for managing water and wastewater.

But the provincial politicians did not give the members of IDA what they wanted the most: an announcement that provincial power would be used to stop the resort. And Mr. McGuinty said that his proposed law would not apply to the project.

As the Premier noted, the resort had been approved by Innisfil Township and Simcoe County. But support for it goes further. Two other ratepayer groups in Innisfil Township have signed off on it, along with the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority, a Barrie environmental group called Living Green, the City of Barrie and the provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing.

The next round in the battle over the Big Bay Point Resort will come at the OMB. As soon as the hearing begins, Mr. Gilbert plans to ask the OMB, on behalf of his clients - the only remaining appellants fighting the resort at the OMB - to adjourn the hearing on a number of grounds, including the province's plans to introduce the act.

To Mr. Rumm, this strategy is obvious: to delay the hearing long enough that, should Mr. McGuinty be re-elected this fall and introduce a Lake Simcoe protection act, the opponents of the resort can influence the preservation plan. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070807.BIGBAY07/TPStory/?query=environment

What's happening to Canada's belugas?

By Ingrid PeritzGlobe and MailMONTREAL -- The threatened belugas of the St. Lawrence have failed to grow in number despite decades of protection efforts, fuelling worry among scientists who fear for the animals' survival.

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The pearly white whales, known as the canaries of the sea for their whistled song, were the object of international alarm in the 1980s when they were brought to the edge of extinction.

According to new estimates, the beluga population at the time had dipped to 1,100 - the same number that survives today.

"The beluga population isn't growing, and it's cause for concern. We don't like to see a species disappear," said biologist Véronique Lesage, a beluga specialist at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

"If a population is stable at six million, it isn't serious," Dr. Lesage said in an interview yesterday. "But when it's stable at 1,000 and it's been that way for 20 years and it's confined to the St. Lawrence estuary, then the population is vulnerable to all sorts of catastrophes."

Scientists say the reason for the whale population's stagnation remains a mystery, but pollution and human harassment remain leading possibilities.

A study led by Quebec researcher Michel Lebeuf, published in the September issue of the journal Science of the Total Environment, found that contaminants such as DDT and PCBs had decreased slightly in the St. Lawrence belugas after years of pollution controls.

But Dr. Lebeuf, an environmental chemist at the federal Fisheries Department, has also discovered non-controlled chemicals such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, widely used as flame retardants, in St. Lawrence belugas. Their toxic presence in the animals has grown substantially.

"I believe the contamination of belugas is probably more significant today than it was in the past," said Dr. Lebeuf, who works along with Dr. Lesage at the Maurice Lamontagne Institute. "It certainly hasn't improved."

Experts say they continue making startling discoveries about the beguiling mammals. New analysis this year indicates belugas live twice as long - up to 80 years or more - as had previously been believed. Their longevity may explain why long-standing pollutants still remain in their bodies.

And it means a relatively young beluga may be afflicted by pollutants in its body because it was weaned by its contaminated mother, "who is older than we thought," Dr. Lebeuf said.

When protective measures were launched in the 1980s, scientists optimistically expected the beluga population to grow at a rate of 3 per cent a year. "We expected the population to regenerate and grow substantially," Dr. Lebeuf said. "Yet the population today isn't showing signs of growth. That worries us."

Human harassment of belugas, which have been the object of fascination since P. T. Barnum captured them for display in 1861, remains a problem. In an attempt to curtail the effects of tourism on the whales, federal regulations in 2002 forbade viewing belugas at closer than 400 metres.

However, individual boaters at the popular Saguenay St. Lawrence Marine Park routinely breach the rule, said Jean Desaulniers, the park's manager of research conservation. He said he's seen pleasure crafters plow directly into groups of belugas.

"Some people either don't want to know the rules or couldn't care less, or say to themselves, 'I just want to see the belugas,' " Mr. Desaulniers said. "It happens regularly."

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On July 21 this year, a sailboat approached to within 200 metres of a beluga, and kept circling near the whale to stay close by. "A lot of people don't respect the distances," he said.

Exacerbating the problem is a dispute this year over arming federal park wardens, which has left no one on site to enforce regulations. Even last year, when the wardens were applying the law, only seven violations were issued to scofflaw boaters, Mr. Desaulniers said.

He said the department still favours education.

"There are people who don't have the kind of environmental consciousness we'd like," Mr. Desaulniers said.

Year after year, an average of 15 beluga carcasses wash up on the shores of the St. Lawrence, where some are recovered and taken to laboratories for analysis to determine the cause of death.

Canada shifted the beluga's status from "endangered" to the less serious "threatened" in 2004.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070807.BELUGAS07/TPStory/?query=environment

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ROWA News Update 8 August 2007

UAE

UAE-Algerian bid to conserve houbara bustard

ABU DHABI — The Environment Agency–Abu Dhabi (EAD) yesterday has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with its Algerian counterpart for the breeding and conservation of houbara bustard.

A high-level UAE delegation, led by Minister of Economy Shaikha Lubna bint Khalid Al Qasimi, is currently in Algeria.

The five-year agreement was signed by EAD Secretary-General Majid Al Mansouri and Mohammed Seghir Mellouhi from the Algerian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Houbara is the traditional quarry for Arab falconers and since the bird population is on the decline, efforts have been made by the UAE Government to protect it.

“This memorandum fits perfectly with what the UAE is doing to protect the houbara. Ever since 1989, houbara bustard conservation has been one of our top priorities at the Agency,” said Al Mansouri.

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He added that the next step will be to establish a UAE-Algerian committee, which will draft guidelines for cooperation to develop an action plan. Part of this plan will be to create a protected area for houbara in Naama, a region near the Algerian-Moroccan border.

