The environment in the news friday, 23 June 2006

K.C. Reddy Committee

The Bill also indicates the splitting up of the BMICP into two independent components - the construction of the toll roads by the State government, and the development of the townships by the town planning authority concerned. It also indicates the formation of a compensation determination tribunal headed by a retired High Court Judge, and the setting up of a streamlining committee headed by the Chief Secretary to oversee utilisation of funds and do a review of lands that were acquired under the KIADB Act for various economic and industrial activities but remain unutilised and direct reversion of such land to the State government for transfer to the land bank for auction.

Not true, says Ashok Kheny. He said the Supreme Court had directed that the BMICP, being an integrated infrastructure development project and not merely a highway project, "may require the acquisition of land and transfer of land even far away from the main alignment of the road". What he did not say is that the court also ruled that the acquisition should arise "from the terms of the FWA".

Consortium and committees

Subsequently, the Supreme Court, while upholding the quashing of the K.C. Reddy Committee, did not allow NICE's plea that it had to be given the 2,450 acres that the Reddy Committee had identified as excess. It also did not allow NICE's plea to sell land or undertake commercial activity in and around Bangalore, or to regularise agreements it had entered into subsequent to the FWA.

There is an environmental angle as well to the project, which also brought out the inconsistency in the government's policy on land acquisition. In December 2005, after initially stating that there was no rare, endangered or unique flora and fauna and securing in-principle approval from the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) for diverting 4.05 hectares of land in the Handigundi Reserve Forest for the carving of a Buddha statue on an ancient 1,050-foot (315-metre) rock, the State changed its views in June 2005. Claiming that there was indeed a large variety of flora and fauna, including endangered species of birds and mammals, the State government requested the MoEF to withdraw the permission accorded for the statue.

There are other environmental issues as well. According to Leo Saldanha of the Environment Support Group (ESG), NICE has violated many of the environmental conditions. "Stone crushers have been set up on government land without the requisite permission; the Hemmigepura tank has been destroyed partly by locating a crusher there; in many instances NICE has not bothered to protect the entry and exit points of village roads thereby denying villagers access; at Kommaghatta (south of Bangalore), the Ramasandra tank has been destroyed since the NICE road goes right through it."

"People are going to work, live and celebrate on the expressway": This could be the new mantra for the promoters of the BMICP. But given the criticism and legal hurdles that have plagued the project over the last decade, the celebrations may have to wait a while longer.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20060630002504000.htm
'WIN ON PAPER' ONLY?

Japan, other prowhalers gain momentum

FRIGATE BAY, St. Kitts (AP) The annual battle over commercial whaling ended Tuesday with Japan and other prowhaling nations edging closer toward their goal of resuming commercial hunts, amid accusations of vote-buying and bullying from both sides of the debate.

As delegates to the International Whaling Commission left the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, many agreed Japan and its allies had scored a victory -- at least a symbolic one -- at the annual conference.

"This was a historic vote," Joji Morishita, a spokesman for the Japanese delegation, said of the resolution. "This means the IWC can go back to managing whales and not just protecting them."

Japan and Iceland hunt whales under the auspices of scientific research, and Norway ignores the 1986 ban altogether.

As the meeting ended, Japan planned a meeting of prowhaling nations early next year to help consolidate its gains and move toward gaining the 75 percent majority necessary to overturn the ban.

"They showed that they are equally strong as a voting bloc as the antiwhaling side," said Eugene Lapointe, an expert on sustainable resource management who attended the conference.

The gathering also showed that the world remains bitterly divided over whaling. Small nations that supported Japan grumbled about what they perceived as bullying by conservationists and governments that support whale preservation efforts.
Opponents meanwhile accused Japan of buying support by paying the dues of friendly nations and providing more than $ 100 million in aid over the past five years to the six Caribbean nations that backed the resolution.
"It took 15 years for Japan to achieve a simple majority, and they invested heavily in it," said New Zealand Conservation Minister Chris Carter.
As delegates debated administrative issues Tuesday, police arrested 10 protesters from Greenpeace who had tried to place cardboard whale tails in the sand outside the conference as a memorial to the 863 whales killed by Japan in the past year.

Earlier, the government of St. Kitts -- which supports the resumption of commercial whaling -- banned the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise from entering its territory.

Conservationists had argued that the six nations that authored the prohunting resolution -- Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda and St. Lucia -- should embrace whale watching instead of hunting to help their tourism-dependent economies.
Antiwhaling members of the commission noted that this year's session wasn't a complete win for Japan, which failed to gain passage of a measure to resume whaling off its coast.

The Japanese also lost a vote to allow secret ballots, which they had hoped would allow nations to support their cause without fear of repercussions.

"But on all substantive issues, they lost."

