International Effort To Unearth The Secrets Of The Soils

The 200 species of mites in this microscope view were extracted from one square foot of the top two inches of forest litter and soil. Mites are poorly studied, but enormously significant for nutrient release in the soil.

London / Nairobi, 28 November 2002 - Scientists are to go below ground in seven tropical countries to search for the largest source of untapped life left on Earth.

Experts know that, millimetres below the surface in the twilight, subterranean world, of the earthworm and the nematode, tens of thousands of new species of tiny organisms including bacteria, fungi, insects, mites and worms await discovery.

Scientists are also convinced that unraveling the secrets of how they operate may be the key to restoring the fertility of damaged and degraded lands while helping to raise crop yields in the tropics without the need for heavy pesticide and fertilizer use.

Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said: “The life forms living just below our feet are the most understudied organisms on the planet. When people think of where new species might be found, they tend to think of the rainforests, mangrove swamps or place like mountain peaks. Not millimetres below their toes”.

“But researchers are now realizing that the world’s soils, especially those in the tropics, are teeming with life and harbor more undescribed species than dwell on the Earth’s surface. Harvesting the secrets of this understudied realm promises huge benefits and improved knowledge towards the goal of delivering sustainable development, towards eradicating poverty. This is one of the more unusual, curious but absolutely vital projects UNEP has undertaken. So I am delighted that the organization is involved in this pioneering work”.

It was Louis Pasteur, the father of modern microbiology, who observed that ” the role of the very small is large”.

For example earthworms, termites and other soil-burrowing organisms influence the amount of rainwater soils can absorb. Soils depleted in such organisms are more drought-prone and at risk from catastrophic run-off. This can in turn increase the risk of flooding and erosion with consequences for river water quality and habitats such as coral reefs.

Bacteria and fungi help to eliminate pollutants and disease-causing germs from groundwater as it percolates through the soil to reservoirs, boreholes and other sources of drinking water.

Soil-living organisms also play a key role in the release of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases from the land to the atmosphere.

Understanding and unravelling the role of these humble creatures and life-forms in the so called “carbon cycle” may help the land absorb more greenhouse gases.

Research has shown that many soil-living organisms attack and neutralize plant, animal and human pests and pathogens It may be possible to promote beneficial soil-dwelling life forms to reduce crop, livestock and human diseases, the researchers believe.

The wealth of new species awaiting discovery, especially in the less well-studied tropics, also represents a huge new genetic resource. It is hoped that this genetic treasure trove will yield an array of new drugs, including antibiotics and 21st century industrial products for the benefit of rich and poor countries alike.

But above all, it is the role of these organisms as “biological ploughs” and suppliers of key nutrients that is intriguing the scientists and which has triggered the new UNEP/GEF project.

In the African savannas the soil structure has largely been formed by termites bringing fertile material to the surface - erosion of this material from the African highlands largely contributed to the fertility of ancient Egyptian agriculture cultivating sediments left by the annual flooding of the Nile.

The ability of termites to re-work iron-hard soils has been used as a tool to reclaim degraded soils in Africa and Australia. Farmers practicing shifting cultivation in West Africa use the mounds of some termite species to judge when fertility has been restored under forest fallow. Scientists showed that the digestive processes of these soil-feeding termites significantly increase the availability of nutrients to plants and are keystones in this traditional agricultural cycle.

Soil organisms also have key roles in modern agriculture.

For example, trials at several 100 year-old tea plantations in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where yields have stalled despite heavy use of fertilizers and the spraying of plant growth hormones, indicate that assessing the role of below ground biodiversity can have huge agricultural benefits.

A team from the French Institute de Recherche pour le Development and the University of Sambalpur in India, working with the Indian company Parry Agro,found that, after the re-introduction of earthworms including native species , harvests at some of the plantations are up as much as 282 per cent, and profits up by as much as $ 5,500 per hectare per year. Dr. Fatima Moreira, a soil microbiologist at the Federal University of Lavras in Lavras, Brazil, said nitrogen fixing bacteria were already being deployed in Brazil to boost soya bean harvests in an environmentally-friendly way.

“Soya beans have been inoculated with a species of nitrogen-fixing bacteria called Bradyrhizobium and this has totally replaced the use of industrial fertilizers. An area of Brazil covering 14 million hectares is being farmed this way. Yields are 2.5 tons a hectare and this new technique is saving the national economy about one billion US dollars a year,” she said.

