Feed aggregator

A recent conference in Bahrain brought together experts in Islamic archaeology to discuss the lessons of the past and how to safeguard Muslim heritage for future generations.

As drones, smartphones other gadgets invade America’s most tranquil trails, many lament the loss of peace and quiet

Andrew Studer was admiring a massive lava fire hose at Hawaii Volcanoes national park when he spotted something unusual: a small quadcopter drone flying very close to the natural wonder pouring hot molten rock.

“There were other visitors sitting out relaxing in somewhat of a meditative state, just trying to enjoy this phenomenon,” said Studer, who recently captured a viral image of a drone hovering near the lava. “I do feel like drones are extremely obnoxious, and I’m sure it was frustrating for some of the people there.”

Continue reading...

Footage from an Orange County police helicopter shows 15 great whites swimming as close at 10ft (3 metres) from shore. The sheriff’s department uses a loudspeaker to advise anyone in the water to exit ‘in a calm manner’

Continue reading...

From devil rays to the baobab tree, 12 new stamps mark Cites’ 20th anniversary and highlight some of the animals and plants they help protect through the regulation of international trade

Continue reading...

Tomohiro Muda photographs artefacts left behind after the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan and damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant – be they boxer shorts or circuit boards

Continue reading...

Workers rebuild a temple damaged during the 2015 earthquake, in Bhaktapur. Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar

Two years after the devastating earthquakes that struck Nepal, the country is struggling to bounce back. Nearly 70% of the affected people still live in temporary shelters, and it is common to see damaged houses, temples without roofs, and earthquake debris lying around, even in the capital Kathmandu.

The recovery is painfully slow, and many families who lost their loved ones continue to live in traumatic conditions.

Over the past two years, working with CARE Nepal and the Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies, we have talked to local communities in the Gorkha, Kathmandu and Kavre districts, and helped to organise a national workshop involving senior government officials, researchers and civil society actors.

Devastation

The twin earthquakes that struck on April 26 and May 12, 2015 caused around 9,000 deaths, and around half a million families in the central region of the country lost their homes. As well as houses, dozens of Kathmandu’s heritage buildings were destroyed, including the iconic Dharahara tower.

In the quakes’ immediate aftermath, relief and rescue work began swiftly, with local volunteers working with the army and international aid workers. However, over the past two years the recovery effort has slowed to a crawl.

Political bickering, a lack of accountability and poor management of funds have all hampered efforts to rebuild. After two years, Nepali media have branded the situation a “failure”.

What went wrong? Our fieldwork and interviews identified four underlying problems.

1. Partisan squabbling

Immediately after the disaster, the government and opposition parties agreed to create a new public body, the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA), to oversee rebuilding.

However, despite pressure from international donors and humanitarian agencies, protracted political wrangling meant it took almost nine months to appoint someone to lead the new body. The chief executive has changed three times in little over a year.

Donors pledged more than US$4 billion to the NRA, but little of the aid money has found its way into the work of rebuilding. As a result, fewer than 10% of the roughly 500,000 damaged homes have been rebuilt with support from the government and donors.

The earthquake hit at a time when Nepal was embroiled in debate over its new constitution, which became a matter of controversy. For about ten years, the disaster response agenda had been neglected by the contentious politics of state restructuring, following the decade-long violent Maoist revolt.

Disaster response has thus been sidelined by protracted political instability, characterised by constitutional transition, ideological and ethnic tension, and frequent changes of government.

2. Absence of local government

Although national parliament elections have been held in Nepal on more or less on a regular basis, there has been no local election or effective local government for 16 years.

Local elections have finally been announced for May 14 and June 14, 2017, but the damage caused by more than a decade of political vacuum is huge. The loss of political accountability to local people is one of the key factors of the failure of disaster recovery in Nepal.

In several locations, we found unaffected local elites included in the lists of victims receiving financial support. Without local democratic leadership, people cannot voice their concerns, mobilise community resources, or scrutinise projects.

Despite this, Nepalese people enjoy strong local social capital, which has helped them in times of distress and difficulty. Community leaders in Gorkha told us: “we work together at the community level to rebuild damaged houses one by one even when there is no support from the government or donors”.

