The environment in the news friday, 2 November, 2012
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- Environmental News from the UNEP Regions
- UNEP and the Executive Director in the News Reuters: UN urges foreign fishing fleets halt ‘ocean grabbing’
- Back to Menu _________________________________________________________________ Arirang (South Korea): Air Pollution in Pyongyang, Worse than Seoul
- Back to Menu _________________________________________________________________ Bangkok Post (Thailand): Tri-nation effort to fight smuggling
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- Back to Menu _________________________________________________________________ Reuters: China struggles for solution to growing NIMBY movement
- Back to Menu _________________________________________________________________ BBC News (UK): Deep concern as deal to protect Antarctic seas fails
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THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE NEWS Friday, 2 November, 2012 UNEP and the Executive Director in the News
Other Environment News
Environmental News from the UNEP Regions
Other UN News
UNEP and the Executive Director in the News Reuters: UN urges foreign fishing fleets halt ‘ocean grabbing’ 31 October 2012 "Ocean grabbing" or aggressive industrial fishing by foreign fleets is a threat to food security in developing nations where governments should do more to promote local, small-scale fisheries, a study by a U.N. expert said on Tuesday. The report said emerging nations should tighten rules for access to their waters by an industrial fleet that is rapidly growing and includes vessels from China, Russia, the European Union, the United States and Japan. "Ocean-grabbing is taking place," Olivier de Schutter, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food and the report's author, told Reuters. "It's like land-grabbing, just less discussed and less visible." The 47-page report on "Fisheries and the Right to Food", which said 15 percent of all animal protein consumed worldwide is from fish, will be presented to the U.N. General Assembly. De Schutter said ocean grabbing involved "shady access agreements that harm small-scale fishers, unreported catch, incursions into protected waters, and the diversion of resources away from local populations." The report cited the example of islands in the western and central Pacific that get only about 6 percent of the value of a $3 billion tuna fishery off their coasts. Foreign fishing fleets get the rest. Equally, Guinea-Bissau nets less than 2 percent of the value of the fish caught off its coast under a deal with the EU. De Schutter said some countries where industrial fleets were based were already taking steps to tighten laws. "What's getting worse is that the capacity of industrial fishing fleets is increasing," he said. Governments give an estimated $30-34 billion in subsidies to fishing each year. That money is often spent on boat-building or fuel that skews competition. "We need to do more to reduce the capacity of the industrial fishing fleets and to manage the fish stocks in a much more sustainable way," said de Schutter. Food security is also at risk from threats such as climate change and pollution, he said. WASTEFUL De Schutter said aquaculture was disproportionately concentrated in Asia which is responsible for 88 percent of all production. "Extremely little has been done in Africa and Latin America in particular. There is a huge potential there," he said. Fisheries received less attention than farming, he suggested, partly because the sector employed only about 200 million people globally. By contrast, the world has 1.5 billion small-scale farmers, he said. The report said that local fishing was more efficient and less wasteful than industrial fishing, urging measures to promote small-scale fishing such as the creation of "artisanal fishing zones". "Small-scale fishers actually catch more fish per gallon of fuel than industrial fleets, and discard fewer fish," it said. It praised some measures which have already been taken to promote local fishing - such as in Cambodia's biggest lake or off the Maldives. Estimates of the scale of illegal catches range from 10-28 million metric tons, while some 7.3 million metric tons, or almost 10 percent of global wild fish catches were discarded as unwanted by-catches every year, the report said. It said industrial fishing was by far the most wasteful. Total global fish production was about 143 million metric tons - 90 million from wild fish catches and 53 million from fish farming, the report said. De Schutter said fish farming would have to expand to feed a rising world population, now just above 7 billion. Population growth would raise demand by a forecast 27 million metric tons over the next two decades, he said.
