The destruction of the environment

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THE world's fish and seafood could disappear by 2048 as overfishing and pollution destroy ocean ecosystems at an accelerating pace, US and Canadian researchers reported today.

If current global trends continued, the loss of fish and seafood would threaten human food supplies and the environment, according to the most exhaustive study to date on the subject, published in the November 3 issue of the US journal Science.

"Our analyses suggest that business as usual would foreshadow serious threats to global food security, coastal water quality, and ecosystem stability, affecting current and future generations,'' the international team of ecologists and economists wrote in Impact of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services.

The four-year analysis was the first to study all existing data on ocean species and ecosystems and put them together to understand the importance of biodiversity at the global scale.

"Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world's ocean, we saw the same picture emerging,'' said lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University, in Canada, said.


Mr Worm said the disappearance of species from ocean ecosystems had been accelerating.

"Now we begin to see some of the consequences. For example, if the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime - by 2048,'' Mr Worm said.

"In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems. I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are - beyond anything we expected.''

At this point, 29 of currently fished species were considered "collapsed'' in 2003, that is, their catches have declined by 90 per cent or more, he said.

"It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating,'' he said.

Fish, seafood 'will disappear by 2048'

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Old toothbrushes, beach toys and used condoms are part of a vast vortex of plastic rubbish the size of Texas floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, threatening sea creatures that get tangled in it, eat it or ride on it, says a Greenpeace report.

Because plastic does not break down the way living material does, ocean currents and tides have carried it thousands of miles to an area between Hawaii and the United States west coast, says the study by the environmental group.

The report, Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans, said at least 267 species, including birds, turtles, seals, sealions, whales and fish, have suffered from entanglement or ingestion of debris in the swirling mess. Eighty per cent of it comes from land and 20% from the oceans, the report says, with four main sources: tourism, sewage, fishing and waste from vessels.

The report comes days after the journal Science forecast that global fish and seafood stocks would collapse by 2048 if trends in overfishing and pollution continued.

Greenpeace sailed through the floating rubbish, capturing images of wildlife interacting with plastic. Steve Smith, aboard the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, said: "Plastics in the oceans act as a toxic sponge, soaking up a lot of the persistent pollutants out here. We've seen photos of albatrosses who eat this plastic ... Even though their stomachs are filled, they end up starving because there's no nutrients in there."

Greenpeace called for a global network of marine reserves, covering 40% of the world's oceans, and for responsibility by coastal countries to cut down on "excessive consumption" and boost recycling.

Pacific wildlife 'threatened by sea of plastic'

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Africa could suffer greater effects from global warming than previously feared, the United Nations said yesterday, with the risk of widespread coastal flooding, substantial loss of animal habitat and lower cereal yields all likely in coming decades.

In a report published on the eve of a key climate change conference opening in Nairobi today, environmentalists gave warning that the continent needed help in dealing with a problem created by the industrialised world.

"Africa has made the lowest contribution to climate change," said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme. "It is also the least prepared to cope with the consequences ... and has the most to lose."

The report states that rising sea levels could place 30% of Africa's coastal settlements, including cities such as Cape Town, Lagos and Alexandria, at risk from flooding by 2080. By then, more than a quarter of animal species' suitable habitats may have disappeared.

Shifting rainfall patterns could threaten the future of renowned wetland systems such as Botswana's Okavango delta. They will also have a devastating impact on agriculture, which is the main source of income for nearly three in four Africans and accounts for 55% of the continent's exports. Cereal crop yields are predicted to drop by 5% by 2080, while subsistence crops such as millet and maize will also experience decline.

Scientists forecast that temperatures in Africa will increase by 2-6C by the next century. Africa's vulnerability is compounded by the lack of historical data and weather monitoring facilities, said Mr Steiner.

The 11-day Nairobi conference, which has drawn 6,000 delegates from 189 nations, will focus on establishing greater consensus in tackling global warming and seek ways to widen the UN's Kyoto Protocol on capping greenhouse gas emissions.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed in 1992, but its voluntary targets to cut emissions of greenhouses gases - especially carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels and forests - were soon missed.

