Orangutan survival and the shopping trolley

The challenge of saving the orangutan - man's closest relative - from extinction is trickling down to the weekly shop.

Many of the biscuits, margarines, breads, crisps and even bars of soap that consumers pick off supermarket shelves contain an ingredient that is feeding a growth industry that conservationists say is killing the orangutans.

The mystery ingredient in the mix is palm oil - the cheapest source of vegetable oil available - and one that rarely appears on the label of most products.

Palm oil is grown on land that was once home to the vast rainforests of Borneo, and the natural habitat of the orangutan.

I think its really about what consumers can do because the most powerful message that can be sent to companies is from their consumers about what it is they want to buy Environment Secretary Hilary Benn

The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that the population has declined by 50% in recent decades and the Indonesian government admits that 50,000 orangutans have died as a result of de-forestation.

A BBC Panorama investigation into clear-cutting in Indonesian Borneo - the island it shares with Malaysia - found that the thirst for land on which to plant palm plantations is encroaching on areas that the Indonesian government has deemed to be off-limits.

'Nuisance'

The orangutans, displaced as the trees of old-growth forests are burned and at times killed by workers who see them as a nuisance in the logging process, are not the only victims of the runaway growth in palm oil - scientists say there is a wider environmental price being paid.

Greenpeace has identified the draining of ancient peat lands to make way for palm oil as a global threat, saying it had lead to massive amounts of trapped methane and carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.

As a result, Indonesia is the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind only America and China.

ORANGUTAN FACTS Orangutan means "old man of the forest" in Malay Only apes living outside of Africa Largest tree-dwelling mammals

Using GPS technology and satellite imaging, the BBC team pinpointed exact locations where palm oil giant the Duta Palma Group is logging on both high conservation lands and deep peat lands - both are illegal.

Shailendra Yashwant, Greenpeace director for Southeast Asia, said this illegal logging is widespread and includes major suppliers to the UK's food and household product market.

"We want the Indonesian government to immediately announce a moratorium on further deforestation…beginning with peat lands."

Willie Smits, a former advisor to the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry turned environmental campaigner, said of the findings: "This is criminal, this should not take place. It means there is no hope left for the most endangered sub-species of the orang-utan in west Kalamantan."

He said the wider environmental issue of greenhouse gases can no longer be overlooked by both manufacturers and everyday consumers.

"This is not just a matter for Indonesia to decide, this is a matter for the world."

'Greenwash'

The palm industry - valued at £5bn ($7.7bn) for Indonesia - is the country's third biggest export earner.

Many of the big manufacturers who buy that oil via European wholesalers say that while they are starting to find oil from sustainable sources, they are not yet in a position to trace the origin of all of the oil they use.

Currently, only 3% of the world's palm oil is certified sustainable, meaning it comes from plantations that pass an environmental and social impact test.

Many have joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) scheme set up to promote certification of where palm oil originates.

Others have set ambitious goals to use sustainable oil by 2015 or earlier, but Greenpeace's Shailendra Yashwant said the RSPO amounts to a "greenwash" because those commitments are unenforceable on the ground.

Bulk oil from a variety of plantations - including that of Duta Palma Group that the BBC found to be illegally clear-cutting - is mixed together and shipped around the world and sold on to manufacturers behind everyday products.

Duta Palma declined to comment on the BBC's evidence of illegal deforestation.

Consumer pressure

Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told Panorama the time is right for consumers to put pressure on manufacturers, demanding to know which of their products contain palm oil and assurances that it comes from a sustainable source.

Many of the sweets and staples in our shopping trolleys contain palm oil

Current labelling laws allow manufacturers to list palm oil as 'vegetable' oil, without singling out the palm oil content.

Many manufacturers, including industry giants Unilever and Proctor and Gamble, say their recipes can change and the amounts and types of oils they use can vary from week to week, making more detailed labels unworkable.

However, Sainsbury's supermarkets had earlier taken the decision to not only single out palm oil on the ingredients lists of their own-brand products, but to state directly that it is from a sustainable source.

Recently Unilever, the UK's largest user of palm oil in products that range from Dove soap to Pot Noodles, Knorr soups and Flora, terminated a large contract with a supplier called Sinar Mas, because of reports it was destroying high conservation value forests.

Unilever has told Panorama that while it may have used oil from Duta Palma in the past, it intends to overcome its supply system problems so that it no longer uses oil from the producer.

Secretary Benn said: "I think it's really about what consumers can do because the most powerful message that can be sent to companies is from their consumers about what it is they want to buy," he told reporter Raphael Rowe, citing the demand for free range eggs in the UK as an example of consumer influence.

Mr Benn said the participation by UK retailers and manufacturers in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is a step towards ensuring that palm oil is traceable and therefore increases the chances that it can be certified sustainable.

Use of Forests as Carbon Offsets Fails to Impress In First Big Trial - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 15, 2009

More than a decade ago in the northeast corner of Bolivia, a group of polluters and environmentalists joined forces in the first large-scale experiment to curb climate change with a strategy that promised to suit their competing interests: compensating for greenhouse gas emissions by preserving forests.

