Worldwatch Institute

As U.S. Climate Bill Stalls, Global Treaty Languishes

Ben Block — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:56:10 -0500

The U.S. Senate will not vote on a proposed climate change bill until spring 2010, Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Tuesday.

An effort to overhaul the United States' healthcare system has pushed other political issues, climate change included, to the sidelines. Senators are no longer planning to vote on the climate bill until March or April.

"I don't think anyone's excited about doing another really, really, big thing that's really, really hard that makes everybody mad," said Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Senator, in a press conference on Tuesday. "Climate fits that category."

International climate negotiations have stalled as delegates wait for the U.S. Congress to approve climate legislation. With the Senate still undecided, U.S. negotiators will not likely approve legally binding emission reductions when they join world leaders in Copenhagen, Denmark, next month to develop a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, said Carol Browner, assistant to President Barack Obama for energy and climate change.

"We're not going to have a final, legally binding agreement in Copenhagen," Browner said Wednesday at a carbon economy conference hosted by The Economist. "But Copenhagen can be an important step forward."

The House of Representatives passed a bill in June that sets an economy-wide cap on greenhouse gas emissions. A Senate bill, approved earlier this month by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is stalled until the healthcare debate concludes.

Without passage of U.S. climate legislation, Obama and his administration have been unwilling to specify emission targets or dedicate funding for greenhouse gas mitigation and climate change adaptation efforts in the developing world.

The U.S. reluctance has, in turn, led countries such as China and India to avoid emission targets as well. During Obama's visit to China this week, for example, he and Chinese President Hu Jintao agreed only to "take significant mitigation actions and stand behind these commitments" at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen.

World leaders recognized the delayed progress on international negotiations this week at an Asia-Pacific Economic Summit forum meeting in Singapore. The attendants, which included Obama, announced their support for a proposal by Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen to work toward a political agreement in Copenhagen and delay a legally binding treaty until next year at a UN summit in Mexico City.

The Rasmussen agreement calls for specific emission reduction pledges from developed and developing countries, in addition to financial commitments from wealthier countries to assist the developing world.

Jason Grumet, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center, said the Copenhagen summit is now likely to be no more than "a passionate commitment to commit."

In the U.S. Senate, cap-and-trade legislation has been delayed not only due to the healthcare debate. Many moderate Democrats and Republican Senators are currently opposed due to economic concerns and confusion about the proposed formation of a carbon market.

"We're having a very hard time finding Republican senators who want to talk about an economy-wide cap, even if it includes 100 nuclear reactors and offshore drilling everywhere," Grumet said.

Several senators are worried that the legislation would lead to higher electricity costs, especially in coal-reliant states, and prevent U.S. industries from competing with businesses located in countries not subject to greenhouse gas restrictions.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates [PDF] that the proposed cap-and-trade legislation would cost the average household between $80 and $111 annually.

Many senators are not considering the potential employment benefits that the legislation may generate, however, by creating incentives for the growth of low-carbon industries, said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

"When people in Congress talk about competitiveness, they're talking about ways to preserve manufacturing jobs in the economy, not new ‘clean energy' jobs that could be created," Claussen said.

Meanwhile, Senators John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham announced earlier this month that they were meeting with Browner to form an alternative climate bill. Their compromise legislation may contain additional incentives for nuclear energy and offshore drilling, the senators said.

"The conversation is not if there is a bill. The conversation has become what the bill will have to do," Browner said. "It's a different tone. That is cause for optimism."

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

Will Women's Voices Be Heard in Copenhagen?

Press — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:59:03 -0500

Worldwatch is Lead Author of the United Nations Population Fund's State of the World Population 2009

Report finds that women will be most affected by climate change but remain noticeably absent from Copenhagen agenda

Washington, D.C.-Women will bear the greatest burden of a changing climate but so far have received little attention from negotiators working toward a new global climate deal, according to the 2009 edition of the United Nations Population Fund's State of World Population. Robert Engelman, Worldwatch Institute's Vice President for Programs, was lead author of the report, which argues that women's issues, and especially women's health issues, have been largely overlooked in discussions leading up to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, this December.

"This is the first report in which a United Nations agency has connected climate change to human population and the status of women," Engelman said. "Its main finding-that investing in women and erasing the constraints on their achievement will slow climate change and build social resilience-is powerful and hopeful."

In addition to exploring the inherent connections between population and climate change, the report examines the climate issue as it pertains to multiple aspects of health, development, and the global environment. These connections have long remained at the forefront of Worldwatch's research.

State of World Population 2009 shows that investments that empower women and girls-particularly investments in education and health-also bolster economic development and reduce poverty. But these investments have an additional beneficial impact on climate. Girls with higher levels of education, for example, tend to have smaller families as adults, and the ensuing lower fertility rates contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions and improved adaptation to the impacts of climate change.

