Catch less fish, Make More $

11/12/200711/12/2007 Stephen Agriculture/Food, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, OCEAN, sustainability , fish stocks, Science

By Stephen Leahy

Dec 11 (IPS) – Catch less fish. Make more money.

Could this be the solution to the global overfishing crisis?

Australian economists writing in the current issue of Science magazine think so.

Reducing fish catches in the short term will bring fishers big profits later. And that profit potential may finally persuade an intransigent fishing industry to agree to lower catch limits, they say.

“Bigger stocks mean bigger bucks,” says co-author Quentin Grafton, research director at the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University (ANU).

“Our results prove that the highest profits are made when fish numbers are allowed to rise beyond levels traditionally considered optimal,” Grafton said. Continue reading →

Junk Food and Smoking to Kill 100s of Millions in Poor Countries

26/11/2007 Stephen Agriculture/Food, developing world, Global Issues and Perspectives, Health, News, sustainability

By Stephen Leahy

Credit:Hendrike

Man lighting a cigaret

Nov 26 (IPS) – Chronic, non-infectious diseases like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes kill more than twice as many people than HIV/AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis, experts warn.

In the next 10 years, some 388 million people will die of these largely preventable diseases, which are caused mainly by smoking, poor diet and lack of exercise. Often thought to be diseases of the rich, most of these deaths will be in the developing world, conclude the authors of a study published in the journal Nature this month.

“We have a huge health crisis here that few policymakers and other officials are aware of,” said lead author Dr. Abdallah S. Daar of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre in Toronto, Canada.

Developing countries, and medical and donor groups have focused almost entirely on infectious diseases, Daar told IPS. “But that’s like putting out one fire in a house burning from both ends,” he said.

Continue reading →

Kill Kyoto or Kyoto II Our Only Hope?

22/11/2007 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News

“We don’t have time to start over… global carbon emissions have to peak in 2015 …” — Jonathan Pershing, World Resources Institute

By Stephen Leahy

Nov 21 (IPS) – Total greenhouse gas emissions of 40 industrialised countries rose to a near all-time high in 2005, but the Kyoto Protocol will still exceed its reduction targets, a United Nations agency said two weeks before political leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia to begin negotiations on a new and more aggressive treaty to battle climate change.

“Greenhouse-gas emissions between 1990 and 2000 went down, but then between 2000 and 2005 they increased again, by 2.6 percent,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol are expected to achieve reductions of 11 percent compared to 1990 by 2012 if their policies deliver the promised reductions, the UNFCCC report said — a significant achievement and surpassing the Kyoto Protocol target of five percent.

“For the totality of Kyoto signatory countries, reductions of 15 percent are feasible should additional policies be planned and implemented,” de Boer said. Continue reading →

Climate Change Experts Warn World

19/11/2007 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, Science

“We are riding in an airplane with the bolts falling out while heading into a storm.”

By Stephen Leahy*

TORONTO, Nov 19 (Tierramérica) – In the end, governments accepted evidence from the world’s top scientists that climate change impacts could be abrupt and irreversible, and that they require urgent action.

“The threat is real,” said United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

“I have seen the impacts of climate change in Antarctica and the Amazon with my own eyes,” Ban said in a press conference in Valencia, Spain, at Saturday’s public unveiling of the Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“It is a very strong document. It sends a stark message that we face abrupt and irreversible impacts,” said Hans Verolme, director of the climate change programme for the international environmental group WWF.

Continue reading →

Human Cloning Likely Legal and Popular

18/11/2007 Stephen Culture, Global Issues and Perspectives, Health, News, Science

“Chances are clones will soon be sharing the planet with us.” — Brendan Tobin, Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland

By Stephen Leahy

Nov 13 (IPS) – As scientists master the technology to clone primates, some legal experts worry that human clones are no longer in the realm of science fiction, and wonder what legal rights they would have in the absence of an international ban on the practice.

More than a dozen animal species have been cloned in the last decade, including sheep, cows, dogs and pigs. Just last summer, a U.S. research team reported the first-ever cloning of a primate. A rhesus monkey embryo was cloned from adult cells and then grown to generate stem cells.

“Human clones are absolutely inevitable,” says Brendan Tobin, a barrister with the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, who researched a United Nations University (UNU) report on the issue.

Continue reading →

The Coming Oxygen Crisis?

07/11/200708/12/2007 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Forests, Global Issues and Perspectives, Health, OCEAN, Science, sustainability

“I have no idea how this will affect oxygen levels but it is something we should be thinking about.” — Bradley Cardinale, biologist, University of California,

By Stephen Leahy

Credit:NASA

The Amazon River and rainforest viewed from space.

Nov 6 (IPS) – Plants are the only source of oxygen on Earth — the only source. Studies around the world show that as plant species become extinct, natural habitats can lose up to half of their living plant biomass.