The pollution in Pyeongyang's atmosphere was attributed to an increase in households using coal for heating and a lack of sewage treatment facilities. Deforestation was also seen as a big problem to exacerbating air conditions. Sulfur dioxide which is produced when burning fossil fuels can cause respiratory problems. Back to Menu _________________________________________________________________ Bangkok Post (Thailand): Tri-nation effort to fight smuggling 02 November 2012 Cambodian, Lao and Thai officials are taking a 14-day training course to beef up cooperation in the fight against wildlife smuggling across international borders. The programme is organised by the Asean Wildlife Enforcement Network (Asean-WEN), the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) and the Freeland Foundation as part of a campaign to curb illegal wildlife trafficking in Southeast Asia. The lower Mekong region is one of the world's major transit points for smuggling endangered and exotic wildlife. Theerapat Prayurasiddhi, deputy chief of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, said the training was aimed at enhancing officials' ability to stop the illegal wildlife trade and unauthorised logging along shared borders. "The department is committed to taking the lead in supporting our friends in Asean to strengthen their capacities and efforts in wildlife trade suppression," he said. During the training sessions, authorities will share information about the illegal wildlife trade, border patrol techniques, law enforcement and forest survival skills. Participants will also learn about new technology for wildlife crime suppression. This includes new smart phone applications that can be used to update and share information about wildlife smuggling. Steven Galster, executive director of the Freeland Foundation, said border zones are often rich in wildlife and better cooperation between neighbouring countries is vital to protect vulnerable species. "Nobody knows how much the illegal wildlife trade along the border is worth. But we know that prices are increasing in line with strong growing demand from customers in China and Vietnam. "You can see the price for a pangolin has gone up to more than 15,000 baht each and the price for tigers has gone up to 1 million baht," said Mr Galster. The Asean-WEN network is also fighting wildlife trafficking in the region, he said. Back to Menu ============================================================= Other Environment News Reuters (UK): Nations fail to agree plan to protect seas around Antarctica 01 November 2012 Major nations failed to reach agreement on Thursday to set up huge marine protected areas off Antarctica under a plan to step up conservation of creatures such as whales and penguins around the frozen continent. The 25-member Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) agreed, however, to hold a special session in Germany in July 2013 to try to break the deadlock after the October 8-November 1 meeting in Hobart, Australia. Environmentalists criticized the failure to agree new marine protected areas in the Ross Sea and off East Antarctica, home to penguins, seals, whales and seabirds as well as valuable stocks of shrimp-like krill. "We're deeply disappointed," Steve Campbell of the Antarctic Ocean Alliance, grouping conservation organizations, told Reuters at the end of the CCAMLR annual meeting. He said that most resistance had come from Ukraine, Russia and China. Environmentalists said that the United States, the European Union, Australia and New Zealand were among countries pushing for agreement on new protected zones. Some fishing fleets are looking south because stocks nearer home are depleted and some nations worry about shutting off large areas of the oceans. CCMALR comprises 24 member states and the European Union. "This year, CCAMLR has behaved like a fisheries organization instead of an organization dedicated to conservation of Antarctic waters," said Farah Obaidullah of Greenpeace. Among proposals, a U.S.-New Zealand plan would have created a 1.6 million sq km (0.6 million sq miles) protected area in the Ross Sea - about the size of Iran. And the EU, Australia and France proposed a series of reserves of 1.9 million sq km (0.7 million sq miles) off East Antarctica - bigger than Alaska. Last week, Hollywood actor Leonardo di Caprio launched a petition to protect the seas around Antarctica with campaigning group Avaaz, saying "the whales and penguins can't speak for themselves, so it's up to us to defend them." Governments in 2010 set a goal of extending protected areas to 10 percent of the world's oceans to safeguard marine life from over-fishing and other threats such as pollution and climate change. By 2010, the total was 4 percent. CCAMLR said in a statement that members had identified several regions of the Southern Ocean that warrant high levels of protection. "These important areas can provide a reference for scientific research on the impacts of activities such as fishing, as well as significant opportunities for monitoring the impacts of climate change in the Southern Ocean," it said. Back to Menu _________________________________________________________________ Reuters: China struggles for solution to growing NIMBY movement 01 November 2012 It looked like another victory for the people when the Chinese city of Ningbo announced the suspension on Sunday of a petrochemical project after days of street protests by citizens concerned it would pollute their community. It may turn out to be more complicated. As China's increasingly affluent urban population battles back against the breakneck growth-at-all-costs model that has fuelled the economy for three decades, environmental activists say the apparently straightforward narrative that has played out several times in recent years - government backs down, citizens win - is simplistic. A spokesman for the Ningbo government said in a statement on Sunday that there would be no further work done on the massive project, which includes a facility for the production of paraxylene (PX), a potentially harmful chemical used in making some plastics, pending further "scientific debate." But a source in Ningbo closely linked to the project told Reuters that once the public furor dies down, China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) will likely proceed with the $8.8 billion dollar expansion to the plant in Ningbo's Zhenhai district, including