A recent report published by Worldwatch and the United Nations Foundation, Global Environmental Change: The Threat to Human Health, notes that 200 million women worldwide currently lack access to the family planning services they want or need, ranging from contraception to reproductive health counseling. The report's author, Dr. Samuel S. Myers of Harvard University, asserts that providing these services and allowing women to decide for themselves whether, when, and how often to give birth is an adaptive strategy against many of the predicted impacts of climate change-all of which will be exacerbated by larger populations needing access to resources, secure homes, and productive lands.

"No other intervention would provide more benefits across the health and environmental sectors than providing global access to family planning services," says Dr. Myers.

According to State of the World Population 2009, the poor are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and the majority of the 1.5 billion people living on $1 a day or less are women. The poor are more likely to depend on agriculture for a living and therefore risk going hungry or losing their livelihoods when droughts strike, rains become unpredictable and hurricanes move with unprecedented force. The poor also tend to live in marginal areas that are vulnerable to floods, rising seas, and storms. Research cited in the report shows that women are more likely than men to die in natural disasters-including those related to extreme weather-with this gap most pronounced where incomes are low and status differences between men and women are high.

"We can't successfully confront climate change if we neglect the needs, challenges, and potential of half the people on this planet," said UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid in a UNFPA release announcing the State of the World Population report. "If we are really serious about halting climate change, then we must get serious about eliminating inequalities between the sexes and empowering women to persevere in our warming world."

For more information or to download State of the World Population 2009, please visit http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2009/en/

Norway to Help Protect Guyana’s Forests

Ben Block — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:40:12 -0500

For the past year, President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana has traveled the world offering to place his nation's forests under international supervision if other countries paid his citizens not to deforest the tropical landscapes.

The campaign received major support last week when Norway announced a $30 million commitment on Monday for the small South American nation to implement an "avoided deforestation" plan. If the program demonstrates success, Guyana will receive an additional $250 million through 2015.

"We are giving the world a workable model for climate change collaboration between North and South," said Erik Solheim, Norway's minister of environment and international development, in a statement. "It's not perfect, but it's good, and it will be improved upon as we learn and develop together."

Much of Guyana's forestland is zoned for logging activities, and avoided deforestation schemes in neighboring Brazil could push logging into Guyana. The Guyanese government has therefore insisted that deforestation is a real threat unless international carbon funding provides an economic incentive for residents to keep forests intact.

"Our country is at a stage where our population is no less materialistic [than industrialized countries] and no less wanting to improve their lives," said Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, the country's minister of foreign affairs, in an interview at the World Wilderness Congress in Mérida, Mexico. "We want to continue our development, but we can't do that without a form of payment."

When international negotiators meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December to develop a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, governments will seek to limit the nearly 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions related to forest loss through an initiative known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).

"REDD needs to be comprehensive to avoid leakage of foresters going to countries that currently have high forest cover but a low deforestation rate," said Brendan Mackey, a forest ecologist with the Australian National University. "If we don't start paying people for the ecosystem services that forests provide, they'll be used for other economic activities that result in deforestation and degradation."

For carbon-offset programs such as REDD to succeed, developing countries will need to regulate their forests in a manner that ensures that the greenhouse gas emissions are sequestered on forested land. The emissions stored in trees and soil would also need to equal the emissions emitted from the industrialized countries and companies that pay for the carbon offsets.

Concerns about accountability and project monitoring are valid but should be addressed at a later time, Rodrigues-Birkett said. "These are details. Principles have to be addressed first," she said.

Guyana is unique among REDD participants. Unlike in Brazil, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the vast forests of Guyana do not currently face significant deforestation pressure. The country maintained consistent levels of national forest cover between 1990 and 2005, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Several conservation groups are supporting highly forested countries such as Guyana in their efforts to collect REDD funding. Although deforestation threats are currently low in these nations, the growing demand for wood products, minerals, and cattle is likely to increase pressures in the next few decades.

"The most effective, cost-efficient REDD designs balance incentives to reduce historically high rates of deforestation emissions with incentives to maintain historically low rates of deforestation emissions," said Jonah Busch, an economist with Conservation International, an organization that has helped Guyana apply for carbon offset payments.

Norway has already committed 1.2 billion Norwegian crowns (about US$214 million) annually to support REDD efforts in Brazil and Tanzania. Such investments would offset Norway's emissions as part of the country's plan to reduce domestic emissions 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Guyana plans to direct the Norwegian funds toward a development plan that shifts energy generation away from fossil fuel burning and toward hydropower, sustainable forest management, and climate change adaptation measures.

"Most of our people live below sea level," Rodrigues-Birkett said. "The sea walls on our coast are extremely expensive to maintain. We can build 25 schools for our children for the cost of half a mile of sea wall."