The Japan Times: Thursday, June 22, 2006

Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - Nick Galvin, June 8, 2006,

Rainforest canopy ... brazilian mahogany ceilings are a feature in this home by Michael Robilliard, which also used sustainably harvested malas wood from Papua New Guinea for the floor.

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Choosing different species can reduce the sale of illegally harvested timber.

When Rodney Hayward addresses a new woodworking class at ANU's School of Art, the students could perhaps be forgiven for thinking they had strayed into a philosophy or ethics class.

"We make sure the first thing the students understand is that timber is not acquired in a supermarket or is some sort of sterile material that comes from a mysterious source," he says. "The material comes from a living organism that has probably been killed and other things have died in association with it.

This has been taken to heart by Henry Wilson, an honours student at the school of art. He used plantation-grown beech from Europe and plantation hoop pine from Australia for his chair designs.

Part of Hayward's approach with his students is to insist they discover the origins of their materials. That way, he says, they will know the fine furniture they produce will not have been at the expense of "devastating a mountainside and leaving the villagers starving or having to move on somewhere else".

The report says: "Of particular concern to Australia are its hardwood imports from the regions identified as having problems, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and smaller nations that are struggling economically, such as Papua New Guinea."

As well as the clear-cut cases of illegal logging, there is an even bigger problem of timber that is technically harvested legally but at a terrible cost to the environment and local communities.
It's a pattern Sydney carpenter Shane Ritchie witnessed when he helped to establish a European Union-funded eco-forestry program in Papua New Guinea in 1998.

Ritchie says the concept of cutting down trees in large numbers was alien to the people there until large commercial logging companies arrived.

"In the past there was no need for them to cut down the bush except [to make space] for their gardens but since us great white guys have gone up there and started logging on a large scale, now there is a threat to their bush," he says.

When the timber is harvested, many food trees are lost, which in turn means an exodus of native animals from the area.

After 10 years of protests, the project was halted but not before huge areas of forest were devastated.

Mussett, who trained as a cabinetmaker, focuses his efforts on timber from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands because "nowhere needs it more than these sorts of places".

"We purchase material from PNG villagers who cut the timber and process it into a green sawn board; that money goes to them, not to some foreign logging company feathering its own nest."

The challenge for the consumer buying floorboards or outdoor furniture is determining where the wood came from and whether it was harvested sustainably.

In an award-winning Palm Beach house completed in 2003, Robilliard made extensive use of sustainable timbers, including malas from PNG on the floor and brazilian mahogany grown in Fiji for the ceiling.

"We see it as our challenge to find a market for those species [people have] never seen before because, if you are going to maintain the biodiversity of a forest, then you have to be able to use what the forest is giving up so it can be sustainably managed. There are some beautiful timbers that the market does not know anything about."

Greenpeace campaigner Grant Rosoman points to developments in China as evidence consumers have the ultimate power to make a difference.

"Australia has been slow on the uptake of FSC products compared to, say, the UK," Rosoman says. "There, if you go into any DIY place you'll find up to half the products or more are FSC [certified]."

Greenpeace aims to educate consumers and promote demand with its "Good Wood" campaign (www.greenpeace.org.au/goodwoodguide), which lists "good" and "bad" wood according to its source, and where to buy it in Australia.
Rosoman says: "When you talk to someone who has gone to the effort of buying good wood in a chair it is very satisfying [for them]."

Build it from the ground up

"On my way to Bougainville through the Solomon Islands one day I ran into a Malaysian logger who proudly boasted to me that he had just bought a person's forest for some chickens, fish and rice," Lillyman says.

"I identify small community groups within PNG that have company registration and find whether they need help," Lillyman says. "I might help them with the purchase of a piece of equipment in return for marketing through me.

"I find it interesting that people from Brussels can come over and tell Papua New Guineans how to manage their resources. You've got to sit down and do the business in the dirt. You've got to build it from the ground up."

"Somehow we want to join the world's top three," Satoshi Kitaoka, head of Sanyo's solar unit, told a press conference in the western city of Osaka, where Sanyo is based.

Japan's third-largest consumer electronics maker said it would invest 40 billion yen or more in its solar business by the financial year through March 2011, starting with an investment of 10 billion in 2007/08.

A typical Japanese family of four can meet its electricity needs for a year with a 3 kilowatt solar system. So 1 megawatt can power about 300 homes.

Sanyo estimates that worldwide demand for solar power will more than double to 4 gigawatts by 2010, helped by government subsidies and increased focus on renewable energy sources with oil prices near record highs.
Solar is one of the fastest-growing sectors in energy but still provides less than 1 percent of the world's power, partially because it is still costly to produce.

Sanyo said it was working to boost the efficiency of its solar panels while at the same time producing thinner wafers to help cope with a global shortage of silicon, the main active component of solar panels.

The electronics maker will continue to use single-crystal wafers to produce high-end panels as well.

