Kamfers Dam: Northgate development gets green light
November 11, 2008
Posted in Conservation
The Northern Cape department of tourism, environment and conservation has given the go-ahead for the Northgate commercial and housing development to be built near Kimberley’s Kamfers Dam lesser flamingo breeding site, Volksblad reports.
The record of decision includes conditions that take the protection of the flamingos and issues with the Homevale sewerage works into account. Raw sewerage has reportedly been leaking from the sewerage treatment works into the dam and has been a major source of concern for the flamingo conservationists.
The RoD states that construction cannot start until “the alternative sewage system (which will be used) is approved in compliance with all applicable laws, constructed and operational AND/OR the upgrade on the existing Homevale sewerage treatment works, which will improve the capacity to the extent that it can accommodate additional effluent, is completed”.
Measures to protect the flamingo include:
- a solid wall with no open gaps or windows must be built with the mininmum height of 2 metres prior to any further construction.
- The wall must be electrified with at least three strands of electric wire
- The development footprint must be completely walled in with controlled access gates
- 24-hour security monitoring including a camera covering the island is recommended
These measures are aimed at minimising human movement to the dam and preventing disturbance of the flamingos by residents.
The RoD was issued on November 7. Interested and affected parties have 30 days to appeal.
The Kamfers Dam site is one of only six lesser flamingo breeding sites in the world and the only one in South Africa. News on the Save the Flamingo campaign Facebook site is that the second breeding season has begun. The first egg was spotted on October 23 and there are high hopes that this season will be as successful as the first one. In May, 9,000 chicks were counted at the end of the first breeding season on the dam.
Wine industry can help conserve cork forests
November 10, 2008
Posted in Conservation, Lifestyle
Photo: A cork oak tree in the mountains near Alcala de los Gazules, Andalucia. Spain
© WWF-Canon / Edward PARKER – WWF
The growing use of plastic and metal substitutes for cork in the wine industry is threatening the Mediterranean’s cork oak forests, says the WWF.
Cork comes from ancient Mediterranean forests. It is a totally natural, renewable and recyclable product. No trees are cut to harvest the cork, instead bark of cork oak trees are stripped every 9-12 years. This is one of the most environmental friendly harvesting processes in the world, the environmental group says.
The cork used in wine bottles and its role in sustainable forestry was an issue raised by the environmental organisation at the general assembly of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) held in Cape Town last week.
The WWF highlighted the vital role the wine industry plays in maintaining the economic value of cork and thus conserving the cork forests. Cork for wine bottle stoppers accounts for almost 70 percent of the total value of the cork market.
“cork forests are home and a source of income to thousands of people and support one of the highest levels of biodiversity in the planet. Decreasing demand from the wine industry for cork stoppers would force entire communities to leave, resulting in more forest fires, desertification and the permanent loss of 2.7 million hectares of forest,” the organisation says.
In its efforts to preserve cork oak landscapes, the WWF is using FSC certification as a market-based tool to drive best management practices on the ground while ensuring sustainable cork markets.
Wine bottles sealed with FSC cork are already available on the market. Three wine producers/ bottlers have certified their chain of custody and seal their wine bottles with FSC cork stoppers (South Africa, Oregon, and Spain). And wine retailers such as Woolworths in South Africa are showing a growing interest in FSC cork, says the WWF-SA.
The FSC is an independent, non profit organisation whose certification system helps consumers make more informed choices when buying timber products. The FSC label is an indication that a product comes from a sustainably managed forest. Although there appears to be disagreement over its certification of “monoculture plantations”.
Dredging a path out of poverty
November 10, 2008
Posted in Conservation
The proposed dune mining project on South Africa’s Wild Coast appears to have been put on hold for the moment but, in the meantime, another mineral sands project, this time in Madagascar, is about to start producing ilmenite, according to a report in Business Report last week.
The mining area is estimated to hold 75 million tons of ilmenite deposits, enough to sustain mining operations for about 40 years. The first shipment will take place in the first quarter of next year, according to the BR report.
Mining investment is seen as a way to alleviate poverty on the island, known for its many unique plant and animal species, but environmentalists have expressed concerns about the sustainability of this development path. Similar concerns have been raised about the proposed mining project on the Wild Coast.
Environmental issues have been a significant obstacle in the development of Rio Tinto’s QIT Madagascar Minerals (QMM) project, Gary O’Brien, QMM’s president, was reported as saying in BR.
Massive investment
The $1-billion mining project near Fort Dauphin in south-eastern Madagascar is reportedly the largest investment in the island’s history and will be a catalyst for broader economic development. Rio Tinto also says the mine is a model for further projects likely to follow in Africa and the developing world because of the care it has taken in managing the social and environmental impacts.
