17June2008
Posted by rama under: Articles.
Global Warming Adding to Pollution and Over-Harvesting Impacts on the World’s Key Fishing Grounds Says New UNEP - “In Dead Water” - Report
Monaco/Nairobi, 22 February 2008 - Climate change is emerging as the latest threat to the world’s dwindling fish stocks a new report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) suggests.
At least three quarters of the globe’s key fishing grounds may become seriously impacted by changes in circulation as a result of the ocean’s natural pumping systems fading and falling they suggest.
These natural pumps, dotted at sites across the world including the Arctic and the Mediterranean, bring nutrients to fisheries and keep them healthy by flushing out wastes and pollution.
The impacts of rising emissions on the marine world are unlikely to end there. Higher sea surface temperatures over the coming decades threaten to bleach and kill up to 80 per cent of the globe’s coral reefs-major tourist attractions, natural sea defences and also nurseries for fish.
Meanwhile there is growing concern that carbon dioxide emissions will increase the acidity of seas and oceans. This in turn may impact calcium and shell-forming marine life including corals but also tiny ones such as planktonic organisms at the base of the food chain.
The findings come in a new rapid response report entitled “In Dead Water” which has for the first time mapped the multiple impacts of pollution; alien infestations; over-exploitation and climate change on the seas and oceans.
“The worst concentration of cumulative impacts of climate change with existing pressures of over-harvest, bottom trawling, invasive species infestations, coastal development and pollution appear to be concentrated in 10-15 per cent of the oceans,” says the report.
This 10-15 per cent of the oceans is far higher than had previously been supposed and is “concurrent with today’s most important fishing grounds” including the estimated 7.5 per cent deemed to be the most economically valuable fishing areas of the world, it adds.
The report, the work of UNEP scientists in collaboration with universities and institutes in Europe and the United States, was launched today during UNEP’s Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum taking place in Monaco.
It is the largest gathering of environment ministers since the climate convention conference in Indonesia just over two months ago where governments agreed the Bali Road Map aimed at delivering a deep and decisive climate regime for post 2012.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said:” The theme of the Governing Council is ‘Mobilizing Finance for the Climate Challenge for trillions of dollars can flow into climate-friendly energies and technologies if government’s can provide the right kind of enabling market mechanisms and fiscal incentives”.
“It is sometimes important to remind ourselves why we need to accelerate these transformations towards a Green Economy. In Dead Water has uniquely mapped the impact of several damaging and persistent stresses on fisheries. It also lays on top of these the likely impacts of climate change from dramatic alternations in ocean circulation affecting perhaps a three quarter of key fishing grounds up to the emerging concern of ocean acidification,” said Mr Steiner.
“Climate change threatens coastal infrastructure, food and water supplies and the health of people across the world. It is clear from this report and others that it will add significantly to pressures on fish stocks. This is as much a development and economic issue as it is an environmental one. Millions of people including many in developing countries derive their livelihoods from fishing while around 2.6 billion people get their protein from seafood,” he said.
The report comes in wake of findings issued last week by a team led by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis which estimates that over 40 per cent of the world’s oceans have been heavily impacted by humans and that only four per cent remain relatively pristine.
It also comes amid concern that sea bird chicks in the North Sea may be being choked after being fed on a diet of snake pipefish-a very bony species. Over the past five years snake pipefish numbers have boomed a meeting of the Zoological Society in London was told last week.
One reason for their sharp increase in numbers might be changes in ocean currents bringing the fish into North Sea waters, the experts suggest.
The new UNEP report has been compiled by researchers including ones at UNEP’s GRID Arendal centre; UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre and UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment.
It draws on a wide range of new and emerging science including the latest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-the 2,000 plus panel of scientists established by UNEP and the World Meteorological Organisation.
Other contributions have come from organizations and institutions including the University of Plymouth; the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research; the University of British Columbia; the Institute of Zoology; Princeton University; the University of Barcelona and the Sustainable Europe Research Institute.
In Dead Water Key Findings
- Half the world’s catch is caught along Continental shelves in an area of less than 7.5 per cent of the globe’s seas and oceans.
- An area of 10-15 per cent of the world’s seas and oceans cover most of the commercial fishing grounds.
- 80 per cent to 100 per cent of the world’s coral reefs may suffer annual bleaching events by 2080 under global warming scenarios.
- Those at particular risk are in the Western Pacific; the Indian Ocean; the Persian Gulf; the Middle East and in the Caribbean
- Over 90 per cent of the world’s temperate and tropical coasts will be heavily impacted by 2050. Over 80 per cent of marine pollution comes from the land. Marine areas at particular risk of increased pollution are Southeast and East Asia.