Some local leaders have worked with their communities to build infrastructure, small roads, schools and hospitals. Nevertheless, these individual efforts are no substitute for strong and democratic local government.

3. Ineffective international aid

In the aftermath of the earthquakes, Nepal’s National Planning Commission estimated that the country needed more than US$7 billion for recovery. The billions of dollars committed by international donors was not translated into a clear plan to direct the money, which meant it has had little impact in rebuilding.

The NRA, which should have led the major state response to the disaster, has been hampered by cumbersome administration. A proposal to allow the NRA to bypass the standard procedures failed to eventuate, and a senior official told us their work is slowed by inefficient and lethargic regulations.

The head of the NRA recently publicly criticised the slow pace of rebuilding, blaming overly inflexible procedures and a lack of strong political will.

Donors have therefore preferred to give to international NGOs instead of state options; in Gorkha alone there were 300 different NGOs operating immediately after the earthquake.

The effectiveness of these organisations has been questioned by independent commentators and academic researchers, some even describing the post-disaster aid industry as “disaster capitalism”. However, despite challenges, several NGOs have delivered vital relief in times of need.

Nepal still lacks effective and enforceable mechanisms to monitor the use of humanitarian support. Having the money is not enough; it must reach the projects that truly help people.

4. Regional tensions

Nepal exists in a delicate balance between India and China, and a few months after the earthquakes a blockade between India and Nepal disrupted supplies. Nepal blamed India for the blockade, while India said the disruption of supplies was due to internal political problems in Nepal.

As a landlocked country, Nepal has historically relied on India for its basic supplies. India’s blockade led to almost total paralysis of not only the recovery work, but the entire economy. At the same time, in recent years China’s interest in Nepal has grown.

During the blockade, China provided free oil, but such one-off assistance did not address recovery needs. The competition between China and India for influence in Nepal has not resulted in any substantial benefit for those affected by the disaster.

Given the persistent seismic risks in the Himalayas, there is a need to create a coherent regional structure for disaster recovery. Yet internal tensions appear to have prevented the Nepal government from promoting serious international cooperation.

Since the entire Himalayas is prone to multiple forms of disaster, a region-wide research and recovery initiative, involving both China and India, is crucial.

Nepal is just one case of poor disaster recovery management. The questions we need to ask, two years on, are: how can we improve national and local government responses? How can international aid work with government efforts? And how can we foster regional cooperation?

Hemant Ojha received support from the Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS) and CARE Nepal while carrying out this research.

Eileen Baldry receives funding from the ARC

Krishna K. Shrestha received funding from Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS) and CARE Nepal while carrying out this research.

South Australia is being accused of raising the drawbridge against synthetic inertia and battery storage too quickly, possibly because gas generators put the fear of god, and more blackouts, into them. The debate over renewable energy penetration is repeating itself.

Why a system with a large proportion of gas turbines is possibly more vulnerable to short term instability than a modern renewable based system with storage.

Langstone Mill Pond, Hampshire The swans’ nest lies deserted, the eggs presumably scavenged while the bereaved cob was defending his territory

Almost two weeks have passed since the nesting female mute swan was viciously attacked by dogs and succumbed to her injuries, but it feels as though the mill pond is still in mourning.

Rain tears my cheeks, the water is turbid with suspended silt, and the customary raucous gaggles of mallards, coots and moorhens are conspicuous by their absence. Even the rising chorus of chiffchaffs, Cetti’s warblers and reed warblers is muted.

Continue reading...

New NYT columnist Bret Stephens is in good company in misunderstanding German energy policy and outcomes. Here's where he goes wrong.

Australia’s monopoly electricity networks are the most profitable businesses in Australia – by far - and earn 10 times the returns of the banking sector.

S&P/ASX All Australian 50 found to have world's highest level of embedded fossil fuel emissions and greatest percentage of coal-derived revenues.

The first few months of 2017 have been added the temperature spiral to celebrate the graph's one year birthday.

2017 federal budget axes funding for agency that provides information to decision-makers on how to manage risks of climate change and sea level rise.

President Trump will make "the right decision for the US" as he reviews the climate change policy.

A sheriff's helicopter crew warns paddle-boarders they are swimming with sharks off the California coast.

