The Convenient But Deadly Plastic Bag.

"Worldwide, an estimated 4 billion plastic bags end up as litter each year. Tied end to end, that’s enough to circle the earth 63 times." - Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

The plastic bag, an apt icon of consumerism and convenience, is the single most common consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. Useful and durable, those plastic bags that you use to bag your groceries and shopping purchases are at the same time deadly pollutants, responsible for the deaths of thousands of marine life and are the scourge of the environment.

Plastic trash in China

Introduce to modern society about 25 years ago, plastic bags are derived from a non-renewable natural resource - oil. Extremely durable and stable, they do not biodegrade but instead photo-degrade under sunlight, fragmenting into smaller toxic bits and contaminating soil, choking waterways and rivers, polluting our oceans and killing wildlife and livestock.

With an estimated 4 billion plastic bags discarded each year and their ability to persist for thousands of years in our environment, plastic bags are the leading cause of deaths of marine life. Often mistaken for food, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags. Estimates from the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation indicated that more than 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic and a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from ingestion of plastic or entanglement.

Turtle feeding on plastic
The Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, is an astounding example of the extend of plastic pollution of our oceans. In this vortex, dubbed the "Trash Vortex", lies a swirling mass of plastic trash with an area that is twice the size of Texas. "It's an endless stream of incessant plastic particles everywhere you look. Fifty or sixty years ago, there were no plastic out there." said Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

Plastic trash also have the ability to act as chemical sponges, attracting and concentrating the many persistent organic pollutants like PCB and DDT in our oceans which enters into the food chain when eaten by animals. As not all plastic floats - about 70 per cent of discarded plastic sinks to the ocean floor - they also smother corals and kill many marine species living at the bottom of the oceans.

Coral smother by plastic bags

And countries around the world are waking up to this scourge of our environment. From Europe to China to tiny Singapore, through a combination of heavy taxes, outright banning or eliminating the widely used thinnest plastic bags, countries are trying to get a grip on plastic pollution.

With a consumption rate of about 3 billion plastic bags a day, China recently announced the banning of the production of the widely used ultra-thin plastic bags and forbidding its supermarkets and shops from handing out free plastic bags from June this year. Kenya and Uganda have banned flimsy plastic bags by introducing minimum thickness requirements with many supermarkets giving away a free reusable basket with a minimum purchase.

An extremely successful plastic levy - at 15 euros per bag - introduced in Ireland in 2003 reduced plastic bag consumption by about 90% while tiny Singapore, where a whopping 2.5 billion plastic bags are used each year, has its Bring Your Own Bag Day every month. Australia has also joined in and recently announced that it will phased out plastic bags in supermarkets by the end of the year.

While legislations, levies and exploring technology to breakdown plastic back to oil will have an immediate impact on the reduction of plastic bags usage, it is at the individual level that the greatest contribution will come from. Adopting simple measures in our daily lives like using reusable shopping bags, foregoing double bagging for our purchases, avoiding plastics for our needs, proper disposal, reducing and reusing can go a long way in addressing an urgent environmental issue.

*Sources :
- BBC News
- Planet Ark
- Green Peace
- Algalita Marine Research Foundation
- Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation

*Related posts :
- Sustainable Solutions - From Plastic To Fuel
- Man and The Loss of Biodiversity
- Global Warming and The Cradle of Life


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Deforestation - How The World Is Losing its Cool

"Over the past 150 years, deforestation has contributed an estimated 30 percent of the atmospheric build-up of CO2. It is also a significant driving force behind the loss of genes, species and critical ecosystem services." - Climate, Biodiversity and Forests, World Resources Institute, 1998

From Indonesia to central Africa to the Amazon basin, the world's great forests, fueled by an insatiable demand for timber, are being lost at an alarming rate. Imagine losing forests the combined size of England, Scotland and Wales - about 20 million hectares - every year, with more than half being pristine primary forests and releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Accounting for more greenhouse gas emissions than all the vehicles in the world, deforestation is a major contributor to global warming and accounts for about 20 per cent of all global carbon dioxide emissions. It is also the leading cause of loss in biodiversity and extinction of many species.