- Increasing concentrations of C02 in the atmosphere are likely to be mirrored by increasing acidification of the marine environment.
- Increasing acidification may reduce the availability of calcium carbonates in sea water, including a key one known as aragonite which is used by a variety of organisms for shell-building.
- Cold-water and deep water corals could be affected by acidification by 2050 and shell-building organisms throughout the Southern Ocean and into the sub-Arctic Pacific Ocean by 2100.
- Climate change may slow down the ocean thermohaline circulation and thus the continental shelf “flushing and cleaning” mechanisms, known as dense shelf water cascading,over the next 100 years. These processes are crucial to water quality and nutrient cycling and deep water production in at least 75 per cent of the world’s major fishing grounds.
- Dead zones, area of de-oxygenated water, are increasing as a result of pollution from urban and agriculture areas. There are an estimated 200 temporary or permanent ‘dead zones’ up from around 150 in 2003.
- Up to 80 per cent of the world’s primary fish catch species are exploited beyond or close to their harvesting capacity. Advances in technology, alongside subsidies, means the world’s fishing capacity is 2.5 times bigger that that needed to sustainably harvest fisheries.
- Bottom trawling is among the most damaging and unsustainable fishing practices at the scales often seen today
- Alien invasive species, which can out-compete and dislodge native ones, are increasingly associated with the polluted, overharvested and damaged fishing grounds.
The report shows that the concentration of ‘aliens’ matches with some precision the world’s major shipping routes.
Christian Nellemann, who headed up the rapid response team that compiled the report, said: “We are already seeing evidence from a number of studies that increasing sea temperatures are causing changes in the distribution of marine life”.
Some of these changes are being found from the Continuous Plankton Recorder survey of the Northeast Atlantic.
Warmer water copepod species or crustaceans have moved northward by around 1,000km during the later half of the 20th century with the patterns continuing into the 21st century.
“Further evidence of this warming signal is seen in the appearance of a Pacific planktonic plant in the Northwest Atlantic for this first time in 800,000 years by transfer across the top of Canada due to the rapid melting of the Arctic in 1998,” said Dr. Nellemann. “We are getting more and more alarming signals of dramatic changes in the oceans. It is like turning a big tanker around. Our ability to change course and reduce emissions in the near future will be paramount to success”.
The link between healthy and productive fishing grounds and ocean circulation or ‘dense shelf water cascading’ is in some ways only now emerging.
Three years ago the Hotspot Ecosystem Research on the Margins of European Seas of which UNEP is part, documented such a phenomenon in the Gulf of Lions in the north-western Mediterranean.
A quantity of water equal to two years-worth of the river discharge from all rivers flowing into the Mediterranean is, in four months, transported from the Gulf of Lions to the deep Western Mediterranean via the Cap de Creyus canyon.
It has a critical impact on the population of the heavily harvested deep sea shrimp Aristeus antennatus, the crevette rouge, by bringing food that in turn triggers a sharp increase in young shrimp resulting in plentiful catches three to five years after the ‘cascading’ event.
“Imagine what will happen if climate change slows down or stops these natural food transport and “flushing” effects in waters that are often already polluted, heavily fished, damaged and stressed”, said Dr. Nellemann. “We are gambling with our food supply”.
Stefan Hain of UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, said it was critical that existing stresses were also addressed too in order to conserve fish stocks and coral reefs in a climate constrained world.
He said there was growing evidence that coral reefs recover from bleaching better in cleaner, less polluted waters.
Dr Hain cited monitoring of corals around the main Seychelles island of Mahé which were among corals world-wide that suffered from the high sea surface temperatures of the late 1990s. Here coral reefs recovery rates have varied between five to 70 per cent.
“Coral reefs recovering faster are generally those living in Marine Protected Areas and coastal waters where the levels of pollution, dredging and other kinds of human-induced disturbance are considered low,” he said.
17June2008
Posted by rama under: Articles.
Brooklin, Canada, 17 Mar (IPS/Stephen Leahy) — Glaciers, the world’s freshwater towers, continue their record-breaking meltdown, a new UN report shows.
The average rate of thinning and melting more than doubled between 2004 and 2006, reports the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), a centre based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight,” said Wilfried Haeberli, director of the WGMS.
The accelerated glacier meltdown is a clear indicator that climate change has taken hold and millions if not billions will be affected, warned Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
Glaciers feed the rivers that people are completely dependent on - 360 million on the Ganges in India and 388 million on the Yangtze in China alone. Reduced water or irregular water flows will make it more difficult to grow crops in these regions and other parts of the world.
