Expert: Rhinos extinct in Mozambique

ORIGINAL: Yahoo

By MICHELLE FAUL

Thu, May 2, 2013

The vanishing rhino

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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Mozambique's rhinoceros population was wiped out more than a century ago by big game hunters. Reconstituted several years ago, it has again been driven to extinction, or to the brink of extinction, by poachers seeking their horns for sale in Asia.

A leading rhino expert told The Associated Press that the last rhino in the southern African nation has been killed. The warden in charge of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park — the only place where the horned behemoths lived in Mozambique — also says poachers have wiped out the last of the rhinos. Mozambique's conservation director believes a few may remain.

Elephants also could become extinct in Mozambique soon, the warden of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, Antonio Abacar, told AP. He said game rangers have been aiding poachers, and 30 of the park's 100 rangers will appear in court soon.

"We caught some of them red-handed while directing poachers to a rhino area," Abacar said.

A game ranger arrested for helping poachers in Mozambique's northern Niassa Game Reserve said on Mozambican Television TVM last week that he was paid 2,500 meticais (about $80) to direct poachers to areas with elephants and rhinos. Game rangers are paid between 2,000 and 3,000 meticais ($64 to $96) a month.

While guilty rangers will lose their jobs, the courts serve as little deterrent to the poachers: killing wildlife and trading in illegal rhino horn and elephant tusks are only misdemeanors in Mozambique.

"Their legal system is far from adequate and an individual found guilty is given a slap on the wrist and then they say 'OK. Give me my horn back,'" said Michael H. Knight, chairman of the African Rhino Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission.

A meeting of the group in February reported there might, possibly, be one white rhino left in Mozambique and no black rhinos at all, Knight said.

According to Abacar: "We have already announced the extinction of the rhino population in Limpopo National Park."

But Bartolomeu Soto, director of Mozambique's transfrontier conservation unit, told the AP "We believe we still have rhinos, though we don't know how many."

Mozambican news reports have said the last 15 rhinos in the park were slaughtered in the past month, but park officials said those reports were wrong. Soto said the misunderstanding had arisen over Abacar's statement to journalists that he had not seen a rhino in the three months since he was put in charge of the large park.

The only official figure available for rhino deaths is that 17 rhino carcasses were found in the park in 2010, Soto said. He said officials believe poaching must be taking place because rhino horn and elephant tusks carried by Asian smugglers are regularly seized at Mozambique's ports, although at least some of the contraband could be from animals killed by Mozambican poachers in neighboring South Africa. This week a person was arrested at the airport of the capital, Maputo, in possession of nine rhino horns, Soto said.

The price of rhino horn has overtaken the price of gold as demand has burgeoned in Asian countries, mainly China and Vietnam, where consumers wrongly believe that the horn — made of the same substance as fingernails — has powerful healing properties. Chinese traditional medicine prescribes it for everything from typhoid, infant convulsions and fever to an antidote for poison and to relieve arthritis and cure possessions by the devil. Syndicates from Vietnam, China, South Korea and Thailand have been identified as being involved in the trafficking.

Knight said rhinos first became extinct in Mozambique around the turn of the last century, in the age of the big white hunters, when the animals also nearly disappeared in South Africa, which is now home to 90 percent of Africa's estimated 20,000 white rhinos and 4,880 black rhinos.

In 2002, leaders of Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe agreed to establish a transfrontier park straddling their borders and covering some 35,000 square kilometers (13,514 square miles) of the best established wildlife areas in southern Africa with South Africa's famed Kruger National Park and Zimbabwe's Gonarezhou National Park. It is funded by several international wildlife organizations and the European Union.

Soto said some 5,000 animals of various species were translocated from South Africa to Mozambique, including the first 12 rhinos to roam in Mozambique in a century.

In 2006, South Africa removed some 50 kilometers (30 miles) of fence between Kruger and Limpopo National Park. Soto said the entire 200 kilometers (125 miles) of fence was not removed because Mozambique still is working to resettle some 6,000 people living in the park.

A second phase was to include two other Mozambican parks, allowing the transfrontier park to extend over 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 sq. miles) that would make it "the world's largest animal kingdom," according to the South African Peace Parks Foundation.

Those plans now are in danger, as is the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Knight said South African officials are even discussing rebuilding their fence with Mozambique.