The Kyoto Protocol, an addendum to the convention, requires the 35 leading industrialised nations to cut their emissions to 5% below their 1990 levels by 2012. More than 160 countries have ratified the protocol, including the developed countries of Europe and Japan, which will present proposals at the conference for post-2012 targets.

But the United States and Australia have rejected Kyoto. They want emerging nations such as China and India, which will contribute an ever-growing share of harmful emissions as they continue their rapid economic expansion, to agree to binding targets as well.

Africa needs help to avert climate change catastrophe, warns UN

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The growth in global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels over the past five years was four times greater than for the preceding 10 years, according to a study that exposes critical flaws in the attempts to avert damaging climate change.

Data on carbon dioxide emissions shows that the global growth rate was 3.2 per cent in the five years to 2005 compared with 0.8 per cent from 1990 to 1999, despite efforts to reduce carbon pollution through the Kyoto agreement.

Much of the increase is probably due to the expansion of the Chinese economy, which has relied heavily on burning coal and other fossil fuels for its energy.

Dr Mike Raupach, chair of the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of researchers who compiled the latest figures, warned yesterday that emissions were spiralling out of control.

"This is a very worrying sign. It indicates that recent efforts to reduce emissions have had virtually no impact on emissions growth and that effective caps are urgently needed," he said.

Current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are 380 parts per million (ppm), about 100ppm higher than before the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. Some computer models predict damaging and irreversible climate change if carbon dioxide levels rise above 450ppm or 500 ppm.

The rate of increase of emissions suggests it may soon be impossible to avoid some of the worst-case scenarios, said Josep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project. "On our current path, we will find it extremely difficult to rein in carbon emissions enough to stabilise the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at 450ppm, and even 550ppm will be a challenge," he said. "At some point in the near future, we will miss the boat in terms of achieving acceptable levels."

Based on current trends, carbon dioxide concentrations are likely to increase to 500ppm this century. The last time the planet experienced levels as high as 500ppm was about 20 or 40 million years ago, when sea levels were 100 metres higher than today.

The Stern report earlier this month warned that the uncontrolled release of greenhouse gases could lead to a rise in average global temperatures of up to 5C by 2100 - about the same temperature difference between now and the last ice age.

Scientist have warned that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades after carbon dioxide concentrations have stabilised due to the environmental inertia of the world's climate system.

Dr Peter Falloon, a climate impact scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, said the latest findings did not augur well for attempts at averting climate change.

"It's not what we want or hope to see. The concern comes from the fact that the greater the emissions are now, the harder it will be to bring them down in the future," he said. "It takes 30 or 40 years to realise the change in carbon dioxide emissions. It highlights how important it is to take quick and effective action now."

Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre in London, said: "This is more very bad news. We need a 60 to 70 per cent cut in emissions, but instead, emission levels are spiralling out of control. The sum total of our meagre efforts to cut emissions amounts to less than zero."

Global growth in carbon emissions is 'out of control'

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Kenya's herdsmen are facing extinction as global warming destroys their lands:

They are dubbed the 'climate canaries' - the people destined to become the first victims of world climate change. And as government ministers sit down in Nairobi at this weekend's UN Climate Conference, the people most likely to be wiped out by devastating global warming will be only a few hundred miles away from their deliberations.

Those people, according to research commissioned by the charity Christian Aid, will be the three million pastoralists of northern Kenya, whose way of life has sustained them for thousands of years but who now face eradication. Hundreds of thousands of these seasonal herders have already been forced to forsake their traditional culture and settle in Kenya's north eastern province following consecutive droughts that have decimated their livestock in recent years.

Earlier this year the charity commissioned livestock specialist Dr David Kimenye to examine how the herders are coping with the recent drought, uncovering a disastrous story. Over two months, Dr Kimenye talked to pastoralists in five areas across the Mandera district, home to 1.5 million people.

The study discovered that:

· Incidence of drought has increased fourfold in the Mandera region in the past 25 years.

· One-third of herders living there - around half a million people - have already been forced to abandon their pastoral way of life because of adverse climatic conditions.

· During the last drought, so many cattle, camels and goats were lost that 60 per cent of the families who remain as herders need outside assistance to recover. Their surviving herds are too small to support them.

