Partly blaming global warming for their alarming decline, Asian delegates at UN climate change talks have renewed calls to protect the region’s huge stock of coral reefs.
Six Southeast Asian and Pacific nations have launched a joint initiative to save the ’coral triangle’ which contains more than half the world’s reefs, considered building blocks for marine life, AFP reported.
“I regret to say that marine resources of our countries and our regions are threatened by climate change, destructive fishing and pollution,“ said Freddy Numberi, Indonesia’s Minister of Maritime Affairs.
The countries aim to establish a network of protected marine zones, to decrease wear and tear on the reefs caused by the fishing industry and to promote eco-tourism.
More than 600 species of coral--76 percent of those known--and more than 3,000 species of plants and fish live in the waters encompassing the Philippines, East Timor, part of Indonesia and Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
“The coral triangle is the place for corals in the world, it’s the global center, it’s the Amazon of the seas,“ said J.E.N. Veron, former chief scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
However experts say the greatest threat is from rising sea temperatures blamed on global warming.
“We are precipitating a mass extinction of absolutely everything,“ Veron said. “Corals are the first really big ecosystem to be wiped out by climate change.“
Hotter seas bleach and weaken the algae that give the underwater sea life its vibrant color, and make it more susceptible to a mystery disease killing off the reefs.
The coral bleaching and die-off have been chronicled by scientists around the world in recent years, though some researchers differ over whether there is a direct link with global warming.
Lida Pet Soede, head of the WWF’s (World Wide Fund) coral program, said the results are not in doubt with corals whitening, then dying and finally falling apart.
“The effects are there and it is quite dramatic,“ she said.
The breakdown of coral reefs, known as a key foundation for sea life, will have a large impact.
“The fish need structures to hide, to eat and to reproduce,“ Soede said.
Marine resources in the coral triangle provide a living for 120 million people. One-third of the world’s tuna catches come from the area.
Delegates from nearly 190 nations are gathered in Indonesia’s Bali island for a December 3-14 summit tasked with laying the groundwork for a new treaty to tackle global warming beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol’s first phase expires.

Emperor penguins

Antarctica’s penguin population has slumped because of global warming as melting ice has destroyed nesting sites and reduced their sources of food, a WWF report said.
The Antarctic peninsula is warming five times faster than the average in the rest of the world, affecting four penguin species--the Emperor penguin, the largest and the grandest in the world, the Gentoo, Chinstrap and Adelie, it said, reported Reuters.
“The Antarctic penguins already have a long march behind them,“ Anna Reynolds, deputy director of WWF’s (World Wide Fund) Global Climate Change Program, said in a statement at the Bali climate talks.
“Now it seems these icons of the Antarctic will have to face an extremely tough battle to adapt to the unprecedented rate of climate change.“
The report, “Antarctic Penguins and Climate Change“, said sea ice covered 40 percent less area than it did 26 years ago off the West Antarctic Peninsula, leading to a fall in stocks of krill, the main source of food for the Chinstrap and Gentoo penguins. In the northwestern coast of the Antarctic peninsula, where warming has been fastest, populations of Adelie penguins have dropped by 65 percent over the past 25 years, it said.
The number of Chinstraps decreased by 30 to 66 percent in some colonies, as less food made it more difficult for the young to survive, while the Emperor penguin has seen some of its colonies halve in size over the past half a century.
Warmer temperatures and stronger winds mean the penguins had to raise their chicks on increasingly thinner sea ice which tends to break off early while many eggs and chicks have been blown away before they were able to survive on their own.
Scientists have predicted that global temperatures could rise sharply this century, raising world sea levels and bringing more extreme weather.

Saving the world’s remaining tigers will require as much as $500 million a year, but average annual international funding only comes to $5 million, a conservation group said.
Most of this was given to non-governmental organizations, while governments of 12 countries with tiger populations were expected to come up with funding themselves, S. C. Dey, secretary-general of Global Tiger Forum, told reporters, AP said.
While Russia and India get up to 20 percent of money they spend annually on tiger conservation from international funding, for other countries it was as low as 1 percent, Dey said after the release of action plans for 12 countries with wild tiger populations.
“As the world’s wild tigers have dwindled to as few as 3,000, it is time for a concerted effort to save the big cat from extinction,“ a Wildlife Trust of India statement said.
Fred O’ Regan, president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said the tiger was facing one of the worst periods of its existence.
“Having these national action plans in one document will make it easier for conservation organizations around the world to understand the requirements of range countries,“ he said in a statement.
The 12 countries where tigers live in the wild are Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam.
While Nepal and Bhutan did not require much international funding, countries like Russia, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia each need up to $20 million annually for their efforts to save the tiger, Dey said.
India alone needs $200 million to relocate thousands of people from the vicinity of tiger reserves, Dey said.
“China has been demanding compensation for stopping commercial farming of tigers for their parts,“ he said. Tiger parts are prized in traditional Chinese medicine.
In India, the wild tiger population is roughly half of what it was estimated to be five years ago, a government study has found.
India’s tiger population may be in the range of 1,300-1,500, according to a survey by the Wildlife Institute of India. The institute’s last study, in 2001-2002, estimated 3,642 tigers were left in India’s jungles and reserves.
Wildlife experts have long warned that poaching and encroachment on the big cats’ habitat has savaged their population, which a century ago was believed to number in the tens of thousands.

