Year: 2008

Indigenous Peoples Protest Carbon Trading at UN

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[from the Indigenous Environmental Network and others]

New York City, NY – Indigenous Peoples attending the Permanent Forum are outraged that their rejection of the carbon market has been ignored in the final report of the 7th Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII). The final report of the PFII hails World Bank funded carbon trading, like the Clean Development Mechanism, as “good examples” of partnership despite the human rights violations and environmental destruction they have caused.

“Indigenous Peoples attending the 7th session of the Permanent Forum are profoundly concerned that our key recommendations on climate change are not being taken into account by the Permanent Forum. This Permanent Forum was created precisely to recognize, promote, and support the rights of Indigenous Peoples,” says Florina Lopez, Coordinator of the Indigenous Women’s Biodiversity Network of Abya Yala. Continue reading

Fire in the Tundra

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“…  a conversion of tundra to boreal forest as temperatures increase.”
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ECOLOGY: Fire in the Far North
Andrew M. Sugden

Paleoecological data sets contain historical
records of biotic responses to changes in
climate. Currently, high-latitude regions are
suffering a particularly aggressive regimen of
climate change; hence, an understanding of past
vegetation dynamics in these regions is
especially pertinent. Higuera et al. have
analyzed pollen records from north-central Alaska
and find that a combination of drier climates and
shrubbier tundra during the late glacial period
14,000 to 10,000 years ago led to regular fires.
Given present-day increases in shrub biomass and
temperature, tundra fire activity might increase
again, with consequences for vegetation dynamics
and carbon cycling. Tinner et al. have analyzed
pollen and other records from the past 700 years
(a period that includes the Little Ice Age of
1500 to 1800 CE) in southern Alaska, and find
that temperature fluctuations of 1° to 2°C,
together with changes in moisture balance, led to
conversions between boreal forest and tundra with
concomitant alterations in fire regimes. Taken
together, these findings are consistent with
models predicting a conversion of tundra to
boreal forest as temperatures increase. — AMS

PLoS ONE 3, e0001744 (2008); Ecology 89, 729 (2008).

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“Big Dry” Hits Australian Farmers

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‘Big Dry’ hits Australian farmers 
By Nick Bryant
BBC News, Sydney 

The drought has forced 10% of farmers off the land in just five years

More than 10,000 Australian farming families have had to leave their land as a result of the country’s ongoing drought, new figures reveal. There has been a 10% drop in the number of farmers in the past five years, the figures released by the Australia Bureau of Statistics revealed.

Australia is presently in the grip of the what’s known locally as the “Big Dry” – the worst drought in a century. The figures reveal its impact on the nation’s farming communities. They show that the number of farmers in Australia has dropped by a third in just 20 years.

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Warming May Starve Oceans of Oxygen Supply

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Global warming could starve oceans of oxygen: study
Thu May 1, 2008 2:31pm EDT 
Natural changes may offset global warming briefly
30 Apr 2008 By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) – Global warming could gradually starve parts of the tropical oceans of oxygen, damaging fisheries and coastal economies, a study showed on Thursday.

Areas of the eastern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with low amounts of dissolved oxygen have expanded in the past 50 years, apparently in line with rising temperatures, according to the scientists based in Germany and the United States.

And models of global warming indicate the trend will continue because oxygen in the air mixes less readily with warmer water. Large fish such as tuna or swordfish avoid, or are unable to survive, in regions starved of oxygen.

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