RI`s first lady gets UN Award for Promoting Tree Planting Movement

New York (ANTARA News) - Indonesian First Lady Ani Yudhoyono got an award from the United Nations for promoting the planting of millions of trees in Indonesia as part of the Billion Tree Planting Campaign spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Agro-forestry Center (ICRAF).

In addition to the First Lady, UNEP also awarded the Indonesian forestry minister for supporting the global tree planting activities

UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner presented certificates of appreciation called "Certificate of Global Leadership" to the First Lady and the forestry minister, who were represented by Dana Kartakusuma, Staff Expert of the Environmental Affairs Minister, at the UN headquarters in New York on Tuesday.

"The award from UNEP is encouragement for Indonesia to work harder and intensify tree planting activities to prevent natural disasters such as floods, erosion, and landslides which often hit the country," Dana told ANTARA News.

Indonesia has at least planted 86 million trees as part of the global campaign to fight climate change.

The Billion Tree Planting Campaign, a unique worldwide tree planting initiative, aimed at empowering citizens to corporations and people up to presidents to embrace the climate change challenge, has now set its sights on planting seven billion trees.

UNEP reported that the Billion Tree Campaign has in just 18 months catalyzed the planting of two billion trees, double its original target.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, said "When the Billion Tree Campaign was launched at the Climate Convention meeting in Nairobi in 2006, no one could have imagined it could have flowered so fast and so far. But it has given expression to the frustrations but also the hopes of millions of people around the world".

"Having exceeded every target that has been set for the campaign, we are now calling on individuals, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments to evolve this initiative onto a new and even higher level by the crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen in late 2009," he said.

"In 2006 we wondered if a billion tree target was too ambitious; it was not. The goal of two billion trees has also proven to be an underestimate. The goal of planting seven billion trees - equivalent to just over a tree per person alive on the planet `must therefore also be do-able given the campaign`s extraordinary track record and the self-evident worldwide support," he added.

The Billion Tree Campaign has become a practical expression of private and public concern over global warming.

Heads of state including the presidents of Indonesia, the Maldives, Mexico, Turkey and Turkmenistan as well as businesses; cities; faith, youth and community groups have enthusiastically taken part. Individuals have accounted for over half of all participants.

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Sinking without trace: Australia's climate change victims

Like Kiribati and Tuvalu, the islands of the Torres Strait are slowly being submerged. But unlike their Pacific neighbours, the plight of their inhabitants is being overlooked.

The Independent, KATHY MARKS, Monday, 5 May 2008

Ron and Maria Passi, who operate Murray Island's only taxi, were out driving the night the king tide struck. Neighbours flagged them down, asking for help, and so it was not until some time later that they saw their own grandchildren standing in the road. "They were shouting 'Granddad, stop the car, the water is coming in the house'," says Ron. "I just slammed on the brakes."

Masig Island, one of the low-lying islands of the Torres Strait - Kathy Marks

The couple's son, Sonny, was outside his fibro shack with his five children, watching the monster surf, lashed by north-west winds, rise ever higher. In the commotion, everyone had forgotten that Sedoi, the baby, was still inside. They heard her crying and found her in her cot, covered in sand. Water had surged in after a wave picked up a big wooden pallet and flung it through the front wall.

No one on Murray had ever seen such a high tide before. Other islands in the Torres Strait, which lies between the far north-eastern tip of the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea, have witnessed similar scenes in recent years. Houses, roads and graveyards have been flooded, and the locals believe they know the reason: climate change.

The low-lying islands that dot the sparkling waters of this region are facing similar challenges to South Pacific nations such as Kiribati and Tuvalu. But while the plight of those countries is well known and is regularly discussed in the international arena, few people outside Australia have even heard of the Torres Strait. Even Australians would have difficulty locating it on the map, and the remote islands – accessible only by light plane – receive few visitors.

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Long-awaited electric sports car rolls out

CNN

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- It's safe to say Jeremy Snyder gets a charge out of the two-seat Tesla Roadster whenever he pulls one off the lot, and not because it's equipped with an all-electric engine.

 

As he pulled one of the sleek new automobiles down a side street Thursday and put the pedal to the metal, its lithium-ion battery-powered engine didn't give off sparks. It just emitted a powerful hum, like a much quieter version of a jet taking off.

 

"Accelerate pretty good?" asked Snyder, head of client services for Tesla, who knew the answer.

 

"I call it a turbine sound," he said of the sound. "Because it's an electric motor, it's got 100 percent torque all the time. So it just pulls you like when you're taking off in an airplane."

After several years of development, the Roadster -- with sleek lines like a Ferrari or Porsche and a sticker price of $109,000 -- moves from the drawing boards to the market next week when Tesla's first store opens. It's near the University of California, Los Angeles, in the city's tony Westwood neighborhood, where Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Hollywood practically intersect.