According to Al Mansouri, birds bred in captivity that will be freed in the protected area, will be brought from the Emirates Wildlife Propagation Centre in Missour, Morocco, which was established by the UAE in 1995.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=theuae&xfile=data/theuae/2007/august/theuae_august239.xml

Lebanon

Ecologists, government officials grapple with how to clean Lebanon's shore following last summer's war AMCHIT, Lebanon: Thick, black oil still clings to the rocks at the bottom of the seabed, an ugly legacy of Israel's war against Lebanon last summer. All along the stony beach of Amchit, some 40 kilometers north of Beirut, every nook and cranny is stained black and effluent washes ashore from a nearby industrial plant, caught up in the sticky flow.

It seems a world away from the glitzy tourist resort, traditional fishing port and UNESCO World Heritage Site of Byblos just five kilometers down the coast.

Here the sand and pebble beaches have been cleaned up in an effort to bring things back to normal, sparking accusations of unfair prioritizing by environmentalists.

"Thirty kilometers of coast north of Byblos have not been cleaned. Historic and tourist sites have been privileged, but nowhere else," says Fifi Kallab from the environmental group Byblos Ecologia.

But even at Byblos, appearances can be deceptive. On an artificial sandbank not two paces away from the bathers, dozens of cans of heating oil lie dumped, some of them broken and spilling out a black and shiny discharge under the sun.

All of the country is still grappling with the environmental devastation wrought by last year's month-long bombardment by Israeli forces in their war against Lebanon.

In the worst single incident, Israel bombed an electricity generating station at Jiyyeh, south of Beirut, last July, sending 15,000 tons of oil into the sea - the most severe oil slick ever seen in the eastern Mediterranean.

One year on, Lebanon's Environment Ministry says that 60 to 70 percent of the oil spread out over 150 kilometers of coastline has been cleaned up, but it admits that 26 rocky sites have not yet been touched.

Many of these sites lie north of Beirut, in a 30 kilometer stretch between Byblos and Enfe. The clean-up work is being financed to the tune of $4.7 million by the United States government's international development agency, which admits the daunting and long-term nature of the work.

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http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=84420

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ROLAC MEDIA UPDATES7 August 2007

River Recovery Campaign Atlantic Bluefin Going Way of Northern Cod

News

River Recovery Campaign

TEGUCIGALPA, Aug 6 (Tierramérica) - .The "Adopt-a-River" project, presented by the Honduran government, is an effort to prevent contamination and the use of water sources as dumps.

"If we can get every community to adopt the river in its area in order to keep it clean, free from pollutants, we will improve the quality of life of all Hondurans," Environment Minister Mayra Mejía told Tierramérica.

The project will begin in the communities of Taulabé and Siguatepeque, in the central department of Comayagua, at the initiative of the residents, who were its original promoters. According to the minister, it will then be expanded to the rest of the country.

Among its components are the appropriate use and management of watersheds, clean-up programs, plant nurseries, reforestation and a ban on toxic waste.http://www.tierramerica.info/nota.php?lang=eng&idnews=eco&nro=141

Atlantic Bluefin Going Way of Northern Cod

BROOKLIN, Canada, Aug 6 (IPS) Fishing wiped out Atlantic Bluefin tuna stocks in Northern Europe 50 years ago, according to a new study, while ongoing pressure on the remaining stocks is pushing the entire species to the edge of extinction.

Every summer in the early 1900s, Northern European waters from Holland to northern Norway teemed with Atlantic Bluefin tuna, some three metres long and weighing 700 kilogrammes, according to historical fishing records. Few could catch the powerful, fast-swimming fish until the 1930s and 1940s when bigger, faster boats with better catch gear were designed.

"The Bluefin population crashed in the 1960s and more than 40 years later it still hasn't recovered," said Brian MacKenzie of the Technical University of Denmark, who led the study to be published in the journal Fisheries Research.

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"You simply don't see bluefins in these waters any more," MacKenzie told IPS.

There is a clear parallel to the more recent collapse of once abundant Northern Cod stocks. Also fished into near extinction on the other side of the Atlantic, the Cod have not recovered despite a no-fishing ban for the past 15 years.

"I'm afraid what happened to the Bluefin is similar to what happened to the Northern Cod," he said.

Meanwhile, Atlantic Bluefin are under intense fishing pressure, including use of spotter planes and helicopters, in the Mediterranean Sea region. Bluefin are highly desired by the Japanese sushi market, with single fish selling for 60,000 dollars -- the record is 174,000 dollars for a 444-pound Bluefin tuna.

The Atlantic Bluefin fishery is regulated by the 44-nation International Commission for the Conservation of the Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) that set a 2007 quota of 29,000 tonnes, down from the previous year's quota of 32,000 for the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic.

Marine biologists and environmental groups say the ICCAT quota is twice what is sustainable. Moreover the WWF, an international environmental group, says illegal fishing is rampant in the region and an independent study revealed the actual annual tuna catch approached 50,000 tonnes.

Atlantic Bluefin range across the entire Atlantic Ocean with three distinct populations. The largest population breeds in the Mediterranean Sea, another is found in the western Atlantic and the third is found in the South Atlantic and is considered by many to be an endangered species, explains Barbara Block, a marine biologist at Stanford University and chief scientist of the Census of Marine Life Tagging of Pacific Predators programme and the Tag-a-Giant Bluefin tagging programme.

The western Atlantic population that breeds in the Gulf of Mexico is also in poor shape, suffering from a 90 percent decline in fish of breeding age, but despite that there is commercial fishing with a quota of 2,100 tonnes for this year.

"There are few Bluefins mature enough to breed in the Gulf of Mexico," Block, one the world's foremost tuna experts, said in an interview.

Block and colleagues have been placing electronic tags on Bluefins for several years to learn more about their movements and breeding areas.

Two giant Bluefins tagged off the north of Ireland in 2004 wound up more than 5,000 kms apart eight months later. One travelled 6,000 kms southwest in 177 days past Bermuda to waters about 300 kilometres northeast of Cuba; the other remained in the eastern Atlantic and moved off the coasts of Portugal.