The new findings follow recent warnings from the UK Met Office that if current trends continue one-third of the planet will be desert by the end of 2100. The scientists modelled how drought is likely to increase globally during the coming century because of predicted changes in rainfall and temperature around the world.

At present, according to their calculations, 25 per cent of the Earth's surface is susceptible to moderate drought, rising to 50 per cent by 2100. In addition, the areas susceptible to severe drought - 8 per cent - are expected to rise to 40 per cent. And the figure for extreme drought, currently 3 per cent, will rise to 30 per cent.

And what is doubly worrying about Kimenye's research is that it has revealed that a system of nomadic pastoralism that has, over the centuries, been able to cope with unpredictable weather patterns and regular drought has been brought by climate change to the point of utter extinction.

It is a fact not lost on those who have been forced out of their historic lifestyle to settle at the Quimbiso settlement. Nearby is a stinking pit where the bones of the last of once thriving herds were dumped and burned - victims of the worst drought in living memory.

The families who until a few months ago herded these animals across northern Kenya and beyond now huddle in this riverside settlement, their children prone to malaria and other illnesses, but at least close to a reliable source of water. Now they are completely dependent on aid handouts for most of their food.

'Our whole life has been spent moving, but we are desperate people. People who have lost our livelihood,' says Mukhtar Aden, one of the elders at the Quimbiso settlement. 'We didn't settle here by choice, it was forced upon us.'

Everywhere are tales of huge livestock losses. In one roadside settlement, which now depends on selling milk from its few remaining animals to passing trucks, a man produces a book recording the dark days of the drought. One entry, for 15 February, shows that the community lost more than 500 sheep and goats and 250 cattle in a single day.

And while rain did came to the region for the first time in more than a year last month, it was too late for the makeshift roadside communities who no longer have animals to put out to pasture.

Wargadud is another sizeable community running along either side of the region's main road. The chairman of Wargadud's water users' association is Abdullahi Abdi Hussein, who describes how the periods of rain have got shorter and the dry spells longer - changing the pattern of four seasons on which the pastoral communities depended.

And while there were always droughts, he says: 'Decade after decade it has been getting more severe. It has only been getting harder and harder and more and more serious.'

African nomads to be first people wiped out by climate change

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Schoolteacher Sherbahadur Tamang walks through the southern Nepalese village of Khetbari and describes what happened on September 9: "During the night there was light rain but when we woke, its intensity increased. In an hour or so, the rain became so heavy that we could not see more than a foot or two in front of us. It was like a wall of water and it sounded like 10,000 lorries. It went on like that until midday. Then all the land started moving like a river."

When it stopped raining Mr Tamang and the village barely recognised their valley in the Chitwan hills. In just six hours the Jugedi river, which normally flows for only a few months of the year and is at most about 50 metres wide in Khetbari, had scoured a 300 metre-wide path down the valley, leaving a three metre-deep rockscape of giant boulders, trees and rubble in its path. Hundreds of fields and terraces had been swept away. The irrigation systems built by generations of farmers had gone and houses were demolished or were now uninhabitable. Mr Tamang's house was left on a newly formed island.

Khetbari expects a small flood every decade or so, but what shocked the village was that the two largest have taken place in the last three years. According to Mr Tamang, a pattern is emerging. "The floods are coming more severely more frequently. Not only is the rainfall far heavier these days than anyone has ever experienced, it is also coming at different times of the year."

Nepal is on the front line of climate change and variations on Khetbari's experience are now being recorded in communities from the freezing Himalayas of the north to the hot lowland plains of the south. For some people the changes are catastrophic.

"The rains are increasingly unpredictable. We always used to have a little rain each month, but now when there is rain it's very different. It's more concentrated and intense. It means that crop yields are going down," says Tekmadur Majsi, whose lands have been progressively washed away by the Tirshuli river. He now lives with 200 other environmental change refugees in tents in a small grove of trees by a highway. In the south villagers are full of minute observations of a changing climate. One notes that wild pigs in the forest now have their young earlier, another that certain types of rice and cucumber will no longer grow where they used to, a third that the days are hotter and that some trees now flower twice a year.