Dr Moreira said surveys have now been carried out on 2,000 species, including trees, shrubs and herbs, in Brazil with the aim of discovering which ones might also be amenable to inoculation by nitrogen fixing bacteria.

Many of these plant species, vital for timber, charcoal and food production, appear likely to benefit from the technology.

The new $26 million project, backed with $9 million funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and support from other donors such as the Rockefeller Foundation, will be initially targeting the “below ground biodiversity” of seven tropical countries. These are Brazil, Mexico, Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda, Kenya, Indonesia and India.

Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the UNEP/GEF which is based in Nairobi, Kenya, said: “There is an urgent need to assess, classify and record the life forms below ground. Many people are well aware that increasing intensification of agriculture and the clearing of forests for farmland is contributing to the threat of extinction and a decline in the numbers of plants and animals on the surface. There is growing evidence that a similar impact is being felt below ground. So we maybe losing many important and useful species from the world’s soils without even knowing it.”

Mike Swift, Director of the Nairobi-based Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute of CIAT (TSBF), which is co-ordinating the “Conservation and Sustainable Management of Below-Ground Biodiversity” project, said that the sites in the countries chosen were thought to be among those with the highest below ground biodiversity. Each of the countries also has well-developed scientific capacity in the ‘Cinderella science’ of soil biology.

The project is aimed at boosting those skills further and spreading awareness and knowledge of conserving soils life forms to environmentalists, farmers, government officials and other experts in these and other developing countries.

“There are huge gaps in our knowledge about the variety of organisms in the soil, especially in developing countries. What we know is the tip of the iceberg. One of the reasons why below ground biodiversity has been the Cinderella subject of the natural world has been linked to the difficulty of actually seeing what is there. But we now have new, genetic or DNA screening techniques, similar to those used by forensic scientists to profile a criminal from a swab or sample, which will allows us to screen soil samples for the bacteria, fungi and other life forms, ” said Professor Swift.

He said apart from discovering new species, one of the project’s aims is to test if different kinds of vegetation cover plays a role in boosting or diminishing the diversity of life forms below.

“It appears that, in places where you have single crops or so called mono cultures, planted there is a sharp decline in the level of species below with all sorts of negative impacts on yields, moisture content, pest control and fertility. The natural ability of the soil to break down pollutants, such as agro chemicals, also appears to be compromised,” said Professor Swift.

“Whilst these losses can be partially compensated for by the use of petrol-driven agriculture and the use of industrially-produced fertilizers and pesticides, complete substitution is often both biologically and economically inefficient and carries dangers of environmental side-effects. A major aim of the project is to determine the optimum trade-off between biological and industrial approaches to management of the soil,” he said.

“Agroforestry schemes, in which trees are incorporated into the farmland, or farms where the land has a variety of crops planted, appear to have a more positive impact on life-forms below. We want to test this hypothesis and, if sound, use the results to encourage more diverse kinds of agriculture with multiple benefits,” he added.

Professor Jo Anderson of Exeter University and Chairman of the programme’s Technical Advisory Group, pointed out that there was rising social and economic pressures across the tropics which were leading to widespread destruction of natural habitats for food, fuel and commercial products like timber.

Critical ‘ecosystem services’, such as water supplies, carbon storage and even the local climate, are being compromised along with losses of the very soil organisms that play a key role in providing many of these services.

“This project will provide critical information on how biodiversity can be conserved within landscapes that provide human needs, such as farm land, while conserving the natural heritage of the extraordinarily diverse, and potentially useful communities of organisms, for future generations,” said Professor Anderson.

Notes to Editors: Mini Beasts, Wiggle Worms and Fellow Soil Dwellers

Over 4,000 bacteria and related organisms have been described by science, an unknown number of which are soil dwelling. It is estimated that in one gramme of forest soil there are up to 40,000 individual bacterial species many of which have never been described.

It is thought that only five per cent of the world’s living fungi have been described. Of the 72,000 described specied up to 35,000 could be classed as soil living.

Protozoa include amoebas and flagellates. Some 1,900 soil living protozoa have been described which may be only 10 per cent of the species alive.

Some 15,000 individual nematode species have been described. It is estimated that there may be more than be as many as 100,000 species.

Mites are small spider-like invertebrates. The 45,000 species described are thought to represent just 5 per cent of the total number of species.

There are numerous groups of soil dwelling insects including Termites. More than 2,000 termite species have been described but the activities of a just few species can affect plants, soils and hydrology of tropical landscapes

Nearly 9,000 ant species have been described.