"These tagging data potentially provides new evidence that mixing is occurring in the northern waters of the eastern Atlantic and complement prior data showing that the western and eastern stocks of north Atlantic Bluefin mingle in rich foraging grounds of the central Atlantic," she said.

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That means Japanese and European tuna hunters off Ireland and elsewhere in the North Atlantic are likely harvesting the increasingly rare western Atlantic Bluefin and counting them as eastern Atlantic Bluefin.

"The western Atlantic population may vanish unless quotas are dramatically lowered in the east," Block said.

Because millions of dollars can be made catching tuna, there is a "gold rush mentality" where "no one wants to follow rules", including not fishing in tuna breeding grounds, she said.

Moreover, because breeding is such a high-stress time for tuna, even closure of breeding grounds to tuna fishing as has been done in the Gulf might not be enough, according to other new data Block and colleagues will publish in the journal Marine Biology.

Twenty-eight western Atlantic Bluefins were given special sophisticated tags that recorded their location, depth, water temperature, light level and their abdominal temperature. Researchers found that a majority of Bluefins (some weighing up to 300 kilogrammes) gravitated to the warm waters near the Florida straits and the western part of the Gulf of Mexico for breeding. Actual physiological measurements of wild tuna courting and mating were obtained during this study.

"They're a big, hot fish and easily stressed at this time," Block noted.

For that reason and to prevent tuna from being caught as bycatch, all fishing should be banned near their breeding grounds during the breeding season, she added.

That seems unlikely to happen. At an ICCAT meeting this past July, little action was taken on illegal fishing, according to the WWF. The oversized and well-financed tuna fleet can easily take 50,000 tonnes in the Mediterranean and East Atlantic, despite a quota allowing only 29,000 tonnes.

"This failure of ICCAT contracting parties to do the right thing is effectively an encouragement of illegal fishing, since capacity far oversteps quota," said WWF's Sergi Tudela, who attended the meeting as an official observer.

"The only way now to guarantee a reduction in fishing effort and facilitate real stock recovery is to impose a ban during the month of June when the bulk of catches are taken," Tudela said in a statement.

When Bluefins started to vanish from the Northern European waters in the 1960s, there was some concern but no action was taken and soon after it was too late, said MacKenzie.

"Today few people know the seas around Northern Europe were once filled with these huge majestic fish" he said. "The warning lights are flashing right now for the rest of the world's remaining Bluefins."http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38799

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UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICEDAILY NEWS

7 August 2007====================================================================

Strong Security Council consensus for UN to have expanded role in Iraq – top official 7 August - There is strong consensus within the Security Council on an expanded United Nations role in Iraq, the world organization’s top political officer said today, although he said security constraints imposed by the continuing conflict in the country would mean only a small increase in UN staff there.

“There was really quite a unanimous agreement in the Council itself on what the role of the UN should be,” Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs B. Lynn Pascoe said after briefing the 15-member body, which was discussing a new resolution for the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI).

“Everyone seemed to feel quite comfortable with the role as laid out in this resolution,” he added. “So I think that there’s a very strong consensus among all the members of the Security Council about what the UN should be doing and I think this resolution is right in the middle of that.”

Mr. Pascoe noted that UNAMI’s current mandate is almost three years old, and that much has now been accomplished. “The effort now is to update that mandate to get it much closer to the kinds of things we are working on, the kinds of things we’re doing and to make it clear that the Council strongly supports that effort,” he said.

“We’re talking in terms of reconciliation, in terms of some of the other issues that we had been working on,” he added, noting that the Iraqi Government had asked the UN to do more in certain areas.

He stressed that physical security is a concern after the Secretary-General’s Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 others were killed in a bomb attack in Baghdad four years ago. Since then, international civilian UN staff in Iraq have been reduced to a maximum of 65, although many more UN personnel work from Amman in neighbouring Jordan.

“We are doing what we can to make sure that our people are safe,” he said. “We are trying to do what we can to make sure that they also have the conditions that they can work and be very productive. So we’re trying to thread through that difficult problem.” He said that the number of UN staff in Baghdad could reach a maximum of 95 by October, but cautioned that security was a major concern, citing recent mortar and other attacks in the Green Zone in the city. “It’s not a huge increase, it’s a small increase, but again what we’re looking for here are not numbers, not the number of people we throw at things, but how much we’re really working on the major issues,” he added. “We will be constantly looking at the security situation everywhere to decide what level is appropriate.”

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UN ‘hitting the target’ towards deployment of hybrid peace force in Darfur

7 August - The United Nations is on target to deploy a mainly African hybrid peace force in the war-wracked Sudanese region of Darfur on schedule, but needs more offers from countries on critical capacities such as aviation and ground transport, a senior UN peacekeeping official said today.

Jane Holl Lute, acting head of the new Department of Field Support, told reporters that “we are hitting the target of a predominantly African force,” outlined in last week’s Security Council resolution authorizing the creation of the hybrid operation, to be known as UNAMID.

The hybrid operation with the African Union, the first of its kind, will become the largest peacekeeping force in the world, with almost 26,000 troops and police officers and nearly 5,000 civilian staff when it reaches full deployment. It will have an initial mandate of 12 months and will incorporate of the existing AU Mission in Sudan (AMIS).

Ms. Holl Lute said the UN has already received enough offers from Member States to meet the required numbers of troops and police officers, but “we still are missing some pledges for key enabling capacities in the area of movement, for example, and in the area of aviation.” Troops or police officers have already been pledged by Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Thailand and Uganda. Those offers, however, are not final.

Ms. Holl Lute said UNAMID’s headquarters will be established in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, with a series of sector headquarters and other deployment locations spread across the three states of Darfur, an arid and impoverished region nearly as large as France. She warned that the mission faces daunting logistical challenges because of Darfur’s climate, terrain and remoteness. There are few water sources and little transport infrastructure, and the nearest port through which supplies can be sent is 2,200 kilometres away.