South African officials say their country has lost 273 rhinos to poachers so far this year. They say most have been killed by Mozambicans who cross into Kruger Park. Poachers killed 668 rhinos in South Africa last year.

The slaughter continues with the number of deaths increasing even though South Africa has declared war on rhino poachers and for two years has deployed soldiers and police in Kruger, a vast park which is the size of Israel.

Soto said Mozambique's government has been working since 2009 on a comprehensive reform of environmental laws involving consultations with all stakeholders. He said he expects the draft legislation to be presented to parliament soon. It includes criminalizing the shooting of wildlife and would impose mandatory prison sentences on offenders.

But it will come too late to save the last of the rhinos in Mozambique.

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Associated Press writer Emmanuel Camillo contributed to this report from Maputo, Mozambique

Concern Over Rare Rhino Rouses Clean Energy Drive in Malaysia

ORIGINAL: National Geographic News

Jeff Smith

Published February 22, 2012

Plans for a coal plant near one of the last remaining habitats for the rare Sumatran rhino were scuttled, but Sabah, Malaysia still faces a power crunch. Waste from the palm oil industry (a plantation in Malaysia is seen below) could help meet demand.

Photograph by Nick Garbutt, Steve Bloom Images/Alamy

Potential threats to the rare Sumatran rhino, coral reefs, and other fragile animals helped galvanize a highly publicized fight last year to stop a coal-fired plant from being built on the east coast of Sabah, Malaysia.

The activists were armed with evidence that renewable energy such as hydropower, geothermal, and waste from the region's abundant oil palm mills could compete with coal in costs.

Activists won the impassioned battle when government officials killed the plant in February 2011. But they haven't yet achieved their goal of getting this ecotourism destination—one of the most biologically diverse spots on earth—to go renewable and serve as a model for other environmentally sensitive areas around the globe.

Instead, a 300-megawatt natural gas plant, announced earlier this month, is slated to ease Sabah's power crunch. The capacity of the proposed plant dwarfs that of renewable energy plants in Sabah. Renewable energy has been progressing slowly, and a key financial incentive for new projects is in limbo.

"The natural gas plant is our only viable option at the moment," Masidi Manjun, Sabah state minister of tourism, culture and environment, said by email. Natural gas is readily available offshore, he noted, and will generate the reliable electricity needed for economic growth. "This includes the development of new resorts, especially beach resorts, that are in short supply at the moment." He predicted renewable energy will have a significant role—in the future.

Natural Gas for Now

Activists knew a year ago this could be the outcome, at least in the short term.

"The government is going with the natural gas option to fuel our immediate energy needs," while making "cautious moves towards renewable energy," said Cynthia Ong, executive director of Malaysia-based Land Empowerment Animals People (LEAP). "During the anti-coal campaign, we took the position that the state needed to explore using its own natural gas resources (offshore) over importing coal . . . and of course we advocated strongly for renewable energy."

An environmental impact assessment hasn't been completed for the gas plant, but concerns aren't likely to be as high as they were for the coal plant. Gas is a cleaner fuel, and the plant will be in an industrial area far from the ecosystems that ignited the coal debate.

Sabah, on the northern end of the island of Borneo, is part of a region known as the Coral Triangle. Its rugged terrain and coral reefs have brought it world acclaim for its biodiversity and beauty.

The coal plant was planned along Sabah's coastline, 12 miles (19 kilometers) from the border of the Tabin Wildlife Reserve, Malaysia's largest animal park and one of the last remaining habitats for the Sumatran rhinoceros. The world's smallest rhinoceros at only about 4.3 feet (1.3 meters) tall, the Sumatran rhino is one of the most critically endangered species on Earth, with only 200 remaining in areas of Indonesia and Malaysia, according to the International Rhino Foundation. Poachers, hunters, and encroaching habitats have trimmed the number of rhinos on Borneo to an estimated 30 to 50. (For some rhinos, it's too late already. The Javan rhino in Vietnam recently was declared extinct by conservationists for many of the same reasons. In South Africa, more than 1,000 rhinos have been slaughtered in the past six years.)

(Related: "Rhino Wars")

Rivaling the price of gold on the black market, rhino horn is at the center of a bloody poaching battle. Stirton Photography

The Tabin reserve also includes Pygmy elephants, Bornean orangutans, sun bears, and leopards.