 

"Because it's Hollywood and glamorous, this is the flagship store," Snyder said.

 

The next store is to open in a couple months near Tesla's headquarters in the Silicon Valley city of San Carlos, where the car was developed with venture capital of more than $40 million from such investors as Google Inc. founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. More stores are planned for Chicago, New York and other cities by early next year.

 

Although a fully loaded model can set a buyer back as much as $124,000, that's still cheap compared with a high-end Ferrari. And its 6,831-cell lithium-ion battery pack gives off no emissions.

 

The car goes from 0 to 60 mph in just under four seconds and tops out at 125 mph. It goes 225 miles on one charge and can be fully recharged in 3½ hours, which Tesla officials say should allow most people to drive it to work and back and recharge it at night like a cell phone.

 

Driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, however, would require stopping in, say, Fresno and plugging its adapter cord into a motel room wall socket.

 

Some critics have expressed concerns about the durability and safety of the lithium-ion battery, which weighs about 1,000 pounds, more than a third of the entire weight of the 2,700-pound Roadster, whose body is made up of carbon fiber materials. Tesla officials respond that the car has passed all required safety tests. They say the battery should last for about 100,000 miles of driving.

 

The company, formed in 2003, is named for inventor Nikola Tesla, a pioneer in the field of electricity. The people buying its cars so far, said national sales manager Doreen Allen, are celebrities, early adopters, wealthy people and environmentalists.

 

Tesla officials say Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, actors George Clooney and Kelsey Grammer and musicians Will.i.am and Flea have ordered Roadsters.

 

It will be a while before anyone can walk in and drive a Tesla home off a lot, however.

 

"Delivery is running about 15 months," Allen said, adding that the company was surprised by the demand.

 

Tesla began taking orders last year for the 600 Roadsters it planned to produce in 2008 and had sold all of them by October, Allen said. The first ones began rolling off the production line six weeks ago, and Allen said all of the 2008 models should be delivered to their owners by March. The first ones should begin going out the door this month.

 

Meanwhile, orders are being taken for 2009 models, with plans calling for production of about 1,500 cars.

 

Eventually Tesla also plans to produce cheaper family vehicles.

 

"There's a model in the works right now, a five-passenger sedan that will be styled comparable to the roadster but a lot roomier to accommodate families, and that is slated for 2010," Snyder said.

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Global warming could starve oceans of oxygen: study

Thu May 1, 2008 2:31pm EDT

 

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

 

OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming could gradually starve parts of the tropical oceans of oxygen, damaging fisheries and coastal economies, a study showed on Thursday.

 

Areas of the eastern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with low amounts of dissolved oxygen have expanded in the past 50 years, apparently in line with rising temperatures, according to the scientists based in Germany and the United States.

 

And models of global warming indicate the trend will continue because oxygen in the air mixes less readily with warmer water. Large fish such as tuna or swordfish avoid, or are unable to survive, in regions starved of oxygen.

 

"Reduced oxygen levels may have dramatic consequences for ecosystems and coastal economies," according to the scientists writing in the journal Science.

 

The north of the Indian Ocean, along with the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, is also oxygen-low but the available data showed no substantial change in the size of the oxygen-minimum zone in recent decades.

 

Lothar Stramma, lead author at IFM-GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany, said there were signs the oxygen-low bands between 300 and 700 meters depths were getting wider and moving into shallower coastal waters.

 

"The expansion of the oxygen-minimum zones is reaching more to the continental shelf areas," he told Reuters. "It's not just the open ocean." That could disrupt ever more fisheries.

 

Problems of lower oxygen supply add to woes for the oceans led by over-fishing as the world struggles to feed an expanding population. A U.N. conference in 2002 set a goal of trying to reverse declines in fish stocks by 2015.

 

The scientists said levels of dissolved oxygen in the oceans had varied widely in the past and more study was needed. "We are far from knowing exactly what will happen," Stramma said.

 

In the most extreme case, at the end of the Permian period about 250 million years ago, there were mass extinctions on land and at sea linked to high levels of carbon dioxide and extremely low oxygen levels in the waters.

 

The U.N. Climate Panel said last year that global warming, stoked by human use of fossil fuels, would push up temperatures and bring more droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels. More and more species would be at risk of extinction.

 

Thursday's study showed that a swathe of the eastern Pacific from Chile to the United States and a smaller part of the eastern Atlantic, centered off Angola, were low in oxygen.

 

Stramma said the oxygen-poor regions were away from major ocean currents that help absorb oxygen from the air. And warmer water is less dense and so floats more easily -- that makes it less prone to mix with the deeper levels of the oceans.

 

-- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on:

 

http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/

 

(Editing by Matthew Jones)