Story by Yumi Horie

Story Date: 22/6/2006

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/36953/story.htm

There are still many data of the fatalities that have not yet reported to the provincial post of the counter disaster, said Saharudin Rahmad, an official in charge in the provincial counter-disaster post.

"The number possibly will rise, as there are still many houses and areas which have not yet touched the rescue team," Saharudin Rahmad, an official in charge in the provincial counter-disaster post in Makasar, the capital of the province told Xinhua.
"The data reported to us now is 200 death and 128 missing," he said.

Indonesian Minister of Forestry Malam Sambat Kaban said that the cause of the flood and landslide in the province was the lack of forest coverage on the land, which was resulted from the accumulative failure of reforestation for decades in the past.

"The coverage of forest now in Sulawesi is only 27 percent (of the total areas), less than the minimum requirement of 30 percent," he said.
However, Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said earlier that the illegal logging was the cause of the flood and landslide.

Indonesian Environmental Minister Rahmat Witoelar said, quoted by the local television of SCTV, that he would limit the issuance of the right for logging company, which he blamed have contributed on the natural disaster.

Indonesia has a total of 162 million hectares forest, the second largest tropical forest area of the world after Brazil, that covers 84 percent of its total land area, according to data from the World Wide Fund (WWF).

Minister Kaban said that 59 million hectares out of the 162 million hectares forest was damaged.

"The tragedy in Sinjai (South Sulawesi) is an indication for the nation that the good forest is only in Kalimantan and Papua (islands)," said Kaban.

The minister said that the big island of Sulawesi and Maluku as well as Java are also sensitive from flood and landslide as their forest coverage is less than minimum requirement.

"Sulawesi, Maluku and Java islands are vulnerable, if rains come down for three hours, the accident like in Sinjai will take place," he said.

"Now there must be an awareness not to disturb the rest of the forest areas," he said.

Indonesia, which is located in tropical areas, often suffers from landslide due to rampant deforestation. Enditem

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-06/23/content_4736322.htm

Vietnam contaminated by arsenic, 10 million at risk: study

Around 10 million people in Vietnam are highly vulnerable to diseases due to high levels of arsenic, a deadly element, in the water table, an expert said based on a recent study at a Wednesday conference.

At the conference organized by the WHO and Vietnamese health ministry, he added that Vietnam was listed among countries contaminated by arsenic.

Another study was cited that concluded northern Vietnam is more contaminated by arsenic than its southern counterpart.
Some 34 percent of water samples taken from Hanoi’s wells in this study tested for high content of arsenic.

Continuous drinking from such water could cause skin cancer, diseases related to bladders, kidneys, lungs, livers, and diabetes.

Source: Nguoi Lao Dong – Translated by Hoang Bao

Story from Thanh Nien News

Published: 22 June, 2006, 14:12:59 (GMT+7)

http://www.thanhniennews.com/healthy/?catid=8&newsid=16927
Dengue fever raging across southern Vietnam
Dengue fever has reached epidemic proportions in Vietnam’s southern region, particularly in Ho Chi Minh City, and Hau Giang, Can Tho, and Soc Trang provinces.

HCMC has so far this year reported 2,700 cases of dengue fever, up over 100 percent year-on-year, the city’s Preventive Health Center said.

In recent days, the city has seen a sharp increase in the number of children contracting dengue fever, many hospitalized in critical condition.

Nguyen Thanh Hung, deputy director of the Pediatrics Hospital No 1 said the hospital has since January received 1,167 dengue fever patients, including 876 from HCMC alone with 126 from districts 6 and 8.

He explained the main reason was that most households used jars, tanks and basins to contain water, favorable conditions for mosquito reproduction.

In addition, hot weather accompanied by rains is to blame for the spread of the disease in the city.
To cope with the situation, according to Be, Vietnam should learn Singapore’s anti-dengue fever model. Accordingly, fines will be imposed on households that are found to have great number of mosquito larvae or mosquitoes.

Other localities

Can Tho province has also seen a considerable increase of dengue fever patients, particularly infants, with some 20 new cases on average per day, said Bui Hung Viet of the Can Tho

Pediatrics Hospital.
Hau Giang province has so far reported three children have died of dengue fever.

Ba Ria-Vung Tau province has reported 232 cases of dengue fever, six times higher than the same period last year.

The provincial Preventive Health Center has launched campaigns to stamp out dengue fever outbreaks in the province, with a focus on Phuoc Long district and Phu Rieng Rubber Co.’s plantations.

Source: Tuoi Tre, VOV News – Translated by Thu Thuy

BEIJING, June 21 (Xinhua) -- A senior Chinese health official has moved to allay fears of a human bird-flu pandemic, saying there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, but he did warn that the evolution of the virus was unpredictable.

Suspected cases of human-to-human transmission in Indonesia have set off international alarm bells. Six family members from a remote farming village on Sumatra died after testing positive for the H5N1 virus -- the world's largest reported family cluster.