Rapidly melting glaciers also produce floods and raise sea levels. On average, there is one metre of fresh water in every 1.1 metres of glacier ice.
The Service has been tracking the fate of glaciers for over a century. Continuous data series of annual mass balance, expressed as thickness change, are available for 30 reference glaciers since 1980.
The ice loss in 2006 was particularly high, nearly triple that of 2005. Overall since 1980, glaciers have experienced an average net loss of 11.5 metres in ice thickness. Such losses are clearly visible in many parts of the world.
Some of the most dramatic shrinking has taken place in Europe, with Norway’s Breidalblikkbrea glacier thinning by close to 3.1 metres during 2006 alone. Recent studies indicate that most of the South American glaciers from Colombia to Chile and Argentina are drastically reducing their volume at an accelerated rate.
Nearly all glaciers in the US are also in decline, says William Bidlake, a glacier expert with the US Geological Survey in Washington State. “There’s been an overall decline since the 1950s,” Bidlake told IPS.
As temperatures rise, glaciers retreat up the mountain to higher and cooler elevations. “We’re seeing new real estate that hasn’t seen the light of day for thousands of years,” he said.
The mountain snow-pack is more important for water flows in the US but in drought years, it is the glaciers that keep water in many rivers during the hot summer months. As glaciers shrink, they have less water to supply those rivers.
This year’s cold winter in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere will do little to halt the glacier vanishing act, said Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University in the US. “Glaciers don’t melt in the winter,” Alley said in an interview.
The colder and snowier-than-usual weather has led some to suggest that the rate of climate change is slowing. But even if a few months are cooler or this year is cooler overall than last, the trend over the past 30 years makes it absolutely clear that temperatures are climbing, he said.
Glaciers will continue to melt. Continuing losses on the massive Greenland ice sheet has the potential to raise sea levels seven metres, Alley said.
Everyone should sit and take notice of the see-it-with-your-own-eyes glacial meltdown, said Steiner in a statement.
However, an important meeting between the world’s top 20 emitters of greenhouse gases ended in acrimony Sunday in Japan. Once again, developed nations failed to find agreement with developing nations on how to curb emissions.
These so-called G20 countries that include leading industrialised nations plus large developing countries such as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia are responsible for about 80% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
There is but 18 months until the 2009 UN Climate Convention meeting in Copenhagen, where governments must agree on a decisive new emissions reduction treaty.
Most scientists around the world say that this treaty must result in the reduction of emissions by 25% to 40% by 2020 to have a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Without that international agreement in 2009, “like the glaciers, our room for manoeuvre and the opportunity to act may simply melt away,” said Steiner. +
8May2008
Posted by rama under: Articles.
Shanti, Shanti, Shanti
By : Gede Prama
It is very unlikely that the great physician Albert Einstein ever expected that the development of science and technology would be as vast as how it is happening now. However, it is the law of nature that there shall never be any improvement without sacrifice. In this respect, the progress of science and technology takes a great cost indeed.
Human’s capability of science and technology utilization advances greatly followed by an even greater capacity of violent formulation. Referring to the outcome of a research in The Social Construction of Technological Systems which was conducted by some experts in the particular field (as Bijker, Hughes, Pinch <ed>), it is identified that even though human initially developed science and technology in order to provide assistance, presently we are facing difficulties in adjusting to our own discoveries.
All aspects of life (religion included) experience trouble in responding to the immensity of science and technology’s advancement. Observing the principal countries in the science and technology development such as the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany and France, one will distinguish that there are numerous social indicators (like depression, mental disorders, war and conflict) those signify that science and technology are not only fail to provide solution to those indicators for they even give birth to further sophistications.
The situation is similar to the race between the development of pesticide invention and the evolution of its target. The harder science and technology struggle to terminate them, the more bugs with advance and complicated immunity emerge. The radical shifting of climate, global warming, and never-ending conflicts are only a few examples among the science and technology’s lacks of competence in this issue.
In the midst of these ineptitudes let there be a time when it is not science and technology those speak but silence instead. In this matter, the author’s intention is not to alter the common order and definitely not to lecture, but solely to share fragments of contemplation.
Perfection in Nature
When J. Krishnamurti presented the idea to return to the children’s innocence of vision (therefore his masterpiece was entitled Freedom from the Known), a lot of Westerners frowned their eyebrows as a sign of bewilderment. Some even suspected the matter as a step back in spiritual evolution.