Research commissioned by Friends of the Earth in 2007 found that the mining project – which is 80 percent owned by Rio Tinto and 20 percent by the Madagascar government and has received World Bank funding – was failing to deliver sustainable development.
“Rio Tinto claims that the Madagascar mine development is whiter than white, designed to benefit local people and preserve the unique natural environment. But the new research tells a very different story. The reality on the ground is a murky shade of grey, with local people losing their land and livelihoods whilst receiving negligible benefits from the project in return,” Friends of the Earth’s corporate campaigner Sarah-Jayne Clifton said in a press statement on the release of the report last October.
World Bank standards
Rio Tinto responded to the criticisms on its website, stating: “While we face enormous challenges to get it right, we are satisfied that our management of the project is setting new benchmarks in responsible mining practices.” The company added that “Rio Tinto’s conduct is subject to World Bank standards which are rigorously monitored by competent regulatory agencies.”
But Friends of the Earth has concerns about the World Bank funding mining projects as a way to alleviate poverty. It urged the World Bank to act to ensure standards were being implemented on the ground in Madagascar and to call a halt on investment in future mining projects because evidence shows that they are failing to deliver sustainable development.
A recent report by AFP said the massive mining project had “knocked sideways” the sleepy fishing town of Fort Dauphin, doubling its population in three years and causing the prices of food and rent to rise by up to 40 percent. On the other hand, the report said that the investment had brought hope to the area, and improved the transport infrastructure and hotel industry. But there was also concern that many of the new businesses would not last over the longer term, the report said. And local fishermen claimed the mining was affecting their livelihood.
The Madagascar government has reportedly thrown its weight behind mining as a way to alleviate poverty on the island. A spokesman told AFP that a suitable balance had been found between the preservation of biodiversity – which is also the island’s main tourism asset – and the development of the mining industry.
Forest rehabilitation
Ilmenite, which is used in the manufacture of titanium dioxide, a white pigment used in a range of products from toothpaste to paint, is extracted by dredging mineral sands. This will result in the destruction of about 1,000 hectares of rare coastal forest.
Rio Tinto says on its website that it plans to rehabilitate the area when the dredging is complete. It says people from non-governmental organisations were hired to develop a credible biodiversity programme. And an independent biodiversity committee made up of Madagascar experts is advising the company on the rehabilitation of the indigenous forest.
Rio Tinto’s South African interests include a 50 percent stake in Richards Bay Minerals, which in the 1990s had tried to mine the dunes in St Lucia, KwaZulu-Natal.
Namibia first to auction ivory stockpile
October 28, 2008
Posted in Conservation
The first of Southern Africa’s legal ivory auctions will be held today in Windhoek, Namibia. Willem Wijnstekers, the secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites), which sanctioned the auction, is in Namibia to oversee the sale. The country will sell nine tonnes of ivory.
Japan and China have been approved as buyers. Mr Wijnstekers will hold talks with Chinese and Japanese authorities, as well as traders, on the details of how Cites will monitor the ivory on its arrival in those countries and thereafter, said Cites in a statement.
Cites has stipulated that the proceeds of the sales must be used exclusively for elephant conservation and community development programmes within or next to elephant ranges. “The revenues are expected to boost the countries’ capacity to conserve biodiversity, strengthen enforcement controls and contribute to the livelihoods of the rural people in Southern Africa. All this without affecting negatively African and Asian elephant populations,” said the organisation.
The next auction will be of Botswana’s 44 tonnes on October 31. Then follows Zimbabwe’s four tonnes and South Africa’s 51 tonnes next week.
In a BuaNews report, South African National Parks (SANParks) said the sale of South Africa’s stockpiled ivory will benefit elephant research, conservation and community development. “There is no argument that this money will go a long way towards enhancing conservation research, boosting our enforcement capabilities and helping communities who share land with elephants,” said David Mabunda, the SANParks CEO.
According to BuaNews, the money will also improve conservation through the employment of additional game rangers, obtaining more vehicles, erecting elephant-proof fences where needed and the purchasing of equipment.
But some conservationists argue that legal ivory sales open the doors for laundering of illegal poached ivory. Although conservation efforts in southern and eastern Africa have been successful enough that elephants moved from vulnerable to near threatened on the latest IUCN Red List earlier this month, not all elephants in Africa are adequately protected from poaching, they argue.
The last legal sale was held in 1999, when Japan paid $5-million for almost 50 tonnes of stockpiled ivory. According to Traffic, a joint programme of the WWF and IUCN that monitors the trade in wildlife around the world, the illicit trade in ivory “declined over the next five years” after the 1999 one-off sale. “We hope a similar result is achieved this time,” Traffic said in a statement earlier this year.