Despite its aridity, Darfur can face intense floods during the annual rainy season, which can run from April to October, while sand storms are also a regular threat. Water will have to be rationed carefully by the mission, Ms. Holl Lute said, adding that the UN was working with experts to see whether an apparent underground “mega-lake” in North Darfur exists and can be utilized.

In response to a reporter’s question, Ms. Holl Lute said early estimates indicate UNAMID will cost more than $2 billion a year to operate, on top of the initial start-up cost.

She stressed that the UN was working towards meeting the benchmarks set out in last week’s Security Council resolution, especially that by October UNAMID is scheduled to have its management, command and control structures in place. As of the end of the year, the new mission should be ready to take over operations from AMIS.

Since fighting erupted between rebel groups, Government forces and allied Janjaweed militias in 2003, UN officials have repeatedly described Darfur as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and the scene of widespread human rights abuses. More than 200,000 people have been killed and the conflict has spilled into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR).

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Somalia: top UN envoy calls for opposition groups to join reconciliation debate

7 August - The United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Somalia François Lonsény Fall today called on the war-ravaged East African nation’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) to invite opposition groups to join the reconciliation meeting currently under way in the capital Mogadishu.

“We would like to see the stakeholders who renounce violence inside and outside the country take part in this process,” Mr. Fall said in an address to the National Reconciliation Congress. The international community firmly supports the reconciliation process and will contribute much-needed technical assistance to allow delegates to reach decisions to promote peace, he added.

The Special Envoy also appealed to participants to discuss all outstanding issues, including power-sharing and disarmament.

Before the meeting, Mr. Fall met with Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and the reconciliation committee’s chairman Ali Mahdi Mohamed, at Mogadishu’s Presidential Palace. The opening of the reconciliation congress on 14 July was followed by a series of deadly attacks targeting locations where the conference, which was suspended for several days, is taking place. The attacks have wounded and killed innocent bystanders, including children, and prompted scores of others to flee.

Hostilities in the country – which has had no functioning government for 16 years – flared up last year, culminating in the expulsion from Mogadishu in December of Islamist groups by the TFG, backed by Ethiopian troops.

According to UN figures, 340,000 people, or roughly one-third of Mogadishu’s population, have fled the city because of ongoing hostilities since February.

Ban Ki-moon concerned by devastating effects of South Asia floods

7 August - Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed his deep sadness at the hundreds of lives lost and the millions affected by the recent floods in South Asia, and reaffirmed the readiness of the United Nations to assist the victims.

Mr. Ban “extends his condolences to the families of those who perished,” according to a statement issued by his spokesperson. “He is also concerned by the economic devastation faced by the survivors.”

The Secretary-General commended the “prompt and effective response” to the flooding by the affected countries – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. UN agencies have warned of a possible health emergency in South Asia, after severe flooding left tens of millions of people in urgent need of fresh water, food and shelter.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN World Health Organization (WHO) are concerned about the spread of water-borne diseases, viral fever and skin infections, and are providing emergency medical kits and other supplies in the affected areas. Speaking to reporters in Geneva, UNICEF’s Veronique Taveau warned that the needs would be long-term and that many thousands could remain homeless for weeks.

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Many of the affected areas in India were home to impoverished communities who suffered from poor sanitation and hygiene year round. Now, entire villages were days away from a health crisis, she said.

While water levels in Nepal have receded in many areas, Ms. Taveau said the delivery of vital aid was being hampered by security concerns and damage to access routes and infrastructure. She warned that the situation in Bangladesh, where nearly 8 million people are affected, could worsen rapidly over the coming days.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is concerned that monsoon rains could worsen flooding in areas already affected by the June cyclone and floods. OCHA notes that its flash appeal for $38 million for Pakistan, launched three weeks ago, remains less than one third funded. The UN Resident Coordinator in Pakistan is appealing to the donor community to urgently meet the funding shortfall.

As sporadic violence continues in Timor-Leste, UN warns of crackdown on criminal acts

7 August - With sporadic fighting, rock throwing and tyre burning breaking out in Timor-Leste after the announcement of a new government, the top United Nations envoy in the small South-East Asian country warned today that any political party supporters engaging in acts of violence would be treated as criminals and swiftly dealt with.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative Atul Khare met with the Secretary-General of the former ruling party Fretilin, Mari Alkatiri and, as in his meetings with other political leaders throughout the entire electoral process, requested his support in keeping the situation calm.

“Mr. Alkatiri told me he had received delegations of people over the past day and had reminded those people that burning buildings and throwing rocks is unacceptable,” Mr. Khare said. The UN enhanced its peacekeeping and policing roles in the country, which it helped to shepherd to independence from Indonesia in 2002, after violence attributed to differences between eastern and western regions broke out in April and May last year, killing at least 37 people and forcing 155,000 others, 15 per cent of the population, to flee their homes. UN police officers (UNPol) along with the National Police of Timor-Leste and the International Security Forces have been working to contain the latest violence, which is mostly comprised of rock throwing, road blocks and some arson.

UNPol said that over the past 24 hours the situation in Dili, the capital, and eastwards to Baucau and Viqueque remained tense, with 32 incidents reported, mostly involving rock throwing, the burning of tyres, and fighting between different groups. At least 15 UN vehicles have been damaged by rock throwing.

UNPol and its partners used tear gas and other non-lethal force to contain the incidents. At least six people were arrested. The customs house at Seaport was set on fire but firefighters brought the blaze under control.

Yesterday Mr. Khare welcomed the announcement of the new Government led by former president Xanana Gusmão after the 30 June legislative elections failed to produce a single outright winner.

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UN agencies to provide relief for refugees from Central African Republic

7 August - Some 26,000 refugees who have fled insecurity in the Central African Republic and are now living in Cameroon will soon receive much-needed help from several United Nations agencies joining forces to alleviate their plight.

On Wednesday, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), along with other UN agencies, will launch a relief operation to aid the refugees who are scattered along the eastern border of Cameroon and living in very precarious conditions.

