INS y MINAE le declaran la guerra al fuego

22 February 2007

published by www.teletica.com

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Costa Rica — Solo en enero, los bomberos atendieron unos 20 incendiosforestales, y cada día deben enfrentar el fuego en más de 40 charrales. Poreso, el Instituto Nacional de Seguros (INS) y el Ministerio de Ambiente y Energía(MINAE) unen esfuerzos para evitar los incendios.

Últimamente no hay día en que los charrales no pongan a correr a los bomberosen diferentes partes del país.

Durante el 2007 ya llevan más de dos mil, el doble del año pasado para estamisma fecha.

En cuento a incendios forestales, solo enero contabiliza 17 que han afectado 240hectáreas en áreas silvestres protegidas de Guanacaste y el Pacífico Central.Es por eso que instituciones como el INS y MINAE apuestan a medidas de prevención.

Atender un incendio forestal no solo es caro en equipo y desplazamiento, sinotambién en pólizas para los bomberos, cuyo monto para los próximos mesessuperó los 7 millones de colones.

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Nowdrought threat looms

7 February 2007

published by thestar.com.my

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Petaling Jaya, Malaysia — Malaysians have barelyrecovered from the recent floods and the authorities are now warning the peopleto brace themselves for a possible drought. 

With the expected prolonged hot and dry weather, the country is also on highalert for peat and bush fire, with Muadzam and Tebu Hitam in Pahang, and BatangBerjuntai in Selangor, identified as potential hot spots. 

The hot spell that is synonymous with the Chinese New Year period is merely aprecursor to an even longer hot and dry spell due next month when the El Ninophenomenon hits Malaysia.  

This is because the monsoon that lashes the country during the early part ofevery year will then reach Indonesia, leaving less moisture here, saidMeteorological Services Department director-general Dr Yap Kok Seng. 

Syarikat Bekalan Air Selangor (Syabas), the Drainage and IrrigationDepartment (DID), and the Department of Environment (DOE) have also warned thepublic to start conserving water. 

DID director-general Datuk Keizrul Abdullah said the country’s dams hadenough water to last three months should there be no rain at all. 

“This in itself is quite good if we have to face such a situation wherethere is no inflow from the rivers for three months.  

“Even if we are looking at a drought, and if we were in the middle of one,there will be ground water to provide some inflow,” he said yesterday. 

Keizrul said the extreme drought in 1997 had always been used as a benchmark. 

“Going by that experience, it was a matter of people reacting only when thesituation was really bad. People were not saving water then (during the drought),”he said. 

This time, instead of waiting for the dams to run out of water, conservationmeasures would be put in place much earlier, he said. 

Selangor DOE director Che Asmah Ibrahim said the department had startedsurveillance for those who carried out open burning. 

Syabas officials said that the public could now start to save rainwater anduse pails when washing the car or watering plants instead of the hose.  

Meanwhile, the state co-owners of Klang Valley’s main water supplier havemet with the Government to discuss exploring alternative sources of the preciouscommodity in an attempt to avert the possibility of a water crisis in case ofdrought, SIM LEOI LEOI reports. 

Energy, Water and Communications Minister Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik said inPutrajaya that it was decided that there were good prospects for scouting forunderground water. 

“This will help mitigate any dry season that may hit the Klang Valley inthe months to come. 

“My ministry is aware of the warning for drought. But at present, there isenough water and enough storage capacity,” he said. 

Syabas, apart from monitoring the water level of dams, has allocated 485static tanks and 65 tankers in case taps run dry, Bernama reports. 

Chief executive officer Ruslan Hassan said Syabas had even collaborated withthe Selangor government to identify several lakes in the Klang Valley wherewater could be used during an extended dry spell.

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Palm oil -eco-vandal turned environmental saviour?

11 February 2007

published by news.yahoo.com

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Southeast Asia — The oil palm must be the most reviled plant on earth, heldresponsible for everything from rainforest destruction and orangutanannihilation to polluted Asian skies and exploitation of workers.

But lately, high crude oil prices and new health concerns have given thetowering palm, grown mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia, a surprising new statusas an environmental saviour.

Palm oil production and prices are soaring as it finds favour as a source ofeco-friendly biofuel — fuel derived from renewable resources as an alternativeto fossil fuels — and as a substitute for the new dietary baddy trans fats,which are commonly used in processed food.