People definitely own the very right to have whatever opinion as they wish. As free as a butterfly perches lightly on a flower and as liberate as an eagle flies high in the sky. A soul frequently experience union with nature will recognize the perfection that lies within it.
Coconut trees grow on sunny beaches while Casuarina remain fresh on the cool mountains. Fishes swim the water, wolves roam the woods. During the pour of a cold rain, chickens take shelter under the trees while ducks plunge their selves into ponds. All are perfect and happy in their natural inhabitant. No words, analysis, judgment nor comparison needed for the only thing required is the effort to see things as they are. Whoever might flow perfectly in this nature, he or she has become the perfection itself.
By doing a more profound study about nature, one shall witness that everything flow without grievance. Every day and night, no matter how scorching or freezing the temperature is, nature accepts all seasons without any melancholy. The outer performance of nature might seem weak and submissive for the ignorance, while the seers may behold in wonder how the inner side of nature is magnificently firm in its frankness.
Trees, in particular, are extraordinary models. Eons before the mortal prophets taught about the sincerity within silence, trees had been practicing the very attitude in absolute wordlessness. Therefore, Kahlil Gibran admired trees for they might serve as the symbols of the recluses those are stepping toward the light in perfect silence and sincerity.
An Australian reputed architect, Andrian Snodgrass, wrote in his profound masterpiece The Symbolism of the Stupa that the stupa and pagoda of the Buddhists’ and the Balinese’ meru share the same point in which they are intending to demonstrate how the life of an ascetic is similar to a tree: walking toward the light in flawless serenity and wholeheartedness. Ramana Maharsi, a divine recluse in Arunachala hill (India), termed this journey as Dhaksinamurti (Shiva teachings in silence); that is Shiva that might only be greeted in silence.
By this point of view, then it is outstandingly wonderful that the Prophet Mohammad termed the summit of His inner voyage by the word Islam (the absolute capitulation / complete sincerity before God). The same greatness also reflected by Jesus Christ whose inner expression was so full of loving-kindness even when His physical body was experiencing the sorrow of crucifixion.
This kind of supreme submissiveness is more likely to be achieved when there is no more desire left, no more lamenting the past nor fearing the future. The only matter remains then is a perfect sincerity in this eternal present-time that belongs to a tranquil and silent spirit.
In relation to this subject, Nagarjuna once stated that: ‘One who is in harmony with emptiness is in harmony with all things’. This is the cause for Simpkins and Simpkins conclusion that ‘emptiness is marvelous’.
Sakyamuni Buddha was once intensely questioned by His disciple during a walk in a forest. Buddha then took a handful of leaves and asked whether the leaves in His hand or those scattered on the ground were greater in number. Obviously, the quantity of leaves in His hand was nothing compared to the ones spread on the earth. Words are similar to the leaves in one’s hand: they are limited and often become the sources of arguments that spoil the journey.
This might be the reason of numerous Balinese’ difficulty in touching (realizing) the Parama Shanti (the supreme peace) as the finale of their worship. A word always leads to its antonym. “Wrong” is contradicted to “right”, “failure” to “success”, “divinity” to “impurity”, and there come the clamors into life.
The seekers who dare to bring words back to the original position as instruments, and then guides their selves with the tree-like qualities during their inner wondering shall return to the children’s purity of vision and reach the supreme understanding of dzogchen (tantra) that there is nothing positive to accept nor anything negative to reject. They will achieve the condition termed by Suzuki Roshi as Zen mind beginner’s mind. Moreover, they are going to experience the existence of shanti, shanti, shanti (peace, peace, peace) within their spirit.
It should be understood that the peace mentioned here is not the one that might be contradicted to chaos, as well as it is not the kind of peace that may be followed by attachment and suffering upon its departure. Instead, this peace is generated by the perfection of all in their nature. The center point of Pura Besakih Bali (between kiwa and tengen) is termed as Parama Shunya (the supreme nothingness). Buddha referred to it as Shunyata. In Rohit Mehta’s words (The Call of the Upanishads), there is silence in chaos as well as there is chaos within silence.
These elaborations conclude that nothingness is the real/ultimate self. For those with nothingness alone dwells in their spirit, the only purpose of the cycle of life is to give as they realize that liberation is the act of giving itself.
The writes wishes the best for all readers in this Nyepi Day and Saka New Year 1930. May shanti expels darkness (as ignorance, hatred and greed) from Bali.
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Gede Prama works in Jakarta and lives in the hillside of Tajun Village, North Bali.
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