PX production. Public worries could force the project owners to downplay or disguise the PX facility by renaming it as something like "affiliated PTA product capacity expansion," the source said speaking on condition of anonymity. PTA is a downstream product made using PX, and a key component in producing polyester. The rationale for the government to beat a public retreat in Ningbo and other places like it is clear enough. "Capitulating relatively quickly to the demands of the local populace seems a worthy trade-off when thinking about the potential for these large scale protests to spread and transform into something much larger," said Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a book on China's environmental challenges. "Of course, this is not a sustainable governance model, but it is clear that neither Beijing nor local officials know what to do." The Ningbo protest came at a highly sensitive time for the government about two weeks before a once-a-decade leadership transition within the Communist Party. SORT OF CANCELED A quiet resumption of the Ningbo plan would hardly be unheard of. "Previously, similar cases were reactivated without much scrutiny from the public. The public is much less organized, so when the crisis calms down it's difficult for them to monitor what's going on," said Li Bo, Secretary General of the NGO Friends of Nature in China. In several cases, what appeared at the outset to be government capitulation turned into quiet compromise. In Dalian last August, demonstrators protested against a PX plant after a typhoon damaged the facility. The government agreed to move it, but months later the plant was still running. Environmental activists told Reuters that according to the local government, the plant was being steadily wound down rather than shut completely, and would finally be closed and relocated to an outlying industrial park by 2013. "They have said it is impossible to close immediately because of safety problems and because other petrochemical plants nearby are using the PX as a feedstock," said Tang Zailin, director of the Dalian Environmental Volunteers Association, a local NGO. A large demonstration in Xiamen in 2007, also against a PX plant, is widely viewed as a watershed moment in urban China's growing environmental consciousness. The government cancelled the project, environmental groups hailed the move as a victory, and paraxylene became a symbolic target for activists everywhere. While Xiamen turned out to be a triumph for the city's NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) movement, the resolution there has become a familiar one. The government over a year later decided to move the facility into someone else's backyard - in this case that of farmers in the neighboring municipality of Zhangzhou. Residents there protested sporadically, but to no effect. RAISING COSTS, UNCERTAINTY The rising tide of protests may be raising costs and uncertainty for some businesses - including foreign firms once attracted to China's lower costs and its willingness to cut through regulatory red tape. In July, a violent demonstration broke out in the city of Qidong, just north of Shanghai, over a planned waste pipe at a Japanese-owned paper factory. It prompted the local government to capitulate and pledge to stop the project altogether. Since then, however, the company, Oji Paper Co Ltd, has been left in the dark. "We don't know what the status is. There is no information, and we can't even get a hold of local government public relations officials," said spokesman Yasushi Iizuka. "We are operating on the premise that the pipeline will be built. There is no alternate plan." The government of Qidong declined to comment when contacted by Reuters. Companies, foreign and domestic, hope the government's now ad hoc and opaque regulatory processes will improve with time. More effective environmental regulation is a key pillar of the current five year plan. But for now, analysts say, they must simply be more attentive to the possibility of environmental backlash to big investments. Duncan Innes-Ker, senior China analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, says the public's rising environmental awareness is forcing changes to the way companies handle large scale projects. "In the past," said Innes-Ker, "you really had to manage local government officials, and once you'd managed that you pretty much were home and dry. Nowadays, you really have to manage the local population as well." Back to Menu _________________________________________________________________ BBC News (UK): 'Deep concern' as deal to protect Antarctic seas fails 01 November 2012 Governments meeting in Australia have failed to reach agreement on new marine protected areas for the Antarctic ocean. They have deferred a decision until July 2013 when all the relevant science will be considered. Environmental groups have expressed deep concern about the lack of consensus on how to develop a network of protected zones. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote
Hot target Made up of representatives from 24 governments and the European Union, it has been considering proposals for the establishment of marine reserves in two critical areas of the Southern Ocean. Many parts of Antarctica have been coming under increasing pressure as the growing global demand for sea food means the region's rich resources are increasingly targeted. Climate change and increased acidification of the waters are also likely to affect the food sources and habitats of many species in the region including penguins, seals and whales. map of proposed east aspartic protected areas Proposed marine protected areas on the east Antarctic coastal region At the meeting the United States and New Zealand put forward competing plans to create a marine protected area of 1.6 million square kilometres in the Ross Sea. Another proposal would have created a reserve zone around East Antarctica - At around 1.9 million square kilometres, it would have covered an area almost three times the size of France. Environmental groups had called for public participation via online petitions. The Antarctic Ocean Alliance (AOA) said that 1.2 million people had supported calls for large scale protection areas. Hollywood star Leonardo Di Caprio wrote an email saying that as whales and penguins can't speak for themselves there should be a "massive wave of public pressure" to drive forward the plans for restrictions. But ultimately that pressure failed to deliver agreement. Campaigners were critical of the failure to move forward with the proposals. WWF expressed "deep concern". Speaking to BBC News, Steve Campbell of the AOA said he was also very disappointed with the results. "There are competing interests, in terms of commercial interests and in terms of the economic control of these areas, we floundered essentially at the end of the talks." Sad and angry He praised the constructive contributions of a number of countries including the United States, Australia and the UK. But with consensus of all 25 members needed for progress, some countries refused to compromise on the proposals. Continue reading the main story Icebergs in Antarctica