But in addition to being an important wildlife habitat, Sabah's east coast has experienced unplanned power outages due to the lack of electrical capacity. Almost all of its power comes from dirty and unreliable diesel plants that the government wants to replace with cleaner sources.

Currently, fossil fuels account for about 90 percent of power capacity in Sabah. The challenge, is "how to green the mix in an economically viable way," says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

(Related: "Can We Close the Energy Access Gap?")

Ong recruited Kammen, an adviser to National Geographic's Great Energy Challenge initiative, in 2010 to study energy options for a coalition of five nongovernmental organizations dubbed GREEN Surf (Sabah Unite to Re-Power the Future).

Kammen's research team concluded that hydropower and biomass waste projects could be cost-competitive with coal, with geothermal slightly less so (but competitive with natural gas). The researchers highlighted palm oil waste as having the potential to produce up to 700 megawatts of power by 2020.

(Related: "A Rainforest Advocate Taps the Energy of the Sugar Palm")

Malaysia is the second largest producer of palm oil in the world, and Sabah has more acreage under cultivation—3.5 million acres in 2010—than any other region of the country.

"Our process was to do the math, do the assessment, come up with a plan," Kammen said in an interview. "We went in not knowing what would work out."

(Related: "How a Malaysian Village Found a Coal Power Alternative, and Habitat Protection, at Low Cost)

Kammen traveled to Sabah to present his findings at a public meeting that was broadcast on local television. He also met individually with local officials, meetings he believes were critical to helping persuade government officials to back down from the proposed coal power plant.

By that time, the coal controversy already had stretched over several years, with two previous proposed sites dropped partly because of community opposition to such environmental impacts as ash ponds and carbon dioxide emissions.

LEAP and other environmental and civil society organizations also had complained that the environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the coal plant failed to adequately consider impacts on marine and animal life, and climate change. They said the assessment also listed species that aren't present in Sabah while omitting others such as the rhinoceros. Ong said those involved in the EIA process showed a lack of understanding of principles of environmental protection. For example, during one informal meeting, she recalls, a consultant working on the EIA said there was "no issue with fish, because fish could swim away."

Ong said many government officials were supportive of the anti-coal campaign in private meetings, but "the way politics works in Malaysia if the top guy says something you don't oppose it." But she said she believes the proposed coal plant became such a hot local political issue that Prime Minister Najib Razak felt compelled to stop it.

A statement issued in February 2011 by Musa Aman, Sabah state government's chief minister, indicated that Najib made the call in recognition that "one of Sabah's greatest assets is its natural attractions and still somewhat pristine environment."

Najib has been trying to position Malaysia as a leader in reducing carbon emissions.

At the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen, Najib pledged to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. Malaysia enacted a renewable energy law in 2011 that, among other things, created a Sustainable Energy Development Authority.

A premium tariff was established, enabling renewable energy producers to sell their power to utilities at prices roughly 50 percent above the current rate.

(Related: "The Solvable Problem of Energy Poverty")

In Sabah, two oil palm biomass plants totaling about 25 megawatts of capacity have qualified for that premium tariff, as well as two small hydro plants totaling about 6.5 megawatts of capacity, according to Malaysia's Sustainable Energy Development Authority.

A company named Tawau Green Energy plans to build a 30-megawatt geothermal plant on Sabah's east coast. But the tariff isn't available for new renewable energy projects in Sabah at this time, said SEDA spokesman Wei-nee Chen. He said by email that the central government "is in talks with the state government of Sabah for them to contribute to the renewable energy fund. Once an agreement has been reached, then the (premium) tariff will be opened to Sabah for new projects."

Kammen's research team calculated that the income from electricity sales at the current tariff wouldn't quite be enough to cover the cost of operating an oil palm waste plant. But the researchers said the projects could be cost-competitive when taking into account potential carbon credits.

Creating a Renewable Industry

Palm biomass projects aren't without environmental concerns.

Louis Verchot, the leading climate change scientist for the Bogor, Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research, said using oil palm waste to produce electricity generally is a good idea because such waste usually is burned or left to decompose slowly.

However, he cautioned, if palm oil waste production generates profits, it could create economic incentives to expand oil palm plantations, leading to more deforestation.