Earthworms; Over 3,600 have been described. It is thought that double this number exist in the wild.

For More Information Please Contact Eric Falt, Spokesperson/Director of UNEP’s Division of Communications and Public Information, on Tel: 254 2 623292, Mobile: 254 (0) 733 682656, E-mail: eric.falt@unep.org or Nick Nuttall, UNEP Head of Media, on Tel: 254 2 623084, Mobile: 254 (0) 733 632755 or when in London 1 917 378 8818, E-mail: nick.nuttall@unep.org

UNEP Web Site www.unep.org A source of excellent pictures and facts and figures on below ground biodiversity can be found at http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/SoilBiology/soil_biology_primer.htm#Contents

It is operated by the United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Soil Quality Institute

UNEP News Release 2002/86

Forest Cover Shrinking

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Janet Larsen

Earth Policy Institute

Global forest cover is a key indicator of the health of the planet. An intact forest cycles nutrients, regulates climate, stabilizes soil, treats waste, provides habitat, and offers opportunities for recreation. By a conservative tally, these services are worth more than $4.7 trillion, a total equal to one tenth of the gross world product. Forests also supply goods, including food, medicines, and a large array of wood-based products.

Forests worldwide cover some 3.9 billion hectares—almost a third of the earth’s land surface excluding Antarctica and Greenland. Though vast, this wooded area is only half the size of forested land at the dawn of agriculture some 11,000 years ago. Most forests are no longer in their original condition, having changed in composition and quality.

Global estimates of forest cover change are difficult to make because of conflicting definitions of what constitutes a forest, lack of satellite and radar data, and unmonitored land use change. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization conservatively estimates that the world lost 94 million hectares of forest in the last decade of the twentieth century. (See data.) This number assumes that developing countries lost 130 million hectares while the industrial world gained 36 million hectares as abandoned agricultural areas returned to forest. The yearly loss of natural forests during this period, which includes deforestation plus the conversion of natural forests to tree plantations, was 16 million hectares—94 percent of which occurred in the tropics.

During the 1990s, Brazil suffered the heaviest loss of forest—23 million hectares. South America as a whole saw net losses of 37 million hectares. In Africa, 52 million hectares were destroyed. Sudan, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo account for half of Africa’s forest loss. While the United States gained 4 million hectares of forests, Mexico lost over 6 million, although government reports reveal the loss may be even higher. The total net losses for North and Central America were 6 million hectares.

A massive reforestation campaign in China meant the country added an average of 1.8 million hectares each year during this period, largely because bans on deforestation near the end of the decade heightened the country’s reliance on plantations and imports of forest products from other nations. In Indonesia, where tree felling destroyed 13 million hectares over the decade, forest loss has accelerated and now averages 2 million hectares each year. Over the decade, forest cover in all of Asia declined by 4 million hectares.

Although FAO data suggest that world forest loss is slowing, deforestation in tropical areas is accelerating, likely exceeding 13 million hectares each year. As tree cutting in many parts of the world accelerates, nearly half of the remaining forests are at risk. The World Resources Institute estimates that about 40 percent of the world’s intact forests will be gone within 10-20 years, if not sooner, considering current deforestation rates.

Wood consumption drives deforestation. Since 1960, global industrial wood production has risen by 50 percent, to 1.5 billion cubic meters, four fifths of which is from primary and secondary-growth forests. About the same quantity, 1.8 billion cubic meters, is burned directly as wood fuel each year in developing countries.

Worldwide, only some 290 million hectares of forested land are under protection from logging, but even protected areas are threatened by illegal exploitation. Of 200 areas of high biological diversity worldwide, illegal logging threatens 65 percent. All told, illegal logging has devastated public forests around the globe, reducing incentives for locals to invest in sustainable forestry and accumulating losses of revenue to governments of some $15 billion annually.

Forest plantations now cover more than 187 million hectares, less than 5 percent of total forested area, but account for 20 percent of current world wood production. As natural forests are exhausted or come under protection, a growing share of future wood demand will be satisfied from tree farms.

Well-planned and managed plantations can efficiently satisfy timber demand. Unfortunately, the world has seen many plantations raised at the expense of old growth or other extremely diverse natural forests. In some cases, governments grant forest concessions to logging companies contingent on their planting of replacement trees, but after the companies clearcut, they leave the land bare and move to new areas. In Indonesia, for example, 9 million hectares have been allocated for development as industrial timber plantations, but only 2 million hectares have been replanted.