They have designated 11 priority areas in the Southern Ocean from which most MPAs will be created. Governments have set a goal of extending protected areas to ten percent of the world's oceans "At the end of the day it seems that countries like Russia, Ukraine and China couldn't really make it work - and we're hoping that at the next meeting they'll come with a stronger commitment to the conservation objectives of the commission." Jim Barnes, the executive director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition was also disappointed with the outcome. "I am feeling sad and angry" he said. "This responsibility, and this failure, rests with all the members." The focus will now turn to a special session of the Commission which will meet in Germany in July 2013. Activists say the situation is grave and there can be no backsliding on decision at that point. Many still have hope that agreement can be found. "There's a number of factors involved and it is quite complex," said Steve Campbell, "but I do believe that CCAMLR has a history of creating conservation outcomes and I believe they can do it again" Back to Menu _________________________________________________________________ Guardian (UK): Revealed: the day Obama chose a strategy of silence on climate change 01 November 2012 The invitation to the White House in the spring of 2009 struck Barack Obama's allies in the environmental movement as a big moment: a clear sign that climate change was on his radar and that the president was eager to get to work. The event was indeed a turning point, but not the one campaigners expected. Instead, it marked a strategic decision by the White House to downplay climate change – avoiding the very word – a decision some campaigners on the guestlist say produced the strange absence of climate change from the 2012 campaign, until hurricane Sandy blew it right back on the political agenda. The storm – which interrupted campaigning for three of the last eight days of the presidential race – may even prove the decisive factor in the elections, with voters watching how Obama handles Sandy's aftermath. The devastation has already sparked debate about America's present-day vulnerability to climate change. But back in 2009, the off-the-record event with the White House green team at the old executive office building offered the first chance for the White House to share its plans for getting a climate change law through Congress. Aides handed round a one-page memo of polling data and talking points. "It was in the context of the financial collapse. With everyone struggling, how do we connect with the public and build political support when everyone's mind was on the very scary economy," said Betsy Taylor, president of Breakthrough Strategies and Solutions an organisation that works with philanthropic and non-profit clients, who attended the meeting. The answer was clear: climate change was not a winning message. Raising the topic would also leave Obama open to attack from industry and conservative groups opposed to intervention in the economy. "What was communicated in the presentation was: 'This is what you talk about, and don't talk about climate change'." Taylor said. "I took away an absolutely clear understanding that we should focus on clean energy jobs and the potential of a clean energy economy rather than the threat of climate change." The message stuck. Subsequent campaigns from the Obama administration and some environmental groups relegated climate change to a second-tier concern. After industry and conservative groups mobilised to attack Obama's policies and climate science in the summer of 2009, the topic was seen as an even greater liability and politically toxic. There was no mention of climate change during six hours of televised debate. Moderators failed to bring up the question, and Obama and Mitt Romney made no effort to fill in the gaps – even during a long and heated exchange about offshore drilling and coal. Romney's convention speech reduced climate change to a laughline. Obama defended climate science at the Democratic convention, and he answered a question on climate in an MTV interview last month. Otherwise, Obama mentioned climate only in passing and in front of safe or rock-solid Democratic audiences, such as fundraisers in San Francisco and New York or events on college campuses. Since Sandy's devastating storm, a number of prominent Democrats like Bill Clinton and Al Gore have talked about climate change, and taken Romney to task on the issue. Those gathered on 26 March 2009 to hear from key members of Obama's green dream team — Carol Browner, then energy and climate adviser, Nancy Sutley, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and Van Jones, then green jobs adviser, believed it would be a pivotal year. The White House and both houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats, world leaders were due to gather in Copenhagen in December to finalise a global climate change treaty. But the economy was in meltdown. The White House, after studying polling and focus groups, concluded it was best to frame climate change as an economic opportunity, a chance for job creation and economic growth, rather than an urgent environmental problem. "My most vivid memory of that meeting is this idea that you can't talk about climate change," said Jessy Tolkan, who at the time was a leader of the climate youth movement, Power Shift. "The real sense at that time was that talking about clean energy jobs, green jobs, was the way we were going to be able to gain momentum and usher in real change. Talking about climate change and global warming was not going to resonate as much." None of the