In June, Dr Susan Lieberman, director of WWF International’s Species Programme, said: “The sight of ivory openly and illegally on sale in many African cities is likely to be a far more powerful encouragement to those contemplating poaching and smuggling, than a strictly controlled one-off sale. The only way to end elephant poaching is through an effective clampdown on illegal domestic ivory markets.”
Traffic said that China had gained approval to buy ivory in the latest legal sale because it had convinced Cities that it had acted successfully against its own illegal domestic market. Tom Milliken, director of TRAFFIC East/Southern Africa said: “Now China should help other countries do the same, especially in Central Africa where elephant poaching is rampant and Chinese nationals have been implicated in moving ivory out of the region.”
Sources: AFP, BuaNews, Traffic, Cites, BBC
eBay bans ivory
October 22, 2008
Posted in Conservation
eBay has decided to ban the sale of elephant ivory products from January 2009 and has called on all other Internet traders to do the same, a move that has been congratulated by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
IFAW says that the trade in wildlife on the Internet poses a significant and immediate threat to the survival of elephants and many other endangered species. In a report released this week the group tracked more than 7,000 wildlife product listings on 183 websites in 11 countries. eBay was responsible for almost two-thirds of the online trade in wildlife products worldwide.
According to the IFAW report, Killing with Keystrokes: An Investigation of the Illegal Wildlife Trade on the World Wide Web, more than 70 percent of all endangered species’ products listed for sale on the Internet are in the United States. The trade tracked in the US was nearly 10 times that tracked in the next two leading countries, the United Kingdom and China.
Elephant ivory made up 73 percent of the products tracked and exotic birds nearly 20 percent. But IFAW said that primates, big cats and other animals are also falling victim to the e-trade in live animals and wildlife products.
Despite the fact that the saie of ivory has been illegal since 1989, website are “teeming with ivory trinkets, bracelets, and even whole tusks for sale”, said IFAW. And every year, more than 20,000 elephants are illegally slaughtered in Africa and Asia to meet demand for ivory products.
Ivory sale won’t help Africa’s elephants, say conservationists
October 17, 2008
Posted in Conservation
About 51 tonnes of South African stockpiled ivory is to be sold as part of a CITES-approved once-off sale to China and Japan. This is just under half of 108 tonnes of government-owned Southern African ivory that will be auctioned in the next two weeks. Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe are the other sellers. But elephant conservationists are against the sale saying it will encourage poachers to launder their illegal stocks.
“We have no doubt that flooding the market with over 100 tons of ivory will put this endangered species in even further jeopardy,” said Michael Wamithi, programme director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s (IFAW’s) global elephants programme and former director of the Kenya Wildlife Service.
“Throughout west and central Africa, isolated populations have actually been wiped out completely due to illegal hunting. If we do not take this trade seriously, we will surely continue see the demise of these majestic creatures – and sooner rather than later.”
The CITES Secretariat has certified that the South African ivory is of legal origin, the South African department of environmental affairs and tourism said in a media statement. The ivory comes from the South African National Parks (SANParks) and the parks boards of Mpumalanga, North West, and KwaZulu-Natal provinces. Collectively the provincial agencies account for about 6 metric tons of the full stockpiled ivory, the department says.
About 45 percent of the ivory was obtained from culling between 1988 and 1994, when the country’s largest game reserve, the Kruger National Park, still practised this method of population control. The rest of the ivory, obtained from 1995 to the end of 2006, was from mortalities and breakages, the department says.
Ivory that was registered from 2007 onwards is not eligible for sale according to the agreement reached at the 14th Conference of Parties to CITES held in the Netherlands in July 2007.
“The tusks from elephants that have been part of the so called “big tuskers” in Kruger National Park will not be sold as it is seen as part of the heritage of South Africa that will be conserved for the future. Most of these tusks will be displayed in the Elephant Museum in Letaba Camp in Kruger National Park where visitors can see the tusks and get information on the carriers of these tusks,” said Dr David Mabunda, chief executive of SANParks.
CITES ruled only in July that China was fit to become a trading partner for the ivory. Japan was approved in 2006. Both countries stated that they would closely monitor their domestic markets, said CITES in a press release.
“The secretariat will closely supervise this sale and evaluate its impact on elephant population levels throughout Africa. We will continue monitoring the Chinese and Japanese domestic trade controls to ensure that unscrupulous traders do not take this opportunity to launder ivory from illegal origin”, said the secretary-general of the convention, Willem Wijnstekers.
But, says IFAW, both nations are known to be among the world’s largest illegal ivory markets. “Several multiple ton seizures have been made at Chinese ports in recent years. The lack of enforcement for the registration systems in both countries also provides a convenient loophole for illegal traders,” it says in a press release.
According to IFAW, the total amounts being auctioned are: Botswana 44 tonnes; Namibia 9 tonnes; South Africa 51 tonnes; and Zimbabwe 4 tonnes. These are the remnants of at least 10,000 elephants, the group says.
