by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 1, 2013 | Mining & Drilling
By John Vidal / The Guardian
The Virunga national park, home to rare mountain gorillas but targeted for oil exploration by a British company, could earn strife-torn DR Congo $400m (£263m) a year from tourism, hydropower and carbon credits, a WWF report published on Thursday concludes.
But if the Unesco world heritage site that straddles the equator is exploited for oil, as the Congolese government and exploration firm Soco International are hoping, it could lead to devastating pollution and permanent conflict in an already unstable region, says the conservation body.
Congo has allocated oil concessions over 85% of the Virunga park but Soco International is now the only company seeking to explore inside its boundaries. This year Unesco called for the cancellation of all Virunga oil permits.
Soco, whose board of 10 directors have wide experience with oil companies working in conflict areas including Exxon, Shell and Cairn, insist that their operations in Congo would be confined to an area in the park known as Block V, and would not affect the gorillas.
Soco chairman, Rui de Sousa, said: “Despite the views of WWF, Soco is extremely sensitive to the environmental significance of the Virunga national park. It is irrefutable that oil companies still have a central role in today’s global energy supply and a successful oil project has the potential to transform the economic and social wellbeing of a whole country.”
He added: “The park has sadly been in decline for many years officially falling below the standards required for a world heritage site. The potential for development just might be the catalyst that reverses this trend.”
However Raymond Lumbuenamo, country director for WWF-Democratic Republic of the Congo, based in Kinshassa, said that security in and around the park would deteriorate further if Soco went ahead with its exploration plans.
“The security situation is already bad. The UN is involved with fighting units and the M23 rebel force is inside the park. Oil would be a curse. It always increases conflict. It would attract human sabotage. The park might become like the Niger delta. Developing Virunga for oil will not make anything better.”
“The population there is already very dense, with over 350 people per sqkm. When you take part of the land (for oil) you put more pressure on the rest. Oil would not provide many jobs, people would flood in looking for work,” he said.
One fear is that the area is seismically active and another eruption of one of the volcanoes in the park could damage oil company infrastructure and lead to oil spills in the lakes. “Virunga’s rich natural resources are for the benefit of the Congolese people, not for foreign oil prospectors to drain away. Our country’s future depends on sustainable economic development,” said Lumbuenamo.
“For me, choosing the conservation option is the best option. We can always turn back. Once you have started drilling for oil there’s no turning back,” he said.
But Raymond accepted that while the gorillas were safe at present, the chances of the park generating its potential of $400m a year were remote. “It would be difficult to make the kind of money that the report talks of. Virunga used to be a very peaceful place and can be again. The security situation right now is bad. The UN is involved with fighting units. Its not as quiet as it used to be.”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/01/congo-mountain-gorillas-virunga-wwf
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 23, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
Last Wednesday, bulldozers entered the Loma Charco Azul Biological Reserve (LCABR) in the Dominican Republic and began clearing vegetation for agricultural development. The move stunned local conservationists who had not been notified ahead of time of the project. Although Charco Azul Biological Reserve is home to a wealth of threatened species—including the world’s largest population of the Critically Endangered Ricordi’s iguana (Cyclura ricordi)—the destruction of the reserve was signed off by the Dominican Republic’s Minister of the Environment, Bautista Rojas Gómez.
“The current Minister of the Environment simply does not care about protected areas. Other Ministry technical staff had denied the permit, but he signed it off himself, yielding to pressure from the Agrarian Institute,” Yolanda Leon, a biologist and president of the local NGO Grupo Jaragua, told mongabay.com.
Grupo Jaragua, which focuses on conservation efforts in the southwestern portion of the Dominican Republic, has called on the government to immediately halt the clearing. Meanwhile the National Institute of Lawyers for the Protection of the Environment are preparing to take legal action over the destruction, arguing that the clearing of a protected area is illegal under national law, reports the Environment News Service. To date, around ten hectares have been cleared, but the government plans on clearing over a hundred hectares.
The agricultural project is reportedly a part of a relocation project for families that have been impacted by rising water levels in nearby Enriquillo Lagoon. However, Grupo Jaragua warns that the arid land around Loma Charco Azul Biological Reserve is little suitable for farming.
“Many other areas have been cleared nearby and no land has been allotted to local people, nor water systems have been installed, they remain fallow.”
However even if the clearing stops, the situation has already created conflict in the region.
“The nearby locals who’ve been promised the land are threatening […] violence against the ministry, environmental groups and any iguana they find unless they receive the land,” Leon notes.
Charco Azul Biological Reserve, which was only established in 2009, is notable for housing around 600 Ricordi’s iguana, a species which is down to just a few thousand individuals and is only found in the Dominican Republic. These iguanas are known for their blood-red eyes. In addition, the reserve is home to endemic species like the least pauraque (Siphonorhis brewsteri), the Hispaniolan racer snake (Haitiophis anomalus), and a tree cactus (Dendrocereus undulosus).
Most recently researchers have discovered the presence of the Hispaniolan solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus) in the park as well. Listed as Endangered, the solenodon is one of the world’s most bizarre mammals: it is the only mammal to shoot venom out of its teeth like a snake. The solenodon is also a living fossil: virtually unchanged in the fossil record, solenodons ran underneath the feet of dinosaurs 75 million years ago. The Hispaniolan solenodon’s only living relative is in Cuba and is Critically Endangered.
The Loma Charco Azul Biological Reserve is apart of the UNESCO Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo Biosphere Reserve.
From Mongabay: “Dominican Republic sends bulldozers to destroy wildlife reserve, home to endangered species“
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 21, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Root Force
A series of recently released studies make it clear that wind power is not going to save us—not from global warming, not from high extinction rates, and not from the system of high-energy-consumption industrial exploitation that is killing the planet.
Let’s start with the most damning findings: even the most large-scale shift to wind power cannot slow greenhouse gas emissions enough to have any positive effect on the climate, although it may manage to make things worse. Why?
A study published in Nature Climate Change in September found that although hypothetically there is enough power in the earth’s winds to sustain current levels of energy consumption, in practice you could never harvest enough energy from wind to affect the climate:
Turbines create drag, or resistance, which removes momentum from the winds and tends to slow them. As the number of wind turbines increases, the amount of energy that is generated increases. But at some point, the winds would be slowed so much that adding more turbines will not generate more electricity. …
[T]he study found that the climate effects of extracting wind energy at the level of current global demand would be small, as long as the turbines were spread out and not clustered in just a few regions. At the level of global energy demand, wind turbines might affect surface temperatures by about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit and affect precipitation by about 1 percent. Overall, the environmental impacts would not be substantial. (emphasis added)
Another study, published in Nature last month, found that wind farms being constructed in Scotland actually lead to a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions:
Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers of current or proposed peatland wind farms.
But peat is also a massive store of carbon, described as Europe’s equivalent of the tropical rainforest. Peat bogs contain and absorb carbon in the same way as trees and plants — but in much higher quantities.
British peatland stores at least 3.2 billion tons of carbon, making it by far the country’s most important carbon sink and among the most important in the world.
Wind farms, and the miles of new roads and tracks needed to service them, damage or destroy the peat and cause significant loss of carbon to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change. …
Richard Lindsay of the University of East London, said … “The world’s peatlands have four times the amount of carbon than all the world’s rainforests. But they are a Cinderella habitat, completely invisible to decision- makers.”
Finally, a study published last month in the journal Environmental Research Letters conducted a further analysis on the effects of wind turbine drag:
Each wind turbine creates behind it a “wind shadow” in which the air has been slowed down by drag on the turbine’s blades. The ideal wind farm strikes a balance, packing as many turbines onto the land as possible, while also spacing them enough to reduce the impact of these wind shadows. But as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact, and the regional-scale wind patterns matter more.
Keith’s research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines’ slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
In short, we may not have access to as much wind power as scientists thought.
“If wind power’s going to make a contribution to global energy requirements that’s serious, 10 or 20 percent or more, then it really has to contribute on the scale of terawatts in the next half-century or less,” says Keith.
If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, “the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is that the effect of that on global winds, and therefore on climate, would be severe — perhaps bigger than the impact of doubling CO2.” (emphasis added)
As if that weren’t enough, another study has just concluded that large wind turbines constructed offshore may snap like matches when hit by medium-size waves:
“If we do not take ringing into consideration, offshore wind turbine parks can lead to financial ruin,” warns John Grue to the research magazine Apollon at University of Oslo. …
Ringing does not just harm wind turbines. Ringing has already been a great problem for the oil industry. The designers of the YME platform did not take ringing into account, and lost NOK 12 billion.
“It is possible to build your way out of the ringing problem by strengthening the oil rigs. However, it is not financially profitable to do the same with wind turbines,” says John Grue.
And finally, let’s not forget what environmentalists have been warning about for decades: wind turbines murder birds.
ReWire has learned that the North Sky River Wind project, which attracted fierce opposition from environmental groups concerned about potential threat to eagles and California condors, was the site of a golden eagle death in January. …
The eagle kill apparently occurred on January 29, just a month after North Sky River started generating power.
So what’s the solution? Certainly not wind, solar, or any other industrial magic bullet. The solution is to dramatically scale back consumption and shift to local-based economies not dependent upon stealing resources from distant people and lands.
The solution is to demolish the global economic system.
Get started!
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 9, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Mongabay
More than 60 percent of Africa’s forest elephants have been killed in the past decade due to the ivory trade, reports a new study published in the online journal PLOS ONE.
The study warns that the diminutive elephant species — genetically distinct from the better-known savanna elephant — is rapidly heading toward extinction.