Palm oil used to be shunned because it is a saturated fat, but trans fats arenow believed to be much more harmful and last year the US market for Malaysianpalm oil grew by 65 percent as consumers began making the switch.

Meanwhile, European nations in particular are fuelling big demand for biofuel,which is derived from natural oils and plants and added to ordinary diesel, andis seen as an important tool for reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

Last year Malaysian exports of palm oil, already the world’s largest, grew toa record 31.81 billion ringgit (9.05 billion dollars), five percent up on thelast high set in 2004.

Biodiesel production is expected to double this year.

Indonesia is also in an aggressive mood, aiming to overtake Malaysia as theworld’s largest producer of palm oil by 2008 by expanding the area underplantation to meet the demand for biofuel raw materials.

Environmentalists are alarmed by the new mood, and say that the benefits interms of health and alternative energy will not outweigh the damage wreaked by adramatic expansion of palm oil planting.

“It’s a huge push to have a monoculture crop replace biodiverserainforest and indigenous people. Palm oil is just a quick fix for biofuel,”said Meena Raman from Friends of the Earth Malaysia.

“It’s being bandied around with all the companies getting excited aboutexpanding palm oil, but from an environmental standpoint they’ve alreadydevastated so much. Species extinction is very clear,” she said.

Friends of the Earth in 2005 called for a boycott of palm oil products in areport dubbed the “Oil for Ape Scandal,” on shrinking orangutanhabitat in Indonesia’s Sumatra island, and Borneo island which is split betweenIndonesia and Malaysia.

“If forest destruction continues at the same scale and speed, theorangutan will be lost within 12 years. The countdown to extinction has begun,”it said.

Malaysia has denied the claims, saying that no forests are cleared forplantations any more, and that the allegations are an attempt by industrycompetitors in the developed world to undermine the sector.

— Forest clearing, wildlife extinction: “just like the Europeans”–

“We owe no apology to anyone to use our forests for our own use. Justlike the Europeans who used up all their forests for their own use,” EnergyMinister Lim Keng Yaik said last year.

In Indonesia, however, land clearing is rampant and last month Greenpeacewarned that EuropeanUnion demand for bio-fuel could threaten Indonesia’s remainingforests as the government approves new palm oil plantations.

Chinese-funded plans for a vast new plantation in Indonesia’s Kalimantanwhich would see the forest stripped from a 1.8 million-hectare (4.5 million-acre)site — half the size of the Netherlands — have raised particular alarm.

Apart from destroying forests where new species are still being discovered atthe rate of three a month, burning to clear land for palm oil poses a majorhazard because the dense smoke wafts right across the region.

In 1997-98 the haze choked large parts of Southeast Asia, costing anestimated 9.0 billion dollars by disrupting air travel and other businessactivities, and triggering a health crisis that rears its head annually.

In the face of illegal and unplanned development worldwide, in 2003 theinternational Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was established todefine and promote sustainable production.

“We need to show that environmental responsibility is not out of syncwith making money. There will always be cowboys out there, but hopefully we canbring them,” said RSPO Secretary-General Andrew Ng.

Driving north from Kuala Lumpur there is rarely a break in the vast swathesof oil palms that line the roads throughout the three-hour drive from thecapital to United Plantations, reputedly one of the best run in the country.

“At the end of the day it’s a very sustainable crop,” saidcommercial director Martin Bek-Nielsen, whose father Borge was a Danishentrepreneur who died in 2005 after spending a lifetime nurturing one ofMalaysia’s key industries.

“Of course there’s black sheep out there who shouldn’t be in thebusiness. We can’t fight against consumers in Europe who see pictures of burntout orangutans,” he told AFP.

Outside, endless neat rows of palm trees shade the mostly Indian, Bangladeshiand Indonesian workers as they go about the tough work of cutting away the palmfronds and harvesting the 40-50 kilogram (88-110 pound) fruits that look likeprehistoric bunches of grapes.

United’s workers are well paid, housed and unionised. They have professionalmedical care and their children are schooled, but civil society groups say thisis exceptional and that elsewhere long working hours, unsafe conditions and lowpay are common.

With European companies already beginning to abandon bio-diesel plantsbecause of environmental concerns, Bek-Nielsen is bent on changing perceptionsof his industry.

