Apr 152014
 

published by the Department of Environment

Wetlands Australia: National Wetlands Update February 2014

Wetlands Australia: National Wetlands Update February 2014

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Introduction

The international theme of World Wetlands Day 2014 is “Wetlands and Agriculture: Partners for Growth”. For millennia, wetlands have been used directly for agriculture, and for supplying food, fuel and fibre to support lives and livelihoods. Wetlands continue to play an essential role in supporting modern day agriculture. They provide water storage, flood buffering, nutrient removal, water purification and erosion control. Sustainable practices which support both agriculture and healthy wetlands are therefore coming to the fore.

This edition of Wetlands Australia includes several feature articles on wetlands and agriculture, along with many other articles on current wetland projects and programs.

Australia was one of the first countries to sign the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (more commonly known as the Ramsar Convention), and in 1974 designated the world’s first Ramsar site: Cobourg Peninsula in the Northern Territory.  In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the first Ramsar designation, this edition of Wetlands Australia also features 23 articles celebrating Australian Ramsar sites.

If you would like to contribute to future editions of Wetlands Australia, please contactwetlandsmail@environment.gov.au

Download individual chapters

Introduction and contents (PDF – 698.64 KB)

Wetlands and Agriculture: Partners for Growth (PDF – 888.7 KB)

  • Wimmera wetland project benefits whole farm
  • Murray Wetland Carbon Storage project
  • Territory Conservation Agreements – helping pastoralists look after wetlands
  • Agricultural water supports wetlands and tourism
  • I’d like to order some bitterns and rice, please
  • Burdekin cane farmer builds a wetland for the future

Ramsar wetland management in Australia (PDF – 749.5 KB)

  • Ramsar in New South Wales – a tale of 12 sites
  • Queensland wetlands celebrate 20 years of Ramsar listing
  • Banrock Station wetland and vineyard – a perfect blend
  • Record breaking flight signals the importance of conserving wetlands
  • Environmental flows bring waterbirds to Tuckerbil Swamp Ramsar site
  • Managing weed and sea level rise threats to Kakadu’s tropical river floodplains

Wetland conservation and restoration (PDF – 807.27 KB)

  • An update on wetland restoration on private land in South Australia and Victoria
  • Protecting and enhancing the wonderful Moolort Wetlands of Victoria
  • Using historical mine pits in Western Australia to create a wetlands complex for the benefit of water bird conservation and the local community
  • Doing it together – a good news story about the fairies and the ferry
  • From little things, big things grow
  • Successful rehabilitation of a Waterbird Refuge
  • Kids tell companies to mind their business
  • Students and surf club – the clean-up team!

Water management and wetlands (PDF – 828.02 KB)

  • Environmental watering in the Lower Lachlan River catchment, New South Wales
  • To wade or not to wade – hydrological management effects on species composition
  • Partnering to restore the Mallowa Creek floodplain wetlands

Wetland management and research (PDF – 706.58 KB)

  • Queensland Indigenous Land and Sea Ranger Program
  • The Finke River- salty & lovin’ it
  • Novel ecosystem, novel approaches
  • Sixth Lake Eyre Basin Conference – cross-border collaboration

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Ramsar Convention in Australia – a showcase of Australian Ramsar sites (PDF – 2.94 MB)

  • Cobourg Peninsula Ramsar Site, Northern Territory
  • Kakadu National Park Ramsar Site, Northern Territory
  • Barmah Forest Ramsar Site, Victoria
  • Flood Plain Lower Ringarooma River Ramsar Site, Tasmania
  • Gippsland Lakes Ramsar Site, Victoria
  • Logan Lagoon Ramsar Site, Tasmania
  • Moulting Lagoon Ramsar Site, Tasmania
  • Port Phillip Bay (Western Shoreline) and Bellarine Peninsula Ramsar Site, Victoria
  • Hunter Estuary Wetlands Ramsar Site, New South Wales
  • Towra Point Ramsar Site, New South Wales
  • The Coorong and Lakes Alexandrina and Albert Ramsar Site, South Australia
  • Macquarie Marshes Ramsar Site, New South Wales
  • Coongie Lakes Ramsar Site, South Australia
  • Eighty-mile Beach Ramsar Site, Western Australia
  • Lake Toolibin Ramsar Site, Western Australia
  • Peel-Yalgorup System Ramsar Site, Western Australia
  • Blue Lake Ramsar Site, New South Wales
  • Ginini Flats Wetland Complex Ramsar Site, Australian Capital Territory
  • Great Sandy Strait Ramsar Site, Queensland
  • Banrock Station Wetland Complex Ramsar Site, South Australia
  • Elizabeth and Middleton Reefs Ramsar Site, Coral Sea Islands Territory
  • The Dales Ramsar Site, Christmas Island
  • Piccaninnie Ponds Karst Wetlands Ramsar Site, South Australia

Calendar of events (PDF – 482.54 KB)

Previous editions of Wetlands Australia are also available:

Apr 122014
 
The following article from Practical Fishkeeping gives a UK perspective about the hobby, but all of the issues discussed are relevant to fishkeeping hobbyists here in Australia.

Original story by Nathan Hill at Practical Fishkeeping

A handful of recent events have prompted Nathan Hill to put finger to keyboard and share some of his biggest fears of what could put an end to the hobby we all love…
Photo: Practical fishkeeping

Photo: Practical fishkeeping

Something I’ve long admired about this hobby is its tenacity. It has, over the years, been subject to all sorts of accusations, including being geeky or uncool, being unnecessarily expensive (early marine keepers, anyone?) and even being environmentally unsound.

Despite this the hobby and the supporting trade prevails, and even in the face of some fluctuating trends: not least of all that same, damning migration to online purchasing that can wither and drain bricks-and-mortar premises. More than just prevailing, in some cases it actively stands proud, is able to boast expansion, recruitment, and economic growth. Even during this ongoing global economic wobble, fishkeeping is burgeoning. Wow.

That’s not to say that we are not vulnerable, susceptible even, to factors that could pull the metaphoric rug from under our feet.

I’m often engaged in conversation with people across a breadth of different fields: anglers, wholesalers, retailers, hobbyists, environmental scientists, and so on. Talking across such a diverse spectrum, I pick up on a lot of different concerns that reside, often unwittingly so, at the backs of peoples’ minds. After sitting and brooding on these for way too long, I’d like to share my biggest fears of what could, at any time, befall our hobby and end fishkeeping.

Disease

Pathogens capable of inciting disease pandemics are a major global worry. Just look at human concerns about antibiotic abuse and the occurrence of MRSA. Look at recent worries about Ebola outbreaks. Even look at the return of diseases that could easily be prevented in humans, were people not so blinkered and scientifically ill informed about vaccines. Disease pandemics are a major fear.