“The analysis confirms what conservationists have feared: the rapid trend towards extinction – potentially within the next decade – of the forest elephant,” said study co-author Samantha Strindberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
“Saving the species requires a coordinated global effort in the countries where elephants occur – all along the ivory smuggling routes, and at the final destination in the Far East,” added co-author Fiona Maisels, also of WCS. “We don’t have much time before elephants are gone.”
The study is based on the largest-ever set of survey data across five forest elephant range countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. The study involved more than 60 scientists who spent 91,600 person-days surveying for elephants, walking over 13,000 kilometers (more than 8,000 miles).
The study shows that elephants are increasingly scarce in areas with “high human density, high infrastructure density such as roads, high hunting intensity, and poor governance”, according to a statement from WCS.“Historically, elephants ranged right across the forests of this vast region of over 2 million square kilometers (over 772,000 square miles), but now cower in just a quarter of that area,” said co-author John Hart of the Lukuru Foundation. “Although the forest cover remains, it is empty of elephants, demonstrating that this is not a habitat degradation issue. This is almost entirely due to poaching.”
The decline in elephant populations has significant implications for the forest ecosystem. Elephants are considered “architects of the forest” for the role in opening clearings and maintain trails.
“A rain forest without elephants is a barren place,” explained Lee White. “They bring it to life, they create the trails and keep open the forest clearings other animals use; they disperse the seeds of many of the rainforest trees – elephants are forest gardeners at a vast scale. Their calls reverberate through the trees reminding us of the grandeur of primeval nature. If we do not turn the situation around quickly the future of elephants in Africa is doomed. These new results illustrate starkly just how dramatic the situation has become. Our actions over the coming decade will determine whether this iconic species survives.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2013 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
Industrial oil palm plantations are spreading from Malaysia and Indonesia to the Congo raising fears about deforestation and social conflict.
A new report by The Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK), dramatically entitled The Seeds of Destruction, announces that new palm oil plantations in the Congo rainforest will soon increase fivefold to half a million hectares, an area nearly the size of Delaware. But conservationists warn that by ignoring the lessons of palm oil in Southeast Asia, this trend could be disastrous for the region’s forests, wildlife, and people.
“Governments of Congo Basin countries have handed out vast tracts of rainforest for the development of palm oil with apparently little or no attention to the likely impacts on the environment or on people dependent on the forest,” Simon Counsell, Executive Director of the Rainforest Foundation UK, said.
The palm tree used to produce palm oil originated in Africa, so production in the Congo Basin isn’t new. But industrial palm oil production involving massive plantations is a recent development for the region. The approach, modeled after operations in Southeast Asia, raises concerns among environmentalists who argue that palm oil has been a disaster for the forests of Malaysia and Indonesia. Indeed, scientific research has found that between 1990 and 2000, 86 percent of all deforestation in Malaysia was for palm oil.
The largest palm oil developer in the Congo Basin is currently Malaysian-owned Atama Plantations SARL, which is working to establish a 180,000-hectare (450,000-acre) plantation in the Republic of Congo. But the entire enterprise is masked by a complete lack of transparency, says the report.
“No publicly available maps of the concession are available, but evidence suggests that the forests designated for clearance mostly appear to be virgin rainforest that is habitat for numerous endangered species, including chimpanzees and gorillas. The area borders, and some of it may fall inside, a planned National Park and Ramsar site,” according to the RFUK report, which notes that logging has already begun on the concession.
The RFUK report further questions whether the plantation development is simply an excuse to log what it calls “primary forests with significant timber stocks.”
Another controversial concession, this time in Cameroon, has received considerable pushback from international NGOs as well as local groups. U.S.-based Herakles Farms is working to develop a 60,000 hectare palm oil plantation in forest bordering four protected areas, but the company’s reputation has been tarnished by local protests, as well as condemnation from international groups such as Greenpeace. Last year, 11 top tropical biologists sent an open letter to Herakles condemning the project.
But Herakles and other companies say they are bringing economic development to a notoriously poor part of the world.
The RFUK report notes that in many cases governments appear unwilling even to take advantage of the economic benefits of palm oil plantations, by overly-sweetening deals to foreign corporations.
“The contracts signed between governments and oil palm developers are being kept secret, reducing transparency and democratic accountability. Those contracts that have come to light show that governments have already signed away some of the potential economic benefits, by granting developers extremely generous tax breaks of 10 to 16 years and land for ‘free’ or at highly discounted rates,” the report reads.
In addition, the palm oil plantations are sparking local conflict with traditional landowners, much as they have done in Malaysia and Indonesia. Locals often have little input on the project and in some cases leases are extraordinarily long, for example Herakles Farms’ lease is 99 years.
“New large-scale oil palm developments are a major threat for communities, livelihoods and biodiversity in the Congo Basin,” Samuel Nguiffo, Director of the Center for Environment and Development (CED), Cameroon, said. “It is absolutely not the appropriate answer to the food security and job creation challenges the countries are facing. Supporting small-scale family agriculture is a better solution.”