Deforestation in Indonesia

In Indonesia, second only to Brazil in terrestrial biodiversity, forests the size of the state of Maryland in the US are being lost every year - much of it from illegal logging - making it the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, after US and China. Between 1997 and 1998, large scale slash-and-burn in Sumatra and Kalimantan resulted in the loss of more than 5 million hectares of pristine rainforests, and the ancient Paradise Forests in Papua New Guinea are being destroyed faster than any other forest on the planet.

Indonesia is, in fact, the world's fastest forest destroyer. According to Greenpeace, between 2000 and 2005, an area of forest equivalent to 300 soccer pitches was destroyed every hour. At this rate, the country's 133.5 million ha of forests will disappear within 47 years, along with many rare plants and animals unique to the archipelago.

Deforestation in Amazon
Alarming deforestation, for timber and land for cattle ranching, is also occurring in Brazil - home to the Amazon basin which contains the planet's largest tropical rainforest. About a fifth of Amazon's forests has already been destroyed with the forests in the state of Parana almost completely cleared by the middle of the 20th century, a duration taking less than 30 years.

"Our recent report indicates that 60 per cent of the Amazon's forests could be gone by 2030, releasing billion of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, with major contributions to global warming", said Dr. Meg Symington, WWF's priority leader for the Amazon. As a result, about 75 per cent of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation and forest fires - mainly in the Amazon - making it the fourth largest climate polluter in the world.

Deforestation in Africa

In Africa, approximately 150 million acres of forests were lost between 1980 and 1995. According to World Wildlife Federation, West Africa had around 500,000 sq. km of coastal rainforests at the turn of the century but by 1997, only 22.8 per cent of West Africa's moist rainforests remain. Largely depleted by commercial exploitation - logging and conversion for agriculture - Africa is now losing forests at an estimated rate of 9 million acres each year. In Madagascar, an island off the southeast of Africa, only about 10 percent of its lush forest remains.

Similiar large scale destruction of our planet's forests can be also be found in China, Vietnam, Philippines and Ecuador.

Pristine rainforest
Often described as the Earth's lungs, forests are natural carbon sinks, soaking up and sequestrating CO2 from the atmosphere while releasing oxygen during photosynthesis but the unprecedented scale of deforestation in recent years had led to the release of millions of tons of carbon dioxide from decaying plants and trees, leading to higher worldwide temperatures.

Besides contributing to higher worldwide temperatures, deforestation also has other environmental implications. As forests play an important role in regulating and stabilising the world's climate, the unabated deforestation has led to disruption in rainfall patterns, altering natural water cycles, soil erosion - through the loss of forest canopies which reduces the impact of rainfall on soil - and catastrophic flooding.

Indonesia's slash-and-burn technique of forests clearing during the 90s' had also caused widespread pollution in South East Asia. The haze from these fires blanketed much of neighbouring countries like Malaysia, Singapore and even northern Australia, risking the health of millions of people and causing an estimated loss of US$4 billion in tourism revenue.

Deforestation is the leading cause of the loss of ecosystems, disappearance of numerous indigenous people and cultures, and the extinction of some of the rarest plants and animals on the planet. This unsustainable exploitation of nature is detrimental to both biodiversity and mankind, and unless actions are taken to halt deforestation and recognise the natural value of these ancient forests, they would virtually disappear as functioning ecosystems, resulting in the loss of a legacy that took thousands of years to form.

*Sources :
- Greenpeace
- World Wildlife Federation
- The Nature Conservancy
- Rainforest Action Network
- Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, United Nations
- Climate, Biodiversity and Forests, World Resources Institute

*Related post : Man & The Loss Of Biodiversity


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Another Year Of Freakish Weather Patterns.

