Wangari Maathai

Rich countries have a moral responsibility to help Africa mitigate the effects of climate change, Kenya’s Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai said.
“For the global South, especially Africa, environmental issues are not a luxury,“ the environmental activist said in an article in Kenya’s Business Daily newspaper on the final day of climate change talks in Bali, Indonesia, on Dec. 14, Reuters said.
“Arresting the world’s warming and protecting and restoring our natural systems are issues of life and death for much of the world’s population.“
The first African woman and ’green’ activist to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Maathai said the industrialized world needed to work with southern hemisphere nations to stop the devastation linked to global warming.
Maathai said Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions could not be compared with those of industrialized nations, yet it was Africa that would be crippled by global warming.
“Will we watch as catastrophic disruption to Earth’s environment and her people occurs on an unimaginable scale? Or will we change course and work together to mitigate the effects of global warming?“ she said in a challenge to those in Bali.
“As major polluters, industrialized countries have a moral responsibility to assist Africa and the rest of the developing economies by sharing technology to reduce our vulnerability and increase our capacity to adapt to global warming.“
The 190-nation talks held in Bali seek to launch two years of negotiations for a global agreement to fight climate change, to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after its first phase ends in 2012.
Maathai was famed for leading the struggle to save Kenya’s forests from illegal land grabbing.
She now leads a global campaign to plant a billion trees which will soak up 250 million tons of carbon dioxide warming the atmosphere.

Australian researchers have begun an aerial count of whales in the Antarctic ahead of the yearly Japanese hunt as Australia’s government mulls a legal challenge to halt the yearly slaughter.
A team from the new Australian Center for Applied Marine Mammal Science will spend several weeks flying over 150,000 square km (58,000 square miles) of pack ice off eastern Antarctica to count Minke whales from the air, reported Silobreaker.com.
“Ships can’t survey through the ice. On a big icebreaker, it’s a bit like trying to count birds in the jungle by driving a bulldozer through--they scatter,“ expedition leader Nick Gales, from the Australian Antarctic Division, told the Age newspaper.
Japan’s whaling fleet plans to hunt 935 Minke whales, 50 fin whales and, for the first time in 40 years, 50 humpback whales for research over the Antarctic summer. The fleet is already on its way south followed by anti-whaling activists.
Humpbacks were hunted nearly to extinction until protected by the International Whaling Commission in 1966.
Australia is a strong opponent of whaling and the new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, will decide next week whether to send a navy ship and long-range aircraft south to gather evidence for a case against Japan in the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Rudd’s center-left Labor government has flagged sending warships beyond Australian waters into the country’s self-proclaimed Antarctic territory, which is not recognized by other nations and which includes a whale sanctuary.
Japan’s fisheries agency, confident its whaling rights will be confirmed, has challenged any country to take it to the court for a binding judgment.

By 2011, India will generate 470,000 tons of e-waste.

India is piling up mountains of electronic rubbish as consumers snap up the latest gizmos and firms upgrade computer systems, raising fears the nation is headed for a toxic-waste crisis.
Manufacturers are introducing new models of mobile phones, televisions and computers to entice cashed-up consumers to upgrade, with no policies or infrastructure in place to recycle often toxic electronic scrap, AFP reported.
By 2011, the world’s second-most populous nation will generate 470,000 tons of “e-waste“, up from 330,000 tons this year, the Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology said in a recent study.
“The situation could assume alarming proportions and therefore it is high time we pay serious attention to the issue,“ said Vinnie Mehta, who heads the association, or MAIT, said.
India needs a policy that “identifies and defines the roles of each stakeholder including the vendors, the users, the recyclers and the regulator for environmentally friendly recycling,“ Mehta said.
The figure for electronic waste generated this year is more than twice the previous official estimate. India also “imports“ an estimated 50,000 tons of e-waste such as obsolete television sets and mobile handsets that are refurbished and resold, said the survey.
Environmentalists say the figure could be higher because the survey does not take into account villages where two-thirds of India’s 1.1-billion people live and which are attracting companies such as mobile-phone makers.
“The way people are discarding their electronics, toxic garbage is going to be a big crisis,“ said Ramapati Kumar, a campaigner for the environmental group Greenpeace, in Bangalore.
“The problem is that it releases toxic chemicals--people burn electronic items to recover valuable materials, impacting health and environment,“ Kumar said. Many components of electronic equipment are toxic and not bio-degradable.
Slum dwellers who scavenge rubbish for a living burn wires in the open to extract re-saleable copper and soak circuit boards in acid baths to extract copper and other materials next to neighborhood drains.
India’s electronics market will expand to 363-billion dollars by 2015, from about 30-billion dollars now, according to an estimate by the Bangalore-based India Semiconductor Association.
India is the fastest growing market for mobile phones, with handset sales reaching 24.5-million units during the three months ended September, according to market research firm Gartner.