Shu Yuelong, director of the National Influenza Center under the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said suspected cases of human-to-human transmission had also been reported in Vietnam, Thailand and other countries.

But there has been no conclusive evidence showing that H5N1 had evolved into a human-to-human transmission virus, Shu was quoted by China Population News as saying.

Both epidemiological and etiological evidence was needed to determine whether a virus could be transmitted between humans, Shu said.

The H5N1 virus had acquired the ability to infect and kill mammals, but the number of human infections was still small, Shu said.

Research of the National Influenza Center showed the virus extracted from Chinese bird flu patients was genetically different from those in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

No trace of human influenza had been found in the gene of the virus extracted from Chinese patients of bird flu, Shu added.

The H5N1 virus remained mainly a virus of birds, but experts fear it could change into a form easily transmitted from person to person and sweep the world.

So far, most human cases can be traced to direct or indirect contacts with infected birds.

The virus has killed 130 people around the world since 2003, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Some 200 million birds have died or been culled.

So far, China has recorded 19 human cases of bird flu with 12 deaths. More than 30 outbreaks of bird flu have been reported in China since last October. The latest outbreak occurred in north China's Shanxi Province, said sources with the Ministry of Agriculture.

The Chinese government should review the strategies and effects of the bird flu control efforts of the past two years and improve them to cope with the epidemic, which was still a serious threat, said Chinese bird flu control expert Liu Xiufan.

"When, and to what extent, the current avian influenza virus could evolve into a human pandemic is unpredictable. We should do our best to reduce the risk of a human pandemic influenza breaking out and make necessary preparations before such a risk becomes reality," said Liu.

Some changes in the H5N1 strain have taken place recently. It had increased its virulence in ducks, and the available vaccines were ineffective in protecting poultry, said Liu.

The H5N1 strains isolated from 2004 to 2006 had increased their ability to replicate in mammalian cell culture. The transmission mode of the viruses is changing from fecal-oral to aerosol, he said, adding the virus had increased resistance to the environment, especially to temperature.

China faced an enormous challenge in eradicating the virus because it had been circulating in poultry in China for some time.

He said in some Asian countries, such as Japan, the Republic of Korea and Malaysia, outbreaks of bird flu in poultry did occur several times in 2004 and 2005.

However no human cases were reported because the outbreaks were stamped out very quickly, Liu said.

Currently the transmission efficiency of H5N1 from birds to humans was very low, as the species barrier still existed. However, the virus was changeable, and might acquire the ability to cross the species barrier to transmit infection to mammals and humans through gene mutation and reassortment, Liu said.

"Therefore, the better avian flu in poultry is prevented and controlled, the quantity and lifespan of the H5N1 virus is reduced, thus lessening the risk that avian flu might evolve into a human pandemic," Liu said. Enditem

The Daily Yomiuri Publication Date : 2006-06-23

TOKYO: The level of heavy metals, including manganese and arsenic, found in air containing yellow sand blown over from China and Mongolia, was more than 10 times the national average level in April 2005 in Tottori Prefecture, said a survey by the Tottori Prefectural Institute of Public Health and Environmental Science.
As the concentration was lower than World Health Organisation (WHO) standards, the impact on health is believed to be minimal. But the institute also worries that environmental pollution from China’s rapid growth has increased the level.
The institute warned that with the increasing amount of yellow sand blown over Japan recently, it is necessary to assess its environmental impact and take appropriate measures.

Last year, the institute began a three-year research project on the effects of yellow sand in cooperation with in South Korea.

http://www.asianewsnet.net/epaper.php

Asianews, June 23-29, 2006, By News Desk

Asia News Network Publication Date : 2006-06-23

SEOUL AND TOKYO: The governments of Japan and South Korea have warned North Korea against conducting the test-firing of a ballistic missile.

US Ambassador to Korea Alexander Vershbow also warned Pyongyang of necessary action that would follow should there be a test of long-range missiles.

The US, Japan and South Korea were on a tense watch after North Korea showed signs of preparing the launch. But the test-firing, which would put the US within striking distance if successful, did not take place on June 18 and the watch continued.

Sanctions would meet US approval.

Possible sanctions include the banning of North Korean ships from calling at Japanese ports and the freezing of monetary remittances by ethnic Korean residents in Tokyo to North Korea.

Fears that North Korea might fire the Taepodong-2 were heightened after Japan’s Sankei Shimbun daily, quoting an unnamed Japanese government official, said Pyongyang had instructed its people to raise the national flag and to monitor television for a “message to the people”.
But an official in Seoul pointed out that June 19 marked the 42nd anniversary of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s joining the ruling Workers’ Party, and that its people had also been told to watch television on June 18 last year.

THE KOREA HERALD AND THE STRAITS TIMES

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