Areas bereft of their original forest ecosystems and associated habitat have lost vegetation that stabilizes soil, cycles nutrients, and prevents erosion. These lands quickly lose utility and become a liability. Even when plantations are put in place, the functioning of a monoculture plantation is a far cry from that of an old-growth forest, where a number of species of differing ages each play a particular biological role, and ecosystem processes are thus bound to change.

A satellite-based survey of the world’s forests by the U.N. Environment Programme, along with NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, found that 80 percent of largely intact forests (those with a canopy closure of over 40 percent) are located in just 15 countries. A full 88 percent of the key closed forest areas are sparsely populated, making them hopeful targets for conservation. Short of calling for a moratorium of all logging, conservation in these 15 countries offers a reasonable starting point for forest preservation.

Crucial to slowing the loss of the world’s natural forests is finding alternative sources of energy for low-income countries, so that valuable wood is not burned. Innovations in reuse and recycling allow reclaimed timber and discarded paper to satisfy wood product demand. Reduced consumption of virgin wood products is a key to saving the world’s trees.

When wood products are used, governments can ensure that all domestic production and imports of wood products come from responsibly managed forests meeting rigorous environmental and social standards, like those of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Worldwide, FSC-accredited bodies have certified some 24 million hectares of forests in 45 countries, numbers that are bound to increase as demand for certified wood rises and as noncertified sellers have difficulty competing.

Copyright © 2002 Earth Policy Institute

Where Computers Go To Die

Poor cities in China become dumping ground for e-waste

By Karl Schoenberger

San Jose Mercury News

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GUIYU, China - Here in southern China, where the gritty air stings your throat and circuit boards pile up like dry leaves in the gutter, a group of women squat on the sidewalk using their bare hands to pull apart the hazardous guts of a small mountain of PCs.

This is where many of America’s computers go to die.

In the Pearl River Delta less than 180 miles away, in factories as immaculate as Guiyu is filthy, growing legions of young women work up to 18 hours a day, soldering chips and wires to motherboards, making the PC boxes that one day will bear the name of Hewlett-Packard or Dell or IBM.

This is where the world’s personal computers are born.

A computer may spend its working days in a comfortable home in Boston or in a programmer’s cubicle in San Jose. But at both ends, the dirty work behind a typical PC’s life is done in China. This is the dark secret of a famously “clean industry.”

At the front end, the industry relies on cheap overseas labor working long hours to make a profit on computers even as they fall in price. At the back end, the industry downplays its responsibility for the toxic chemicals and metals used in its short-lived products.

In the Pearl River Delta and other regions, spotless new factories have made China the world’s premier electronics workshop by drawing young women from the desperately poor countryside to work most of their waking hours for 30 cents an hour. These are the kind of labor practices made notorious by apparel factories used by Nike and the Gap in the 1990s.

In Guiyu, as in similar dumping grounds in India, Pakistan and the Philippines, migrant workers are paid pennies to crack open and sort the parts of monitors and circuit boards, exposing themselves to toxic metals like lead, mercury and cadmium. They burn PVC cables to extract copper, poisoning the air. They dip circuit boards and chips in acid to recover small amounts of gold, inhaling the fumes and dumping the acid into a nearby river that is dying.

“Rather than having to face the e-waste problem squarely, the United States has made use of a convenient, and until now, hidden escape valve: exporting the crisis to developing countries in Asia,” the environmental groups Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and Basel Action Network stated in a recent report.

This fall a Mercury News reporter and photographer set out to chronicle this complex cycle, from a computer’s birth to its death, and document the little-known story behind Silicon Valley’s celebrated success. Its sheer scale is formidable: This year, the global computer industry produced its billionth PC, and it is expected to make 1 billion more by 2008.

Our journey begins in Guiyu, on the banks of the Lianjiang River, its sluggish waters contaminated by shards of lead-shielded glass from computer monitors that crossed the Pacific in containers of electronic trash.

Li traveled the breadth of China to escape destitution in Sichuan province. Here on a Guiyu sidewalk, she is pulling apart a PC carcass, earning about 17 cents an hour as she exposes herself to a witch’s brew of chemicals without gloves, goggles or other protection.

“I don’t know yet if I like this work,” said Li, 30, who had been on the job about one month. “But back home there are no jobs. There is no money. There is nothing to do.”

Guiyu stands out as a relatively prosperous pocket of activity compared with Shantou, a coastal city that the economic boom left behind. But incoming electronic trash litters the town, from bales of plastic monitor shells in a back alley to heaps of cell phone casings on the sidewalk of a grubby street where people live in concrete-block houses above recycling workshops.