Waterfall in Iran's Golestan province.

World’s sea levels could rise twice as high this century as UN climate scientists have predicted, according to researchers who looked at what happened more than 100,000 years ago, the last time Earth got this hot.
Experts working on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have suggested a maximum 21st century sea level rise--a key effect of global climate change--of about 32 inches, Reuters reported.
But researchers said in a study that the maximum could be twice that, or 64 inches.
They made the estimate by looking at the so-called interglacial period, some 124,000 to 119,000 years ago, when Earth’s climate was warmer than it is now due to a different configuration of the planet’s orbit around the sun.
That was the last time sea levels reached up to 20 feet (6 meters) above where they are now, fueled by the melting of the ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica.
The researchers say their study is the first robust documentation of how quickly sea levels rose to that level.

Head of the International Energy Agency in an interview with a German magazine urged world politicians to take bolder, if unpopular, action to curb CO2 emissions to fight climate change.
Nobuo Tanaka told Der Spiegel magazine that humanity was on track to discharge about 42 billion tons of CO2 per year in 2030, up from 27 billion tons, and that would lead to global temperature rises.
“That is a scenario which must not be allowed to become a reality,“ Tanaka was quoted as saying in the weekly magazine, Reuters reported.
Politicians must find ways to put a price on CO2 emissions to spur industry to develop efficient technologies, he said.
“Lawmakers will need a lot of courage. They must make clear to their people that in the medium term, it is the cheaper way,“ said Tanaka. “It’s risky for politicians but they must do it.“
The IEA advises 26 industrialized countries on energy policy.
“(Putting a price on emissions) could be done via an energy tax, pollution rights trading or other measures, but without a price for emissions, new technologies will not be developed.“
The deposition and storage of CO2 from power plants will only be economic if the price for a ton of CO2 emissions is heading towards $50, he said.
On Saturday, nearly 200 nations agreed to launch negotiations on a new deal to battle global warming at UN-led talks in Bali, Indonesia.
The agreement followed a last-minute reversal by the United States.

China’s government is investigating reports that villagers were persuaded to hunt down giant pandas and trade their pelts, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
A spokesman for the State Forestry Administration told Xinhua that local forestry police had detected several cases of such illegal activities around Ya’an City in the southwestern province of Sichuan.
“We have sent a working group to supervise the investigations and we will prosecute anyone involved,“ Cao Qingyao said, according to the agency dispatch.
Citing a report carried in China’s Nanfang Weekend newspaper, Xinhua said mysterious buyers of panda fur had been persuading villagers to hunt and kill the endangered species.
The pelt of a panda could fetch up to 500,000 yuan ($68,000), a massive draw to villagers who earn less than 3,000 yuan a year, Xinhua said, citing the Nanfang report.
There are about 1,590 pandas living in the wild, most in the mountains of southwestern China. The Ya’an reserve is home to about 300 wild pandas.

More than 4,000 ancient trees have been recorded in the UK in the last six months.

Maps more than 200 years old are being used to help find and protect Britain’s natural treasure house of ancient trees.
Historical maps help reveal how landscapes once looked when vast swathes of the country were covered by forest.
As well as showing how much woodland Britain has lost, they can also help pinpoint the ancient survivors, Telegraph.co.uk said.
The Woodland Trust, the UK’s leading woodland conservation charity, launched the Ancient Tree Hunt last summer to find, record and preserve oldest trees.
The project aims to create a database of at least 100,000 ancient trees by 2011 and is relying heavily on the public to scour their own areas for suitable candidates.
More than 4,000 ancient trees have been recorded and verified since the launch of the project six months ago.
Now the Trust has teamed up with digital mapping company Landmark Information Group, to provide historical maps so tree sites can be plotted online.
The maps reveal isolated ancient trees which have been left behind as the boundaries of parks and estates have shifted over time.
Nikki Williams, Ancient Tree Hunt project manager, said: “These wonderful maps are helping us identify some of the best places to search for remaining ancient trees.“
Ancient trees also provide a home to thousands of species of plants and animals, including many rare and threatened species.
As the trees get older, they develop holes, nooks and crannies, as well as dead and rotting wood, providing perfect homes for insects and bats.