Gabon paid for protecting forests, in African first

Yahoo – AFP, Tue, June 22, 2021 

Gabon has been a leader in central Africa in preserving its rainforest, creating
13 national parks since 2000 that cover around 11 percent of the country.

Gabon has become the first African nation to receive a financial reward for protecting its forests as part of international efforts to fight climate change, the government announced Tuesday. 

Gabon has received $17 million in recompense for successfully cutting its carbon emissions by reducing deforestation and forest degradation, the environment ministry said in a statement. 

The payment came "after independent experts verified Gabon's results" showing that the country's carbon emissions in 2016-17 had dropped compared with the annual figures for 2006-15. 

The funds were delivered by the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), an organisation launched in 2015 by the United Nations and backed by international donors. 

The scheme provides financial incentives to Central African governments to pursue economic growth without harming the vast forests that cover much of the region. 

The world's rainforests are seen as a vital weapon in the fight against climate change by sucking out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

Gabon, where forests cover 90 percent of the territory, is home to some 18 percent of the Congo Basin forest, known as "the second lung of the planet" after the Amazon. 

Under a 10-year deal signed with CAFI in 2019, Gabon is set to receive a total of $150 million if it meets its carbon-cutting targets. 

Gabon is home to nearly 60 percent of Africa's remaining forest elephants,listed
in March as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature

The small tropical country has pledged to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2025 from 2005 levels. 

The forests in Gabon alone "absorb a total of 140 million tonnes of CO2 each year, which is equivalent to removing 30 million cars from circulation throughout the world," the environment ministry said. 

Gabon has been a leader in Central Africa in preserving its rainforests, creating 13 national parks since 2000 that cover around 11 percent of the country. 

Norwegian Environment Minister Sveinung Rotevatn, whose government is a major donor to CAFI, said Gabon had "demonstrated that with vision, dedication and strong dynamism, reductions in (CO2) emissions can be achieved in the Congo Basin forest". 

Gabon's environment ministry said the first cash payment would notably be used to invest in local forestry projects. 

"The aim is to improve the income, livelihoods and well-being of communities in Gabon," it said. 

Along with fighting climate change, protecting the world's rainforests is seen as key to staving off threats to biodiversity. 

Gabon is home to nearly 60 percent of Africa's remaining forest elephants, listed in March as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

Oxfam calls for radical rethink of world food system

Deutsche Welle, 2 June 2011

In sub-Saharan Africa, 32 percent
are undernourished

International aid organization Oxfam says world demand for food will skyrocket over the next few decades, while production capacity will decline. It has launched a campaign to change the globe's approach to food.

International aid group Oxfam has released a report on hunger around the world that paints a bleak picture of the global food supply and calls for a restructuring of a "broken" food system, which has resulted in almost one billion people going hungry.

On June 1, Oxfam launched its global GROW campaign, which aims to lobby world leaders to change policies around food subsidies, promote sustainable agricultural methods and strengthen regulations on speculation in the international food market.

The campaign also aims to make consumers in rich countries aware of the consequences of their habits on the world's poor and the environment.

Time for reflection

"Our goal is to radically change the global food system, the way we use and share and consume in order to make it sustainable," Marita Wiggerthale, an expert on trade and food security for Oxfam Germany, told Deutsche Welle.

The report offers a sobering picture of current and future world hunger levels, saying nearly 925 million people - one out of seven – now face hunger every day.

Climate change, including increased
periods of drought, will exacerbate
the hunger problem

While food prices have skyrocketed since 2007, the price for staples such as maize will continue to rise, nearly doubling in the next 20 years, which will push the number of hungry people even higher, Oxfam says.

As global population grows, so will the demand for food, the report adds. By 2050, the demand for food will have increased by 70 percent, even though the ability to increase food production is declining due to flat crop yields and weak harvests caused by a range of factors including environmental problems such as water scarcity and climate change.

"Peak food production has already been reached because there is increased competition between food, fuel and feed," Wiggerthale said, pointing to biofuel production that diverts 15 percent of the world's corn to engines and the world's growing appetite for meat, which pushes farmers to grow food for animal feed at the expense of other food crops.

Poor record on hunger

The global record for tackling hunger is not a particularly good one. In 1995, a UN food summit set a goal to reduce the number of hungry people – then at 820 million – by half. That goal has not been met.

A 2008 spike in food prices pushed an additional 100 million people into poverty. The number stabilized somewhat in the second half of that year, but has been rising again.

The largest number of the world's hungry live in Asia-Pacific region

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says food prices are higher than they have been in the last 20 years, surpassing the 2008 price spike that set off food riots in cities around the world.