A decade ago, this was an idyllic cluster of farming villages nestled around the pristine Lianjiang River. Now the stale air in town is choked with fumes that burn the throat — a condition that environmental investigators partly attribute to nighttime burning of cables to recover their copper.

Guiyu became a symbol of the global e-waste problem after environmentalists investigated conditions here a year ago. They released their findings in February in a report published by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and the Seattle-based Basel Action Network.

The report, “Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia,” indicted the U.S. computer industry for not taking responsibility for the toxic substances that are built into its products. Instead of allowing the problem to be exported, it argued, brand-name PC makers should design products for easier recycling and should monitor the integrity of U.S. scrap recycling. The report also rebuked the U.S. government for failing to ratify the 1992 Basel Convention and an amendment to the accord that would ban exports of hazardous electronic waste. And it embarrassed China, which had ratified both the convention and the amendment yet allowed cities like Guiyu to subsist on imported scrap.

U.S. recycling companies were denounced for their “dirty little secret.” Many of these companies were collecting monitors and PCs, but instead of recycling them under U.S. standards for hazardous-waste handling, they were shipping the scrap to Asia, where there is a ravenous, unregulated market and wages are dirt-cheap.

An estimated 50 percent to 80 percent of the electronic waste collected for recycling in the Western United States ends up shipped to developing countries, and scrap brokers in China are the biggest buyers, industry sources say. Electronic-trash recycling is a lucrative niche in the waste industry.

“You get paid to pick it up, and you get paid by people who want to take it away,” said the head of a major recycling company who asked not to be identified.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 1999 that only about 18 percent of all discarded computers were being recycled, the rest presumably left in storage or going into landfills. That would amount to about 12.8 million computers feeding the electronic-trash supply chains this year.

The tech industry has distanced itself from the problem of e-waste exports, but is grappling with the demand for domestic recycling solutions.

The Electronic Industries Alliance said recently that its members are “working hard to provide Californians with several immediate options to help with the creation of a recycling industry.”

In China, the central government has tried repeatedly to stop imports of hazardous material over the past decade, but has been stymied by the nation’s poorly developed rule of law and the central government’s limited ability to enforce its will in outlying provinces.

Beijing cracked down in Guiyu after the state-run broadcasting network documented the hazardous electronic-scrap recycling in 2000. Later that year, a Hong Kong magazine published an account of Guiyu’s environmental blight, citing tests indicating alarming levels of lead in the Lianjiang River.

Then came “Exporting Harm” and its international exposure.

HP, IBM and Kmart were among the brand names on the tags and labels fastened to the scrapped electronics products videotaped by the investigators. Former owners identified on the tags included San Francisco State University, the Los Angeles Unified School District and Xerox Corp. A 16-inch Sony color monitor previously owned by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency found its way to Guiyu.

The Basel Action Network and undercover investigators from Greenpeace China collected sediment and water samples from the Lianjiang for testing by an internationally accredited testing agency in Hong Kong. One water sample showed levels of lead to be 190 times higher than the threshold set by the World Health Organization for drinking water. The lab also found sky-high levels of lead, zinc and chromium in one of two sediment samples.

The water is so filthy that Guiyu residents now rely on a town 30 miles away for their drinking water, which rickety three-wheel trucks bring in orange plastic tanks.

No one is studying workers in places like Guiyu for the health effects of hazardous electronic waste, but there are anecdotal reports of respiratory, skin and stomach problems, and an increasing number of miscarriages in the area.

Embarrassed, Chinese officials rushed to Guiyu this year to try to clean up the mess and place it out of sight. Police detained and interrogated a correspondent for Japan’s major economic daily, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 30 minutes after he arrived in April.

Authorities effectively made Guiyu off limits to foreign reporters and Western diplomats without an official invitation and a guided tour that did not permit sightseeing along the toxic river.

When the Mercury News explored Guiyu in late September to corroborate environmentalists’ findings, there were no signs of a police presence on the streets. But there was considerable apprehension among the workers and scrap brokers who agreed to talk.

Workers unloading a truck full of computer chassis chased away the Mercury News team. “No pictures! No pictures!” they shouted in Mandarin.

A rough-looking scrap broker interrupted an interview with his migrant laborers who were cooking motherboards over primitive charcoal stoves beneath a shade tarp near the river, melting the lead solder to retrieve chips and bits of wire.

“We don’t mean to pollute the environment,” said the broker, who appeared to be in his early 30s, as he beckoned the journalists into a crumbling brick warehouse.

A green plastic bin of semiconductors rested on the coffee table before him as the man held court, chain-smoking and surrounded by a ragtag gang of associates. He said he was a Guiyu native but would not give his name or allow photos.

“We’re just peasants trying to make a decent living,” he said. “We’re afraid of the government coming here and giving us trouble, because our business is already suffering.” The man suggested the journalists should leave town, “and don’t come back tomorrow.”

Another Guiyu scrap dealer, Yang Xiong Hong, said he buys his electronic waste from dealers in Guangzhou, the provincial capital, and sells the salvaged material to specialized traders in town. He admitted he was burning remnants of cables and motherboards “at a suitable location,” but expressed no regrets.

“I can’t control what goes on here,” said the 24-year-old Yang, who is saving money so he can move to Hong Kong and start a new life. “If I didn’t do this work, someone else would.”

Guiyu’s recycling entrepreneurs insist they process only domestically generated computer scrap, and worry that the ban on imported waste is harming the town’s primary source of income.

Officials in Beijing issued a statement Sept. 21 saying the government had struck a blow to the inbound traffic in electronic waste. Customs officials seized 22 containers sent from the United States packed with electronic contraband in Wenzhou, about 400 miles up the coast from Shantou.

The statement did not mention the thousands of cargo containers unloaded at China’s 45 major seaports daily, however. Nor were the underpaid customs and public-security officials who live off petty graft taken into account. The statement did not explain why trucks bearing oceangoing containers were still rumbling into Guiyu that very day.

“Things have been backed up for the past three months, and you can’t export to China now without a special connection,” said Mark Dallura, president of Chase Electronics, an electronic-scrap broker outside Philadelphia. The former computer programmer said he exports material though a Chinese agent in Los Angeles.

“We go through this about every year and a half,” Dallura said. “Then the flap dies down and it’s business as usual.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Warmer Weather Threatens Western Water Supplies

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RICHLAND, Washington, November 22, 2002 (ENS) – A warming climate will put increasing pressure on water supplies in western states, new research suggests.

In the most rigorous study to date of potential greenhouse impacts, a group of leading global warming and climate change researchers detail how major water problems could evolve over the next 50 years throughout the West as a result of climate change already underway. The report was written by more than two dozen scientists and engineers from around the country.

The new simulations, released Thursday, suggest the effects of rising temperatures will exacerbate problems that are already beginning to emerge. In the West, the effects of global warming can already be seen in earlier melting of mountain snow packs and spring flooding dates.

Scientific studies show that these, and other expected climate changes, could have a devastating impact on water resources in some parts of the West over the next half century.

“Population and economic growth already are placing severe pressure on water resources in the West. Climate change is one more very important factor that has to be taken into account when thinking about the future,” said Bill Pennell, director of the atmospheric science and global change division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

Among the conclusions of the PNNL research team:

In the Columbia River System of Washington State, residents and industries may be faced with the choice of water for summer and fall hydroelectric power or spring and summer releases for salmon runs, but not both. Accelerated Climate Prediction Initiative research, or ACPI, shows that with climate change, the river cannot be managed to accommodate both. In fact, the window for successful salmon reproduction in the Pacific Northwest may become so compressed by climate change that some species could cease to exist regardless of any current or future water policies.

The Colorado River Reservoir System will not be able to meet all of the demands placed on it – including water supply for Southern California and the inland Southwest – because reservoir levels will be reduced by more than one-third and releases by as much as 17 percent. The greatest effects will be on lower Colorado River Basin states. All users of Colorado River hydroelectric power will be affected by lower reservoir levels and flows, which will result in reductions in hydropower generation by as much as 40 percent.

In the Central Valley of California, it will be impossible to meet current water system performance levels so that impacts will be felt in reduced reliability of water supply deliveries, hydropower production and instream flows. With less fresh water available, the Sacramento Delta could experience an increase in salinity, causing major ecosystem disruptions.

“It also is important to point out that these predictions are based on one of the most conservative climate models,” said Dennis Lettenmaier, professor of civil engineering at the University of Washington. “Other models show a much larger warming effect.”

“However, even this conservative model indicates substantial changes,” Lettenmaier cautioned. “For example, by mid-century the yearly average snow pack in the Washington and Oregon Cascades may be reduced on the order of 50 percent and because most of our water storage is in this snow pack, such a reduction will result in big changes in flows and water temperatures in Cascade rivers and streams.”