If you’re a newcomer to the hobby, then whatever you think you know about fish farming – forget it. If you have images of clinical facilities where each and every fish is treated like a newborn infant, then it’s back to the drawing board time. Farms are businesses, plain and simple. The goal is to get young fish out of adults as eggs, to hatch them, and to get them up to saleable juveniles as soon as possible, and that means that pretty much anything is on the cards to get them there. Antibiotics are used where necessary (and maybe even where not), and not just the kinds of antibiotics that you or I might have access to via a vet. Different countries have different laws about what can and can’t be used, and in some it’s a bit of a medicine free for all.

Hopefully we all know the dangers of antibiotic abuse, but in case anyone is unsure, here’s a brief recap:

Antibiotics kill things indiscriminately (the very word ‘antibiotic’ literally translates as ‘against life’). The idea is that they kill bacteria at a lower dose rate than which they kill the host. So if a fish gets ill, you can poison everything in the tank with antibiotics, and the pathogens making the fish ill should die before the fish does, and then you can stop the antibiotics.

However, if you leave a few bacteria behind, they start to get immune, and can build tolerance to the antibiotic. So, the next outbreak of bacteria will be a bit ‘harder’ to control than the first lot. Repeat the process, leave a few bacteria behind, and they get harder to kill again, until eventually you end up with pathogens that are so resistant to antibiotics that you’d need to use a dose rate so high that you’d kill the host before the pathogen.

That’s the abridged version, anyway.

The problem of course is that unregulated use of antibiotics over in the farming nations could quite feasibly create a strain of bacteria that our own antibiotics have no effect against. With diseased fish coming in, and no ability to cure them, we wouldn’t stand a chance.

But it’s not just bacteria.

There are a few pathogens on the horizon that are cause for concern at this time. In coldwater fish, there are the dreaded illnesses of KHV (Koi herpes virus) and SVC (Spring viraemia of Carp), both of which have the potential to cause massive problems to Cyprinids. Not so long ago, massive wipeouts from the former blighted farms across the world, causing losses on unmentionable scales in both ornamental and food fish culture. Here in the UK, some retailers faced the furious backlash from introducing the disease to consumer’s ponds. One was even driven to bankruptcy over it.

In the tropical world, I am very twitchy about Tetrahymena pyriformis, otherwise known as Guppy disease (though this is unfair as many fish are susceptible). This disease can cause massive mortality at breakneck speeds, especially in farm, wholesale and retail environments. I’m not the only one worried about this particular pathogen, either.

What is so very infuriating is the ‘wait and see’ attitude of some traders. This is not a disease to ignore, and to do so is not just at your own peril, but that of the entire industry.

Running costs

You will recall recently that Jack Heathcote had to close down his massive aquarium because of exorbitant running costs. Agreed, his tank was huge: an absolute electricity guzzling swimming pool of a thing. But the point is, it used to be well within his outgoings to operate. Prices are creeping, across the board, and more and more of us are noticing.

Compulsory water metering, if introduced across the UK, will spell death for many users of RO water. Given that tapwater isn’t going to get better any time soon, marine keepers in particular will have the choice of either paying out for a safe supply, reverting the hardiest, nitrate tolerant specimens there are, or jacking the hobby in.

Electricity might start to play on the minds of the fiscally conscious, too. As we’re encouraged to get our own monitors in the home to calculate what’s consuming what, I suspect that many will be alarmed at just how much a decent sized tank can cost to run. A handful of frantically spinning pumps, a couple of hundred watts of lighting, and a wheezing 300W heater or two all add up to become a financial burden, and given the balance of sacrificing the tank to the cause of improved monetary household harmony, I’ll wager that some might start to seriously consider a less power-hungry hobby.

Importation costs

The tropical fish we get in the UK tend not to come from within the British shores. Many will be far eastern, along with some European, American and African contributions. Wherever they’re coming from, they’re coming via planes. A continuous squadron of winged beasts bring us boxes of fish like a hovering conveyer belt, and we’ve become very reliant upon it.

Plane freight has been insidiously creeping upwards (no pun intened) for as long as I can remember. In fact, it’s the freight that frequently constitutes the majority cost of the livestock we buy. The trade might hate me for saying it, but a farmed guppy can be bought from Singapore or Malaysia for pennies. It’s only once it’s circumnavigated the globe, whizzing from one Hemisphere to the other that it has racked up a lot of airmiles, and those airmiles all add up to extra expenditure that needs to be reclaimed.

Now this isn’t the end of the earth for fish where you can cram a few hundred into a box for transit. In that case the cost is distributed about: each and every fish carries its own little fragment of expense, to be added to a mark up. But what of larger specimen fishes? What of the larger wild catfish that come one to a box? I suspect that this aspect of the hobby is fast becoming vulnerable.

Retailers, to their credit, strive to keep retail prices down on fish. You only have to look at the glacial creep of the value of staples like Neon tetra to realise that they’re becoming less and less profitable for the trader, though the competition and the market is fierce. These fish were about £1 each ten years back, and they’re still about £1 each now. Retailers know that they can’t crack the prices of many of these staples up without dissociating themselves like pariahs from the hobby, so they suffer in silence.

Time could force a trader’s hand and we could see incremental price hikes. The big concern is where the cut off point is for the hobbyist. £3 for a Neon? £25 for a Pictus catfish? African cichlids starting at £30?

Let’s rule nothing out, because a lot of factors are at play with pricing.

Release of fish into the UK

I have spent the last few weeks scathing at the irresponsible actions of a minority of those in the industry.

I’m not sure many of us realise just what kind of scrutiny we are under as a hobby. Whether we like it or not, we have enemies, and powerful ones at that, who see what we do as a threat. Many of our opposition and detractors are those in the angling community, who can have an unbalanced and solely derogatory view of us, and the perceived threat we could pose to their own industry.

We as aquarists maintain what amount to collections of alien species in our ponds and tanks. Sterlets are far from indigenous, nor are the various gobies, catfish, tetra and so on that we keep.

This taps back in to what I mentioned earlier, vis. disease of fish. Any one of us, anywhere in the world could, in theory, be sat on the equivalent of case zero. We already know that domestic shrimps can be carriers of White tail disease, an illness currently ravaging farms of commercial food shrimp. We don’t know if there’s any risk of native crayfish picking up this disease, and I don’t want to find out the hard way, but all it takes is for some bright spark to consider putting his or her shrimps in a pond at the height of summer, to then be promptly flooded so that the shrimps get into a local river and meet a crayfish. The outcome of that encounter isn’t hard to envisage.

Is that even feasible? Well, yes. Loads of aquarists were affected by this year’s flooding, and I’m open mouthed and speechless that some people are even trying to highlight to the national tabloids that their fish escaped. Already that’s opened a forum on whether those at risk of flooding are allowed to keep the fish that they do. But the last thing we want to be doing now is drawing excess attention to it.