“If we don’t get our act together this bad perception is going to growand grow. If European companies can’t buy environmentally sustainable palm oilthey won’t buy any at all,” he said.

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Saving the Heart of Borneo

19 February 2007

published by http://asiasentinel.com

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Southeast Aisa — Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia have signed apact to preserve what’s left of Borneo’s tropical rainforest. Do they meanit?

On Feb. 12, in an elaborate ceremony in Bali,representatives of the three governments with jurisdiction over the ecologicaljewel that is the island of Borneo signed the “Heart of Borneo” Declaration,promising to conserve one of the most important centers of biological diversityin the world.

Designed to conserve and provide sustainable management foralmost a third of the island ‑ approximately 220,000 square kilometers ofequatorial rainforest – the historic pact represents an unusual although notunprecedented approach. The central African states of Congo, Equatorial Guinea,Cameroon and Gabon in 1999 committed themselves to international administrationof the Congo Basin forests in Africa and there are signs that a joint policy canwork. 

“The goal is to keep the Borneo natural heritage for thebenefit of present and future generations and to fully respect sovereignty overeach other`s territorial borders without prejudice,” Indonesian ForestryMinister MS Kaban said at the ceremony.

But there are questions whether the governments involvedreally are committed to saving the rainforest. The officials who signed the pact‑ Natural Resources and Environment Minister Azmi Khalid of Malaysia,Indonesia’s  Kaban, and Brunei’s Industry and PrimaryResources Minister Awang Ahmad Jumat – represent countries with vastlydifferent needs and agendas despite their common geography.

Only the Sultanate of Brunei, which covers just 7.3 percentof the island’s 743,107 sq km, has shown a full commitment to the preservationof its rainforest. Some 75 percent of Brunei is covered by primary rainforest, apristine environment of whitewater rivers, waterfalls, deep jungle, longhousesand uncounted species of flora and fauna. Of course, It has the luxury to remainthat way because the sultanate is almost exclusively dependent on the sale of200,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

By contrast in Malaysia’s part of Borneo, just five daysbefore the signing of the agreement, police assisted the Malaysian logging giantSamling Group to remove a three-year blockade set up by local indigenous Penantribes in Upper Baram in the state of Sarawak in an attempt to halt logging inone of the country’s last primary forests.

Samling has received certification and logging licensesfrom the Sarawak State Authorities as well as from the Malaysian Timber Council(MTCC). Although the Penan have strongly contested the certification andlicenses at the High Court in Sarawak since 1998, they are no match for thecorporate giants.

“This is an historic occasion which marks new collaboration between our three countries. This will put the Heart of Borneo on the world stage as one of the last great blocks of forest in the world” ‑  MS Kaban, Indonesian Minister of Forestry

Across Malaysia and Indonesia, it is a cruel fact that the lure of profit from aburgeoning bio-diesel industry in the United States and Europe is also drivingthe leveling of increasing amounts of Borneo’s rainforest. In other words, thedrive to ease dependence on fossil fuels in one region is helping to destroyvital forest cover in another region.

Palm oil-related products are driving the creation ofmassive palm oil plantations acquired through large-scale slash and burnpractices. The result is a deep annual haze that blankets parts of Indonesia,Malaysia and Singapore. The open burning of huge swaths of forest is a cheapmeans of clearing land and has been going on for years with especially adverseeffects in the last 10 years.

Since 1996, deforestation across Indonesia alone hasincreased to an average of 2 million hectares per year, devastating an areaabout half the size of the Netherlands. Today only half of Borneo’s storiedoriginal forest cover remains.

The island is home to 13 species of primates, 150 species of reptiles andamphibians, over 350 species of birds. Borneo also has a cat species unique tothe island, the bay cat, which is considered one of the rarest cats in the worldas well as 15,000 species of plants with 6,000 found nowhere else in the world.It continues to be the source of many new discoveries, with more than 50 newspecies were discovered last year alone.

Dionysius Sharma, the World Wildlife Fund-Malaysia’schief executive officer, is hopeful that the new agreement can help. The threecountries “have come together with a shared vision that will promotesustainable development, protect vital natural resources and reduce poverty andshould be an inspiration to everyone,” he said.