The coalition of U.S. utility companies, two nonprofit groups and the Bolivian government had the common goal of making a dent in the worldwide deforestation that accounts for about 17 percent of greenhouse gas emissions each year. The outcome of that experiment is fueling debate over a key element in international climate strategy.

While the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project has succeeded in keeping a biologically rich preserve of more than 6,000 square miles free from logging, it has fallen far short of its goal of reducing emissions. The mix of pragmatism and idealism -- providing powerful financial incentives to encourage influential companies and poor countries to work together to slow global warming -- shows the complexity of a much-heralded approach that Democratic lawmakers and international negotiators are trying to write into law.

Preventing the clearing and burning of tropical forests, which help absorb carbon dioxide and provide habitat to an array of species, has become a critical objective for environmentalists.

"It doesn't matter who caused the problem. We are in it together," said Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work on tree planting in Africa and appealed to President Obama in a meeting last week on the need to preserve forests overseas. "If forests can be kept standing, it would be good for developed nations, it would be good for the developing world."

It also gives the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases more affordable carbon credits under the cap-and-trade system Congress is now debating. Without international offsets, pollution allowances would be 89 percent more expensive under the climate bill authored by Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) and Edward J. Markey (Mass.), according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Sixty percent of the international offsets would come from tropical forests, the agency said.

"Including offsets from tropical forests in a climate bill is a key to affordability," said Nigel Purvis, executive director of the bipartisan Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests. "It would be geopolitically and economically foolish for us to push back on that."

But a report Greenpeace will release Thursday questions the premise of using forest conservation overseas to compensate for U.S. pollution, noting that Noel Kempff envisioned keeping 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere over 30 years but has lowered that expectation to 5.8 million. The revised estimates do not take into account that logging may have moved to areas to the north, east and southwest of the project. And the report notes that the project's three corporate underwriters -- American Electric Power, BP America and PacifiCorp -- overestimated how much carbon the project kept from entering the atmosphere, telling the EPA it accounted for 7.4 million metric tons from 1997 to 2004.

"At this crucial time, with the [climate] negotiations in Copenhagen and U.S. legislation, can we afford to take a gamble on what the backers of these programs say haven't been as effective as they anticipated?" said Greenpeace spokesman Daniel Kessler.

American Electric Power chief executive Michael G. Morris said Greenpeace is naive to suggest the world should create a multibillion-dollar fund to preserve forests instead of letting corporations undertake these initiatives to meet their bottom line.

"When Greenpeace says the only reason American Electric Power wants to do this is because it doesn't want to shut down its coal plants, my answer is, 'You bet, because our coal plants serve our customers very cost-effectively,' " he said.

Several forestry experts said the world has learned from the Noel Kempff project and has incorporated lessons from it in the policies that U.S. lawmakers and international negotiators are now shaping. The sharp cut in verified emissions reductions came from satellite technology and better computer models that adjusted the baseline for what would have happened if the project had not been conducted.

Toby Janson Smith, who directs Conservation International's forest carbon markets program, said two new global standards -- one measuring a project's carbon storage and another its social and environmental benefits -- have built "great confidence in the market" in the last couple of years.

And Sarene Marshall, deputy director of the Nature Conservancy's climate team, said any binding climate regime would allow emitters to use verified offsets only after the fact, rather than projected estimates. "We can definitely measure with a high degree of scientific accuracy, and this can be verified by a third party, what would have been the emissions from forests that were targeted for destruction," she said.

The Norwegian government, which has pledged $1 billion between now and 2015 to conserve forests in Brazil, has proposed that any global climate deal inked this year spell out that rich nations pay to protect tropical forests and establish an offset program only once developing countries improve their governance and accounting systems. Audun Rosland, a Norway climate negotiator, said his country wants this stored forest carbon to be on top of what industrialized countries are already doing. "We need both deep cuts in developed countries and developing countries," he said.

Markey, who focused on deforestation during a visit to Brazil last year, included a provision in his and Waxman's bill that sets aside 5 percent of the money from emissions allowances to conserve forests overseas, and the bill states that offsets must come from projects in countries that have a national deforestation plan or are working toward one. The Senate bill includes the same set-aside and slightly different project requirements.

But Kyle L. Davis, PacifiCorp's director of environmental policy and strategy, said the two bills' strict forest requirements might make it impossible for companies like his to find the 2 billion tons of offsets they promise.

And Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), a pivotal vote on climate legislation, said he remains concerned that this sort of system can lead to market speculation. "That's a very complicated area where there's not a lot of experience," Dorgan said.

In the end, according to Center for Clean Air Policy President Ned Helme, both U.S. and international officials need to figure out how to preserve tropical forests as part of any domestic and international climate agreement.

"In terms of selling the deal, this is an important part of the deal, because so many countries benefit," Helme said. "We have to make sure we're not overselling the promise."

As Trees Fall in the Amazon, Fears That Tribes Won’t Be Heard

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.

Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.

“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”

Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”

Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.

Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.

Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.

But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.

“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”

At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.

Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.

The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.

About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.

That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.

Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.

Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.

The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.

It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.

A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.

But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.

“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”