If ecosystems in certain rivers or lakes are impacted by fish like sterlets, who do you think will take the blame? And what then, the ramifications for our trade? Suffice to say, if someone’s escapees blight the native fish of a county, the angling lobbyists and national newspapers will demonise us to the extent that we won’t be able to walk down the roads without being spat on.

Controls are in place to stop just this kind of thing from happening. Legislation already incorporates rules and laws about where non-natives may and may not be put. Dangerously invasive fish are denied entry to the country through the implementation of the Import of Live Fish Act.

Enter the imbecile. The imbecile is someone who, upon going against all of the advice of his retailer, decides to buy a gaggle of potentially invasive, non-natives that promptly outgrow his pond. The imbecile then takes the fish, in his desire to be rid, and upends them into a local waterway.

I’m not saying that any of us should sit back and await this to happen. Rather, we should be aware of such people, and be thoroughly prepared to dob them in at the first hint of trouble. Call me a snitch for that if you like, but I’m more interested in the welfare of UK waterways than I am in some puerile, school playground code of honour.

CEFAS would be a good port of call when reporting imbeciles like the one mentioned above. Even the local constabulary, when made aware that someone is intending to release non-natives into British waterways, will be obligated to do something. The release of non-natives is an illegal act, and we should all be guarded against it.

Anti-hobbyists would seize any opportunity to extirpate our industry, and it is essential that we don’t give them an easy opening to do so.

Environment degradation

This one isn’t something that we have too much say over, but where we do, we should.

Here’s a surprise for you. Some of the fish we currently keep are extinct in the wild. Red tailed sharks, for example, no longer have a native range. It was destroyed by damming, cities, irrigation and farming. Liquorice gouramis are going the same way, as their habitat is eaten up by Palm plantations. Certain African cichlids have vanished into the maws of Nile perch.

Degradation leads to extinction, and extinction means no new bloodlines. Eventually, that means inbreeding and variation. Now that’s fine if you fancy stores choc-full of Flowerhorns and the blandest of the bland in farmed staples, but with nothing interesting to offer, the trade might will be on its knees. It’ll certainly have no substance if there aren’t any decent fish left.

Legislation

A few paragraphs above, where I lamented the release of non-natives, I drew attention to the dangers of a few rogue aquarists jeopardising our hobby on a national scale.

Worse still is that our comrades in mainland Europe could just as easily spoil things for us by releasing fish there, too. Recall the recent debacle of the Golden apple snail. We Brits did nothing wrong on our own turf, but it transpires that a snail population was released and decided to make merry in the waters of Spain. After some investigation it was argued that the snails could just as easily invade and establish into certain water of East Anglia. Just like that, legislation was drafted and the snails banned from importation and movement between EU countries.

I choke every time I read about the likes of Pacu being found in Parisian rivers, or Cabomba strangling Dutch waterways. Each of these is the produce of an irresponsible aquarist out there somewhere, and all are potential trade cripplers for the whole continent.

It’s bad enough knowing that a slip up on our own shores could warrant investigation, but to know it’s possibly wrested from our hands altogether is outright harrowing. The idea that someone could upset the Euro trade of Callichthyds by being foolish enough to put Scleromystax into Italian rivers is a troubling one. Rhinogobius found in Austrian ponds could be the end of those little cuties for all of us, and so on.

Given how high the powers of Europe go, I’m not even sure we’d have the grounding or stamina to successfully fight our corner.

Autonomy is required, though how to gain it isn’t exactly clear. It’s certainly one for the regulatory bodies to ascertain, because I’m sure that like me, you don’t want to be held accountable for problems you were never part of.

Ethics

We’re all familiar with the idea of culture shock, and cross-generation differences. With each new generation the nation produces, the paradigm of attitudes and opinions alters ever so slightly.

It happens across so many different trains of thought that I’m almost stuck for choice, so examples are rife. Let’s start with obvious points like racism and sexism. If we go back 100 years, prevalent attitudes to females and foreign ethnicities were radically different to what they are today. That’s not to say that everybody was a xenophobic misogynist, but compared to today’s standard, the percentile of people who would have happily passed off derogatory comments about either was considerably higher than it is now.

Opinions and attitudes are often languidly slow to change, but change they do. The same applies to the world of animal ethics, too. Fifty years ago, the idea that someone might be tried for abusing a pig on a farm would have been near laughable. Flash forward to 2014, and the same person could expect to be near lynched, banned from working with animals, and possibly even subject to custodial sentence.

We’re seeing gradual encroachment into pet keeping, if you keep eyes peeled. How frequently do you now see cage birds on sale? Many retailers have abandoned them, and those that haven’t yet are often under pressure to do so. Again, just fifty years back a teenager wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at his or her mother keeping a canary in a cage. In the modern day, you’ll find increasing numbers of youngsters who would brand the act as cruel. It’s a gradual process.

We’ve already witnessed campaigns to get some fish out of aquatic stores. Giants like Pacu are increasingly considered ethically unsound, with the long term welfare consideration for the fish itself now ranking much higher than the novelty of keeping one for a while.

Retailers are becoming more switched on and savvy in their vetting of potential keepers. Ethics rank higher than pound signs in some stores, who will politely refuse a sale if they think the fish in question will not have its requirements yet. People care.

None of this is to say that we’re on a slippery slope that will eventually lead to a total rejection of fishkeeping by some future generation. We can, after all, dig our heels in before it gets runaway, and this is something that we should perhaps guard against. Showing ourselves in a positive light is essential, and perhaps more essential than ever if we’re to win over the minds of tomorrow’s keeper. Young people will be the future of the hobby, and if they reach hobby age having been influenced in such a way they think the trade negative, then it’s pretty much game over. No new fishkeepers, no continued hobby.

Zoonotic illness (Disease part two…)

I should probably include the caveat ‘once grabbed by the mainstream media’ for the above subheading.

Zoonotic illness alone is unlikely to wipe out fishkeeping, in the same way that recent TB cases acquired from cats won’t be leading to a global purge on felines any time soon.

But a devastating sob story pandering to our worst fears (I needn’t say which tabloids I brand as capable of this) and highlighting the loss of a hand or foot through some badly diagnosed, ill treated and runaway case of fish TB could quite easily inflict a wound from which we’ll never quite recover

The worst situation that could befall us would be a combination of tragic events. Someone young and immunocomprimised for whatever reason, picking up a particularly nasty strain of Leptospirosis, or something similar and dying would be a disaster in every way, not least of all for the individual concerned.

We know that hygiene is essential when working with tanks. We understand that getting unprotected hands with cuts in aquaria is to invite disaster, and we can eradicate this risk at source, just by being both aware of the hazards, and being aware of how to safeguard against them.

Just bear in mind that if you’re taking risks with your health for the sake of your hobby, then you’re not just putting your own neck on the line. If it all goes very, very wrong and you end up in a bad way, then you’re potentially messing it up for the rest of us.

Likelihood?