"Breaking news in recent years has been swamped with stories of extreme weather - flash floods in East Asia, prolonged drought in Africa, destructive hurricanes like Hurricane Katrina, heavy monsoon rainfall in South Asia, and an historic heat wave in Europe. The effects of these weather crises have been devastating and their frequency seemingly on the rise." - A NASA Feb 2007 report

As climate experts warned that higher temperatures are a taste of things to come, the new year begins ominously with wacky weather patterns occurring in major countries around the world in the first week of 2008.

Bush fires in Australia

Australia started the new year with a spate of extreme weather conditions from heatwaves, heavy rainfall to flooding. Major cities, like Perth and Melbourne, suffered heatwaves with bushfires raging in the east and west coast while in Sydney, huge waves of up to 3 m high pounded the beaches, forcing their closure to the public. In northern Darwin, Cyclone Helen wrought havoc with winds of up to 130 kmh and a stretch of New South Wales coast was declared a natural disaster zone after five rivers in the east coast broke their banks amid heavy rainfall, with the flooding forcing people to flee their homes, submerging properties and bridges.

Winter storm in US
According to Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, Australia experienced its sixth warmest year on record last year, with an average annual temperature of 21.8 deg C, some 0.67 deg C above normal. The southern states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, as well as the major agricultural zone of Murray Darling Basin, experienced their hottest year since 1910.

These areas are home to the majority of Australia's population and formed about 75 per cent of the country's irrigated farmlands. "What we have seen in the past year is a confirmation of what we have known is going on. Australia is warming; it is warming quickly," said Mr. David Jones of the National Climate Centre. What made the higher temperatures abnormal was the fact that it came about as the country experienced the La Nina phenomenon - usually associated with cooler and wetter conditions.

Heavy flooding in Malaysia

Similiar freakish weather behaviour were also reported in other countries for the new year. In the US west coast, winter storms left hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in California, Oregon and Washington without power. Emergencies were declared in three counties in California and about 160 km of the Interstate 80 highway was closed. In Malaysia, sudden monsoon storms and heavy downpours caused heavy flooding in the states of Johor, Pahang and Kelantan, submerging homes and leaving thousands of people stranded without food and power.

Harbin Ice Festival
In China, higher temperatures are even hurting the most famous tourist attraction in the northern city of Harbin - its annual ice sculpture contest. Average annual temperatures in the city, dubbed the "City of Ice", hit 6.6 deg C last year, the highest since record-keeping began. Ice sculptures and lanterns melted right after they were sculpted and as the temperatures rises, the period of ice and snow activities shortened dramatically. "The average temperature of winter in Harbin is 5 deg C higher than historical records," said a senior meteorologist from the Heilongjiang Observatory.

The unbridled burning of fossil fuels have led to higher worldwide temperatures and changing weather patterns. With the world projected to experience a warmer 2008, and unless man can come to grips with reducing carbon emissions to mitigate the effects of climate change, the freakish and unpredictable weather patterns seems like here to stay

*Sources :
- NASA
- BBC News
- Science journal Nature
- Bureau of Meterology, Australia
- Heilongjiang Observatory, China

*Related post : The Impact of Global Warming on Rainfall and Flooding.

Global Problem, Local Solutions

"If we want to tackle climate change, we have to be local. Our aim is for the cities to push the governments to act on climate change." - Pedro Ballesteros Torres, manager of the European Commission's Sustainable Energy Europe campaign.

With the inability of governments around the world to take immediate and concrete actions to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, many cities, towns and even villages across Europe are forging ahead with their own initiatives to cut carbon emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change and global warming.

From Vaxjo, in southern Sweden, to major cities like London, Munich and Paris, Europeans are taking the lead and using novel ways to reduce their carbon footprints, with some of them achieving emission cuts that exceeded those prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol. Here are some heartwarming examples of what an environment-conscious citizenry can achieved :

Woodchip fuel, Vaxjo

Vaxjo, Sweden
This southern city of 78,000 in Sweden, which aims to be completely free of fossil fuels eventually, has been using leftover products from forestry industry and sawmills, namely fir and pine chips, to generate electricity. Its centralised "district heating system", running on the low-emitting woodchip fuel, provides about 90 per cent of local heating needs. Ashes from the process are also brought back to fertilize the forest.