principal White House officials would talk on the record about the meeting. The White House did not release materials related to the meeting or respond to a request for visitors' records. But most of the environmental groups were inclined to go along. "When the White House invites you to a meeting and says: 'here is how we are going to talk about these things', it sends a very clear message," said Erich Pica, president of the US Friends of the Earth Action, who was also at the meeting. Now with Obama fighting for re-election, and the climate agenda stalled and under constant attack from Republicans and industry, environmental groups acknowledge the go-softly strategy was a mistake. "I thought it was a mistake and I told them," said Bill McKibben, who heads the 350.org group, who was one of the few people at the meeting to voice his misgivings. "All I said was sooner or later you are going to have to talk about this in terms of climate change. Because if you want people to make the big changes that are required by the science then you are going to have to explain to people why that is necessary, and why it's such a huge problem," he said. The stealth approach also gave the opposition an opening. The White House reluctance to even mention climate change allowed some in industry and on the right of the political spectrum to discredit climate science. Others argue the strategy of downplaying climate change was a politically necessity. It was naïve to expect to get ambitious measures through Congress in a debate clogged up with scientific detail. "I don't think it was a mistake," said Steve Cochran. vice-president of climate and air at the Environmental Defence Fund. "The people that supported climate were already with us. The people who had questions needed arguments beyond climate, which led to more and more focus on arguments beyond climate." Campaign groups agree Obama continued to push the climate agenda, even if he did so below the radar, through the Environmental Protection Agency regulations and other branches of the government. The economic recovery plan included some $90bn for green-ish measures, such as high speed rail and public transport, and weather-proofing low-income homes. Obama also publicly embraced some environmental measures, standing out in front when the administration proposed raising car mileage standards in May 2009. But the president left climate change out of his Earth Day event, and was a no-show in June 2009 at the release of a landmark scientific report on how America's cities and coastlines would be affected by climate change. There was no mention of climate change in his 2012 state of the union address. Environmental groups, taking their cue from the White House, also downplayed climate. The coalition pushing for climate change law in Congress called itself Clean Energy Works. The bill itself was called the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Campaign groups ran ads featuring former steel workers in green helmets talking about the well-paying new jobs building wind turbines. "If you look at the messaging being done during the climate legislation, it was mostly not about climate," said Carl Pope, who was then the executive director of the Sierra Club. "They realised it was going to be a big target as soon as it passed the house." And it nearly didn't pass. The house of representatives' vote on the climate bill was uncomfortably close, 219-212, with only eight Republicans supporting and 44 Democrats opposed, and it set off a furious backlash. The oil and gas industry alone spent $175m in 2009 trying to block climate legislation, according Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics. The conservative Tea Party movement turned opposition to climate legislation, even climate science, into an article of faith. In the summer of 2010, the US senate dropped the bill, with then Democrat Senate majority leader Harry Reid admitting: "We know we don't have the votes." The administration and environmental groups talked about climate change even less, said Pica, and when they did the connections were even less clear. Facing public confusion about the green jobs promised by Obama's recovery plan, and scepticism about his promise to build a clean energy economy, administration officials switched to talking about climate through healthcare or even national security. They recruited Iraq war veterans to talk about wind energy. "There was a really big emphasis on talking about what I call the sub-narratives – that there were other ways to speak about the opportunity and the challenge of climate change rather than calling it that," said Maggie Fox, the chief executive of Al Gore's Climate Reality Project. "There was a whole suite of sub-narratives: national security, clean energy future, diversification of energy, health, future generations … " But Fox acknowledges none of those reasons – although compelling – went far enough in justifying the need for sweeping transformation needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. "Over time it became in effect an absence of conversation about climate change as a threat, and I think in the end that proved to be unwise because it is the one reason all these storylines matter." The problem now, say campaign groups, is that it has become even more difficult for politicians to talk about climate change, even when evidence is all around them in extreme weather events and even when there is growing public concern about climate change. A Yale University study last month found 70% of Americans now believe in the reality of climate change, a sharp rise over the last two years. The administration, the campaigners say, missed an educational opportunity. Obama, in debates and in campaign stops, continued to talk up the importance of investing in America's future through building a clean energy economy. But the connection to the threat of climate change was lost. "It's really hard to sell clean energy. Clean energy is really struggling because the story has gotten garbled," said Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "You can't have a clear conversation, and the reason there can't be a clear conversation is because of this elephant in the room which is climate change." Back to Menu Directory: cpi -> briefs briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news Download 395.43 Kb. Share with your friends:
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