Most of the world's hungry are in Asia, and particularly on the Indian subcontinent. However, Africa is the continent where the largest percentage of the population faces hunger. In 2010, some 239 million, or 30 percent, faced hunger there.

"In most African countries, there is not enough long-term investment made in the agricultural sector," Tobias Reichert, a senior advisor on trade and food at the NGO Germanwatch, told Deutsche Welle.

EU policy making it worse

That is a result, at least partly, of European Union agricultural policy, he said. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the EU changed from a net importer to a net exporter of food, especially when it came to wheat and other grains as well as animal products such as beef, milk, pork and chicken.

"The EU focused on exporting to developing markets such as Africa, which ended up hurting local producers who couldn't compete," he said. "It gave local governments the signal that they didn't need to invest in their own agricultural sector since the products were cheaper on the world markets."

But when world food prices started going up, at first slowly, then dramatically, developing countries couldn't react quickly enough. The long neglect of their own infrastructure meant they could not increase domestic production to offset rising import prices.

The low import prices also had an impact on local food customs as people began to use imported wheat and corn for cooking instead of locally grown crops such as millet and sorghum. That hurt local farmers who saw their markets shrink.

Many of those who tried to switch to wheat or corn found that the soil or local climate wasn't suited to the cultivation of those crops, Reichert said.

Speculators

Other analysts place some blame for growing hunger on increased speculation in commodities markets, which has led to food price volatility.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, lobbying by investment banks and hedge funds led to weaker regulations on food speculation. Key financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital created new investment products to help financial companies make money on food prices.

Oxfam's GROW program is pushing
to give women the same rights to land
as men

This speculation, betting that food prices would rise, ended up pushing the prices to much higher levels than would have been expected otherwise.

"It has had a devastating impact on people around the world," Murray Worthy, a policy officer at the World Development Movement in London, told Deutsche Welle. "It's forcing millions of people into poverty."

His group and others are calling for new regulations that would bring more transparency to financial markets and limit the amount of food that can be held and traded by banks and investment funds.

"Food is a fundamental right, it shouldn't be traded with at the whim of bankers and other financial speculators," he said.

Oxfam says that the world is actually capable of feeding all of the world's people, but that short-term thinking, failed government policies and vested interests - including 300 to 500 powerful companies who "benefit from (the current system) and lobby to maintain it" – has exacerbated the problem of hunger, which hits the world's poorest the hardest and threatens to affect millions of more men, women and children.

Oxfam's Wiggerthale said she was heartened by the fact that hunger was high on the agenda of this November's meeting of G20 leaders. There, they will decide whether and how to manage food prices and regulate markets to protect against future price volatility and food crises.

"We want to put pressure on governments so they really act," she said. "We are in an urgent situation and if we can't manage to effect change in the next few years, the situation will be much worse."

Author: Kyle James

Editor: Nathan Witkop

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Shrinking Lake Chad turning farmland into desert

CNN News, From Isha Sesay, CNN, March 2, 2011

The shrinking shores of Lake Chad

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Lake Chad is just a twentieth of the size it was 50 years ago
• The lake feeds between 20 million people in Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger
• Local fishermen say they are catching fewer, and smaller, fish in the lake
• Some people are planting trees to stop desertification of the surrounding land

(CNN) -- Lake Chad is shrinking rapidly, threatening the millions of people who depend on it for their survival. But some locals are fighting back in a bid to preserve their way of life.

From droughts causing bad harvests, to floods destroying farms and homes, life in Africa's Sahel belt can be a constant struggle.

The arid belt of land stretches from Senegal in the west, all the way across the continent to Ethiopia in the east. With the Sahara to the north, and the savannah to the south, it's a region that experiences extreme dry and wet seasons.

In the middle of it all is Lake Chad, the most reliable resource in this region of shifting extremes. More than 20 million people depend on the freshwater lake for their survival.

But it's been shrinking over the past 50 years and satellite images show it is now just a twentieth of its former size.

Huge expanses of water are now nothing more than a series of ponds and islands, and the once-fertile land that surrounds the lake is now dusty and barren.

RELATED TOPICS

• Lake Chad
• UNICEF
• Africa
• Sahel

"If there are solutions we must find them," said Farid Dembell, from the Society for the Development of Lake Region.

"The lake is in the process of disappearing and the lake feeds many people, not just here but in other countries like Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger," he continued. "They are all people who live on Lake Chad."

The way of life in this area stretches back centuries and many earn a living fishing in the lake.