With emissions from cars being a major contributor to carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere, Vaxjo has also been encouraging its citizens to use bicycles as the main mode of transport. Snow is cleared from the cycle paths before roads and its bicycle network has also been expanded. So successful has been its efforts that Vaxjo has managed to cut greenhouse gases emissions by 30 per cent since 1996 and is confident it can get a 50 per cent cut by 2010. Visitors from all over the world also come to see what can be done on a local level.

Photo-voltaic panels, Woking
Woking, England
An early pioneer in adopting environmental-friendly practices, this town south of London has gained a reputation as Britain's greenest city. With its solar-powered street lights, photo-voltaic panels and energy-efficient power generators, it has managed to cut carbon emissions by about 20 per cent since 1990. Enterprising solutions like installing photo-voltaic panels on top of glass-roofed structures along its roads, generates more than 50,000Kwh of energy every year and reduces carbon dioxide emissions by more than 40 tonnes annually. Thanks to its alternative energy supplies, parts of Woking will remain lit even if the national energy grid were to go down.

Gussing, Austria
This tiny town in Austria is the first community in the European Union to cut carbon emissions by more than 90 percent since 1995. Using a technology that produces natural gas from scrap lumber, which is use to drive the town's power plants, Gussing generates about 22 megawatt hours of power a year, more than enough to meet its energy needs and sells the surplus of 8 megawatt hours to the national grid.

Big signs of "Eco-Energy Land" greet visitors to the town and its alternative and renewable energy movements have spawned an entire "eco" industry with many companies producing power, heat and fuels from sawdust, corn, cooking oil and creating more than 1,000 jobs. So determined is this tiny outpost in Austria in seeking alternative energy that it is now embarking on a major project to harness the power of the sun through a 50 million euros plant built by Solon AG Fuer Solartechnik of Germany, which is scheduled to begin operation next year.

"Velib" bicycle scheme, Paris

Cities
Major metropolises in Europe are also doing their part in reducing their carbon footprints. In Barcelona, through its Solar Thermal Ordinance, all new and renovated buildings are required to be fitted with solar panels to generate at least 60 per cent of the energy needed for hot water production while in Munich, old buildings are been refurbished to tackle energy wastage through poor insulation.

The Europeans are also tackling the fastest-growing source of carbon-emissions in cities : transport. Paris has its "Velib" free bicycle rental scheme, a self-service bicycle-hire scheme that is available round the clock to encourage people to cut down usage of cars. Similar bicycle schemes can also be found in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Brussels. In London, its much-admired congestion charge has tremendously cut down weekday traffic through the city centre. And through the Climate Alliance of European Cities, a grouping of more than 1,400 cities and municipalities across Europe, the Europeans have also set the ambitious target of cutting carbon emissions by 10 per cent every five years.

Cities covers just 1 per cent of the earth's surface but are home to more than half the world's population. They consume about 75 per cent of global energy and are responsible for 80 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases emissions. As a result, it is cities that have an important role to play in mitigating the effects of climate change and it is also in cities that climate and sustainability solutions are to be found.

The actions by the Europeans are definitive and shining examples of what the local populace can do and achieve in the battle against global warming, proving that it does not need international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol or the recently ended contentious Bali Climate Talks to come to grips with climate change.

*Sources :
- The Nature Conservancy
- Climate Alliance of European Cities
- Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign, European Commission
- Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, United Nations

*Related posts :
- A Planet In Peril
- From Ice To Water
- The Kyoto Song And The Bali Dance


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Bali Climate Talks - A Nation Who Lost The Plot.

"....So, I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali," - Former US Vice-President Al Gore.

Having followed the progress of the Bali Climate Talks and waiting in anticipation for the outcome, I was compelled to ditch today's post on deforestation around the world in favour of a piece on the divisive behaviour of some nations, especially the United States, in the Bali Talks.

Exasperated and disgusted are understatements of how I felt. What's with the moral police and champion of democracy of the world? So quick on the draw with Iraq and Afghanistan and condemnation of human rights abuses around the world, but seemingly myopic, almost blind to the urgent task at hand to come up with a coherent agenda to tackle global warming. The behaviour of the United States at the Bali Talks seems like a nation with a leader who is morally bankrupt.

A recent headline by Associated Press : "US obstructing progress of talks, says Gore," spoke volumes of a nation who have both the ability and resources, but most importantly, a moral responsibility, by being the world's largest emitter of carbon emissions, to take on a leadership role in pressing for a solution to global warming but instead, chooses not to do so.

The moral responsibility and need for the United States to take decisive actions to curb carbon emissions cannot be overstated. Recent statistics released by the Washington-based National Environmental Trust, showed that 42 US states individually emitted more carbon dioxide per year than 50 developing countries combined and 3 states individually emitted more CO2 than 100 developing countries. The US President home state of Texas, with just 24 million people, emits 696 million tonnes of CO2 per year, much more than Britain, whose 60 million people emit 578 million tonnes annually.

It is one thing not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (which is already bad enough), but to throw spanners in the works at every opportunity, adopting a divisive stance and creating dissension among nations in an attempt to derail the Bali Talks smacks of the behaviour of an over-sized bully out of control. From opposing mandatory carbon emission caps, going off in a different direction with its unilateral decision to have its own climate change talks to the constant proposing of amendments, even at the end of negotiations, the United States arrived at the Bali Talks without any intention of working with the rest of the world in forging a common consensus. Not only was the EU at odds with the US position, but all the members of the G77 developing countries, including China, found US demands that all countries be treated the same way, illogically and unacceptable.

While the United States is not the only country that opposed mandatory carbon dioxide emission caps, the Bali Climate Talks - already saddled with a whole range of contentious issues to deal with, from equity, worries of slowing of economic growth to calculation of carbon emissions caps by per capita basis or by per volume basis between developed and developing nations - certainly can do without the needless posturing of the United States. A statement by the delegate from Papua New Guinea, Kevin Conrad, aptly summed up the general feelings about the behaviour of the United States : "If you are not willing to lead, then get out of the way!" - a position that i had adopted and thought was necessary in order to achieve a modicum of progress in the Bali talks in my previous post - The Kyoto Song And The Bali Dance.

Well, the Bali Climate Talks are now over and the United States should be patting themselves on the back, as the outcome was a compromised piece of watered-down "Bali Road Map", with no mandatory and binding carbon emissions capping, but 2 more years of further negotiations leading to a new accord to replace the Kyoto Protocol by 2009. The original goal of the Bali Climate Talks to cut industrialised nations' carbon emissions by between 25 per cent to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 was eliminated and relegated to a footnote, replaced by vague goals like "....developed countries should take the lead in driving cuts in emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases," and "....developing nations should consider measurable and reportable national mitigation actions." More talks, more song and dance.

While I am not totally surprised by the failure of the Bali Talks to come up with concrete and decisive actions to deal with global warming, considering the complexity of the talks as the threat of climate change cuts across all aspects of our life and challenges the very structure and system that our current societies are built on, what actually surprised me was the continual faux pax that the guy in the White House, with that funny-sounding plant name, keeps doing in recent years, from the fiasco in Iraq to his handling of the sub-prime mortgage crisis in US.

With the latest "performance" by the United States at the Bali Talks, I doubt he can look at his children and children's children eyes and say he did what was best for the only home we will ever have. My children will certainly say he did not.

*Related articles :
- Climate Talks Near End Amid Row - BBC News
- Al Gore Lays Blame Of Bali Stalemate On US - Reuters
- The Kyoto Song And The Bali Dance



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