SRI LANKA: No Calm After the Storm

Global Intelligence News / IPS

IPS Correspondents

COLOMBO, Dec 5 (IPS) – The only good thing about tropical storm ‘Nisha’, that lashed northern Sri Lanka in the last week of November, was that it brought a lull to the fierce fighting between Tamil separatist rebels and the Sri Lankan army.

According to the Disaster Management Centre, over 370,000 persons were affected by gale force winds and rains, and more than 50,000 houses were damaged — 11,000 of them completely destroyed — in nine districts in the country between Nov. 22 – 30 when Nisha struck. Eleven persons were known to have died.

The worst damage was recorded in the northern Jaffna peninsula where 330,000 people were affected and nine killed. The peninsula at the northern edge of the island has been besieged by renewed fighting between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) since August 2006.
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ENVIRONMENT: Modified Habitats Pose Threat of Zoonotic Diseases

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Diego Cevallos

MÉRIDA, Mexico, Dec 3 (IPS) – A breakout of yellow fever among monkeys caught authorities in Argentina and Brazil, and the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), off-guard in October.

As in dozens of cases that occur every year, the outbreak was the result of growing interaction between wild animals and humans and changes in habitats, which is generating new diseases and reviving old ones.

Ebola, encephalitis, avian influenza, pulmonary hemorrhagic syndrome, viral hepatitis, leptospirosis and HIV, the AIDS virus, are just a few of the diseases that according to scientists emerged from the relationship between animals and humans, and that claim thousands or even millions of lives a year while generating huge economic losses around the world.

”Climatic factors and human activity that is increasingly destructive and close to wild animals trigger diseases that in the past we could not even imagine, or that we believed had disappeared,” Silvia Alonso, a researcher with the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, told IPS.
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TRADE-WEST AFRICA: Swollen Shoot Disease Devastating Cocoa Trees

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Francis Kokutse

ACCRA, Nov 27 (IPS) – On a hot November afternoon, Opanin Owusu Adu showed me around his farm on the outskirts of Suhum, a town in the Eastern Region in Ghana.

He pointed out what has happened to the cocoa trees that he had hoped to make a living from. With a sad voice he said, ‘‘my son, that is what the people say swollen shoot disease does to the cocoa trees”.

What should have been golden pods, have become blackened, dried up and withered. ‘‘You cannot cultivate these ones. It means no money.”

Swollen shoot disease is a problem across the West African region. Farmers in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo and Nigeria have not been spared the devastation.

Worried by its long-term effect, Ghana’s President John Kufuor early this year called on the regional grouping the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to take steps to fight the disease.
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CLIMATE CHANGE: Hot Days and Nights in Mexico 2090

Global Intel Net / IPS

Stephen Leahy* – Tierramérica

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 20 (IPS) – Climate change will dramatically increase the number of hot, dry days in Mexico in the coming decades, while coastal regions like the Yucatán, in the southeast, will be swamped by sea levels that are half a metre higher than today, a new study has found.

By 2030, Mexico’s average daily temperature is likely to climb 1.4 degrees Celsius above what has been the average for the past 30 years. By 2090, this increase could rocket upwards by 4.1 degrees, virtually guaranteeing hot days and nights for 80 to 90 percent of the year, says the Oxford University study financed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Cold weather will become very rare in Mexico according to data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an umbrella organisation of scientists from around the world and the preeminent authority on climate change.

”Mexico is one area of the world where all the computer climate models agree,” says Carol McSweeney of the School of Geography and Environment at Oxford.
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ENVIRONMENT-BURMA: Conflict Threatens Karen Biodiversity

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Keya Acharya

BANGKOK, Nov 17 (IPS) – On top of 60 years of military occupation, the Karen people of Burma are now facing severe impairment of their environmental and cultural foundations, say activists.

Burma’s incredibly rich and highly endemic biodiversity has a recorded 11,800 plant species including a species-collection of 800 orchids, 100 bamboos, 1,000 birds and 145 globally threatened mammals.

A great part of this biodiversity is found in Karen State in southeast Myanmar bordering Thailand, now suffering heavily due to the ongoing conflict between the government’s State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and the Karen National Union (KNU).

The conflict has displaced over 500,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) within Karen State, mostly hiding in the forests.

Civilians have become the target of the Burmese military as the SPDC aims to weaken the KNU by cutting off provisions and support from local Karen. And, according to Paul Sein twa, director of the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), there is a toll on the environment as well.
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ENVIRONMENT: Where That ”Recycled” E-Waste Really Goes

Global Intel Net / IPS

Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 14 (IPS) – Is your old TV poisoning a child in China? Or your old computer contaminating a river in Nigeria?

Without a law banning export of toxic electronic waste in the United States, there has been no way to know if old cell phones, computers or televisions originating there didn’t end up in some poor village in the developing world, where desperate people pull them apart by hand to recover some of the valuable metals inside.

A small group of people have now allied with a few responsible recyclers to ensure e-waste can be treated responsibly by creating an e-Stewards certification programme. Announced this week, e-Stewards are electronics waste recyclers that are fully accredited and certified by an independent third party.

Such accreditation is crucial in an industry that often makes fraudulent claims. Currently even when e-waste (electronic trash) goes to a ”green” recycler, the chances are high that toxic stuff from the developed world ended up in a huge pile in the middle of some village.
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BIODIVERSITY: The Real Price of Farmed Salmon

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 10 (IPS) – Salmon aquaculture is devastating the world’s oceans and an international coalition of scientists, Canadian First Nations and tourism operators have called for a global moratorium.

”We’ve seen a regional collapse of all sea life in the 20 years since the salmon farms moved in,” said Chief Bob Chamberlin of the Kwicksutaineuk Ah-kwa-mish Canadian First Nation in the province of British Columbia on Canada’s west coast.

”I can only shake my head in bewilderment that this is allowed to continue,” Chamberlin told IPS from Gilford Island in the Broughton Archipelago, where 20 salmon farms are in operation.

Scientific studies have linked sharp declines in wild salmon populations in British Columbia to disease and parasites originating in open-ocean salmon farms. Millions of non-native salmon have escaped ocean net-pens in Chile and have become an invasive species, transforming the ecology of local river systems.

These and other unsustainable practices violate the United Nations code on Responsible Fisheries, the coalition from Norway, Canada, Chile, Scotland, and Ireland claim. An international declaration has been submitted to the U.N. calling for a global moratorium.
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CHINA: Dam Casts Long Shadow Over Idyllic Valley

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS
Monday, November 03, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Antoaneta Bezlova

LIJIANG, Nov 3 (IPS) – The town at Tiger Leaping Gorge is a ghost town. Clusters of new apartments in mock-Tibetan style with whitewashed walls and ornate flat roofs sit all empty, with gaping windows. The newly widened streets are free of traffic and the surrounding beauty of nature makes for an eerie contrast to the emptiness of the place.

Nestled in the folds of the snow-peaked mountains of Shangri-la and perched over the rushing waters of Jinsha River, the place is so picturesque that it is no surprise that it was picked as the perfect retirement spot for local government officials.

They too wanted to retreat from the world in the paradise on Earth that English writer James Hilton made famous in his 1933 fantasy novel ”Lost Horizon”.

”They (the officials) all bought properties here,” says Xiao Luo, a local tour guide from the Naxi minority. ”These buildings are all new and were all built for retired cadres. But no one dares yet to come and live here. If the dam gets built this whole area will be flooded.”
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