I’m upset that most of the factors above are in many ways beyond the remit of the day-to-day aquarist. Responsible buying can help to reduce the chance of disease and zoonosis, and voting with our wallets can promote retailers to purchase better quality and responsibly sourced stock.

Expenses are beyond our control, bar lobbying MPs and embracing efficiency where we can. Championing low running cost technology over higher wattage ‘budget’ alternatives will help such lines to grow, in turn safeguarding us in the longer run.

What is definitely in our grasp, and what I consider the biggest danger to us all, is not releasing fish in the UK. I cannot reiterate enough just how damning it would be for us to have subtropical species that are only sourced through our hobby turning up in native ponds and rivers.

I’ve harped on about it numerous times, but I’m not going to miss another opportunity to do the same. If you release your fish in to the wild, or are considering doing so, then shame upon you. I will have no truck with anyone who wants to jeopardise the hobby for all of us like that, and who also shows abject disregard for the wellbeing of their livestock.

Keep fish in their tanks where they are not a risk, and I beseech each and every one of you: if you know someone who’s planning to release, call the authorities and make them act on it. It’s your hobby at stake too.

Apr 112014
 

Original story by Jake Sturmer, ABC News

A new study of Australia’s dirtiest and cleanest beaches has revealed some surprising results.

A red-footed Booby on a polluted beach in Australia. Photo: Dr Denise Hardesty, CSIRO

A red-footed Booby on a polluted beach in Australia. Photo: Dr Denise Hardesty, CSIRO

CSIRO researchers have spent two years surveying Australia’s entire coastline, counting rubbish on sections of sand and sea every 100 kilometres.

Australia’s dirtiest and cleanest beaches

NSW

  • Dirtiest: Shelly Beach, Manly
  • Cleanest: Red Rock Beach, NSW North Coast

Northern Territory

  • Dirtiest: Cape Arnhem
  • Cleanest: Cape Hay

Queensland

  • Dirtiest: Barney Point Beach, Gladstone
  • Cleanest: Mackay

South Australia

  • Dirtiest: Border Village (SA)
  • Cleanest: Nora Creina

Tasmania

  • Dirtiest: East Kangaroo Island (West Gulch)
  • Cleanest: Cape Grim

Victoria

  • Dirtiest: Pearse’s Road Beach
  • Cleanest: Gibbs Track Beach, Lakes Entrance

Western Australia

  • Dirtiest: Ellensbrook Beach
  • Cleanest: 80 Mile Beach

Source: CSIRO

The survey of more than 175 beaches found the dirtiest beach in Australia was Border Village on the coast between Western Australia and South Australia.

This was typical of the study that found remote and hard to reach beaches were among Australia’s most grotty.

Lead researcher Dr Denise Hardesty says the rubbish did not float in from polluted oceans abroad.

By using ocean current data and examining the items, researchers could tell much of the mess fell from the hands of ordinary Australians.

“In general most of what we find is from us,” Dr Hardesty said.

“No matter how remote you are, how close you are to an urban city, we leave our litter everywhere.”

Illegal dumping, irresponsible mariners and careless beachgoers are all to blame, she says.

Researchers are suggesting increased regulation and enforcement, particularly of illegal dumping.

“We aren’t doing as well as we could, as we need to be doing, in terms of waste management,” Dr Hardesty said.

More than 150 million pieces of rubbish

The CSIRO study estimates more than 150 million pieces of rubbish litter Australia’s sand and shores.

The most common item was plastic following rapid growth in global plastic production.

“More than three-quarters of what we find in terms of rubbish is plastic,” Dr Hardesty said.

This had a disastrous effect on some 600 marine species who then consumed what researchers have termed “plastic food”.

Dr Hardesty said she had found cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, pill bottles and bottle caps in the stomachs of birds.

“We open turtles that have died and see that they’re jammed full of plastics,” she said.

“I’ve found over 200 pieces of plastic in a single bird.”

Communities cleaning up Australia

Retired plastic surgeon John Hanrahan and other former professionals have formed a group to clean up the waters off Western Australia’s sunny Abrolhos Islands.

They visit once a year to clean up the mess left by tourists and fishermen over the decades.

“To me they are unique islands in this part of the world, they’re coral islands, they’re well south of the usual position and it seems to be sacrilege to let them deteriorate,” Mr Hanrahan said.

“I think we all have a responsibility to look after these islands and part of looking after them, in my view, is cleaning up the refuse.

“What I’d like to see is other people take up the cause as it were and say ‘yes all right, we can do a little bit’.”

Migratory shore birds on 80 Mile Beach in Western Australia. Photo:  Matt Brann, ABC

Migratory shore birds on 80 Mile Beach in Western Australia. Photo: Matt Brann, ABC

Apr 102014
 

News release from Pensoft Publishers

Hidden in one of Australia’s most developed and fastest growing areas lives one of the world’s smallest freshwater crayfish species.

The eastern swamp crayfish Gramastacus lacus sp. n.  a new species of freshwater crayfish from coastal New South Wales, Australia.

The eastern swamp crayfish Gramastacus lacus sp. n. a new species of freshwater crayfish from coastal New South Wales, Australia.

Robert B. McCormack the Team Leader for the Australian Crayfish Project described the new species belonging to the genus Gramastacus, after 8 years of research in the swamps and creeks of coastal New South Wales, Australia. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Being a small crayfish species it has remained undescribed and undiscovered in one of the fastest developing regions of Australia. Only one other species of Gramastacus crayfish is known and it occurs some 900 km away in the Grampians region of Victoria.

This new species is found in lowland ephemeral habitats surrounding coastal lakes and lagoons from Wamberal Lagoon, north along the coastal strip to Wallis Lake. Being dependent on regular natural flooding and drying cycles, only lowland, swampy areas are suitable for this tiny crayfish.

Each crayfish digs a small rounded cross-section burrow up to one metre deep into the water table to survive the drying cycle. Some areas are riddled with these small burrows as they are a very prolific species and can occur in very high numbers in small habitat areas.

The newly described crayfish are found in one of Australia’s most developed regions. Unfortunately, this means that much of their habitat has been lost in the past as these ephemeral areas are the first to be drained or reclaimed to make way for agriculture, industry, housing developments, golf courses, infrastructure, etc. Now, being found and officially described, this crayfish must be considered in any further developments and hopefully future habitat loss will be reduced.

The scattered populations of Gramastacus seem highly fragmented and many are increasingly threatened by a range of risks other than human development. Invasive crayfish, pest fish species like plague minnows and swordtails, rising sea levels and falling water tables all are increasing dangers. Luckily, the large number of National Parks and Reserves along the coastal strip provides safe refuges for some populations.