Locals report that they are catching less fish and the ones that they do catch are smaller than they used to be.

A declining stock could have devastating consequences far beyond the water's edge, says Yakowra Mallom, from UNICEF.

"At the start we didn't know anything about the problem of malnutrition," she said. "But now the figures are enormous. The children are all malnourished. There are no more fish. There's no more milk, no maize, no vegetables or cereal."

Local communities say the changing weather is the biggest reason for the shrinking of the lakes shores. The necessary irrigation of farming land has also been a factor.

But some people are making efforts to save their livelihoods.

A small local group is trying to save the surrounding land by planting trees in the villages that have been worst affected by desertification. If they cannot bring back the lake, they hope there will at least be workable land.

Saleh Sagoubi heads up the Tree Planting Association, a volunteer organization that has around 50 young members.

"I was born here and I grew up here," he said. "I want the lake to come back, not just for me, but for the children of the future."

Sagoubi blames climate change for turning much of the once-fertile land of the Sahel into desert.

His group is trying to hold back the Sahara with a "great green wall" of drought-resistant trees.

"To stop the Sahara we must make lots of effort day and night -- we must work," he said.

"The desert will be stopped one day by trees; they are our weapons of mass destruction."

Scientists Create 52 Artificial Rain Storms in Abu Dhabi Desert

Time, by: Josh Sanburn, Jan 3, 2010

Fifty-two storms in Abu Dhabi this summer were artifically created.
(Via Getty Images)

Hail, lightning and gales came through the state's eastern region this summer thanks to scientist-puppetmasters.

As part of a secret program to control the weather in the Middle East, scientists working for the United Arab Emirates government artificially created rain where rain is generally nowhere to be found. The $11 million project, which began in July, put steel lampshade-looking ionizers in the desert to produce charged particles. The negatively charged ions rose with the hot air, attracting dust. Moisture then condensed around the dust and eventually produced a rain cloud. A bunch of rain clouds.

(See TIME's pictures of the year 2010)

On the 52 days it rained in the region throughout July and August, forecasters did not predict rain once.

While fascinating, this is not the first time scientists have attempted to mess with Mother Nature. China has been tinkering with cloud seeding for years, not always successfully.

But the idea that countries in the Middle East could actually create rain in this water-poor region could go a long way to solving the area's problems with drought and is considered to be cheaper than desalination. But how controllable the weather can be is still in doubt, and the consequences of meddling with nature at this level are yet to be seen.

(See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2010)

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Violent Seismic Activity Tearing Africa in Two

Der Spiegel, by Axel Bojanowski, Jan 20, 2011

Northeastern Africa is no longer like it once was. The earth there is in upheaval.
(University of Bristol / Lorraine Field)

Photo Gallery

The fissures began appearing years ago. But in recent months, seismic activity has accelerated in northeastern Africa as the continent breaks apart in slow motion. Researchers say that lava in the region is consistent with magma normally seen on the sea floor -- and that water will ultimately cover the desert.

Cynthia Ebinger, a geologist from the University of Rochester in New York, could hardly believe what the caller from the deserts of Ethiopia was saying. It was an employee at a mineralogy company -- and he reported that the famous Erta Ale volcano in northeastern Ethiopia was erupting. Ebinger, who has studied the volcano for years, was taken aback. The volcano's crater had always been filled with a bubbling soup of silver-black lava, but it had been decades since its last eruption.

The call came last November. And Ebinger immediately flew to Ethiopia with some fellow researchers. "The volcano was bubbling over; flaming-red lava was shooting up into the sky," Ebinger told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Afar Triangle (Spiegel Online)

The earth is in upheaval in northeastern Africa, and the region is changing quickly. The desert floor is quaking and splitting open, volcanoes are boiling over, and seawaters are encroaching upon the land. Africa, researchers are certain, is splitting apart at a rate rarely seen in geology.

The first fracture appeared millions of years ago, resulting in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The second fracture, stretching south from Ethiopia to Mozambique, is known as the Great Rift Valley, and it is lined with several volcanoes. Millions of years from now, it too will be filled with seawater.

Could Go Quickly

But in the Danakil Depression, in the northern part of the valley, the ocean could arrive much sooner. There, low, 25 meter (82 foot) hills are the only thing holding back the waters of the Red Sea. The land behind them has already dropped dozens of meters from previous levels and white salt deposits on the desert floor testify to past encroachments of the sea. But lava soon choked off its access.

For now, no one can really say when the sea will finally flood the desert. But when it does, it could go quickly. "The hills could sink in a matter of days," Tim Wright, a fellow at the University of Leeds' School of Earth and Environment, said at a recent conference hosted by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.