“The refugees, particularly women and children, are in a vulnerable condition with some 15 to 18 per cent of infants malnourished and suffering a rate of infant mortality six to seven times higher than the emergency threshold in some areas,” UNHCR spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis said at a press briefing in Geneva.

Mainly Mbororo nomadic cattle herders, the refugees have arrived in Cameroon in several waves since 2005 after fleeing their villages, where they had been targeted by rebel groups and bandits who steal cattle and kidnap women and children for ransom. The last recorded arrivals were in February this year.

Ms. Pagonis warned that there are a number of logistical challenges in getting aid to the refugees, who are living in more than 50 sites spread over thousands of miles. “The imminent start of the rainy season may hamper the delivery of the relief supplies, and security conditions caused by banditry also need to be taken into account.”

The relief operation, which involves the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), will provide 200 tons of basic supplies such as blankets, plastic sheeting, mosquito nets, hygiene supplies and medicines to the refugees. In addition, WFP is positioning nearly 3,000 tons of food in its warehouses to supply the basic food needs of the refugees for six months, while UNICEF is supplying nutritional needs for children suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition. In addition, UNFPA will be helping women and young girls with problems related to reproductive health and maternal mortality.

Fleeing Chadians should be classed as refugees, says joint UN-Sudanese report

7 August - A joint report by the United Nations refugee agency and its Sudanese Government counterpart has recommended that the estimated 30,000 Chadians who have fled to neighbouring Darfur to escape a worsening security situation in their homeland be classified as refugees. But the report also warned that anyone in that group who is an active or former combatant in the clashes in Chad should not be granted refugee status, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis said today.

Ms. Pagonis told reporters at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva that the recommendations follow an in-depth field assessment carried out in West Darfur state this year by staff from UNHCR and Sudan’s Commissioner for Refugees (COR).

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Most of the Chadians interviewed by the UNHCR-COR teams said they fled their country after armed men in military uniforms entered their homes, searching for weapons and accusing locals of participating or backing militia activities. Many of the searches turned violent, culminating in lootings, beatings, arrests and even murders.

“In addition to the brutal searches, many families said they left Chad because of the general insecurity and fighting between governmental forces and opposition groups,” Ms. Pagonis said, noting that most people interviewed indicated they feared returning to Chad. The new arrivals in Darfur, which has been beset by its own violence and humanitarian suffering since 2003, are mainly from Arab nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes, although some are from non-Arab tribes.

Ms. Pagonis said most of the group entered West Darfur near Foro Baranga, about 200 kilometres south of El Geneina, the state capital, and then settled along the Wadi Azoum river bed. The majority of arrivals came from the Tiero, Marena, Mayo and Awinrado areas in south-eastern Chad.

Most of the Chadians who have crossed the border do not seem to need urgent food or material assistance, having brought livestock and bags of sorghum with them, according to the report. But it recommended that the most vulnerable people among the new arrivals be provided with a food ration, and called on the Sudanese health ministry to launch a vaccination campaign for children as soon as possible.

UN expert reports gross violations of human rights by all sides in Darfur

7 August - All parties to the Darfur conflict continue to carry out “gross violations” of human rights, including killings, disappearances, torture and sexual violence, an independent United Nations rights expert has reported after wrapping up her latest visit to Sudan. Sima Samar, the Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Sudan, yesterday called for greater action to protect civilians in violence-wracked Darfur from breaches of international law.

“While the [Sudanese] Government has the primary responsibility in this regard, I welcome the recent approval of the [African Union] AU-UN peacekeeping force for the region,” she said in a statement issued in Geneva after her visit to Sudan, which took place from 25 July to 2 August. Ms. Samar said she had received allegations of serious violations in areas under the control of the wing of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) controlled by Minni Minawi, a faction that was a signatory to the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) last year. Those allegations include torture, sexual violence, harassment and extortion.

In South Darfur, Ms. Samar said she had also been told of forced disappearances and killings in the town of Gerida. “These cases should be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice.” The Special Rapporteur, who reports to the UN Human Rights Council, noted that both the Council and the Sudanese Government have undertaken or pledged to carry out steps and measures to ameliorate the conditions inside Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have been killed since 2003 and another 2 million people forced to flee their homes.

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“I welcome the Government’s acknowledgement of the seriousness of the situation,” she said, urging Khartoum to quickly carry out the recommendations of a group of UN rapporteurs and other experts – which she presides over – on the situation in Darfur. Fighting began in Darfur, an impoverished and arid region of western Sudan that is almost as large as France, when local rebels took up arms against the Government, which then responded with the support of notorious militia known as the Janjaweed.

In her statement Ms. Samar also said that civil and political rights are breached in other regions of Sudan, despite the Government’s efforts to introduce legislative bills to ensure that its armed forces, police and national security apparatus comply with international legal obligations. The situation is also tough in the “transitional areas” in the wake of the comprehensive peace agreement in January 2005 ending the north-south civil war, according to Ms. Samar. Those regions are officially administered by the north but its populations are linguistically and ethnically closer to the south, causing “particular problems,” especially given that two parallel judicial systems are in place.

Global land temperatures for January and April likely warmest ever recorded – UN

7 August - Global land surface temperatures for January and April will likely be ranked as the warmest since records began in 1880, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported today, adding that it is working with its partners to set up a multi-hazard early warning system to tackle the extremes brought on by climate change, such as violent storms, floods and heatwaves.

“Weather and climate are marked by record extremes in many regions across the world since January 2007,” WMO said in its update, noting that global temperatures were 1.89°C warmer than average for January and 1.37°C warmer than average for April.

It noted that the most recent assessment report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the warming of the climate system was unequivocal and most likely due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.

Among the latest extremes WMO cited four monsoon depressions, double the normal, which caused heavy floods in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, killing more than 500 people, displacing over 10 million others and destroying vast areas of croplands, livestock and property; the first documented cyclone in the Arabian Sea hitting Oman and Iran; and the wettest May to July period in England and Wales (406 milimetres) since records began in 1766.