Anecdotal observations are backed by scientists who are recording in Nepal some of the fastest long-term increases in temperatures and rainfall anywhere in the world. At least 44 of Nepal's and neighbouring Bhutan's Himalayan lakes, which collect glacier meltwater, are said by the UN to be growing so rapidly they they could burst their banks within a decade. Any climate change in Nepal is reflected throughout the region. Nearly 400 million people in northern India and Bangladesh also depend on rainfall and rivers that rise there.

"Unless the country learns to adapt then people will suffer greatly," says Gehendra Gurung, a team leader with Practical Action in Nepal, which is trying to help people prepare for change. In projects around the country the organisation is working with vulnerable villages, helping them build dykes and set up early warning systems. It is also teaching people to grow new crops, introducing drip irrigation and water storage schemes, trying to minimise deforestation which can lead to landslides and introducing renewable energy.

Some people are learning fast and are benefiting. Davandrod Kardigardi, a farmer in the Chitwan village of Bharlang, was taught to grow fruit and, against his father's advice, planted many banana trees. It has paid off handsomely. As other farmers have struggled he has increased his income.

But Nepal as a country needs help adapting to climate change, says Mr Gurung. Its emissions of damaging greenhouse gases are negligible, yet it finds itself on the front line of change.

"Western countries can control their emissions but to mitigate the effects will take a long time. Until then they can help countries like Nepal to adapt. But it means everyone must question the way they live," he says.

Nepal's farmers on the front line of global climate change

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Ice is melting so fast in the Arctic that the North Pole will be in the open sea in 30 years, according to a team of leading climatologists.

Ships will be able to sail over the top of the world and tourists will be able visit what was, until climate change, one of planet’s most inaccessible landscapes.

Researchers assessing the impact of carbon emissions on the world’s climate have calculated that late summer in the Arctic will be ice-free by 2040 or earlier - well within a lifetime.

Some ice would still be found on coastlines, notably Greenland and Ellesmere Island, but the rest of the Arctic Ocean, including the pole, would be open water.

The Nasa-funded US team of researchers said the ice retreat is likely to remain fairly constant until 2024 when there will be a sudden speeding up of the process.

In between 30 and 50 years, they concluded, summer sea ice will have vanished from almost the entire Arctic region.

Their finding may, however, already be out of date and something of an over-optimistic forecast, said Professor Chris Rapley, head of the British Antarctic Survey.

He said a recent study by the Global Carbon Project suggests emissions are rising more than twice as fast as in 2000 which is likely to speed up ice-loss even further.

"The study findings may be an under estimate of when the Arctic summer ice might be all gone," he said. "It could well be their assumptions are more optimistic than they might be."

He described the report as "worrying" but said it fitted into recent findings based on satellite observations of the speed at which ice is retreating.

Arctic ice is being hit by the double effects of loss of reflectivity and warmer currents being washed into the ocean.

Scientists have long realised that ice reflects heat and as the quantity reduces so, too, does the amount of heat that can be bounced away from the Earth.

However, the study team from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, US, and two US universities, identified warmer ocean currents as an additional factor to be considered.

Disappearing ice is already causing problems for the Polar Bear and it is likely to be driven to the brink of extinction unless it can find ways of adapting.

Other wildlife, including seals, are also likely to suffer, though not so badly but the removal of sea ice is likely to benefit a range of marine creatures, including cod, which could move in to the open waters.

For people the open waters are likely to lead to fresh opportunities, though the Inuit lifestyle would be damaged.

Tourism could open up to allow visitors Arctic cruises with cocktail parties over the North Pole that previously defied the best efforts of many explorers.

Oil companies would move in to tap resources previously protected by the ice and freight firms could use the ocean as a shortcut.

Winter ice will still remain because temperatures will plunge during the winter when there is no sun to heat up the region but it will melt faster each year because less will form.

The US study team modified one of the climate models used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to establish what will happen to the ice as carbon emissions rise.

"We have already witnessed major losses in sea ice, but our research suggests that the decrease over the next few decades could be far more dramatic than anything that has happened so far," said Professor Marika Holland who led the study. "These changes are surprisingly rapid."

"As the ice retreats, the ocean transports more heat to the Arctic and the open water absorbs more sunlight, further accelerating the rate of warming and leading to the loss of more ice. This is a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic region."

Experts warn North Pole will be 'ice free' by 2040