A coolabah forest in Western Australia – one of the world's previously unrecognised dryland forests. TERN Ausplots, Author provided

A new global analysis of the distribution of forests and woodlands has “found” 467 million hectares of previously unreported forest – an area equivalent to 60% of the size of Australia.

The discovery increases the known amount of global forest cover by around 9%, and will significantly boost estimates of how much carbon is stored in plants worldwide.

The new forests were found by surveying “drylands” – so called because they receive much less water in precipitation than they lose through evaporation and plant transpiration. As we and our colleagues report today in the journal Science, these drylands contain 45% more forest than has been found in previous surveys.

We found new dryland forest on all inhabited continents, but mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, northeastern Brazil, northern Colombia and Venezuela, and northern parts of the boreal forests in Canada and Russia. In Africa, our study has doubled the amount of known dryland forest.

The world’s drylands: forested areas shown in green; non-forested areas in yellow. Bastin et al., Science (2017)

With current satellite imagery and mapping techniques, it might seem amazing that these forests have stayed hidden in plain sight for so long. But this type of forest was previously difficult to measure globally, because of the relatively low density of trees.

What’s more, previous surveys were based on older, low-resolution satellite images that did not include ground validation. In contrast, our study used higher-resolution satellite imagery available through Google Earth Engine – including images of more than 210,000 dryland sites – and used a simple visual interpretation of tree number and density. A sample of these sites were compared with field information to assess accuracy.

Unique opportunity

Given that drylands – which make up about 40% of Earth’s land surface – have more capacity to support trees and forest than we previously realised, we have a unique chance to combat climate change by conserving these previously unappreciated forests.

Drylands contain some of the most threatened, yet disregarded, ecosystems, many of which face pressure from climate change and human activity. Climate change will cause many of these regions to become hotter and even drier, while human expansion could degrade these landscapes yet further. Climate models suggest that dryland biomes could expand by 11-23% by the end of the this century, meaning they could cover more than half of Earth’s land surface.

Considering the potential of dryland forests to stave off desertification and to fight climate change by storing carbon, it will be crucial to keep monitoring the health of these forests, now that we know they are there.

Ground-based observations were a crucial part of the survey. TERN AusPlots, Author provided Climate policy boost

The discovery will dramatically improve the accuracy of models used to calculate how much carbon is stored in Earth’s landscapes. This in turn will help calculate the carbon budgets by which countries can measure their progress towards the targets set out in the Kyoto Protocol and its successor, the Paris Agreement.

Our study increases the estimates of total global forest carbon stocks by anywhere between 15 gigatonnes and 158 gigatonnes of carbon – an increase of between 2% and 20%.

This study provides more accurate baseline information on the current status of carbon sinks, on which future carbon and climate modelling can be based. This will reduce errors for modelling of dryland regions worldwide. Our discovery also highlights the importance of conservation and forest growth in these areas.

The authors acknowledge the input of Jean-François Bastin and Mark Grant in the writing of this article. The research was carried out by researchers from 14 organisations around the world, as part of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Global Forest Survey.

Andrew Lowe receives funding from the Australian Government, and has previously received funding through the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN). He has served as Associate Science Director for TERN (2009-2016), and is currently the University of Adelaide representative on its Board.

Ben Sparrow receives funding from the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) where he directs the AusPlots and Eco-informatics programs.

Two big cats including the African lion are most at risk from extinction due to loss of prey, say scientists.

Customers are being asked to save water, but more than 20% of water is lost before it reaches homes and leakage levels are not declining, Guardian analysis shows

Fears of a drought are rising after an exceptionally dry spell and water companies are asking customers to save water, but the vast amount of water that leaks from company pipes every day has not fallen for at least four years, according to a Guardian analysis.

Furthermore, many companies in the parched south and east of England have been set leak reduction targets for 2020 of zero or even targets that could allow leakages to increase. Critics blame a system where it is “cheaper to drain a river dry than fix a leak” and say it is unfair to place the water saving burden on customers while 20% of all water leaks out before it even reaches homes.

Continue reading...

Leaked draft says Labour will protect bees by banning all neonicotinoid pesticides, which have been linked to species decline

If you were wondering why bees popped up in the Labour party’s leaked manifesto this week, then here’s the answer.

Since 1900 about 20 bee species have become extinct in the UK and 35 more are now at risk.

Continue reading...