In hopes of following Guyana's success in attracting investment, Suriname announced earlier this month a similar plan to avoid deforestation with international support.

With 90-percent forest cover, Suriname brands itself as the "greenest country on this Earth." The plan noted that the country's reliance on bauxite, gold, and aluminum mining for foreign exchange earnings cannot be maintained sustainably. REDD payments would help diversify the economy, according to Michael Pierre Jong Tjien Fa, minister of physical planning, land, and forest management.

"Suriname's forests embody a range of wildlife services," Jong Tjien Fa said at the World Wilderness Congress. "Intact forests provide important climate beneficial services and must be part of endeavors for global sustainable development."

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org

Worldwatch Launches Vital Signs Online

Press — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:22:56 -0500

Washington, D.C.-Worldwatch Institute announced today the launch of Vital Signs Online, an interactive, subscription-based tool designed to provide busy decision makers and researchers with data-driven analysis on the most important sustainability trends that are shaping our future. The system is intended for use in strategic planning, understanding world events, or as a reference source for presentations and reports.

The new Vital Signs Online system will allow the Worldwatch research team to update global sustainability trends as data becomes available and will provide subscribers with a host of online tools and resources previously unavailable.

All of the trends in Vital Signs Online include clear analysis and are placed in historical perspective. New trends cover emerging hot topics-from global carbon emissions to green jobs-while trend updates provide the latest data and analysis for the fastest changing and most critical trends today. Every trend includes full datasets and complete endnote referencing.

A subscription includes:

Access to more than 40 global trends in five categories:
- Energy & Transportation
- Environment & Climate
- Food & Agriculture
- Global Economy & Resources
- Population & Society
More than 24 new or updated trends each year, released bi-monthly
Concise, unbiased, data-driven analysis by authoritative researchers
Presentation-ready charts and graphs
Excel worksheets for data manipulation and comparative analysis
Full endnote referencing

Trends will be available through a one-year unlimited subscription or on an individual basis. The price is $195 for a one-year subscription (nonprofit rate is $125) and individual trends are $19.95. For more information, please visit vitalsigns.worldwatch.org.

For bi-weekly e-mail updates with a preview of each new trend as it is released, sign up for our Vital Signs Newsletter.

North American Governments Agree to Protect Wilderness

Ben Block — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:32:43 -0500

The United States, Canada, and Mexico agreed this week to work together to protect wilderness areas across North America.

The cooperation agreement establishes an intergovernmental committee to exchange research and approaches that address challenges such as climate change, fire control, and invasive species in land, marine, and coastal protected areas throughout the continent.

"This agreement will allow for the exchange of successful experiences, monitoring, and training of human resources, as well as the financing of projects that will protect and recover wild areas," said Mexican President Felipe Calderón at the opening ceremony of the Ninth World Wilderness Congress in Mérida, Mexico.

The three nations have long cooperated on wilderness management - programs have straddle the U.S.-Canadian border since 1910 and the U.S.-Mexican border since the 1930s. Yet the memorandum of understanding is the first multinational agreement on wilderness protection, according to Vance Martin, president of the Wild Foundation.

"It's not very easy to do anything internationally, even when the countries are neighbors," Martin said.

With the agreement, wildlife officials said, ecological monitoring efforts such as migratory species tracking, air and water quality tests, and staff training will be better managed across the seven agencies responsible for such tasks in North America.

"There is already work in progress; the MOU will help speed it up," said Ernesto Enkerlin Hoeflich, president of Mexico's National Commission of Protected Natural Areas.

Among the new intergovernmental committee's priorities, wilderness protection will require greater international collaboration as climate change alters regional temperatures and wildlife species adapt by shifting their habitat ranges, officials said.

"As climate changes, the distribution and abundance of animal and plant species will be affected...and wildlife will know no boundaries - whether state or international," said Sam Hamilton, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "This is an opportunity to look across borders as we design future landscapes."

International agencies will likely need to form corridors that connect protected areas as part of their climate change adaptation plans. The United States has already initiated conversations with Canadian and Mexican officials to map corridors between the nations' parks, according to Jon Jarvis, director of the U.S. National Park Service.

"Protected areas have to be larger than they were previously. Also, they have to have connectivity, eventually across country boundaries," Jarvis said. "Species' historical range of variability is no longer a reliable paradigm."

The U.S. Department of Interior is also expanding the focus of its eight regional science centers to provide additional climate change guidance for wildlife management officials. As part of the $10 million included in the department's 2010 budget, the centers plan to share climate models and downscale the data among international land management and wildlife agencies, Hamilton said.

The United States already coordinates wildlife resources with Canada to manage adjacent Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta and Glacier National Park in Montana, as well as Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario and Superior National Forest in Minnesota.

The United States and Mexico work together to protect the wilderness areas covered by Big Bend National Park in Texas, Maderas del Carmen Protected Area in Coahuila, and Santa Elena Canyon Protected Area in Chihuahua. In addition, the ongoing construction of nearly 670 miles (1,080 kilometers) of immigration control fences and other security equipment across the countries' shared border has required that wildlife officials collaborate to address expected ecosystem damages.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request from several environmental groups to block the fence construction. The groups said that habitats for dozens of species, including jaguars, ocelots, deer, and owls, have been damaged or fragmented due to the construction.

"For some species [the border fence] will no doubt create barriers, big species particularly, such as the jaguar," Hamilton said. "But birds and many species will continue to migrate."

Larry Merculieff, a consultant for indigenous peoples and co-founder of the Alaska Indigenous Council on Marine Mammals, said the cooperation agreement is welcome progress. Indigenous peoples, however, continue to be marginalized from government-led wildlife decisions, he said.

"It is one tiny, fetal step to where we really need to go," Merculieff said.

The agreement ensures that wilderness partnerships transcend a single government administration or official committed to the cause, and it commits the governments to discuss wildlife issues at high levels.

"We sometimes put too little stock in opening dialogues - it gets people talking," said Carl Rountree, director of national landscape conservation system with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. "Just getting people together is difficult for the U.S. to do amongst its agencies."

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

Aid Groups, Farmers Collaborate to Re-Green Sahel

Ben Block — Sun, 8 Nov 2009 23:45:12 -0500

Disastrous droughts crippled Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali in the early 1970s and more severely in the early 1980s. More than 100,000 people died.

"The soil dried up. Everything dried up. All the trees died," said Yacouba Savadogo, a sorghum and millet farmer from the village of Gourma in Burkina Faso, at an Oxfam-hosted event in Washington, D.C. "When the soil dries up, there's no more trees and no more rain."

Dry conditions and a locust outbreak hit West Africa again in 2005, and millions of people suffered from malnutrition. But an effort in Niger to boost tree vegetation-known as the "re-greening of the Sahel"-improved soil quality and provided nourishment for livestock, helping to avert an even larger food crisis.

"In the Sahel, over the past 30 years, food crises have been more localized and less frequent," said Issa Martin Bikienga, deputy executive secretary of the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel.

In Niger, many small farmers turned to timber harvesting during the major droughts as a way to raise money for their families. As a result, trees covered only 1.5 percent of the country in 1975. Since then, a combination of tree plantations and an agroforestry technique known as "farmer-managed natural regeneration" have allowed tree cover to increase to more than 4 percent as of 2005 - some 4.8 million hectares in total, according to recent satellite studies conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

"The trees we see now are young, 10-15 years old," said Gray Tappan, a USGS geographer. "Month by month, year by year, the trees are growing. The amount of wood is growing on a trajectory that, in 20-30 years, there will be 5-10 times more woody biomass in the system than there is today."

Typical reforestation programs transplant local or non-native tree species to barren patches of land, and one-quarter to one-half of the saplings often die in the process. "Farmer-managed natural regeneration" instead requires that farmers nurture tree roots and stems to encourage tree growth among row crops. The trees in turn provide nitrogen for the soil as well as a sustainable supply of wood fuel.

"Farmer-managed natural regeneration is a fairly simple technique, but it produces multiple benefits," said Chris Reij, a natural resources management specialist with the Center for International Cooperation. "Sometimes planting trees make sense, but in terms of costs and long-time success, in many cases it makes more sense to use natural regeneration."

Industrialized nations agreed this year to spend $20 billion during the next three years on food security projects across the developing world that improve small farmers' access to seeds, training, and markets. Methods that combine traditional agricultural techniques, such as natural regeneration, with modern technologies are more likely to become a larger component of the food security initiatives, development experts said.

"We've learned that many aspects in increasing food production and productivity are dependent on traditional knowledge," said Franklin Moore, deputy assistant administrator for Africa and global food security coordinator with the U.S. Agency for International Development. "We look at technology to provide food security, but we often overlook some things humans came to understand hundreds of years ago, which can lead to a modern rebirth of a green revolution."

The roots of this agroforestry approach begin with farmers such as Savadogo. In 1979, Savadogo resurrected traditional agriculture practices that place rows of stones around farm perimeters to slow precipitation runoff. With support from Oxfam, he dug foot-deep holes and filled them with compost, knowing this would attract termites that dig channels through the soil and help rainwater penetrate beneath his crops.

"The Oxfam-funded agroforestry program spread activities started by Yacouba to hundreds of villages," said Mathieu Ouedraogo, director of the Niger-based African Re-greening Initiative. "Burkina Faso has become a lab of agro-soil science."

But natural regeneration techniques have been more widely adopted in Niger, due largely to a 2004 law that allows farmers to manage trees on their land, according to local researchers.

"The driver for the situation was a policy change. It made a tree property that belongs to landowners," said Mahamane Larwanou, senior program officer with the African Forest Forum. "They consider trees like their cow or sheep-a valuable animal that needs protection."

Reij, however, said the policy was not the main reason for the revegetation efforts. "A change in policy doesn't always filter down to farmers," he said.

Instead, government instability-military coups overthrew two administrations during the 1990s-reduced the central government's presence in rural Niger and allowed farmers to manage their forests as they deemed appropriate, Reij argued.

Regardless of its rationale, aid organizations agree that the technique has worked, and they are now searching for financial support to expand its use.

"The desert will rejoice," Ouedraogo said. "It will take time, but we all can help contribute to it."

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamodn@worldwatch.org.

Not What the Doctor Ordered: Rapid Environmental Change Threatens the Foundations of Human Health

Press — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 10:37:56 -0500

Washington, D.C.-Changes to the Earth's land cover, climate, and ecosystems are endangering the health of hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people worldwide and now represent the greatest public health challenge of the 21st century. The scale of these global changes is rapidly undermining human life-support systems and threatening the core foundations of healthy communities around the globe: access to adequate food, clean air, safe drinking water, and secure homes.

These are the findings of the new report, Global Environmental Change: The Threat to Human Health, published today by the Worldwatch Institute and the United Nations Foundation. The report notes that, as a result of rapid changes to the climate and in land use, we are already seeing alterations in the distribution of malaria, schistosomiasis, and other infectious diseases in many regions. It concludes that poor populations, mainly in developing countries, are the most vulnerable to these environmental changes, even though they are the least responsible for contributing to them.

"It is increasingly apparent that the breadth and depth of the changes we are wreaking on the environment are imperiling not only many of the other species with which we share the ecological stage, but the health and wellbeing of our own species as well," writes the report's author, Dr. Samuel S. Myers, M.D., M.P.H., an instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Research Associate at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

The report outlines a series of public health threats-food and water scarcity, altered distribution of infectious diseases, increased air pollution, natural disasters, and population displacement-that collectively threaten large segments of the human population. But most of the death and disability from these threats is fundamentally preventable, Dr. Myers writes, if the political will can be mobilized to take strong, concerted action. The report outlines the need for national-level risk assessments to identify the greatest threats in different regions, as well as unprecedented technical and financial assistance from the international community to help developing countries adapt to the health impacts of accelerating environmental change.

Ultimately, the report argues, we will need to find new ways to generate economic growth that do not cause serious ecological deterioration, or the progress that has been made toward global health, nutrition, and poverty alleviation will be undone. "At present, all of the major types of human caused environmental change-climate change, changes in land use and cover, and ecosystem service degradation-are accelerating," Myers says. "To reduce the avoidable human suffering that will result, we must redouble our efforts to slow the pace of environmental change, reduce the rate of human population growth, and reduce the vulnerabilities of those in harm's way."

In her preface to the report, Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and Special Envoy on Climate Change to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, describes the report as "a call to action." She writes that, "The knowledge that we can make a difference means that we have a large responsibility to act. By fighting ignorance, inaction, and inequity, we can create the conditions under which health threats can be averted. Most importantly, we must take targeted collective action to reduce the vulnerability of the poorest people on the planet to threats they played little role in generating."

The United Nations Foundation, of which Gro Harlem Brundtland is a board member, supported this report. The UN Foundation connects people, resources, and ideas to solve the world's global problems.

Degraded Habitats Push More Species to Extinction

Ben Block — Tue, 3 Nov 2009 13:54:26 -0500

The latest global assessment of biodiversity ruled yesterday that an additional 11 species are either fully extinct or extinct outside of captivity.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) updated its Red List of Threatened Species, considered the authority on the status of the world's species, to an all-time high of 17,291 species threatened with extinction.

The annual index has become a consistent indicator of how environmental change is altering natural habitats worldwide. As climate change, invasive species, and habitat destruction place greater pressure on wildlife, more species are disappearing at rates faster than conservationists can react to ensure the species' survival.

"A serious extinction crisis is mounting," said Jane Smart, director of IUCN's biodiversity conservation group, in a statement. "We're rapidly running out of time."

The Red List compiled the latest scientific data on 47,677 species across the globe. The findings indicate that 36 percent of assessed species are threatened with extinction and 2 percent of assessed species are extinct or extinct outside of captivity.

Plant species, frequent victims to land use changes and shifts in local and regional temperatures, are particularly imperiled. The new data reveal that 70 percent of assessed plant species are threatened.

Among assessed animal groups, 37 percent of freshwater fish species, 35 percent of invertebrates, 30 percent of amphibians, and 28 percent of reptiles are threatened. In addition, 21 percent of known mammals and 12 percent of known birds are under threat.

Although the data is the most reliable thus far, insufficient studies of species abundance prevented the Red List from categorizing 14 percent of known species, and many species remain understudied, said Craig Hilton-Taylor, manager of the IUCN Red List Unit.

"These results are just the tip of the iceberg," Hilton-Taylor said in a statement. "There are many more millions out there which could be under serious threat."

The Kihansi spray toad is among the species that IUCN now considers extinct in the wild. Native to a two-hectare region of the Udzungwa Mountains in southern Tanzania, the population numbered as many as 21,000 in June 2003 before effectively collapsing.

A hydropower project built upstream of the toad's habitat three years prior led to the rapid decline. The dam cut off 90 percent of the water flow to the gorge near the Kihansi Falls. Dry conditions, a fungal disease outbreak, and possible pesticide contamination led the toad population to crash in 2003. By mid-January 2004, scientists spotted only three individuals and heard the croaking of only two males.

A Wildlife Conservation Society-led breeding program is making progress on recovering the species. The Tanzanian government invited WCS scientists in 2000 to transfer 499 of the toads to the Bronx Zoo in New York. The zoo announced last year that the program raised a population of 300 toads. The Toledo Zoo has since advanced a similar captive breeding program.

IUCN also listed eight tree snail species from French Polynesia and Seychelles as extinct, as well as two similar snail species as extinct outside of captivity. Each snail species was adapted to living on a particular island, forest, or tree type, but invasive species, deforestation, and climate change pushed them to extinction.

The introduction of African giant land snails to the Pacific islands led to the eventual demise of seven of the native snail species. The introduced snails provided a food source for local communities, but when the snails began to eat area banana plants, residents decided in the 1970s and 1980s to substitute them with another non-native species, rosy wolf snails. The carnivorous new snails had an appetite for the native Polynesian tree snails, eating many of them to extinction within less than a decade.

The Aldabra banded snail, listed now as extinct, was abundant on Aldabra, a 150-square-kilometer coral atoll in the Seychelles, in the 1970s. But the snail lives in a dormant state during prolonged dry seasons, reducing the likelihood that reproductive individuals find mates. After a series of dry years in the 1980s and 1990s, the population crashed. The last living individual was spotted in 1997.

An estimated 125 different tree snail species once lived across French Polynesia. Now, at least 50 tree snail species are extinct and another 24 are alive in captive breeding programs across Europe and North America. The programs have produced mixed results. Three species have been released into a reserve on the French Polynesian island of Moorea. Attempts to breed one of them, Partula labrusca, ended in 2002.

Two Polynesian tree snails formally listed as extinct, Partula affinis and Partula taeniata, have been rediscovered and are know listed as critically endangered.

The Miles' Robber frog, a species native to Honduras, has also been upgraded from "extinct" to "critically endangered." IUCN declared the frog extinct in 2004, but last year scientists rediscovered an individual in Cusuco National Park.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

This article is a product of Eye on Earth, Worldwatch Institute's online news service. For permission to reprint Eye on Earth content, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

“Reverse Trick-or-Treaters” Deliver Fair Trade Chocolate

Ben Block — Mon, 2 Nov 2009 12:21:49 -0500

Dressed in masks and outfits reminiscent of the film The Matrix, a group of foreign exchange students celebrated their first Halloween in proper fashion on Saturday in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

But the classmates turned the U.S. tradition on its head. In addition to accepting candy, the students handed back their own Fair Trade-certified, organic dark chocolate.

"Farmers are paid more with Fair Trade, so they don't have to live in poverty and their children can get an education," explained Gaurav Noronha, a 15-year-old student from Mumbai, India, to a perplexed neighbor. "The farmers from whom this company gets the cocoa, they are paid fairly. Usually farmers are not paid well enough."

Noronha and his classmates were participating in "reverse trick-or-treating," an effort to raise awareness about the prevalence of child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa.

The San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange began the campaign two years ago to put increased grassroots pressure on international companies that purchase cocoa. The non-profit delivered about 260,000 information packets this year, each containing a sample of Fair Trade-certified chocolate, to parents, school groups, and religious organizations that participated across the United States and Canada.

"We're hoping this will create a landslide of interest among chocolate companies," said Adrienne Fitch-Frankel, coordinator of the reverse trick-or-treating campaign. "There is an outrageous number of children who are suffering from horrible back pain and other ergonomic neck issues between the ages of 5 and 18 just so we can have chocolate."

The reverse trick-or-treating campaign also generates free advertising for the growing Fair Trade movement. In the cocoa industry, Fair Trade standards guarantee that farmers receive a premium of $150 on top of market prices for each ton of cocoa they produce, as long as they meet specified labor standards. For example, field workers must not be younger than 15 years of age unless their education is not jeopardized and they do not perform particularly hazardous tasks, such as wielding a machete or applying pesticides. The program reasons that higher-paid farmers are less likely to rely on child labor.

In the United States, Fair Trade chocolate has grown in popularity but the market is relatively small compared to that in Europe. About 1,745 tons of the chocolate was imported into the country last year, nearly double the total from 2007. Worldwide, 10,299 tons of Fair Trade-certified cocoa was sold in 2008, according to Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International.

"We're just trying to make people aware that there are other options out there, and important issues need to be considered," said Michael Zelmer, communications director for TransFair Canada, a Fair Trade certification body that promotes the reverse trick-or-treating campaign in Canada.

The world's largest chocolate manufacturers agreed in 2001 to ensure that their products are not grown and processed on farms where the "worst forms of child labor," such as trafficking children and compulsory labor, persist. Such incidents are on the decline, yet nearly 2 million children still work on cocoa farms in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, often without pay, according to the Payson Center for International Development at Tulane University, which the U.S. Department of Labor tasked to monitor progress on the 2001 agreement.

The governments of the two West African countries, where about 75 percent of the world's cocoa is grown, have since established child-labor monitoring systems. The governments are also partnering with the international law enforcement body INTERPOL to arrest farmers who are known to use child labor. A June sting operation freed 54 children who were trafficked to southeast Côte d'Ivoire from seven different African nations.

In addition, the chocolate industry is participating in various certification schemes that strive to reduce child labor. Companies such as Mars, Nestlé, and Cargill are cooperating with UTZ CERTIFIED, a program that sets social criteria similar to Fair Trade, based on International Labour Organization conventions.

Rather than provide farmers with a premium, many companies that have partnered with UTZ support separate programs that train cocoa farmers on advanced production methods and proper labor conditions.

"One of the concerns we've seen is that some of the activities children are involved in are inappropriate to their age: carrying heavy loads, using machetes on farms," said Bill Guyton, president of the World Cocoa Foundation, a developer of several industry-supported training sessions in cocoa-growing regions of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. "Through farmer field schools, we explain to parents why activities are dangerous to young people."

Cadbury's aligned this year with Fair Trade for its chocolate products in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

"These certifications are a major step forward because finally most of these companies recognize the need to take responsibility for labor standards in the cocoa supply chain. It itself is a victory," said Tim Newman, campaign director at the International Labor Rights Forum. "The next step is to provide consumers with information about what these programs actually mean.... Some standards are stronger than others in enforcing worker rights."

Despite the progress of these programs, Tulane University's Payson Center said in a 2009 report that any certification system is unlikely to eliminate child labor completely.

"The ability to verify a 100-percent free [worst-forms of child labor] environment is doubtful," the report said. "More realistic objectives should be established by the countries."

For the foreign exchange students, who are participanting in a U.S. State Department youth leadership program, the campaign was an introduction to Fair Trade. Most of them visited neighbors who were unfamiliar with the program as well.

"Many were not aware what Fair Trade is, but many are eager to find out," said Fabian Bollinger, a student from Schaffausen, Switzerland.

Jody Axinn, a liaison for the American Field Service/Youth Exchange and Study Program (AFS/YES), chose to engage the students in the reverse trick-or-treating campaign in hopes that the students would raise awareness of Fair Trade in their home countries of India, Indonesia, Mozambique, and Switzerland.

"They come from countries that would benefit if Fair Trade was more widely spread," Axinn said. "If they bring the idea back to their country, and it's more widely spread on the producer side, it'd help."

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

This article is a product of Eye on Earth, Worldwatch Institute's online news service. For permission to reprint Eye on Earth content, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

Conservationists Fight Proposed Amazon Road

Ben Block — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:57:54 -0400

Leaders of conservation groups from the United States and South America are requesting that international donors end their support for a road that would connect Amazonian towns in Brazil and Peru.

The 250-kilometer (155-mile) corridor would allow farmers and businesses based around the western Brazilian town of Cruzeiro do Sul to access Pucallpa, a city in eastern Peru. From there, goods could travel to the Peruvian coast and continue on to destinations in Asia and North America.

While the road may offer economic benefits, the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul project may also imperil already-threatened ecosystems and expose indigenous communities that have chosen to live in isolation.

Disagreement on the road's future exemplifies the difficulties that South American leaders face as they seek to develop rural economies while preserving the region's lush forested areas.

"The new roads and waterways have to be built, but built in compliance with local communities looking for protection of the forest," said Marina Silva, a senator from the western Brazilian state of Acre, and the country's former environment minister, during a visit to Washington, D.C., this week.