Others included a powerful storm system in much of northern Europe in January; abnormally heavy and early rainfall in Sudan since the end of June; a series of large swell waves (estimated at 3-4.5 metres) that swamped 68 islands in the Maldives in May; two extreme record-breaking heat waves in south-eastern Europe in June and July; and a heat wave that swept across western and central Russia in May, breaking several records.

“Recognizing the severe health impacts of heat waves, the WMO and the [UN] World Health Organization (WHO), are at an advanced stage of preparing Guidance on the implementation of Heat Health early Warning Systems,” the agency said.

Nor was the southern hemisphere spared extremes. An unusual cold southern winter brought winds, blizzards and rare snowfall to various parts of South America with temperatures reaching

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as low as -22°C in Argentina and -18°C in Chile in July. In June South Africa experienced its first significant snowfall since 1981 with 25 centimetres registered in parts of the country. By contrast, in the northern hemisphere winter many European countries had their warmest January on record, with The Netherlands reporting the highest since measurements were first taken in 1706, averaging about 7.1°C (2.8°C above 1961-1990 average) while in Germany the temperatures were 4.6°C above the 1961-1990 average.

An increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970 has also been observed.

“WMO and the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services of its 188 Members are working with other UN agencies and partners towards the establishment of a multi-hazard early warning system,” the agency declared.

“Furthermore, they are putting in place sustainable observation systems needed for monitoring and assessing the impacts of climate change and determining the adaptation priorities for the most vulnerable countries.”

Climate change could intensify hunger risk in developing world, UN official says

7 August - Climate change could lead to potential food shortages and increase the risk of hunger in developing countries, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said today.

However, industrialized countries could see an increase in their crop yields, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said in a speech in Chennai, India.

“Crop yield potential is likely to increase at higher latitudes for global average temperature increases of up to 1 to 3°C depending on the crop, and then decrease beyond that,” he said. “On the contrary, at lower latitudes, especially in the seasonally dry tropics, crop yield potential is likely to decline for even small global temperature rises, which would increase the risk of hunger,” Mr. Diouf noted in his address to the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation Conference. Also at low latitudes, more frequent droughts and floods would decrease local production. “Rain-fed agriculture in marginal areas in semi-arid and sub-humid regions is mostly at risk.” For example, he noted that India stands to lose 125 million tons of its rain-fed cereal production, close to 20 per cent of its total production.

He stressed that advances in science and technology will be paramount in the field of agricultural production in the next three decades.

“I cannot sufficiently underline the need to also address the needs of resource poor farmers in rain-fed areas and on marginal lands,” Dr. Diouf said. “Ensuring that new biotechnologies help achieve this goal, in full awareness of biosafety, socio-economic and ethical concerns associated with the use of some of these technologies remains a challenge for the entire scientific community.”

UNICEF-backed programme provides Egyptians with cleaner water

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7 August - The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation have joined forces to bolster access to improved water services for Egyptians in rural and urban areas. Only a handful of 4,500 villages in Egypt have adequate waste water disposal systems or municipal solid waste management.

In many areas, the quality of water is undermined due to the dumping of inadequately treated domestic, agricultural and industrial wastes in waterways. As a result, water availability is reduced, Egyptians’ health is negatively impacted and ultimately the country’s economy suffers. “The contamination of water supplies from improper disposal of liquid and solid wastes to canals and drains is a serious problem in Egypt that is being aggravated by the rapid growth of the nation’s population as well as the fixed and limited water resources,” said UNICEF’s Deputy Representative for Egypt Hannan Sulieman. “This new alliance focuses on the role of local rural communities in water management and encouraging greater civic responsibility.” UNICEF – which is providing $90,000 – will initiate community awareness campaigns and training programmes to both educate Egyptians about healthy water resource management and encourage community members to preserve and improve their water facilities. The project will focus on two of Egypt’s governorates to improve water quality, reduce water health hazards and increase water productivity.

The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation is contributing $250,000 towards the project, while the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Resources Group (IRG) will provide an additional $250,000.

These organizations collectively are working together as the newly-formed Global Development Alliance.

Ukraine agrees to enforce sentences imposed by UN war crimes tribunal

7 August - Ukraine today became the 12th European country to agree to enforce a sentence imposed by the United Nations war crimes tribunal that was set up to deal with the worst crimes committed during the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Anyone convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and given a jail term can now serve that sentence in a Ukrainian prison after an agreement was signed in The Hague, where the Tribunal is based.

Aside from Ukraine, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Italy, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Austria, France, Spain, Denmark and Germany have already entered into similar agreements with the ICTY.

In a press statement issued in The Hague, the ICTY thanked Ukraine and the other UN Member States that have struck these enforcement of sentences agreements.

Afghan returnees from Iran receive vital aid thanks to UN emergency fund

7 August - The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has provided crucial assistance to over 1,600 Afghan families returning home from Iran since the end of July thanks to the help of the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF).

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With support from the Fund, IOM has been able to distribute supplies such as agricultural tools and emergency shelter materials to returnees in Farah, Nimroz and Herat provinces. The funds provided by the CERF are essential in enabling IOM to help individuals, stabilize border provinces and strengthen peace in affected areas. “Many returning families are very vulnerable and arrive in communities that have very limited resources,” noted Fernando Arocena, head of IOM Afghanistan.

IOM teams are working closely with national and provincial Afghan authorities, as well as the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and other agencies, and will continue to provide assistance to Afghan returnees through August and September or longer if needed. In another development, over 300 young people from all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces have gathered in Kabul for a national conference in support of peace and development. The three-day conference, which began yesterday, is supported by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and part of a national youth programme involving various Government ministries and UN agencies.

It aims to provide Afghan youth with the opportunity to share their ideas, hopes and visions for a more peaceful and prosperous nation, according to the organizers. Speaking on behalf of the world body, UNDP Country Director Anita Nirody described Afghanistan’s youth as a “vast resource of human capital” with the potential to contribute positively towards the country’s development and reconciliation.