###

About the Australian Crayfish Project

Started in 2005 The Australian Crayfish Project (ACP) is a privately funded project run entirely by volunteers with a thirst for knowledge on freshwater crayfish. We all freely give our time and resources to support the project. Australia has one of the most diverse ranges of freshwater crayfish species on the planet yet there is much confusion with the description and distribution of species and many species remain undiscovered & undescribed. The project is discovering dozens of new species or new populations that were never known to exist. Our aim is to find and identify all species of freshwater crayfish and their habitat, the bottom line is that if no one knows these species are there and they don’t even have a name then how can they be protected and conserved into the future? The results of this project will ensure that all management agencies take the crayfish and their habitat into consideration for future environmental, conservation, development and catchment management plans, etc.

Australia’s unique crayfish are important keystone species which have a disproportionately large effect on the whole catchment relative to their abundance. They play a critical role in maintaining the structure of the whole ecological community, their prosperity and abundance directly affecting the health and abundance of numerous other species (macroinvertebrates, fish, eels, turtles, lizards, snakes, water rats, platypus and birds, to name just a few) in the ecosystem. Please help us help the crayfish and all the other species that rely on them for their survival. http://www.aabio.com.au/the-australian-crayfish-project/

The Australian Crayfish Project (ACP).

Additional Information

Article under conservation and research Australian Aquatic Biological.

For a full list of all Australian Freshwater Crayfish: http://www.aabio.com.au/crayfish-list/

Original source

McCormack RB (2014) The eastern swamp crayfish Gramastacus lacus sp. n. (Decapoda, Parastacidae) a new species of freshwater crayfish from coastal New South Wales, Australia. ZooKeys 398: 53–67. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.398.7544

Apr 092014
 

Original story by Tom Arup and Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald

At least half the world’s energy supply will have to come from low-carbon sources, such as renewables and nuclear, by 2050 as part of the drastic global action needed to cut greenhouse gases to relatively safe levels, a major United Nations climate change assessment will say.

The emission reductions pledged by nations for 2020 are found to fall short of the action needed. Photo: Graham Tidy

The emission reductions pledged by nations for 2020 are found to fall short of the action needed. Photo: Graham Tidy

A leaked draft of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by Fairfax Media, also warns the world is fast running out of time to make the cuts to emissions required to keep global warming to an average of two degrees – a goal countries, including Australia, have pledged to meet through the UN.

The draft comes as Lord Nicholas Stern, the author of a 2006 landmark review of the economics of climate change, chastised Australia for being ”flaky” on global warming. In an interview with Fairfax he said each country had to be ambitious in its approach to cutting emissions and developing a low-carbon economy because climate change was a such as serious and global problem.

Australia’s target of cutting emissions by 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020 “looks very small” and Abbott government policy changes such as the scrapping the carbon tax and its “tone of discussion” suggested it was “not very serious” about climate change.

The final version of the latest IPCC report – the third part of its fifth major assessment of climate change – will be released in Berlin on Sunday. It focuses on ways human-caused emissions can be mitigated.

The draft of the third section warns if the world puts off deep cuts to emissions until 2030 it will make the two-degree task significantly harder to achieve, and limit the options for mitigation.

The world has already warmed 0.85 degrees since 1880.

The emission reductions pledged by nations for 2020 are found to fall short of the action needed to have the best chance of keeping to two degrees, meaning deeper cuts will be required later, with higher costs and probably the need to develop technologies to draw significant amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

The draft finds greenhouse gas emissions rose faster between 2000-10 than in previous decades, driven largely by economic and population growth.It says the majority of scenarios studied that ensure just a two-degree rise in warming include a trebling, to a near quadrupling, of the share of clean energy in the global supply by mid-century.

That would require the share of renewable technologies, nuclear and fossil fuels using carbon capture and storage, to rise from about 17 per cent in 2010 to at least 51 per cent by 2050.

The draft also stresses climate change is a global problem requiring international co-operation. It warns the problems will not be solved if individual countries and companies advance their own interests independently of others.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

Apr 092014
 

Transcript from Landline 6/4/2014, reporter Pete Lewis

Rivers of Dreams

Rivers of Dreams

PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER: For some, northern Australia is farming’s final frontier. A field of irrigated dreams just waiting for the right people and the right projects to unleash its full potential.

Yet others are cautious about triggering an unsustainable land and water grab that tramples over the natural and cultural significance of some of the world’s largest unspoilt tropical savannah country.

The ABC’s rural and regional reporter Pete Lewis headed to Queensland’s Gulf, where one single project has brought both sides of this agricultural development debate into sharp focus.

(Graeme Connors “A Little Further North”)

SONG: I head a little further north each year. Leave the cities behind, out of sight, out of mind. Up where my troubles all disappear I head a little further north each year.

KEITH DE LACY, I-FED: We believe that this is groundbreaking. This is going to change the way agriculture is carried out in Australia. For the last 50 years we’ve been talking about developing the north, the food bowl of Asia. We’ve had white papers and green papers. We’ve found a way of actually doing it. And the great thing about it, it’s absolutely sustainable.

PETE LEWIS, REPORTER: The grand plan is to harness the power of this river in Queensland’s Gulf Country for irrigated agriculture on an unprecedented scale.

CSIRO’s scientists spent two years and $10 million looking into the land, the water and the climate in the Flinders and Gilbert river catchments and they’re not quite so bullish, which some say is just as well.

GAVAN MCFADZEAN, WILDERNESS SOCIETY: We don’t want to see the mistakes of the past now characterise future development in northern Australia and we urge decision makers around this project, but also the Federal Government’s northern development inquiry, to look at sustainable long-term development options for this region, not the legacy of a failed business and development model of the past.

PETE LEWIS: Over the course of the next year, authorities both state and federal will assess the arguments for and against agricultural developments in northern Australia. Whether to opt for the CSIRO’s more precautionary approach to opening up more irrigated projects or a complete game changer, that might not just change the course of mighty rivers up here, but how the water in them is allocated.

So the first line in the sand between those for and against substantially more irrigated agriculture has been drawn here, where a private consortium, Integrated Food and Energy Developments, is seeking Federal Government imprimatur and formal State Government approval for its $2 billion project – and yes, in this case, size does matter.

I-FED is factoring in 65,000 hectares of irrigated crops, mostly sugarcane, fed by two large off-river dams. That justifies investment in a sugar mill, whose by-products in turn would be used to both generate electricity and ethanol to power the mill, as well as stockfeed for beef cattle that will also be processed onsite.

KEITH DE LACY: The message we’ve got to get across and this is really the breakthrough, is that you’ve got to have the scale to make this work. The scale that can – so that we can create all of the processing architecture that enables us to grow agriculture in this isolated part of the world. If they allocate water so that we can develop projects to this scale, then you will get enormous times more economic benefit or jobs, if you like, per megalitre.

(Speaking to audience) We’ll have 12 months supply of stock, then that justifies…

PETE LEWIS: Keith De Lacy, a former Queensland Labor Treasurer, told the recent ABARES Outlook conference that this project brings him full circle, back to where he grew up, but with a keener sense now of what’s possible, honed after careers in state politics and the corporate world.