Can the three governments maintain an effective commitmentto the enforcement of security of the Heart of Borneo declaration? According toa United Nations Environment Program report released on Feb. 6 ‑ the daybefore the Penan were ousted from their barricades ‑ the naturalrainforests in Sumatra and Borneo are being cleared so rapidly that up to 98percent may be gone by 2022 unless urgent action begins immediately Illegallogging driven by global demand accounts for an estimated 73 percent-plus of alllogging in Indonesia.

Another report, by the environmental group Mongabay, basedin the United States, points out that consumption of tropical timber by the USand other industrial countries plays a significant role in deforestation. The US, according to Mongabay’s report, consumes 17 percent of theworld’s timber output and is the third largest importer of tropical timberalthough it has less than five percent of the world’s population.

The UNEP’s report concludes that loss of orangutanhabitat is happening at a rate of up to 30 percent higher than previouslythought. Indonesia, the report says, is active in fighting illegal logging andis working with a number of international programs but the assistance of theinternational community is crucial.

H. E. Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia’s environment ministerand the outgoing president of UNEP’s Governing Council, said; “We arecurrently in an unequal struggle over illegal logging, which in the medium tolong-term could be won through certification processes. Such processes can helpglobal consumers choose between sustainably produced wood and palm-oil productsand those produced illegally and unsustainably”.

In 2006 smoke from forest fires in Malaysia and Indonesiaclouded the region during the usual dry season during the month of July toOctober. It was however milder in comparison to the haze that engulfed theregion in 1997 and 1998 when approximately six and a half million hectares ofland were burned in Kalimantan alone, nearly half of which was forest covered.

If the Heart of Borneo agreement works, it may be a reliefto the local population as it seeks to end plans to create the world’s largestpalm oil plantation in Kalimantan, along the border with Malaysia. This plan,which was to be funded and supported by Chinese investment, would have includedapproximately 1.8 million hectares. The environmental degradation from this planhad it come to fruition would have been disastrous for the Heart of Borneo.  Theplan was widely regarded by environmentalists as a ploy to cut millions of cubicmetres of tropical hardwood

The Malaysian state of Sabah and the forests of Borneostill hold huge tracts of natural forests. This is one of only two places –the other being Indonesia’s Sumatra island – where orangutan, elephants andrhinos still co-exist and where forests are large enough to maintain viablepopulations. Yet in 2001 a World Bank report predicted that all of Sumatra’sforest would soon be destroyed outside protected areas.

Borneo could loose most of its lowlands by 2010. Among thefirst casualties of this predicament are the Orangutans who once lived all theway from southern China to the foothills of the Himalayas and south to theisland of Java. Today, they are confined to the rapidly dwindling forests ofSumatra and Borneo.

Just 100 years ago there were probably more than 230,000orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra. In the last 10 years alone their numbers havedeclined by 30-50 percent, and now just over 60,000 survive.

In Indonesia’s Kalimantan province, 10,000 squarekilometers of lowland peat swamp forest were partially cleared in the 1990s forconversion to rice fields. In Sumatra, illegal logging is still rampant.Satellite studies show that some 56 percent (more than 29000 square kilometers)of protected lowland forests in Kalimantan were cut down between 1985 and 2001.Another species moving perilously close to extinction is the rhino of Borneo.There are fewer than 13 left in the interior forests of Sabah, where the mainthreats are poaching – its horn and virtually all of its body parts arevaluable on the black market for Chinese medicine – and loss of its forestedhabitat.

Without the maintenance of very large blocks ofinterconnected forest, there is a clear risk that hundreds of species couldbecome extinct. Large mammals such as orangutans, elephants, Borneo rhinos andothers are particularly at risk because of the vast areas they require tosurvive. Other smaller species, especially small mammals may not be able tore-colonize isolated patches of suitable habitat and thus will become locallyextinct. Road construction through Protected Areas leads to further separationof habitat ranges and provides easy access for poachers to some of the moreremote and diverse tracts of remaining virgin forest.

The problem is further exacerbated because the majority ofBorneo’s rivers are also threatened by deforestation and destruction of theenvironment. The rivers originate in the island’s the uplands and are crucialto maintaining water supply and mitigating the effect of fires and droughts.They function as an ecological support system for the lowlands. These watershedsface being lost forever to the world.

Can we trust Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei to preservewhat’s left of Borneo’s beauty and its ecological importance to our very ownsurvival? That remains to be seen.  

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