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DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESPERSON FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

7 August 2007 _____________________________________________________________________________

The following is a near-verbatim transcript of today’s noon briefing by Farhan Haq, Associate Spokesperson for the Secretary-General.

**Guest at Noon Today

Our guest at the noon briefing today is Jane Holl Lute, acting head of the Department of Field Support, who will discuss preparations for the AU-UN “hybrid operation” in Darfur.  That should be in just a few minutes, so I’ll try to keep my part short.

**Security Council

The Security Council has finished discussing in consultations the work of the UN Mission in Iraq, and it received a briefing on that subject by Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Lynn Pascoe.  Council members also received a draft resolution on the extension of the UN Mission’s mandate; the current mandate expires on 10 August.

After he was done in the Council, Pascoe spoke to reporters at the stakeout and he said that the United Nations has consistently been on the ground, supporting and providing assistance to the Government of Iraq.  He mentioned the constraints posed by the security situation on the ground, adding that we are doing what we can to ensure that UN staff are safe.  He said there might be a small increase in UN staff on the ground in the coming months, bearing in mind security conditions.

Also, the letter from the Secretary-General to the Security Council recommending a 12-month extension of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon -- that is, until the end of August 2008 -- is out as a document.

** Somalia

François Lonseny Fall, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Somalia, earlier today addressed the National Reconciliation Congress in Mogadishu, urging the Transitional Federal Government to invite opposition groups to join the debate.

He told the assembled delegates, “We would like to see the stakeholders who renounce violence inside and outside the country take part in this process.”  He also stressed the fact that the international community remains firmly in support of the reconciliation process.  He added that the international community will contribute much-needed technical assistance to ensure that delegates can reach decisions for peace.  Fall also encouraged them to discuss all sticking points, which range from power-sharing to disarmament.

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Before speaking at the Reconciliation Congress, Fall met with Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and with Ali Mahdi Mohamed, the Chairman of the National Reconciliation Committee, at the Presidential Palace in Mogadishu.

**Timor-Leste

The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Timor-Leste, Mr. Atul Khare, condemned the violence in Dili following the announcement of the new Government yesterday afternoon.

Characterizing the violence as sporadic and isolated, Khare stressed that any political party supporters engaging in acts of violence will be treated as criminals and dealt with swiftly.

Khare met this morning with the Secretary-General of Fretilin, Mari Alkatiri, to request his support in keeping the situation calm.

Timorese and UN police officers, along with the International Security Forces, have been working to contain the violence, mostly comprised of rock-throwing, roadblocks and arson.

**Floods in South Asia

UN agencies are warning of a possible health crisis after the monsoon rains have left millions in urgent need of freshwater, food and shelter.  There are increasing reports of outbreaks of water-borne diseases, viral fever and skin infections, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).

WHO says it is stockpiling emergency medicines for disease-outbreak management and has prepositioned health kits to the worst-affected areas.  UNICEF is also providing emergency medical kits and essential drugs, among other things.

According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the flooding has so far affected nearly 40 million people in the region.

And we have more on this upstairs.

** Pakistan

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, OCHA is concerned that the onset of the monsoon season could worsen flooding in areas that were already affected by the June cyclone and floods.  It notes that its flash appeal for $38 million for Pakistan, launched three weeks ago, remains less than one third funded.  The UN Resident Coordinator in Pakistan is appealing to the donor community to urgently meet the funding shortfall.

** Afghanistan

Afghanistan’s cereals production has doubled in the six years since the end of the Taliban regime and the Afghan people have nearly reached cereal self-sufficiency, according to the latest figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

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FAO reports that, despite the continuing tense security environment, the country’s cereal output will reach 4.6 million tonnes in 2007, more than twice the level of 2001.  The UN agency says Afghanistan’s success with cereals stems from several years of favourable weather and from ongoing development efforts.

And we have a press release upstairs highlighting the projects supported by FAO in the country.

**Refugees from Chad and Central African Republic

The UN refugee agency and other United Nations humanitarian agencies are tomorrow launching a relief operation to assist some 26,000 refugees from the Central African Republic who are living in precarious conditions along the eastern border of Cameroon.  The refugees are mainly Mbororo nomadic cattle herders who have been targeted by rebel groups and bandits.  UN agencies are sending more than 200 tons of basic supplies, while WFP is positioning 3,000 tons of food rations.

Meanwhile, UNHCR says it and its Sudanese governmental counterpart have recommended that thousands of new arrivals from Chad, who have crossed over to Darfur in recent months, be recognized as refugees.  The joint report notes that refugee status should not be granted to active or former combatants, however.

And there is more information in UNHCR’s briefing notes, which are upstairs.

**Weather

On the weather we have been having recently:  so far, 2007 has been marked by record weather extremes in many parts across the world, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Land surface temperatures in January and April will likely go down as the warmest since record-keeping began in 1880.  Meanwhile, two extreme heat waves hit South-Eastern Europe in June and July, while South America has been gripped by bitterly cold weather.

Several regions have also experienced extremely heavy precipitation, including a doubling of monsoon depressions in South Asia -- as we were mentioning just a few minutes ago -- the first ever cyclone in the Arabian Sea, and record-breaking rains in England and Wales.

The World Meteorological Organization notes that climate change projections show that extremes of heat and precipitation will likely become more frequent.  And we have information on this upstairs.

**Press Conference Tomorrow

Like I said earlier, we’ll expect Jane Holl Lute to talk to you about the preparations on Sudan.  We also have a press conference scheduled for tomorrow, at 12:30 p.m.  That will be by Ambassador Irakli Chikovani, the Deputy Permanent Representative of the Mission of Georgia, on the situation concerning Georgia.

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Are there any questions for me now, before we go to Ms. Holl Lute?

**Questions and Answers

Question:  Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert met, as we know, with President [Mahmoud] Abbas.  The meeting was very constructive and Mr. Olmert apparently wants to accelerate the establishment of an independent Palestinian State.  Does the Secretary-General have any reaction to this development?  Also, the Under-Secretary-General of DPA announced a few minutes ago that the Secretary-General is very close to announcing the appointment of a Special Envoy to Iraq.  Would you confirm or deny that it would be Ambassador [Lakhdar] Brahimi?

Associate Spokesperson:  On your second question, I don’t have any name to give right now.  We will make an announcement, hopefully fairly soon, but I don’t have anything to tell you about the replacement for Mr. [Ashraf] Qazi just yet.

For your first question:  yes, we are encouraged by the talks between Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas.  We would encourage them to continue meeting with each other, and we certainly hope that they can continue to make progress in that effort.  Along those lines, the Secretary-General will be meeting this evening with the Quartet’s Envoy for the Middle East, Tony Blair.  They are both in Barbados now and they will have a working dinner.  So, we can expect them to discuss some of these recent developments further.

Question:  Did the UN receive any request about providing a safe place for negotiations between the South Koreans and the Taliban regarding the hostage situation?

Associate Spokesperson:  I have been in touch with my colleagues in the UN Mission in Afghanistan.  They are not aware of any such request.

Question:  Is there any update on the status of the Russian translator who has been charged with immigration fraud?  You said yesterday that he had not been suspended.

Associate Spokesperson:  As of right now, he has not been suspended.  If a process is put in place, I’ll let you know at that point.  But this is at an early part.  Basically, as of 6 August, that is to say yesterday, the US law-enforcement authorities announced that Mr. [Vyacheslav] Manokhin has been arrested and charged with carrying out a scheme of providing illegal entry into the US for non-citizens.  We had already waived his immunity a week earlier, on 27 July.  In terms of any further administrative action, I’ll have to wait and see if that is taken.

Question:  Does the Secretary-General have any response to Georgia’s claim that Russia has committed an act of aggression by firing a rocket…?

Associate Spokesperson:  We have seen conflicting press reports regarding an alleged bombing of Georgian territory.  The UN has no access to first-hand information either to confirm or deny these reports.  The UN is not going to investigate the incident, which is beyond our peacekeeping role in Georgia, which is limited to the Georgia-Abkhaz conflict.  The site of the alleged incident is outside our area of operations.

Question:  So, if a request was made to the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG), they would not, you are saying, they would not get involved?

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Associate Spokesperson:  Like I said, UNOMIG sees this as outside its peacekeeping role in Georgia, which is part of the Abkhaz conflict.  And I think before you entered this room, Mark, that the Georgian Deputy Permanent Representative will give a briefing in this room at 12:30 tomorrow.

Question:  I have just one follow-up to this.  Would the UN consider one country announcing that another country has committed an act of aggression on its territory as a threat to international peace and security?

Associate Spokesperson:  Again, since we are dealing with allegations that we are not in a position to corroborate, I wouldn’t have any further comment on that.

Question:  As the anniversary of the bombing in Baghdad in Iraq is approaching -- on 19 August -- are you planning some events here at New York Headquarters?

Associate Spokesperson:  Yes, we are.  On 17 August, the Friday before the fourth anniversary commemoration, we will have, at about 10:15 in the morning, in the General Assembly building’s public lobby, lasting about 15 minutes, in which the names of those who were killed during the 19 August 2003 attack will be read out.  There will be a wreath-laying and, I believe, a moment of silence at that time.

Question:  Mr. Pascoe just said at the stakeout that the size of the UNAMI force is going to grow from 65, which is its current level, to around 95.  Is that under the conditions of the existing mandate, and, therefore, are all bets off in terms of any increase in force under the new mandate?

Associate Spokesperson:  I don’t want to speculate on what the new mandate will contain.  That is still being discussed by the Security Council.  The Secretary-General is able to alter the ceiling for UN personnel on the ground, depending on security conditions.  What Mr. Pascoe is suggesting is that we might be able to adjust it upward slightly from the present level, which, as you mentioned, is at 65.

Question:  Could you coordinate with Jared of the Department of Political Affairs on what the 65 do? Are they national or international?

Associate Spokesperson:  These are international staff, not including the Fijians, who are also internationals but are part of the security presence there.  They are the inner-ring security presence.  That would boost the international presence of the ground upward.

Question:  What do they do?

Associate Spokesperson:  The Fijians?

Question:  No, the 65…  Are they political officers or are they…?

Associate Spokesperson:  Exactly, these are people who handle basic political tasks.  They have been handling things like electoral functions, constitutional review and also some humanitarian work, although a lot of our humanitarian staff dealing with Iraq are actually based in Amman, Jordan.

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Question:  On Iraq, the Staff Union has been circulating a resolution -- I think they are going to vote on it today -- that would call on the Secretary-General to certify under Staff Regulation 1.2 c that things are safe in Iraq to send staff in.  Under the staff regulation, is it self-enforcing?  Is there a process by which the Secretary-General, or some other unit of the UN, would make such a certification?

Associate Spokesperson:  We have daily assessments of security situations on the ground in Iraq, as indeed elsewhere in the world wherever we operate.  Our decisions on staffing, wherever UN staff are based, are based on the regular security update.

Question:  So this path, I mean it wouldn’t change, from your point of view, it wouldn’t change…

Associate Spokesperson:  What you describe does not sound different from what we do as a standard practice.  We have a Department of Security and Safety that coordinates these security assessments around the world.

Question:  There is a report in Carib Net News that Ban Ki-moon has met with the Acting Prime Minister of Barbados.

Associate Spokesperson:  Yes, we announced that on Friday.  Mia Mottley.

Question:  On the schedule today, it just says “travelling”.

Associate Spokesperson:  He met with the Acting Prime Minister on Friday.  We are also trying to schedule a meeting with the Prime Minister, who had been out of town, but hopefully we might have something to announce in the next day or so.

* *** *

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