KEITH DE LACY: (Speaking to audience) I’d just really like to see, as we say, bringing government policy to life. You just have to do it differently than you did it before. Analyse everything that’s been done, find out why it didn’t work and say, ‘Well, is there a way to make it work?’ and we believe we’ve found it.

PETE LEWIS: Someone with a more cautious outlook is CSIRO scientist Dr Peter Stone.

DR PETER STONE, CSIRO: History’s shown that capitalising on the north’s advantages has its challenges and uncertainties. And this erodes confidence, which in turn can deter investment. So unlocking significant new investment in the north’s agriculture requires confidence about the scale of opportunities and the risks that attend them.

(Speaking to audience) A high-level view of what we did and the sorts of results that we found as part of the Flinders Gilbert Agricultural Resource Assessment. I’m a kind sort of person, so I’m not going to take you through 4,000 pages. If you’re wanting a little bit more detail, there’s the 15 or 16-pager that you’re either sitting on or have in your hands. That’s where I probably prefer to start myself. It gives a nice high-level overview but also enough information to really wrap your head around what we did.

DR PETER STONE: In the Gilbert catchment, we found over 2 million hectares of soil that is at least moderately suited to irrigated agriculture production. That’s a lot of soil. We found sufficient water resources to irrigate 20,000 to 30,000 hectares of that 2 million. To some people, 20,000 or 30,000 hectares sounds like an awful lot of land and to others it doesn’t sound like much.

So just to put it into perspective, the Ord River irrigation area currently irrigates about 14,000 to 15,000 hectares. So the 20,000 to 30,000 hectares that we’ve identified in the Gilbert could increase all of the irrigation area in northern Australia – so, north of the Tropic of Capricorn – by 15 to 20 per cent – that’s a big increase.

PETE LEWIS: Any comparisons with the Ord River scheme in Western Australia’s east Kimberley tends to stir some sceptics into campaign mode. The Wilderness Society has made a detailed submission to the northern Australian development white paper, arguing less is more.

GAVAN MCFADZEAN: There’s two projects already on the drawing board in this catchment which far exceed what CSIRO say is possible. One project, the I-FED project, wants to, at a minimum, take out three times more water and use twice as much land as what CSIRO was suggesting is possible. And that’s just one project.

There’s another project which has already started land-clearing in the Gilbert and wants to clear up to 100,000 hectares of land.

So both of these projects together result in almost 200,000 hectares of land-clearing and vast extraction of water, far beyond what CSIRO say is possible.

(Sound of heavy machinery)

PETE LEWIS: Third generation Gulf grazier Greg Ryan isn’t a fan of I-FED or its super farm either. Indeed, he’s not cleaning up land for crops. He’s weeding chinee apple out of his floodplain pastures that sprouted after the first decent rainfall here after fires and a long drought.

GREG RYAN, GREEN HILLS STATION: You’d hope we’re just at the bottom of the cycle and things will sort of pick up if the weather’s kind to us and the markets are kind to us and everything else sort of turns around, well, yes, we’ll hopefully start working our way up the cycle to the boom end.

PETE LEWIS: While he’s not opposed per se to increased irrigated agriculture here on the Gilbert River floodplain, Greg Ryan says the huge I-FED proposal simply hasn’t had the due diligence it deserves and that’s split the community.

GREG RYAN: It does concern me. I think everyone would like to see a successful project in the district for the benefit of everyone within the district. But we’ll only get one shot at this and we have to get it right, so I think the split clearly indicates that there’s not enough information and enough research being done to tell us whether it’s a viable sort of project or not.

PETE LEWIS: On neighbouring Forest Home Station, cropping helped get Ken Fry and his family through the big dry. They grew stockfeed for hungry cattle. The family moved up from Queensland’s Burdekin region, the engine room of Australia’s sugarcane industry, for a crack at irrigated cropping Gulf savannah style.

KEN FRY, FOREST HOME STATION: This was the perfect spot for us at the end. It had irrigation potential, a 400-hectare irrigation licence, farmland, irrigators… Essentially we’re cattle people, but I figured we had to be able to diversify and for the last couple of years, it’s been keeping us going, being able to grow crops on our country with irrigation.

PETE LEWIS: Today he’s checking his emerging guar crop; a legume that’s sometimes referred to as poor man’s soybean. Guar gum is a thickening agent used in everything from fast food and toothpaste to coal seam gas fracking.

Forest Home Station’s rich alluvial soil profile is around 4m deep. They grow everything from cavalcade hay to peanuts and corn and are hopeful they’ll get not only approval to clear more scrub, but a crack at more water on the open market against I-FED and others.

Do you think there’s enough for all of you?

KEN FRY: Ah… Yes, I wouldn’t like to say. I don’t really actually know what water, what percentage of water will be released. I don’t have those figures. We need a considerable amount. The Gilbert River precinct needs a considerable amount. I-FED’s proposal, they’re asking for a considerable amount. A lot.

If we’re all equal, if we’ve got to go and put our tenders in for the water or go to auction and bid on it, it will all be fair, but if anything else besides that happens, they get granted water, they will be the biggest water holders and they will hold and they will organise the markets around that.

Saying that, I hope there is enough water here that we can survive and they can survive and it will be so much better for the area if we can both go in tandem.

PETE LEWIS: Huenfels Station was a soldier settler block that’s been in John Bethel’s family since the 1920s, mainly running cattle. But thanks to an agreement he signed with I-FED, it may eventually boast an expansive water feature, a header dam for the irrigated farm.

JOHN BETHEL, HUENFELS STATION: What is attractive about it is they’ll lease it back to us for a peppercorn rental for three years and then you’ve got the option to lease it back after all the development’s done, whatever’s left, so probably a godsend really for a lot of people that are under pretty stiff financial circumstances.

PETE LEWIS: And for John Bethel, that’s the rub. There just simply aren’t a host of development alternatives in this part of the country that could underpin economic growth quite like the super farm.

JOHN BETHEL: One of the things that holds the shire back is it has a very small rate base and projects like these are the only opportunity they’ve got to grow their rate base, but from my perspective I’m more concerned about the next generation that want to stay on the land and be involved in the area and I think that without these sort of projects, the future looks pretty grim really.

PETE LEWIS: Perhaps not surprising the local council is pretty excited about the potential windfall too. The population projections alone would result in a tenfold increase in Georgetown’s 250 residents.

WILL ATTWOOD, ETHERIDGE SHIRE MAYOR: I see that it’s going to be good for a town, to grow the economics of our town, the economics of our area. It’s going to make a lot of opportunity for people to have businesses around. But we’re doing it really tough just at the moment. I mean this is an absolutely huge boost, but really any boost to us at the moment would be great.

(John Denver “A Little Further North”)

SONG: Up where there’s silence and the night sky is clear I head a little further north each year.

