Wildlife and conservation new, wild travel information and links for booking
In theory, a power station that makes its electricity from burning wood could be carbon neutral. That is, if the power station owns the land that they get the wood from, and each time they cut some trees down, they immediately replace them.
Unfortunately, this is not how biomass burning power stations work.
Continue reading “Tinkering so as to meet carbon reduction goals, without doing anything?”In Columbia a bird only seen twice before – the Santa Marta Sabrewing has been seen again.
Anti-protest bills are obvious anti-democratic. Yet Republican run states have past bills prohibiting protest in 1 in 3 USA states in the last 4 years. The American Legislative Exchange Council helped write laws criminalizing protest against pipelines, gas terminals and other projects in 24 states in the USA. This is theoretically to protect critical infrastructure.
This is in response to successes in creating laws to keep fossil fuel companies accountable for the damage they do.
For the time being, laws in the USA have swung away from climate protection. We need the US central government to take up this cause, and reverse this issue.
New Zealand has no native land mammals. There are mammals that swim to new Zealand, or indeed that fly there, but all the land mammals are non native. Unfortunately with no mammals there are also no predators to control, it is also unfortunately true that in most cases introduced predators take the native flightless birds far more than the non-native mammals.
There are currently thought to be millions of wallabies living free on both of New Zealand. Finally pest control have started to try to deal with these. One pest controller can kill 100 wallabies in a good night. As elsewhere, these wallabies are causing problems, causing local plants to die and get pushed towards extinction.
It is estimated that by 2025 the cost to New Zealand could be costing $84 million a year in damaged ecosystems and lost agricultural revenue.
The decline in African Lions has been pretty constant and totally devastating. Just 100 years ago, there were about 200,000 lions in Africa (some estimates suggest as many as 500,000 in 1950, and 200,000 as late as 1975.
While the Cheetah has suffered a horrific fall in range and numbers in the world over the last century, there are some hopes for the species.
Cheetah are not big cats- this means that they often struggle to thrive in small reserves alongside other big cats. What this has meant is that in many countries there are more cheetah outside reserves than inside reserves. This is primarily the case in Southern Africa, in particular Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe where the most free ranging cheetah currently live. To a lesser extent, there are also free ranging cheetah in east Africa in Tanzania and Kenya.
Mangrove trees are essential in many parts of the world. Having been severely depleted in recent decades, the human race has realized their importance late, as ever. From stabilizing shore lines, and stopping excessive loss of sand into the sea, they also seive much of our pollution out of the water.
One of the biggest arguments against electric cars is the length of time that they take to charge. This of course forgets that for virtually every journey in the year, the distance that the car can go without being charged is enough to do the return trip. For the majority of electric cars, you can drive 200-300 miles before having to stop to charge- short of a rare road trip this will do almost all drives. It of course also forgets the fact that a human driver needs to stop for refreshments, to use the toilet and to have a break.
With the advent of large numbers of zoos – with healthy collections of animals from around the world, the loss of a species in the wild can sometimes be reversed.
Unfortunately the history of the Oryx is not good. By 1800, its range had become severely restricted throughout the Arabian peninsular. Pressure merely increased after this. By 1948 Oryx had been hunted to near extinction, particularly after the advent of the motor car, allowed access to previously safeholds. In 1972, the last few Arabian Oryx were living in Oman, and were killed a few weeks later.
A mixture of overgrazing by livestocks, and capture for private collection were of lesser importance of this species extinction in the wild, but proved also to be its saving grace.
Today, there are thought to be about 1200 wild Arabian Oryx (1 of four Oryx species) living in Saudi Arabia, with a further 6-7000 living in the wild.
This means that this species has gone from being extinct in the wild, to merely vulnerable (as classed by the IUCN) the first to ever do this.
The process started in 1986 when 50 individuals were transferred to a research centre in Saudi Arabia. At this point only a few hundred survived in captivity. To add to the complication, many were found to be severely infected by TB. While in normal species any infected animal would be killed this could not be done. Instead they were treated with various drugs, any young born to infected females would be taken away and hand-reared, as TB can be transferred in the mothers milk.
In 1989 the first Arabian Oryx were rereleased into teh wild in central Saudi Arabia. A decision was made to enclose allof the reserve 2553 square km, about the area of Dorset, though this was good for the other wild life in the area, which included Arabian gazelles, red-necked ostrich and Houbara bustards.. This reserve now has over 500 of these Oryx making it the biggest wild population.
Later Oryx were released into a large reserve into the south of the country, and these have become established with a population of about 100. While small, this is the largest fully free ranging population int he world.
There is still much to be done. Currently, work is being done, to create cross border reserves with the UAE, Oman and Yemon -the other countries of the Arabian Peninsula. If this works, then the Oryx will become a full feature of the whole of the Arabian peninsula as it once was.
The worlds international deals of all kinds rely on countries doing what they promise, though it is true that if a small country promises a big country, then the big country can make them fulfil their pledge.
What should happen here? It is by definition the case, that the poor countries are those that has been promised the money.
The USA and the UK will fall short of their pledge for 2022.
The amount of this support that each country was responsible was worked out, on the basis of historical emissions and their gross national income. In other words, this split was done as fairly as possible – getting those countries that are responsible for the majority of emissions over time to pay the most, taking into account the countries current ability to pay.
Unfortunately, the USA has the biggest gap between what it has paid, and what it owes. In 2020, the USA paid just 5% of its share, indeed, despite having an economy that is 40% bigger than the EU it paid just 1/12 of what the EU did.
While the UK did better, it is still in default. In 2020 we paid just half of its fair share, and the plan is for this to only reach 2/3 by 2025. Australia paid only 23% and Canada just 18%, and neither have pledged to improve this in the next few years.
The only rich countries that are paying what they owe, are Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, France and Japan.
Currently, of the promised $100 billion each year, only 83% is being met.
What is alarming, is the amount that was agreed (the $100 billion) is extremely small compared to the losses suffered by these poor countries as a result of the weather that has been triggered by global warming.
This is a big problem. If all these poor countries simply ignored science and destroyed their environment, it would be devastating for the west. Yet currently we are not doing what was promised.