ECOLOGY

Will Forests Adapt to a Warmer World?

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Forests, Global Issues and Perspectives, News

How is climate change affecting the world’s forests today and in the future

Copyright 2006 Renate Leahy
By Stephen Leahy

TORONTO, Nov 20 (IPS/IFEJ) – Deforestation remains the greatest current threat to the world’s forests, claiming 10 to 15 million hectares of tree-covered areas every year, but climate change may represent a bigger challenge in the long term, scientists say.

“We’re like a two-year-old playing with fire… We’re messing around with something dangerous and don’t really understand what will happen,” says William Laurance, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, in reference to climate change and the Amazon rainforest.

Forests and other forms of life are now living on an “alien” planet where the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher than they have been for a million years.

These unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases are creating a new, hotter planet with weather that is much more extreme than in the past.

What does this mean for the 20 percent of the Earth’s original forests that are still standing? Some scientists believe forests will grow faster in a warmer world. Others say they are more likely to burn, or suffer from disease or die from drought.

— Full story here

Part of a series on sustainable development for IPS and IFEJ (International Federation of Environmental Journalists)

Polar Bears Go Hungry as Icy Habitat Melts Away

Stephen Alaska, CANADA, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, News, WILDLIFE

By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Nov 17 (IPS) – The iconic animal of the frozen north, the polar bear, is starving to death because climate change is melting the Arctic Ocean sea ice.

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Polar bears hunt seals almost exclusively and do so from the sea ice. But in the past five years, summer sea ice coverage has declined by 20 percent due to warming temperatures. Although excellent swimmers, the bears are not very good at catching seals in the water, so changes in the ice are making it difficult for these giant bears to survive — several have recently been found drowned and to have died of starvation.

This week scientists announced new findings that the survival rate of polar bear cubs in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea has plummeted. In the late 1980s, 65 percent of polar bear cubs in the southern Beaufort Sea survived their first year. That has fallen to an average of 43 percent in the past five years, report scientists at the Canadian Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

“This an extremely ominous finding for polar bears,” said Kassie Siegel of the Centre for Biological Diversity, an environmental non-governmental organisation, based in Joshua Tree, California.

“We’ve observed massive melting of the sea ice in the Arctic in recent years, and they can’t survive without it,” Siegel told IPS.

— Full Story here

And here are my most recent articles on the state of the Arctic: Arctic Ice Gone in 5 Years – First Time in One Million Years

Arctic Is the Canary in the Coalmine

Burning Down Our House

Arctic Oil and Gas Rush Alarms Scientists

Arctic Meltdown Signals Long-Term Trend


Billions Needed to Climate-Proof Africa

Stephen Africa, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News

By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Nov 6 (IPS) – Climate change will devastate Africa without substantial help from the world community, according to a new report released at the opening of a major U.N. climate change conference in Nairobi, Kenya Monday.

“Africa is the least responsible for climate change but will be hit the hardest,” said Nick Nuttall, spokesperson for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

New scientific data shows that Africa is more vulnerable to the impacts than previously thought, Nuttall told IPS from Nairobi.

Seventy million people and 30 percent of Africa’s coastal infrastructure face the risk of coastal flooding by 2080 linked to rising sea levels, the report found. More than one-third of the habitats that support African wildlife could be lost. Crop yields will fall due to warmer temperatures and more intense droughts.

By 2025, some 480 million people in Africa could be living in water-scarce or water-stressed areas.

“If Africa’s weather gets any more fickle, then they are in very deep trouble,” said Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace International. Sawyer is one of 6,000 people in Nairobi attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

— Full story here

Oceans on the Brink of No Return

Stephen ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, OCEAN
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By Stephen Leahy Nov 2 ’06 (IPS) – Every single commercial fishery in the world will be wiped before 2050 and the oceans may never recover if over-fishing continues at its current rate, a four-year scientific investigation has found.

“By the time my nine-year-old son is my age, there would be no wild seafood left,” said Emmett Duffy, a scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences in the United States.

In this grim, not-to-far-off future, not only will there be no fish to eat, humans will also lose the vital services oceans provide, including processing wastes, cleaning beaches, controlling flooding and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Continue reading →

Binational Crusade to Save Wetlands

Stephen BIRDS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Mexico, News, Pollution and Toxics, WILDLIFE

Stephen Leahy*

TORONTO, Sep 8 (Tierramérica) – With 20,000 hectares of bright green in a sea of sand in the state of Sonora, the Ciénaga de Santa Clara is one of Mexico’s richest coastal ecosystems. Faced with the imminent reopening of a desalinisation plant just across the border in the United States, a binational team is working to protect the vast wetland.

Ongoing drought conditions in the south-western United States has prompted the George W. Bush government to finance the restart of the long unused Yuma Desalting Plant (YDP) in the border state of Arizona in 2007.

“Full operation of the desalting plant would mean the ciénaga will get less water and the water would be much saltier,” said Karl Flessa, professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

And “that would completely eliminate the wetland,” according to Jaqueline García-Hernández, a scientist at a food and development research centre (Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo) in the Mexican city of Guaymas, Sonora.

The Ciénaga de Santa Clara is home to some 225 species of birds, like the Yuma clapper rail (Rallus longirostris yumanensis) and southwest willow flycatcher (Empidonax traillii extimus), which are rare in the United States.

— Tierramerica and Inter Press News Service

Another Piece of Alaska Goes on Sale

Stephen Alaska, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, News, Pollution and Toxics, Science/Tech

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Sep 8 (IPS) – While the George W. Bush administration has so far failed in its bid to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, eight million acres of pristine Alaskan wilderness goes on sale to oil and gas companies Sep. 27.

Located west of the Prudhoe Bay’s oil fields, the eight million acres include Teshekpuk Lake and the surrounding wetlands, considered important habitat for caribou and water birds.

“This is the most important bird area in the entire circumpolar Arctic,” said Stan Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska, an environmental group.

“We’re not opposed to oil and gas development, but it needs to stay out of critical areas like this,” Senner told IPS from Juneau, Alaska.

“The lands near Teshekpuk Lake are one of the most important ecological areas on the entire North Slope,” agreed Nicole Whittington-Evans, assistant regional director in Alaska of the Wilderness Society.

— Inter Press news Service

60 Years to Restore the Ozone Layer Over Antarctica

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, developing world, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, ozone, Pollution and Toxics, Science/Tech

Stephen Leahy*

TORONTO, Sep 20 (Tierramérica) – Another giant ozone hole has opened up over the Antarctic, while evidence mounts that 20 years of international efforts have finally helped the atmosphere to start to heal itself.

The “hole” over the South Pole — actually an annual thinning of the ozone layer, which protects Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation — measured about 24 million square kilometres, nearly the size of North America, according to the Sep. 8 estimate by the renowned British Antarctic Survey, a scientific organisation that has been studying the region for the past six decades.

The ozone hole will continue to grow and likely be one of the larger and “deeper” ones, perhaps 28 million square kilometres, predicts Andrew Klekociuk of the Australian government’s Antarctic Division. The largest ever recorded was 30.3 million sq km in 2000, according to NASA, the U.S. space agency.

— Tierramerica and Inter Press News Service