PETE LEWIS: So where is that boost likely to come from?

KEITH DE LACY: Well let me say, we would go to the Australian capital markets first. We would prefer to get the money from Australia. Nevertheless, getting money from offshore is good for Australia anyway.

We expect there will probably be a mix of it, but we’ve had enormous interest from the United States, from North America, enormous interest, probably the most interest from there, I’ve got to say that. But, no – we’re ecumenical about that. We want to develop this project and we’ll raise the funds where we’ve got to raise the funds.

PETE LEWIS: First they’ll need to raise $15 million to get the project to the next stage, and undertake the environmental impact and detailed engineering assessments, before pitching for a half a million megalitres in water entitlements and tree-clearing permits. To say nothing about winning over all the locals.

JOHN BETHEL: I don’t think there’s ever been a community born where there wasn’t polarised views. This community – if I’m any judge of the community sentiment – I’d say there’s a small number that are strongly opposed. There’s a small number like myself that are very pro. And everyone else is sitting a leg on either side of the fence. And if you’re a business owner, you’re hoping like hell it’s going to go ahead but probably thinking that it’s too good to be true. And that’s where I think most of the community sit. I’m pretty sure of it actually.

 

Apr 082014
 

Original story by Brendan Trembath, ABC News

Box jellyfish stings, which can be deadly, could be made worse by applying vinegar, Australian researchers have found.

PHOTO: James Cook University researcher Jamie Seymour swims with a large box jellyfish in 2004. Photo: AAP/Paul Sutherland

PHOTO: James Cook University researcher Jamie Seymour swims with a large box jellyfish in 2004. Photo: AAP/Paul Sutherland

Pouring vinegar on the welts caused by the sting of the jellyfish has been the recommended first aid treatment for decades.

But researchers from James Cook University and Cairns hospital in far north Queensland have found that vinegar promotes the discharge of box jellyfish venom.

Box jellyfish are the most venomous creatures on the planet, and Associate Professor Jamie Seymour from the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University says she is in awe of them.

“No venomous animal on the planet kills quicker than this thing, so they are reasonably impressive, from that point of view,” he said.

People badly stung by box jellyfish have died within minutes.

The Australian Resuscitation Council (ARC) is a voluntary coordinating body that represents all major groups involved in the teaching and practice of resuscitation as part of first aid treatment.

The ARC recommends treating stings with vinegar to inhibit the injection of venom.

Meanwhile, the Queensland Poisons Information Centre advises on its website says to not use vinegar to treat stings from Bluebottles (Physalia sp), however does currently say to use vinegar on box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri) and Irukandji stings (Carukia barnesi jellyfish).

However, Associate Professor Seymour says the research has now called that advice into question.

“You can increase the venom load in your victim by 50 per cent,” he said.

“That’s a big amount, and that’s enough to make the difference, we think, between someone surviving and somebody dying.”

He says first responders would be better off relying on the fundamentals of first aid.

“If the person’s not breathing on the beach, breathe for them,” he said.

“Otherwise leave them alone and they’ll probably come out of it.”

He says organisations that deal will this sort of emergency medicine, such as the ARC, now need to look at the research findings.

“That’s the interesting one – we now have evidence that shows that vinegar increases the venom load in the victim,” he said.

“There is no evidence that shows the application of vinegar decreases the amount of venom in the victim.

“What now is up to the ARC, is for them to review the data that we’ve published, which has already obviously been peer reviewed, and for them to make a decision as to what should go on.

“We would expect that the protocols would change.”

[Stinging balls] that have already fired off – and it might only be 20 or 30 per cent – you apply vinegar to them and it increases the venom coming out of those by 60 per cent, and that’s the kicker.

Associate Professor Jamie Seymour

However, he says it is not known how long that might take.

The first documented case of using vinegar to treat box jellyfish stings was in the Philippines just over a century ago.

“Vinegar was first used, from what I can gather, in 1908 in Manilla where a then-medical officer in the army saw a couple of kids jump off a wharf, they got stung, and he put vinegar on them,” Associate Professor Seymour said.

“We have absolutely no idea why, but he did.”

He says in the 1980s researchers investigated what vinegar did and found evidence of its effectiveness.

“What those studies with vinegar showed was that if you apply vinegar to those tentacles when they’re on the body, that those stinging balls that haven’t gone off become completely and totally inactive, which is really good,” he said.

“The problem was nobody looked at what the vinegar did to the ones that have already fired off.

“That’s what our research has shown: that of the ones that have already fired off – and it might only be 20 or 30 per cent – you apply vinegar to them and it increases the venom coming out of those by 60 per cent, and that’s the kicker.”

The research has been published in the journal of Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine.

Apr 082014
 

Original story by , Northern Rivers Echo

ENVIRONMENTAL science students at Southern Cross University got the chance to visit the Slaters Creek constructed wetland in North Lismore on Monday and learn about the positives of modern stormwater treatment techniques.
FIELD TRIP: Touring Lismore City Council’s constructed wetland at Slaters Creek are Southern Cross University natural resource management students Sam Walker and Trent McIntyre, with (back from left) council environmental strategies officer Anton Nguyen, SCU lecturer Dr Antony McCardell and the Water and Carbon Group’s Katrina Curran.

FIELD TRIP: Touring Lismore City Council’s constructed wetland at Slaters Creek are Southern Cross University natural resource management students Sam Walker and Trent McIntyre, with (back from left) council environmental strategies officer Anton Nguyen, SCU lecturer Dr Antony McCardell and the Water and Carbon Group’s Katrina Curran.

Third-year SCU students from the unit Ecotechnology for Water Management got to explore the wetlands with their tutor Antony McCardell, who said one of the great benefits of the environmental science courses at SCU was the wide range of natural and manmade environments available for students to visit on a field trip.

“With increasing human impacts on waterways there is a growing need for urban planning to approach stormwater and wastewater management in ways that benefit both humans and the environment,” Dr McCardell said.

Lismore City Council had commissioned the $180,000 wetland to improve the creek’s water quality – identified as containing high levels of pollution – before it enters the Wilsons River.

Now the wetland is showing good signs of working efficiently following a period of settling, is also attracting bird life and has improved the amenity of public open space in the area, the council has said.

A technical analysis of the wetland was provided for the students by Katrina Curran from the Water and Carbon Group, which designed the wetland and monitors it.

“Wetland habitats have been severely impacted as a result of urban development through changes to both water quality and quantity entering waterways,” Ms Curran said.

“New urban areas are now required to treat stormwater but this project is important as it seeks to improve water quality and biodiversity in an area that has already been developed.”

As well as treating stormwater effectively by mimicking nature’s own systems of filtration, the wetland complements restoration work undertaken by the Banyam/Baigham Landcare Group over the past few years.

Apr 072014
 

Original story by Alister Doyle, Reuters

World powers are running out of time to slash their use of high-polluting fossil fuels and stay below agreed limits on global warming, a draft U.N. study to be approved this week shows.