In the last five years, the geologic transformation of northeastern Africa has "accelerated dramatically," says Wright. Indeed, the process is going much faster than many had anticipated. In recent years, geologists had measured just a few millimeters of movement each year. "But now the earth is opening up by the meter," says Loraine Field, a scholar at the University of Bristol who also attended the conference.

Earth tremors cause deep fissures to form in the desert floor and the ground in East Africa is shattering like broken glass. Researchers in the Gulf of Tadjoura, which juts into Djibouti from the Gulf of Aden, have recently registered a barrage of seismic shocks. "The quakes are happening on the mid-ocean ridge," Ebinger reports.

Shifting Tectonic Plates

Lava gushes out of fissures in these underwater mountain ranges to constantly create new earth crust -- when it hardens, it becomes part of the sea floor. As the magma surges upward, it spreads the ocean floor on both sides, shifting tectonic plates and causing tremors.

In recent months, the quaking in the Gulf of Tadjoura has been getting closer and closer to the coastline. As Ebinger explains, the splitting of the ocean floor will gradually extend to dry land. This is already the case along some fault lines in the Ethiopian desert, creating a geological spectacle that can otherwise only be witnessed deep below the surface of the ocean.

Even the pattern of earthquakes supports the conclusion that the desert landscape is transforming into a deep seafloor, according to a recent article in the Journal of Geophysical Research published by Zhaohui Yang and Wang-Ping Chen, two geologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The researchers have recorded several strong earthquakes at a shallow depth in northeastern Africa similar to ones that are otherwise only seen on mid-ocean ridges far out at sea.

In recent months, researchers have also recorded an up-tick in volcanic activity. Indeed, geologists have discovered volcanic eruptions near the earth's surface at 22 places in the Afar Triangle in northeastern Africa. Magma has caused fissures up to eight meters (26 feet) wide to open up in the ground, reports Derek Keir from the University of Leeds. While most of the magma remains beneath the surface, in places like Erta Ale it has made its way above ground.

An Ocean Without Water

Scientists have also noted that the kind of magma bubbling up in the region is the type otherwise only seen spewing forth from mid-ocean ridges deep below the water's surface. One of its signature characteristics is a low proportion of silicic acid. The magma coming out of Erta Ale has the same chemical composition as the kind that emerges from deep-sea volcanoes. The entire region increasingly resembles an ocean floor -- one without water.

The new burst in activity began in 2005, when a 60-kilometer-long fissure suddenly formed in the Afar Depression. Since then, roughly 3.5 cubic kilometers of magma have gushed forth, according to Tim Wright -- enough to cover the entire area of London to an average person's height.

From a geological perspective, the speed with which the magma is pushing forth is astonishing. It has been channeling its way through the rock below the earth's surface at speeds of up to 30 meters per minute, reports Eric Jacques from the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris. Satellite measurements attest to the consequences: In one 200-kilometer stretch welling up with magma, the ground looks like asphalt on a hot summer day. Magma is also pooling up under the Dabbahu Volcano in northern Ethiopia, Lorraine Field reported in San Francisco.

Continuing to Expand

The satellite data has also shown that a much larger area has been scarred by fissures than previously assumed, says Keir. Subterranean currents of magma are also causing ground temperatures to spike in eastern Egypt, a team of geologists from Egypt's National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics recently reported in Seismological Research Letters. At the AGU conference, Columbia University's James Gaherty reported that magma eruptions have ripped a 17-kilometer gash into the desert floor in the northern part of Malawi and that the lateral pressure they have exerted has even lifted the surrounding earth up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) in places.

The most violent upsurge of magma in recent years, though, happened in an unexpected place. In May 2009, a subterranean volcano erupted in Saudi Arabia. A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 5.7 accompanied by tens of thousands of milder tremors forced 30,000 to seek shelter. Magma spewed out of the ground in an area about the size of Berlin and Hamburg combined, Sigurjon Jonsson from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology reported at the AGU meeting. The fact that the eruption took place almost 200 kilometers (124 miles) away from the fault line in North Africa "surprised all of us," says Cynthia Ebinger. And the world's largest geological construction site continues to expand. Loraine Field confirms that more and more magna is pushing its way to the earth's surface, adding that: "The magma chamber is reloading."

Oxford University's David Ferguson predicts a considerable increase in volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in the region over the next decade. They will, he says, "become of increasingly large magnitude."

Related Article:

“2011 and Beyond” - What you are seeing, and why - Jan 16, 2010 (Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll)