Honiara, Sep 23,2023: Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands Manasseh Sogavare on Friday blasted Japan’s discharge of nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean, describing it as an attack on global trust and solidarity.
Solomon Islands stands with like-minded Pacific islanders and is appalled by Japan’s decision to discharge over 1 million tons of nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean, Sogavare told the General Debate of the UN General Assembly.
The assessment report of the International Atomic Energy Agency is inconclusive and the scientific data shared remain inadequate, incomplete and biased. These concerns were ignored, he noted.
If the nuclear-contaminated water is safe, it should be stored in Japan. The fact that it is dumped into the ocean shows that it is not safe, said the prime minister.
“The effect of this act is transboundary and intergenerational and is an attack on global trust and solidarity. So the message is clear: our lives, our people do not matter!” he said.
“We call on Japan to explore other options in addressing the treated nuclear wastewater and to immediately stop discharging it into the Pacific Ocean,” he said. “If we are to rebuild trust and reignite global solidarity, we must be honest and frank in protecting our oceans which is the lifeblood of our people.”
Sogavare said he has a moral obligation to speak against Japan’s discharge of nuclear-contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean.
“I am morally and ethically obliged to speak for humanity, the voiceless, and our children’s children. We are the ocean. It is our past, our present, our future. It is the foundation of our very existence, it is our identity,” he said. “Please stop the discharge of nuclear treated water or history will judge us.”
New Delhi , March 15: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India on Tuesday sent letters to the presidents of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress urging them to include animal welfare in their respective parties’ 2024 election manifestos through updates to policies and legislation to provide stronger protections for animals and create harsher penalties for those who commit acts of cruelty.
The request includes phasing out the use of animals in experiments in favour of state-of-the-art research methods and prohibiting the use of elephants in performances, among other animal rights-related initiatives.
“Integral to the moral fibre of our country are the principles of ahimsa and karuna,” writes PETA India Director of Advocacy Projects Khushboo Gupta adding, “It is of utmost importance that the welfare of all living beings is given due consideration and protection.”
PETA India said that The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, is more than 60 years old and is in need of urgent updates to adequately protect animals, including stronger penalties for acts of cruelty.
“Currently, a person who commits cruelty to an animal can get away with just a Rs 10 fine,” Gupta weote. The group recommended more significant fines, jail time, and a ban on keeping or working with animals for those who are convicted.
Other recommendations made by PETA India to add into the parties’ manifestos include prioritising funding for the development of sophisticated, non-animal research and testing methods and committing to a strategy to phase out the use of animals in science, focusing on the production of vegan food and leather in India, prohibiting the caging of aerial birds and ending the use of animals forced to perform in circuses.
PETA India further recommended prohibiting the sale of animals through pet shops and breeders while promoting the adoption of dogs and cats from overburdened animal shelters. It further recommended developing action plans to reduce the consumption of animal-derived foods so as to protect animals, human health, and the environment.
Mar 06,2023:Nations have reached a historic agreement to protect the world’s oceans following 10 years of negotiations.
The High Seas Treaty aims to place 30% of the seas into protected areas by 2030, to safeguard and recuperate marine nature.
The agreement was reached on Saturday evening, after 38 hours of talks, at UN headquarters in New York.
The negotiations had been held up for years over disagreements on funding and fishing rights.
The last international agreement on ocean protection was signed 40 years ago in 1982 – the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
That agreement established an area called the high seas – international waters where all countries have a right to fish, ship and do research – but only 1.2% of these waters are protected.
Marine life living outside of these protected areas has been at risk from climate change, overfishing and shipping traffic.
In the latest assessment of global marine species, nearly 10% were found to be at risk of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
These new protected areas, established in the treaty, will put limits on how much fishing can take place, the routes of shipping lanes and exploration activities like deep sea mining – when minerals are taken from a sea bed 200m or more below the surface.
Environmental groups have been concerned that mining processes could disturb animal breeding grounds, create noise pollution and be toxic for marine life.
The International Seabed Authority that oversees licensing told the BBC that moving forward “any future activity in the deep seabed will be subject to strict environmental regulations and oversight to ensure that they are carried out sustainably and responsibly”.
Marine protected areas could help endangered species like the whale shark – the largest living fish – recover
Rena Lee, UN Ambassador for Oceans, brought down the gavel after two weeks of negotiations that at times threatened to unravel.
Minna Epps, director of the IUCN Ocean team, said the main issue was over the sharing of marine genetic resources.
Marine genetic resources are biological material from plants and animals in the ocean that can have benefits for society, such as pharmaceuticals, industrial processes and food.
Richer nations currently have the resources and funding to explore the deep ocean but poorer nations wanted to ensure any benefits they find are shared equally.
Sea sponges have yielded key ingredients for HIV and cancer treatments
Dr Robert Blasiak, ocean researcher at Stockholm University, said the challenge was that no one knows how much ocean resources are worth and therefore how they could be split.
He said: “If you imagine a big, high-definition, widescreen TV, and if only like three or four of the pixels on that giant screen are working, that’s our knowledge of the deep ocean. So we’ve recorded about 230,000 species in the ocean, but it’s estimated that there are over two million.”
Laura Meller, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace Nordic, commended countries for “putting aside differences and delivering a treaty that will let us protect the oceans, build our resilience to climate change and safeguard the lives and livelihoods of billions of people”.
“This is a historic day for conservation and a sign that in a divided world, protecting nature and people can triumph over geopolitics,” she added.
Countries will need to meet again to formally adopt the agreement and then have plenty of work to do before the treaty can be implemented.
Liz Karan, director of Pews Trust ocean governance team, told the BBC: “It will take some time to take effect. Countries have to ratify it [legally adopt it] for it to enter force. Then there are a lot of institutional bodies like the Science and Technical Committee that have to get set up.”
Feb 20,2023:United Nations members will gather in New York City in the United States on Monday to resume efforts to forge a long-awaited and elusive treaty to safeguard the world’s marine biodiversity.
Nearly two-thirds of the ocean lies outside national boundaries on the high seas, where fragmented and unevenly enforced rules seek to minimise human impacts.
The goal of the UN meetings, which will start on Monday and run through March 3, is to produce a unified agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of those vast marine ecosystems. The talks, formally called the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, resume negotiations suspended last year without agreement on a final treaty.
“The ocean is the life support system of our planet,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University.
“For the longest time, we did not feel we had a large impact on the high seas. But that notion has changed with expansion of deep-sea fishing, mining, plastic pollution, climate change,” and other human disturbances, he said.
The UN talks will focus on key questions. How should the boundaries of marine protected areas be drawn, and by whom? How should institutions assess the environmental impacts of commercial activities such as shipping and mining? And who has the power to enforce rules?
“This is our largest global commons,” said Nichola Clark, an oceans expert who is following the negotiations for the non-partisan Pew Research Center in Washington, DC. “We are optimistic that this upcoming round of negotiations will be the one to get a treaty over the finish line.”
The aim of the talks is not to actually designate marine protected areas, but to establish a mechanism for doing so.
“The goal is to set up a new body that would accept submissions for specific marine protected areas,” Clark said.
Marine biologist Simon Ingram of the University of Plymouth in England said there is an urgent need for an accord.
“It’s a really pressing time for this – especially when you have things like deep-sea mining that could be a real threat to biodiversity before we’ve even been able to survey and understand what lives on the ocean floor,” Ingram said.
Experts say a global oceans treaty is needed to actually enforce the UN Biodiversity Conference’s recent pledge to protect 30 percent of the planet’s oceans, as well as its land, for conservation.
“We need a legally binding framework that can enable countries to work together to actually achieve these goals they’ve agreed to,” said Jessica Battle, an expert on oceans governance at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
US Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Monica Medina said the treaty was a priority for her country.
“This agreement seeks to create, for the first time, a coordinated approach to establishing marine protected areas on the high seas,” she said. “It’s time to finish the job.”
Officials, environmentalists and representatives of global industries that depend on the sea are also watching negotiations closely.
Gemma Nelson, a lawyer from Samoa who is currently an Ocean Voices fellow at the University of Edinburgh, said that small Pacific and Caribbean island countries are “especially vulnerable to global ocean issues”, such as pollution and climate change, which they generally do not cause or have the resources to easily address.
“Getting the traditional knowledge of local people and communities recognised as valid” is also essential to protect both ecosystems and the ways of life of Indigenous groups, she said.
With nearly half the planet’s surface covered by high seas, the talks are of great importance, said Gladys Martinez de Lemos, executive director of the non-profit Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, which focuses on environmental issues across Latin America.
“The treaty should be strong and ambitious, having the authority to establish high and fully protected areas in the high seas,” she said. “Half of the world is at stake these weeks at the United Nations.”
New Delhi , March 07,2023: India’s G20 Presidency is an opportunity to resume focus on the Arctic and its impact on the world as there is a complete lack of engagement between Russia and the West in the aftermath of the Moscow-Kyiv conflict, reported The Arctic Institute.
In protest against Russia’s actions, on 3 March 2022, seven (A7) of the eight members of the Arctic Council (AC), announced a historic suspension of participation in all activities of the council. This was followed on the same day by the Nordic Council of Ministers.
Much of the research and data sharing between scientists has been put on hold due to restrictions imposed by funding agencies in Europe and the US. Several field experiments originally planned for the region have shifted to the North American or European Arctic.
The relevance of the Arctic for India can be broadly explained under three categories: Scientific Research, Climate Change and Environment; Economic and Human Resources; and Geopolitical and strategic reasons, said Anurag Bisen, a Research Fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
The Arctic and the Himalayas, though geographically distant, are interconnected and share similar concerns.
The Arctic meltdown is helping the Indian scientific community to better understand the glacial melt in the Himalayas, which has often been referred to as the ‘third pole’ and has the largest freshwater reserves after the North and South Poles.
The changes occurring in the Arctic are yet to be understood fully, but apart from affecting global weather, climate, and ecosystems, they also influence the monsoons in India and have a significant negative impact on India’s economy as well as other human and development indices, reported The Arctic Institute.
Moreover, India is the only developing country, apart from China, to have a permanent research station in the Arctic since 2008. India has undertaken 13 scientific expeditions to the Arctic since 2007, reported Bisen.
The rising sea levels can have a significant impact not only on India’s 1,300 island territories and maritime features and the welfare of 1.3 billion Indians but also on India’s immediate neighbourhood.
There are also some good consequences arising out of global warming-induced changes in the Arctic. The warming Arctic is leading to increased availability and accessibility of resources. The Arctic has the potential to secure India’s energy and rare earth mineral deficiencies.
For India, geopolitically, the Arctic is of special significance as its two most significant strategic partners, the United States and Russia, and its principal adversary, China, are locked in an ever-increasing direct strategic contestation.
While India has adroitly balanced the geo-political and geo-economic ramifications arising out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it needs to remain engaged in the Arctic region, to secure its increasing national interests, said Bisen.
The resumption of scientific exchange is an imperative that can be ignored only at the cost of collective detriment to the world. Since there is a deep trust deficit in the Arctic, the resumption of scientific exchanges will need a mediator with legitimacy, credibility, and acceptability of all member states.
No other country and organisation other than India and G20 fit the bill, reported The Arctic Institute, said Bisen.
Promotion of security and stability in the Arctic region and pursuit of international cooperation and partnerships with all stakeholders in the region, inter alia are listed as objectives in India’s Arctic policy.
Most importantly, in keeping with India’s civilizational ethos of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam–The World Is But One Family, India offers its readiness to “play its part and contribute to the global good” in its engagement with the Arctic.
The resumption of scientific cooperation in the Arctic is one such global good that India could strive for, by bringing together the conflicting protagonists, said Bisen.
Eleven of the 19 G20 member countries, representing a majority 60 per cent of the forum, have an Arctic stake, with three of them–the United States, Russia and Canada, being permanent members of the Arctic Council.
Eight G20 countries–China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom–are Observers at the Arctic Council.
Further, three other Arctic Council members (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden) and two Observers (Spain and Poland) are also represented at the G20 by the virtue of their European Union membership and EU being a G20 member.
Thus, six of the eight Arctic Council Permanent Members and 12 of the 13 Observers are represented at the G20.
Moreover, the Arctic is no longer the distant and cold region that it was once considered. It stands at the crossroads of several issues with global consequences such as climate change, increased accessibility and availability of resources, and an arena of global strategic contestation, that has made the region increasingly relevant to the world. As such, the stakes of a large portion of humanity cannot be decided by a select few.
Taipei, Taiwan,Feb 28,2023: At opposite ends of Southeast Asia, researchers Pornampai Narenpitak and Heri Kuswanto are both working on the same problem: Is it possible to mimic the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions to halt global warming?
Using computer modelling and analysis, Narenpitak and Kuswanto are separately studying whether shooting large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the earth’s stratosphere could have a similar effect on global temperatures as the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1815.
The eruption, the most powerful in recorded history, spewed an estimated 150 cubic kilometres (150,000 gigalitres) of exploded rock and ash into the air, causing global temperatures to fall as much as 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in what became known as the “year without a summer”.
Stratospheric aerosol injection is among a number of nascent – and controversial – technologies in the field of solar geoengineering (Solar Radiation Management-SRM) that have been touted as potential solutions to mitigating the effects of climate change.
Other proposed strategies include brightening marine clouds to reflect the sun or breaking up cirrus clouds that capture heat.
SRM is largely untested in the real world.
But in Asia, where many countries are juggling the demands of trying to keep the lights on despite outdated power infrastructure and striving for carbon neutrality, the concept is at the centre of a growing body of academic discussion and research.
Narenpita and Kuswanto, who are studying the use of the technology in their respective home countries of Thailand and Indonesia, believe that SRM at the very least merits further study.
“There’s a lot that we do not understand about the climate system itself, let alone SRM,” Narenpitak, a researcher at the National Science and Technology Development Agency in Bangkok, told Al Jazeera.
“And when I say ‘we’, I think it means everyone, from every region in the world, because eventually, the impacts will look differently for different countries. And to assess the impacts, I think it’s best to have people who understand the context of each country to do the analysis. We can’t make any informed decisions if we do not know about these things.”
Take Indonesia.
Kuswanto’s team at the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology in Surabaya, East Java found that while SRM could have positive effects in some parts of the country such as Sumatra and Kalimantan, it would lead to temperature rises elsewhere.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t yet done any more studies about what is the cause of these different results in Indonesia, but of course to improve it, we have to look at the climate systems and we need to study it more,” Kuswanto told Al Jazeera.
The two scientists, whose work is funded by the Degrees Initiative, an NGO focused on furthering SRM research and discussion in developing countries with funding from San Francisco-based Open Philanthropy, are neutral on whether SRM should be used to offset the effects of climate change, but they do share a sentiment shared by many researchers: it is better to know how the technology works, just in case.
Both are also careful to say that SRM is not an alternative or substitute for cutting carbon emissions, but should be seen as more of a supplemental technology.
“Even after we reduce carbon emissions, it takes several years for the carbon that has already been emitted into the atmosphere to be removed – its warming effect is still there,” Narenpitak said.
“There’s a time lag between when we can significantly reduce carbon emissions and when we will see the temperature stop rising. In that sense, SRM may be able to bring down the temperature.”
Climate scientists say that the world must keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5C (2.7F) to avoid some of the worst projected effects of climate change. Achieving that goal, however, appears to be increasingly unlikely.
In October, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of UN Climate Change, warned that countries’ decarbonisation efforts were still “nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required” to meet the 1.5C target.
Whether SRM should even be considered as a solution is still up for debate. The technology was absent from the UN Environment Programme’s 2022 Emissions Gap Report, which included different strategies for climate mitigation.
Much of the major funding for SRM has been concentrated in the United States after a five-year research project by China’s Beijing Normal University, Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences came to an end in 2019, although researchers concluded China should keep pushing towards a global agreement on SRM.
This trend is set to continue after the US 2022 Appropriations Act authorised funding for a five-year project by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to examine how to study SRM on a national scale – setting down goals, concerns, funding needs and which agencies would actually oversee this work.
Testing SRM beyond computer modelling, however, is deeply controversial because of the unknown effects and unpredictability of shooting chemicals into the stratosphere.
Since SRM involves shooting chemicals into the atmosphere 20-30km (12.4-18.6 miles) above the earth’s surface, the deployment of the technology by one country could affect weather patterns in other parts of the world.
Govindasamy Bala, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science’s Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, found in experiments using computer models that the effects of aerosol injections can vary depending on the latitude at which the injections are carried out.
One climate model predicted, for example, different effects on monsoon rains depending on the hemisphere: aerosols injected at 15 degrees north reduced monsoon rain in the Northern Hemisphere and increased rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa.
Other research has shown different effects on hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean compared with typhoons and cyclones elsewhere.
“I think the only conclusion we have right now is if we do stratospheric aerosol injection, it has the ability to reduce global warming. We know it will work, but it will also have side effects and unequal impacts,” Bala told Al Jazeera.
“If we can do this, it means humans can control the climate, right? We have the ability to control climate but the more difficult question is who will decide?”
Such concerns were among the reasons Sweden’s Space Agency in 2021 cancelled a joint project with Harvard University to carry out a landmark technical test of SRM in the Arctic Circle using a high-altitude balloon following public outcry, most notably from Indigenous Saami people living in the region.
The SCoPEx project had been intended as a dry run for navigating a 600kg (1,323 pounds) payload at more than twice the height of a commercial aircraft.
Some climate activists have also raised concerns about moral hazard, arguing the technology could weaken countries’ commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions and give companies licence to keep polluting.
Meanwhile, there are outstanding questions about how the technology would be regulated given the global implications of unilateral action, especially by large countries such as the United States and China.
“The benefits itself [of SRM] can be questioned in the sense that, do we need this when we have other means like mitigation, which is something that we need to push for at this stage,” Dhanasree Jayaram, a research fellow at Earth System Governance and assistant professor at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education’s Centre for Climate Studies in India, told Al Jazeera.
“Does it actually sideline, for instance, research investments and other resources that need to actually go into mitigation? Is this a distraction from the real requirements of climate governance?”
SRM raises geopolitical questions, as well, Jayaram said, as developing countries struggle with their own energy transitions. They could also feel pressure to join the SRM “bandwagon” to ensure they can still have a seat at the table, she said.
While such questions preoccupy academia, some of SRM’s most enthusiastic champions have emerged in Silicon Valley.
Make Sunsets, a two-person team based between the US and Mexico, is preparing to carry out micro SRM experiments with Amazon-bought weather balloons, helium and small amounts of sulphur dioxide. Their long-term goal is to use the balloons to sell cooling credits to private companies.
“Our theory is basically that companies can only meet their net [carbon] zero goals if they resort to things like our measure, because it’s so much more cost-effective,” Make Sunsets founder Luke Iseman told Al Jazeera.
“We can issue a whole lot of these cooling credits, and we don’t wait around for 20 years to see if these trees grow, we actually put this up into the air and can see an impact within several years.”
Make Sunsets has hit a number of snags since its launch in October 2022.
Only a handful of individuals have bought credits so far, according to Iseman.
More seriously, flights were grounded in Mexico after the government there banned the company from carrying out experiments following a number of balloon launches on the Baja Peninsula, citing potential environmental damage.
Last week, Make Sunsets announced it had carried out the launches of three balloons containing small amounts of sulfur dioxides in the US state of Nevada.
SRM researchers such as John Moore, however, argue that the world needs to get a grasp of how the technology could work as soon as possible, rather than finding out later during a global emergency.
“What people tend to be worried about is that people will, in a sense, panic and go for the geoengineering option, suddenly because some terrible catastrophe due to climate change is happening somewhere. And then people try to launch balloons or spray aerosols into the stratosphere,” Moore, a research professor at the University of Lapland’s Arctic Center in Finland and leader of China’s five-year SRM project, told Al Jazeera.
This is particularly true, Moore said, for the countries that are feeling the harshest effects of climate change despite contributing historically fewer greenhouse gases.
“I know there are some people that are quite high profile that say doing any research on solar geoengineering is bad because of this moral hazard argument, and I completely disagree with that,” he said.
“Fundamentally, I think that we actually have a duty to people in the developing world, that have not contributed to greenhouse gas emissions, who are already suffering disproportionate damage because of climate change impacts.”
Source: Al Jazeera