Half of the oxygen they produced is lost. Half of the water, food and other ecological services they provide are lost.

If a forest loses too many unique species, it can reduce the total number of plants in that forest by half, says Bradley Cardinale, lead author of the meta-analysis published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Those unique species are not replaceable. Nothing takes their place. It was a really shocking finding for me,” Cardinale, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told IPS. “That’s how much biodiversity matters.”

Continue reading →

Three Names the World Should Know

06/11/2007 Stephen CANADA, developing world, Global Issues and Perspectives, Media, News

By Stephen Leahy

Nov 5 (IPS) – “I am staying in Afghanistan to prove that women are brave and strong,” says Afghan journalist Farida Nekzad.

Nekzad has been threatened with death even as she attended the funeral of Zakia Zaki, a female radio broadcaster murdered by gunmen as she slept with her eight-month-old son at her home near Kabul in June.

“I was given asylum by some countries but I am not going to hide,” declared Nekzad, the current editor in chief of the Pajhwok News Agency, the sole independent news agency in Afghanistan.

“If I leave, the next woman journalist will become a target,” she told IPS.

Nekzad was in Toronto last Thursday to receive one of this year’s three International Press Freedom Awards from the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). CJFE promotes and defends free expression and press freedom and grants thousands of dollars to aid persecuted journalists in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.

Iraqi journalist Sahar Al-Haideri, shot and killed on Jun. 7 this year by four unidentified gunmen in Mosul, and Canadian journalist Ali Iman Sharmarke, who was killed by a remote-controlled landmine in Somalia Aug. 11, were the other award recipients. Continue reading →

Climate Change Shifts Into Fast Forward

29/10/200729/10/2007 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, OCEAN, Science

By Stephen Leahy

Oct 26 (IPS) – Global warming has been compared to a slow-moving train wreck, in which the passengers are blissfully unaware of the coming catastrophe.

With the shocking loss of the Arctic sea ice this summer and several new reports this week that oceans and tropical forests are now absorbing less of the world’s steadily rising carbon emissions, our collective train wreck appears to have already tipped into fast forward.

“Global warming is a big feature of our lives now. It is no longer something that only future generations will have to cope with,” said Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado.

The major ecosystems that absorb carbon emissions from the atmosphere are failing, and it is happening faster than anticipated, Scambos told IPS.

Continue reading →

Venezuelan Smuggling Opens Door to Blood Diamond Trade

25/10/2007 Stephen Africa, CANADA, economics, Global Issues and Perspectives, News blood diamonds, conflict diamonds, diamonds, kimberley process

“Crooks are taking Venezuelan diamonds out of the country and selling them to other crooks.“

In November, the Venezuelan government will report to an intergovernmental entity about the controls used to regulate diamond mining.

By Stephen Leahy

Oct 22 (Tierramérica).- Venezuela will have to explain its policies on mining and exporting diamonds at the next annual session of the Kimberley Process, an intergovernmental initiative to halt the use of the diamond industry to finance conflicts and civil wars.

The Venezuelan government has recognized that it is not easy to monitor its vast border, but assures that it intends to comply with the Kimberley Process, of which it is one of the three South American members, along with Brazil and Guyana.

Venezuela is not involved in the smuggling of the so-called conflict diamonds, or “blood diamonds”, uncut stones that in the past two decades were mined and trafficked to finance civil wars and illegal armed groups in countries like Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. Continue reading →

Ethanol: The Great Big Green Fraud

21/10/200714/08/2011 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, economics, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, Science, sustainability, water biofuel, Energy, European Union, Greenhouse gas, International Food Policy Research Institute, United States

“Subsidising biofuels is just about the dumbest way to go.” –– Todd Litman, director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute — Subsidies for 2007 est $13-$15 billion

…increasing biofuel production is a “total disaster” for starving people — Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

By Stephen Leahy

Oct 20 2007 (IPS)

A raft of new studies reveal European and American multibillion dollar support for biofuels is unsustainable, environmentally destructive and much more about subsidising agri-business corporations than combating global warming.

Not only do most forms of biofuel production do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, growing biofuel crops uses up precious water resources, increasing the size and extent of dead zones in the oceans, boosting use of toxic pesticides and deforestation in tropical countries, such studies say.

And biofuel, powered by billions of dollars in government subsidies, will drive food prices 20-40 percent higher between now and 2020, predicts the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.

“Fuel made from food is a dumb idea to put it succinctly,” says Ronald Steenblik, research director at the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Biofuel production in the U.S. and Europe is just another way of subsidising big agri-business corporations, Steenblik told IPS.

“It’s (biofuel) also a distraction from dealing with the real problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he asserts. Continue reading →