Parents who have more than two children should be charged a lifelong climate change tax to offset the effect of their extra greenhouse gas emissions, an Australian medical expert has proposed.
They should pay 5,000 Australian dollars (US $4,400) a head for each extra child and up to 800 dollars every year thereafter, according to the plan published in the Medical Journal of Australia, AFP reported.
In contrast, contraceptives and sterilization procedures would be eligible for carbon credits, suggested Professor Barry Walters at the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth.
“Every family choosing to have more than a defined number of children should be charged a carbon tax that would fund the planting of enough trees to offset the carbon cost generated by a new human being,“ he wrote. Walters, an obstetrician, made his proposal in a letter in which he criticized the government’s payment of a 4,000 dollar “baby bonus“ in a bid to boost the birth rate in this sparsely-populated country of 21 million people.
Paying parents extra for every baby fuelled more emissions and contributed to global warming, he said, adding that the bonus should be replaced with a “baby levy“ in line with the “polluter pays“ principle.
And Professor Garry Egger, director of the New South Wales Center for Health Promotion and Research, agreed.
“Population remains crucial to all environmental considerations,“ he wrote. “The debate (around population control) needs to be reopened as part of a second ecological revolution.“

A dolphin jumps out of the water in the Persian Gulf, IranÕs Hormuzgan province.

Sumatran Orangutans

Indonesia launched a program to save its dwindling orangutan population, the last of Asia’s great apes, from the brink of extinction by protecting its vast tropical rain forests.
Orangutans once ranged the region, but the shaggy brown primate’s population in Indonesia has been decreasing rapidly as its habitat in Borneo and Sumatra has been disrupted by illegal logging, forest fires and the illegal pet trade, wrote Reuters.
A recent WWF (World Wide Fund) report said climate change would add to the pressure already caused by human-induced activities such as massive conversion of forests into plantations by reducing the orangutans’ food stock.
Thousands will be driven out of forests into villages and plantations to look for food.
“In the last 35 years about 50,000 orangutans are estimated to have been lost as their habitats shrank. If this continues, this majestic creature will likely face extinction by 2050,“ President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said at the launch of an orangutan conservation plan at the climate talks in Bali
(Dec. 3-14).
As part of the orangutan conservation plan developed by the forestry ministry and NGOs, Indonesia will aim to stabilize orangutan populations and habitat from now until 2017 and return orangutans housed in rehabilitation centers to the wild by 2015.
A 2004 survey showed there were around 60,000 orangutans left in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra. Some ecologists say the country has lost 3,000 orangutans a year since the 1970s and the species could eventually become extinct.
Indonesia is one of few countries that still has swathes of rainforests left, and is pushing a proposal to make emission cuts from protecting forests eligible for carbon trading.
Even though it has lost an estimated 70 percent of its original frontier forest, it still has a total forest area of more than 225 million acres, with a host of exotic plants and animals waiting to be discovered.
Indonesia’s forests are a massive natural store of carbon, but environmentalists say rampant cutting and burning of trees to feed the pulp, timber and palm oil sectors has made the country the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmentalists warned that South Korea’s southwest coast could take years to recover from the country’s worst oil spill, as nearly 20,000 people worked to halt the spread of the sludge.
Troops, police and volunteers used buckets and spades to clean some 150 kilometers (94 miles) of coastline, known for its pristine beaches, rich marine farming areas and a resting place for migratory birds, said Sung Nam-Cheon, an official at the disaster centre in Taean county, AFP said.
About 10,500 tons of crude leaked into the Yellow Sea when a drifting barge carrying a construction crane smashed into an anchored oil tanker on Dec. 7.
“The ecosystem has been devastated at coastal areas in Taean,“ said Chohan Hye-Jin, spokeswoman for the Korean Federation for the Environmental Movement. “We simply don’t know how to cope with it as the oil is still spreading.“
Lee Jae-Hak of the Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute said, “The damage is so immense that we can hardly predict how long it will take to recover.“

The Netherlands wants to redraw the map of Europe--literally. Dubai has built Palm Island. Now the world leaders in land reclamation are considering an island in the shape of a tulip to fight overcrowding and shield the coastline from the rising sea.
Supporters of the scheme say it will give Dutch companies a chance to showcase water management skills that are increasingly in demand due to global warming, but critics say the plan will be prohibitively expensive and harm delicate ecosystems, Reuters said.
While a poll in October by research company TNS NIPO with the Red Cross showed the Dutch are more afraid of flooding than a terrorist attack, many have a strong faith in Dutch expertise and technology to protect them from the water.
The Dutch parliament has asked a commission on coastal development to look into the idea of building islands in the North Sea that could be used for housing, farming or a nature reserve, while at the same time helping to protect the coast.
“People live on top of each other in the Netherlands,“ said Christian Democrat politician Joop Atsma, who sponsored a parliamentary motion on building in the North Sea. “We are hungry for land. A huge area is needed for building.“
Atsma says high land prices threaten the country’s position as the world’s third biggest exporter of agricultural products, and make a 100,000 hectare island potentially worth 10 billion euros ($14.69 billion)--enough of a return to fund the project.
The Netherlands--literally the Low Countries--has a long history of pioneering technology to help it claw back land from the sea and fight recurrent flooding.
Scientists expect global warming to raise sea levels along the Dutch coast by up to 85 centimeters in the next century, and cause more severe storms that could make rivers more likely to flood.