Malaysia already has suffered greatly from deforestation of its hardwoods and peatlands. Verchot's team has published several analyses over the past two years that have shown that such biomass cultivation has a negative effect on the atmosphere and on natural habitat. That's especially true if the cultivation occurs on peatlands, which naturally store carbon.

Ong said her group has had a few meetings with Sabah's big oil palm players on the possibility of generating electricity from palm oil waste. But, she said, "It was a little bit of a challenge to convince them to pioneer what was basically going to be a new industry. The bottom line is their focus."

LEAP instead is working with a group of indigenous oil palm farmers on a small project to convert waste into biomass pellets, in hopes of proving its viability as a commercial enterprise.

Ong said she is optimistic about renewable energy over the long term, but believes it will be up to the people to engage the government and "provoke and take leadership in pioneering the renewable energy industry." LEAP is putting together a Southeast Asia renewable energy group and also has been asked to help an anti-dam group in Sarawak, Sabah's Borneo neighbor.

Said Masidi Manjun, Sabah's environment minister: "Renewable energy will not only have a significant role in the future but perhaps is the only viable option if the world is serious about conservation and tackling climatic change . . . . This is the way forward-that is, if we are interested in saving the world."

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

Otro paso adelante hacia el Barómetro de la Vida

ORIGINAL: IUCN

10 November 2011 | News story

La última actualización de la Lista Roja de Especies Amenazadas™ ilustra los esfuerzos emprendidos por la UICN (Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza) y sus asociados para ampliar el número y la diversidad de las especies evaluadas, mejorando la calidad de la información para obtener un panorama más preciso en torno al estado de la biodiversidad. Con más de 61.000 especies examinadas, se ha dado un importante paso adelante para convertir la Lista Roja de la UICN en un verdadero “Barómetro de la Vida”, como lo propugnaron renombrados expertos en la revista Science en 2010.

"Esta actualización ofrece noticias buenas y malas sobre el estado de muchas especies en todo el mundo", apunta Jane Smart, Directora del Programa Mundial de Especies de la UICN. "Sabemos con plena certeza que la conservación funciona si se ejecuta de manera oportuna; empero, sin una decidida voluntad política aunada a esfuerzos y recursos específicos, las maravillas de la naturaleza y los servicios que ofrece podrían perderse para siempre".

El rinoceronte negro de África Occidental (Diceros bicornis longipes), ha sido declarado oficialmente extinto. Foto: Black Rhino (Diceros bicornis michaeli) ©Dr Richard Emslie

Pese a los programas de conservación, el 25% de los mamíferos está en peligro de extinción. Por ejemplo, las reevaluaciones de varias especies de rinocerontes muestran que la subespecie del rinoceronte negro en África Occidental, el rinoceronte negro occidental (Diceros bicornis longipes), ha sido declarada oficialmente Extinta. La subespecie del rinoceronte blanco en África Central, el rinoceronte blanco del norte (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), se encuentra al borde de la extinción y ha sido clasificada como Posiblemente Extinguida en Estado Silvestre. El rinoceronte de Java (Rhinoceros sondaicus) va por el mismo camino, por cuanto es probable que la subespecie de Rinoceros sondaicus annamiticus se haya extinguido a causa de la caza ilegal de lo que se cree era el último animal en Viet Nam en 2010. Aunque este no es el final del rinoceronte de Java, sí reduce la especie a una sola población pequeña en Java. Las principales amenazas que acechan a los rinocerontes son la falta de apoyo y voluntad política para acometer esfuerzos de conservación en muchos de sus hábitats, los grupos del crimen organizado internacional ligados a los rinocerontes, y el aumento de la caza furtiva de cuernos de rinoceronte con fines comerciales.

"Los seres humanos somos los guardianes de la Tierra y tenemos la responsabilidad de proteger las especies que comparten nuestro medio ambiente", dice Simon Stuart, Presidente de la Comisión de Supervivencia de Especies de la UICN. “Tanto en el caso del rinoceronte negro occidental como del rinoceronte blanco del norte, la situación podría haber sido muy diferente de haberse aplicado las medidas de conservación sugeridas. Estas medidas deben reforzarse ahora, especialmente en lo tocante a la gestión de los hábitats, a efectos de mejorar el rendimiento reproductivo y evitar la extinción de otros rinocerontes, como en el caso del rinoceronte de Java".