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With the Brazilian election to occur during October, and Jair Bolsonaro widely seen as a failure in many ways – as well as having favoured specific groups at the detriment of the rest of the population, it is considered highly unlikely that Jair Bolsonaro will get a second term.
Yesterday, I wrote about the last lions of Nigeria. In Nigeria, there are just 2 populations of lions totalling 35-40. While this is good for the places that the lion has survived, this is highly unlikely to be able to survive long-term. With human assistance, and translocating lions regularly these populations might eventually recover.
There is one place where west African lions might stand a chance without human help and this is W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) protected area complex that straddles Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger and which holds 90% of West Africa’s lions. This is because all other populations are like that in Nigeria – to small to be capable of surviving longterm without human help. While the WAP complex can be lost amongst the brown on this map – if you look at the intersection of Benin Burkina Faso and Niger, you cannot miss it.
Importantly, this population is still 37% of the size of the Indian lion population. In other words, this is the last stronghold of the West African lion; the West (and central) African lion is one of the remaining relict populations of the Asiatic lion – the other one being the Indian lions of the Gir national park.
Should the Asiatic lion be renamed? It is usually referred to as the Indian lion, but with more than 1 in 4 remaining wild Asiatic lions living in Africa, this does not seem right. What is more, while over the last few decades West African lions have not done wonderfully, there is far more available habitat in West and Central Africa than there is in India, or indeed in Asia.
Perhaps more importantly, the Barbary lion, long thought extinct, appears to be the same species as the Asiatic lion and the West African lion. In other words, the Barbary lion was the genetic bridge between west Africa, and India. before its extinction, these two populations would have been permanently linked. What does this mean? Well, it is vastly simpler to move lions from one wild place to another than to train and release captive lions. If we can fortify the remaining West African lion populations, perhaps we can also allow some of these animals to be moved to other parts of the Lion range – thereby ensuring their long-term survival.
Lions have been lost from a huge area in Africa. Already extinct in 26 countries in Africa, there are perhaps as few as 15,000 lions left. Furthermore, most of these are in a small handful of reserves.
Between the Selous, Serengeti, Ruaha, Kruger and the greater Kalarhari zambezi transfrontier park are represented perhaps as high as 14,000.
This means that other reserves that still host lion tend to have very small populations with the inherent risks of inbreeding that this brings.
You will notice that on this list of lion ecosystems, none are in west Africa. This is unfortunately not a mistake. Recent analysis of the Genetics of western African lions has proved something that has been suspected for centuries. The west African lion is not the same species as the eastern and southern lion, in fact these populations are relict populations left behind as the Asiatic lion was pushed back into its home in India. In actual fact the “Asiatic lion” or “Indian Lion” once had a huge range that took in much of Europe, north Africa and Asia.
After a great deal of negotiating, back in 2015 more than 200 countries signed up to targets that aim to restrict world warming to an average of 1.5°. Despite the decades between scientists positing that humans are warming the planet and this point, this is the easy part.
“Get the countries of the world to agree what is happening, and agree that we do not want to allow it to continue, so we had better do something about it”.
After this, we need the countries of the world to not only meet the targets that they set, but to exceed them and be willing to rachet up these targets until the reductions will be enough to keep warming to 1.5°.
Continue reading “0.1% chance of hitting our 1.5° according to study. Time to give up and get ready for the horrific world to come?”For those who have been reading this blog for years, you will remember that I have written repeatedly about Jair Bolsonaro.
The concern by those who work in tourism with the Komodo dragons seems quite justified. They fear that this enormous increase in price will put off people from visiting, and therefore completely destroy the tourism industry.
It should be noted that this is merely the fee to visit the islands, anything the guides charge is on top of that.
Continue reading “Workers strike as Indonesia increases fee to visit Komodo dragons is increase by more than 18 times to £205”The Caspian tiger once lived in 12 countries, from the west in Turkey, to the east in central Asia. Seemingly, across this range, they did not have consistent populations but the tigers lived on the shores of lakes in the region, with 15-20 valleys being their strongholds.
On the whole, the Caspian tiger lived in relative harmony with humans up until the Russian invasion. The Russians brought with them, the custom of keeping livestock, which brought the humans into direct competition with the tigers. As a result, Russia started paying a bounty for every tiger killed. This was incredibly successful, such that by the 1940 they were exterminated. The hunting was banned in the 1940s but too late to save these tigers.
After this, the tigers former home was taken over and converted into farmland, so the few that survived the hunting, soon lost what home was left.
In the 1990s as Russia fell, WWF started working to help the ecosystem recover. As a result in the late 2000s a satellite analysis was carried out on the area, and one area stood out – a delta of the Lli river in Kazakhstan. It was found that if the prey base was first helped to recover (animals such as boar and deer) then this area could easily support tigers.
Now, it is true that the Caspian tiger went extinct 70 years ago. However, recent genetic analysis has shown that the Caspian and Amur tigers are not distinct enough to be classed separately – they are essentially one subspecies, with a large range. It is true that Caspian tigers tend to have had shorter fur, but tigers are able to adjust in this way, so tigers that are moved to warmer climates will grow less fur and be able to thrive.
Given Kazakhstan being the most advanced of the countries in the area, with relatively high living standards, they should be able to carry out the plan. The delay until 2026 is to allow time for the prey base to build up to sensible levels.
Most of Sweden is still covered in forest. I have visited the country, and have enjoyed exploring it. Never the less, an alarming study has shown that most of the forestry – about 97% relies on clear cutting ancient woodland, and then replanting it with monocultures of trees, not all of which are native.
Clearly Sweden must buck its ideas up, or change fast. I have commented on the low density of bears and wolves. In the past, this has been put down to the countries large number of hunters, but perhaps this is an early warning about what is happening to these forests.
Might this hit the IKEA brand? certainly if they wish to survive, they are going to have to change their behaviour dramatically.
A quick search tells you that the developed world is responsible for roughly 79% of all historical emissions. What is worse, is that this represents under 20% of the world population.
This means that per person emissions are as much as 16 times more the result of each person living in the developed world than the developing world.
Last year was a case in point. Last year, costs for extreme weather events like droughts floods and wildfires cost an estimated $329 billion, which is approximately twice the total money given by donor nations – in other words, when you take into account the financial damage that our behaviour is causing, the developing world is actually donating hundreds of billions to the rich developed world.
We in the west have had politicians claim for decades, that stopping climate change would cost to much. If we had to pay the full amount, clearly the numbers would be quite different.
Current worldwide pledges on carbon dioxide reduction are no where near enough and would lead to catastrophe.
Last year commonsense was found. It was recognized that global warming of 2 degrees will lead to a horrific situation, and that we need to be aiming for 1.5 maximum degree warming. This has been agreed, but at cop26 the pledges gathered were just enough to limit warming to a maximum of 2 degrees.
Unfortunately, actions taken (those pledges that are actually changing behaviour) fall far behind promises, leaving us on target for 2.7 degrees of warming – the upper band suggests 3.6 degrees of warming is still possible.
Developed countries around the world are not acting fast enough. They are also failing to supply funds promised to help the developing world cut their emissions.
Importantly delay will increase the cost. If we fail to act now, actions in the future could be 10-100 times more expensive
NOT A LEGACY I WISH TO LEAVE FOR MY CHILDREN
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