Cruzeiro do Sul is the last major town along the Cuiabá-Porto Velho Highway (BR-364) before the road reaches a dead end at the Peruvian border. Merchants who want to travel between Cruzeiro do Sul and Pucallpa must travel by plane.

"Pucallpa currently has no options for a rapid road or river connection with Brazil, despite its proximity to the border," said Mariano Castro Sánchez Moreno, an environmental lawyer with Lima-based Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental (SPDA).

The lack of reliable roads across rural South America has contributed to relatively stagnant economic growth throughout the region for decades, whereas many rural areas of South Asia and the Middle East have experienced rising annual growth rates, in part due to infrastructure development, according to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB).

"The region has slipped in world rankings of infrastructure quality," a 2008 IADB oversight report stated. "South America needs to re-launch integration infrastructure endeavors to bolster cross-border connectivity and the region's global market foothold."

The Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road is one of five corridors being planned across the western Amazon. The projects are part of a $69 billion Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), an international effort to build hundreds of projects, mostly roads, across the continent.

Conservationists are concerned, however, that the recent acceleration of infrastructure projects will cause a wave of deforestation across the Amazon.

"Such a vast amount of road construction will seriously threaten the future of many indigenous groups and of the biological integrity of the western Amazon headwaters region," the leaders of Amigos da Terra-Amazônia, Fundaci ón Peruana para la Conservaci ó n de la Naturaleza, Conservation International, Environmental Defense Fund, and Cultural Survival wrote last month in a letter to Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno.

The groups suggested that the IADB delete the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road from its list of approved projects until the Bank has designed a comprehensive public consultation process, measured the project's environmental impact, and gained indigenous communities' full consent.

After BR-364 was paved in 1984, droves of ranchers moved into the Amazonian frontier. Migrants clashed with indigenous peoples, and rare tropical forests were removed at a rate much faster than government planners had expected.

Conservation groups fear that a Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul corridor would have similar consequences. The road would run through Serra do Divisor National Park, home to dozens of threatened species. On the Peruvian side, the road would enter a territorial reserve established by the regional government as a shelter for the Isconahua tribe.

"In addition to crossing through these reserved areas, the proposed road would impact two additional proposed reserves, the Yavari-Tapiche and Kapanahua, for indigenous peoples that are uncontacted or living in voluntary isolation, as well as other indigenous groups including the Ashaninka and Shipibo-Conibo," the letter said.

With previous infrastructure projects, environmental and social concerns were often raised after construction already began. For the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul corridor, civil society groups are acting more proactively, according to Connie Campbell, the Amazon conservation coordinator with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

"People in the Amazon basin have seen what roads can bring into frontier areas, in terms of destructive forest clearing and uncontrolled economic activities," Campbell said. "It's not that civil society is against any and all infrastructure. As they've made clear, they're looking to build capacity, so there's much more informed decision making process by people who live in the region."

Local environmental groups, government representatives, and business interests have met regularly in Pucallpa and Cruzeiro do Sul during the past 18 months to monitor the corridor's potential environmental impact. Workshops have also been arranged with indigenous groups to explain how their communities may be affected.

"The regional group has developed measures to obtain information and disseminate it with indigenous representatives near the possible construction zone," said SPDA's Castro, who has helped coordinate the monitoring group through the Iniciativa de Conservación en la Amazonía Andina (ICAA), Instituto del Bien Común (IBC), and USAID.

The new corridor would come as construction on Interoceánica Sur, or the Interoceanic Highway-South, draws to a close. The roadway connects São Paulo, Brazil's financial capital in the south, to Puerto Maldonado in the Peruvian Amazon and eventually to Peru's ocean ports.

Conservationists argue that once the Interoceanic Highway is complete, the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul corridor becomes less economical.

"It was inevitable for there to be a road from Brazil to the Pacific-it was in the nature of things, a geopolitical fact," said Bruce Babbitt, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton administration, in an interview. "But you don't need three more or six more, just for the sake of building roads. The price of construction on indigenous peoples, uncontacted people, and biodiversity to create those roads is too great."

Babbitt, who currently serves on the board of directors of the Amazon Conservation Association, suggested that the governments instead improve port infrastructure to maximize the Amazon River tributaries that connect the region. The Ucayali River flows north through Pucallpa.

"The Ucayali River is navigable all the way to Pucallpa for boats or heavy machinery," Babbitt said. "Obsession with vehicular travel has led to a complete neglect of traditional river systems."

Campbell agreed that roads are not the only option for Pucallpa's business community to extend their commerce.

"While we don't want to deny places like Pucallpa the necessary economic connections they need for sustainable development in the region... there are alternatives to land routes that could be explored," she said. "Fluvial transport is an obvious one."

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

This article is a product of Eye on Earth, Worldwatch Institute's online news service. For permission to reprint Eye on Earth content, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.