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2002. All Rights Reserved.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Continue Reading Warmer Weather Threatens Western Water Supplies

Food Travels Far to Reach Your Table

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By Cat Lazaroff

ens-news.com

WASHINGTON, DC, November 21, 2002 (ENS) - As families travel across the United States next week to gather for the Thanksgiving holiday, many will sit down to eat food that has traveled even farther - between 1,500 and 2,500 miles (2,500 and 4,000 kilometers) from farm to table. A new study by the Worldwatch Institute details the lengthy journeys that much of the nation’s food supply now takes, finding a growing separation between the sources and destinations of American food.

The distance that food travels has grown by as much as 25 percent, according to the report by the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental and social policy research institute based in Washington DC. The nation’s reliance on a complex network of food shipments leaves the United States vulnerable to supply disruptions, the group argues.

“The farther we ship food, the more vulnerable our food system becomes,” said Worldwatch research associate Brian Halweil, author of “Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market.”

“Many major cities in the U.S. have a limited supply of food on hand,” Halweil added. “That makes those cities highly vulnerable to anything that suddenly restricts transportation, such as oil shortages or acts of terrorism.”

This vulnerability is not limited to the United States. The tonnage of food shipped between countries has grown fourfold over the last four decades, while the world’s population has doubled. In the United Kingdom, for example, food travels 50 percent farther than it did two decades ago.

This reliance on long distance food damages rural economies, as farmers and small food businesses become the most marginal link in the sprawling food chain, says the Worldwatch report. Long distance travel also creates numerous opportunities along the way for food contamination, and requires the use of artificial additives and preservatives to keep food from spoiling.

Food transportation also contributes to global warming, because of the huge quantities of fuel used for transportation. A typical meal bought from a conventional supermarket chain - including some meat, grains, fruit and vegetables - consumes four to 17 times more petroleum for transport than the same meal using local ingredients.

“We are spending far more energy to get food to the table than the energy we get from eating the food. A head of lettuce grown in the Salinas Valley of California and shipped nearly 3,000 miles to Washington, D.C., requires about 36 times as much fossil fuel energy in transport as it provides in food energy when it arrives,” Halweil said.

While most economists believe that long distance food trade is efficient because communities and nations can buy their food from the lowest cost provider, studies from North America, Asia, and Africa show that farm communities reap little benefit from their crops, and often suffer as a result of freer trade in agricultural goods.

“The economic benefits of food trade are a myth,” said Halweil. “The big winners are agribusiness monopolies that ship, trade, and process food. Agricultural policies, including the new [Bush administration backed] farm bill, tend to favor factory farms, giant supermarkets, and long distance trade, and cheap, subsidized fossil fuels encourage long distance shipping. The big losers are the world’s poor.”

Farmers producing for export often go hungry as they sacrifice the use of their land to feed foreign mouths, Halweil writes. Meanwhile, poor urban dwellers in both developed and developing nations find themselves living in neighborhoods without supermarkets, green grocers, or healthy food choices.

“Of course, a certain amount of food trade is natural and beneficial. But money spent on locally produced foods stays in the community longer, creating jobs, supporting farmers, and preserving local cuisines and crop varieties against the steamroller of culinary imperialism,” Halweil added. “And developing nations that emphasize greater food self reliance can retain precious foreign exchange and avoid the instability of international markets.”

Halweil points to a vigorous, emerging local food movement that is challenging both the wisdom and practice of long distance food shipping.

“Massive meat recalls, the advent of genetically engineered food, and other food safety crises have built interest in local food,” he said. “Rebuilding local food economies is the first genuine profit making opportunity in farm country in years.”

Communities that seek to meet their food needs locally will reap benefits including a more diverse variety of regional crops, cheaper food that avoids added costs from intermediate handlers and shippers, and a boon for the local economy as money spent on food goes to local growers and merchants. Of course, many consumers will choose local produce just for the flavor.

“Locally grown food served fresh and in season has a definite taste advantage,” Halweil said. “It’s harvested at the peak of ripeness and doesn’t have to be fumigated, refrigerated, or packaged for long distance hauling and long shelf life.”

In the United States, for example, more than half of all tomatoes are harvested and shipped green, and then artificially ripened upon arrival at their final destination.

Consumers now have a growing variety of local food providers to choose from. The number of registered farmers’ markets in the United States has jumped from 300 in the mid-1970s and 1,755 in 1994 to more than 3,100 today. About three million people now visit these markets each week, spending more than $1 billion each year.