Smoke rises from chimneys of a thermal power plant near Shanghai March 26, 2014. Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Smoke rises from chimneys of a thermal power plant near Shanghai March 26, 2014. Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Government officials and top climate scientists will meet in Berlin from April 7-12 to review the 29-page draft that also estimates the needed shift to low-carbon energies would cost between two and six percent of world output by 2050.

It says nations will have to impose drastic curbs on their still rising greenhouse gas emissions to keep a promise made by almost 200 countries in 2010 to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times.

Temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 C (1.4F) since 1900 and are set to breach the 2 C ceiling on current trends in coming decades, U.N. reports show.

“The window is shutting very rapidly on the 2 degrees target,” said Johan Rockstrom, head of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and an expert on risks to the planet from heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising seas.

“The debate is drifting to ‘maybe we can adapt to 2 degrees, maybe 3 or even 4’,” Rockstrom, who was not among authors of the draft, told Reuters.

Such rises would sharply raise risks to food and water supplies and could trigger irreversible damage, such as a meltdown of Greenland’s ice, according to U.N. reports.

The draft, seen by Reuters, outlines ways to cut emissions and boost low-carbon energy, which includes renewables such as wind, hydro- and solar power, nuclear power and “clean” fossil fuels, whose carbon emissions are captured and buried.

It said such low-carbon sources accounted for 17 percent of the world’s total energy supplies in 2010 and their share would have to triple – to 51 percent – or quadruple by 2050, according to most scenarios reviewed.

That would displace high polluting fossil fuels as the world’s main energy source by mid-century.

CARBON CAPTURE

Saskatchewan Power in Canada will open a $1.35 billion coal-fired electricity generating plant this year that will extract a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from its exhaust gases – the first carbon capture and storage plant of its type.

Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group meeting in Berlin, will help governments, which aim to agree a deal to slow climate change at a Paris summit in December 2015. Few nations have outlined plans consistent with staying below 2 degrees C.

Another report by the IPCC last week in Japan showed warming already affects every continent and would damage food and water supplies and slow economic growth. It may already be having irreversible impacts on the Arctic and coral reefs.

The new draft shows that getting on track to meet the 2C goal would mean limiting greenhouse gas emissions to between 30 and 50 billion tonnes in 2030, a radical shift after a surge to 49 billion tonnes in 2010 from 38 billion in 1990.

The shift would reduce economic output by between 2-6 percent by 2050, because of the costs of building a cleaner energy system based on low-carbon energies that are more expensive than abundant coal, the IPCC said. Capturing carbon dioxide is also expensive, it added.

China and the United States are the top emitters.

One option is to let temperatures overshoot the 2C target while developing technology to cool the planet by extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, the draft says. The draft that would add to risks of warming and push up costs.

Extracting carbon from nature includes simple measures such as planting more trees, which soak up carbon as they grow, or capturing and burying greenhouse gases from electricity-generating plants that burn wood or other plant matter.

A problem is that markets for trading carbon dioxide focus on cuts in emissions at power plants and factories burning fossil fuels, not renewable energies which are viewed as green.

“In Europe there is no incentive” said Jonas Helseth, director of environmental group Bellona Europe who chairs a group of scientists and industry experts looking at burying emissions from renewable energy.

The IPCC draft report is the third and final study in a U.N. series about climate change, updating findings from 2007, after the Japan report about the impacts and one in September in Sweden about climate science.

The September report raised the probability that human actions, led by the use of fossil fuels, are the main cause of climate change since 1950 to at least 95 percent from 90. But opinion polls show voters are unpersuaded, with many believing that natural variations are the main cause.

Apr 062014
 

Original story by Neil McMahon, Brisbane Times

Vanity – and our vulnerability to the power of advertising – are changing consumer habits from breakfast to bedtime, and contributing to an almighty environmental mess. The culprit: microbeads.
In a lather: Minute plastic beads from toiletries are making their way into the marine environment.

In a lather: Minute plastic beads from toiletries are making their way into the marine environment.

These are minute bits of plastic that have been inserted into everyday products from facial creams to toothpaste, proclaimed in advertising as a healthy advance but which are turbo-charging an already dire problem – the global pollution of oceans, lakes and rivers by cast-off plastic.

What makes microbeads especially threatening is that they enter the environment – washed down our bathroom drains – already broken down into all-but invisible microplastics, defined as 0.1 to 0.5 millimetres in size.

Tiny and buoyant, and not filtered by sewerage systems, they are swiftly ingestible by marine life, making them more immediately dangerous than a discarded drink bottle. They are likely to have entered the food chain – so while you wouldn’t eat your facial scrub from the jar, you might be consuming it if you eat fish.

And for what benefit to ourselves – to our skin?

Almost none. According to Associate Professor Greg Goodman, a fellow of the Australasian College of Dermatologists, our modern obsession with scrubbing our skin is, for most people, doing more harm than good.

“People are exfoliating everything,” he says. “But we’re not floorboards. We don’t need to be polishing and buffing and scrubbing. Most science dermatologists don’t like exfoliation because the barrier functions of the skin get exfoliated and that’s a negative thing for your skin. Exfoliating takes out the top layer that keeps your skin in good nick.”

The use of microbeads in cosmetics is recent – Dr Goodman says most patents date only to the middle of the last decade – but there is already a backlash against the harm they are doing. The 5 Gyres Institute in the US found such significant microbead pollution in the Great Lakes region last year that it launched a campaign to have them banned.

In Australia, there has been little study of the harm caused by microbeads. But Dr Scott Wilson, a coastal management expert from the Central Queensland University Gladstone, says harm is being done to marine life and potentially to humans.

“It’s an area we’re just touching on now, trying to find out what the potential harm is,” he says. “We know they’re being ingested – there’s a whole gamut of species that we now know have these microplastics in their guts, and some are being incorporated within the tissues as well … so there’s this trophic transfer of the plastics through the food chain. If you take it to its fullest [conclusion], if we’re consuming fish or other sea life there’s potentially a transfer. We need to find out what risks there are to humans as well as to the organisms.”

Dr Erik van Sebille, of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, says the impact of microbeads will be felt in heavily populated urban centres.

“We know from a food source point of view that the smaller the plastic, the more harm it does. My suspicion with something like microbeads is the harm is done right where our sewerage systems hit the ocean.”

Major cosmetics manufacturers say they will phase out the use of microbeads over the next three to five years. The Body Shop is leading the way, with a spokeswoman telling Fairfax Media its products would be microbead-free by the end of this year. For consumers, Dr Goodman says there is a quicker solution: use something natural – an oatmeal soap would do the job – or don’t exfoliate at all.

“We mix up the squeaky feel of skin as being something healthy and it’s really not – it’s actually impending dry, terrible skin,” he says. ”They’re not understanding what healthy skin is.”