Jason Bell-Leask, Regional Director for IFAW’s southern Africa office also expressed his disdain. “The international trade in ivory simply cannot be justified by a perceived short-term gain such as profits from these sales. Not only are elephants a keystone species, but African tourism relies on their existence. To toy with that is to toy with the livelihoods of the citizens within these poor African nations.”
CITES banned the international commercial ivory trade in 1989. In 1997 it permitted Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe to make a one-time sale of ivory to Japan totalling 50 tons because, says CITES, it recognised that “some Southern African elephant populations were healthy and well managed”. That sale took place in 1999 and raised about $5 million for elephant conservation. The forthcoming auction will be the second sale sanctioned since the ban.
Elephant pic by: nickandmel2006 licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0
Sonar use linked to whale strandings
October 8, 2008
Posted in Conservation
Sonar is killing more whales than we realise, says a whale expert who has been tracking the patterns of mass whale strandings around the world for the past eight years.
In a paper entitled “Navy Sonar and Cetaceans: Just how much does the gun need to smoke before we act?”, Professor Chris Parsons of George Mason University in the United States strongly argues for stricter environmental policies related to the use of sonar in the US Navy. “We are increasingly finding if there is a beaked whale mass stranding, there is a military exercise in the area,” he says.
Parsons is a national delegate for the International Whaling Commission’s scientific and conservation committees, and on the board of directors of the marine section of the Society for Conservation Biology. He has been involved in whale and dolphin research for more than a decade in South Africa, India, China, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom.
He argues in his paper that the US navy could perform its exercises and affect less of the whale population if it had properly trained, experienced whale experts as lookouts – “not just someone who has watched a 45-minute DVD”, as is now the case. They also need to avoid sensitive areas completely, he says.
“Eventually the Navy may have to reconsider the use of certain types of sonar. Without strict mitigation, they could be wiping out entire populations of whales, and seriously depleting others.”
[Via: EurekaNet]
Scientists call on Tanzanian government to protect Lake Natron
October 7, 2008
Posted in Conservation
Lesser flamingo on Lake Bogoria in East Africa. Picture courtesy BirdLife International, www.jameswarwick.co.uk
Conservationists have urged the government of Tanzania to protect Lake Natron, the world’s most important lesser flamingo (Phoeniconaias minor) breeding site, from a proposed soda ash (sodium bicarbonate) plant.
The Lesser Flamingo population in East Africa – some 1.5-million to 2.5 million birds – accounting for 75% of the global population, is dependent on the lake for its survival, stated 250 scientists from around the world, who had gathered near Cape Town for the 12thPan-African Ornithological Congress (PAOC 12), in a resolution. Read more
Mammals face extinction crisis, says IUCN report
October 7, 2008
Posted in Conservation
“The damage industries and commerce do to people and the environment is real, it is considerable, and it is unacceptable,” said Valli Moosa, the president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), who was, until recently, the chairman of South Africa’s electricity utility Eskom.
Speaking at the opening of the conservation body’s 10-day meeting in Barcelona on Sunday, the former SA minister of environmental affairs called on businesses to change their attitudes to environmental issues and largely blamed them and unfettered markets for the world’s environmental woes, the BBC reports.
“Leading entrepreneurs and markets have certainly contributed to the growth of the global economy; yet while individuals may be moral, markets are not,” he was quoted as saying.
A day later the conservation body released its 2008 Red List, the “global standard for conservation monitoring”, which paints a grim picture of the state of the environment. It confirms that the world’s mammals and amphibians face an “extinction crisis”. Read more
We passed Earth’s ecological limit on September 23
October 2, 2008
Posted in Conservation
Since September 23 we Earthlings have been living beyond our ecological means. In fact, by the end of the year we will have used 40 percent more of our planet’s resources than nature can replenish, says the Global Footprint Network, a non-profit organisation committed to a world where all people have the opportunity to live satisfying lives within the means of one planet.
This year we have already overshot the Earth’s biological capacity and the result is that our supply of natural resources – trees and fish and such – will dwindle, while our waste, primarily carbon dioxide, accumulates. We are in ecological debt and we have been for about 20 years.
Every year the date on which the world begins to go into ecological deficit – or Earth Overshoot Day, as it is called – moves forward. The GFN calculated that the first Earth Overshoot day was on December 31 1986. By 1996 humanity was using 15 percent more resources in a year than the planet could supply and Earth Overshoot Day fell on November 21. By 2050 they estimate that it’ll fall in July.
Our ecological footprint has grown rapidly. As recently as 1961 humanity used just over half of the planet’s biocapacity, now we need 1.4 planet Earths to sustain us, says the GFN. If we carry on using the Earth’s resources the way we are we will need the equivalent of two planets by 2050. Read more
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