Innovative restaurants, school cafeterias, caterers, hospitals, and even supermarkets are beginning to offer fresh, seasonal foods from local farmers and food businesses.

North America now boasts more than a dozen local food policy councils, which track changes in the local food system, lobby for farmland protection, point citizens towards local food options, and help create incentives for local food businesses.

But the most powerful force behind the growing local food market is the consumer. The Worldwatch report offers several suggestions for how consumers can help to promote local food systems, including:

• Learn what foods are in season in your area and try to build your diet around them.
• Shop at a local farmers’ market, or link up with your neighbors and friends to start a subscription service featuring seasonal foods from local growers
• Ask the manager or chef of your favorite restaurant how much of the food on the menu is locally grown, and then encourage him or her to buy food locally.
• Take a trip to a local farm to learn what it produces.
• Host a harvest party at your home or in your community that features locally available and in season foods.
• Produce a local food directory that lists all the local food sources in your area
• Buy extra quantities of your favorite fruit or vegetable when it is in season and experiment with drying, canning, jamming, or otherwise preserving it for a later date.
• Plant a garden and grow as much of your own food as possible.
• Speak to your local politician about forming a local food policy council.

For more information on the report, “Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market,” visit the Worldwatch Institute at: http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/paper/163/orderpage.html

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2002. All Rights Reserved.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Church groups: ‘What would Jesus drive?’

DETROIT, Nov. 20 (UPI)—A convoy of gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles driven by representatives of religious groups trying to get major automakers to build cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars stopped at General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. headquarters on Wednesday.

Their bumper stickers asked: “What would Jesus drive?”

Religious leaders allied with the Evangelical Environmental Network say it’s unlikely it would be a gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle or an oversized pickup.

“The Risen Lord Jesus is concerned about the kinds of cars we drive because they affect his people and his creation,” the group said in a call to action for Christian leaders on its Web site, whatwouldjesusdrive.org.

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Portland at forefront of eco-friendly roof trend

By GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press Writer

PORTLAND – When Chris Moehling wants to show off the new garden at the youth hostel he manages, he steps out a second-story bedroom window onto a roof blooming with plants.

The 650-square-foot garden of scrubby succulents and yellow marigolds grows right out of the roof, above the busy street and is visible to the hundreds of shoppers and motorists who pass below.

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U.S. States Combat Climate Change on Their Own

The King Mountain Wind Ranch near Odessa, Texas, added almost 77 MW of capacity to the state’s wind power capacity in 2001. Austin Energy purchases the power produced by the 59, 1300-kW turbines manufactured by Bonus. © Cielo Wind Power, courtesy National Renewable Energy Laboratory

By J.R. Pegg

WASHINGTON, DC, November 15, 2002 (ENS) – With the U.S. federal government dragging its feet on addressing the Earth’s warming climate, some states are not waiting for the feds to tell them what to do. State action on the issue has been intensifying in the past few years, according to a new report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change released Thursday.

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Corn Near Gene-Altered Site to Be Destroyed

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 (Bloomberg News) Federal regulators said today that they had ordered the destruction of an Iowa cornfield surrounding a test site for gene-altered crops.

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Deadly Parasites Infect Darwin’s Famous Finches

CAMBRIDGE, UK, November 11, 2002 (ENS) – Darwin’s finches, made famous by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, are facing a new threat. Parasitic fly larvae are feeding on nestling birds in Ecuador’s Galapagos islands, BirdLife International is warning. BirdLife International is a global alliance of national conservation organizations of which the Ecuadorian Ornithological Foundation is a partner.

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Farming chemicals may harm sperm

Quality varies among regions of the United States, report finds

By Cheryl Wittenauer
Associated Press

ST. LOUIS—A study has found the quality of semen significantly poorer in men from rural mid-Missouri than in males from urban areas, and its authors believe agricultural chemicals might explain the difference.

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Satellite Images Show Artistic Side of Earth

WASHINGTON, DC, November 8, 2002 (ENS) – A new online exhibit of satellite imagery explores how natural landscapes create abstract art.

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Big business gobbling up small organic farms

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

The organic foods movement, born on the pesticide-free ideals of back-to-the-land farmers, marked a milestone with last week’s launch of federal standards for labeling. Under the new rules, organic labels now assure consumers that meat or poultry comes from animals not given any growth hormones and that crops were grown on land not fertilized with sewage sludge or chemicals.

But the standards come as increasing numbers of the original small farms are being taken over by large food corporations tapping into a booming market.

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