Egypt Independent: Environment news

Irrigation Ministry: Prevent rice cultivation in deserts

MENA — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:15:00 +0000

Water Resources and Irrigation Minister Mohamed Bahaa Eddin has called for the prohibition of rice cultivation in desert lands, which is already forbidden by law, so as to reduce overdraft of water from aquifers.

“The groundwater went down 2.5 meters,” he warned in a statement Wednesday. “Future generations may not find water.”

His statement came on Wednesday during a celebration of the International Accreditation Certificate ISO 17025 that was awarded to the ministry’s groundwater laboratory in the New Valley Governorate.

“This is the first lab of its kind to win the award despite the logistical and financial challenges it had to face,” said laboratory director Abdel Hamid Ahmed. “It is an important step towards providing a global level of services.”

He added that the laboratory made LE5 million in profits this year from services rendered to the private sectors and individual users.

Edited translation from MENA

Scientists find Antarctic ice is melting faster

Reuters — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:11:00 +0000

The summer ice melt in parts of Antartica is at its highest level in 1,000 years, Australian and British researchers reported on Monday, adding new evidence of the impact of global warming on sensitive Antarctic glaciers and ice shelves.

Researchers from the Australian National University and the British Antarctic Survey found data taken from an ice core also shows the summer ice melt has been 10 times more intense over the past 50 years compared with 600 years ago.

"It's definitely evidence that the climate and the environment is changing in this part of Antartica," lead researcher Nerilie Abram said.

Abram and her team drilled a 364-m deep ice core on James Ross Island, near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, to measure historical temperatures and compare them with summer ice melt levels in the area.

They found that, while the temperatures have gradually increased by 1.6 degrees Celsius over 600 years, the rate of ice melting has been most intense over the past 50 years.

That shows the ice melt can increase dramatically in climate terms once temperatures hit a tipping point.

"Once your climate is at that level where it is starting to go above zero degrees, the amount of melt that will happen is very sensitive to any further increase in temperature you may have," Abram said.

Robert Mulvaney, from the British Antarctic Survey, said the stronger ice melts are likely responsible for faster glacier ice loss and some of the dramatic collapses from the Antarctic ice shelf over the past 50 years.

Their research was published in the Nature Geoscience journal.

Climate change forcing Egypt to change agriculture practices

Al-Masry Al-Youm — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Agriculture Minister Salah Abdel Momen commissioned the Agricultural Research Center to review their recommendations for harvesting wheat, corn, cotton and rice following the release of new information regarding the impact of climate change on crop cycles.

"The current year witnessed climate changes that ordinary citizens noticed, including underground fluctuations and sharp rises and drops in temperature, which confounds all our expectations," said Agricultural Research Center head Abdel Moneim al-Banna in a press statement on Thursday.

The center will bring its agricultural experts together to discuss how to revise growing and harvesting cycles in the midst of these new weather patterns to maintain high productivity in the cultivation of wheat, corn and rice, Banna added. The center will then submit their recommendations to the ministry to approve before implementing them in the next planting season.

The meetings will also determine actions that could address problems arising from climate change, such as changing irrigation practices to reduce the risk of frost damaging citrus, mango and other crops, he said.

Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm

Ministry: Hot weather, giant sponges cleaned up Lake Nasser diesel spill

Al-Masry Al-Youm — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:29:00 +0000

Ninety percent of the diesel that spilled into Lake Nasser on Sunday has already evaporated due to high temperatures in Aswan, the Environment Ministry claimed on Thursday.

The rest of the spill was mopped up by the Armed Forces with huge sponges, the ministry alleged.

Preliminary investigations suggested that the spillage came from a leaky ship stationed at the port of the High Aswan Dam.

On Thursday Environment Minister Khaled Fahmy ordered the formation of a field committee to perform a full scan of the High Dam port area to ensure that no contamination occurred from the spill.

Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm

Shale-gas rich Spanish region bans 'fracking'

Reuters — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:58:00 +0000

Lawmakers in Spain's northern Cantabria region unanimously voted on Monday to ban hydraulic fracturing on environmental concerns, shooting down the central government's hopes for a project to boost jobs in a region believed to be rich in shale gas.

Spain, battling a deep recession and high unemployment, imports about 76 percent of its energy needs and the technology to extract shale gas, known as fracking, could help relieve its foreign dependence on oil, coal and gas.

Early estimates indicate Spain has large shale gas reserves, but environmentalists have voiced concerns over the safety of the technique, which involves injecting water and chemicals at high pressure into underground rock formations.

Cantabria's ruling People's Party (PP), which has an absolute majority in the regional parliament, proposed the law to ban the practice.

The bill passed with support from all political parties in the Cantabrian parliament on Monday afternoon. The Cantabrian parliament said on its Twitter feed: "Unanimous. Law to ban hydraulic fracturing approved."

"In Cantabria, there is a very large social movement against fracking... the bill will be passed unanimously by the three parliamentary groups. The region is very small and highly populated," a PP source told Reuters earlier on Monday.

However, at a national level, the PP has voiced support for hydraulic fracturing as long as it complies with environmental rules. The ruling PP, which controls the Spanish parliament, could seek to appeal or overturn Cantabria's ban.

Experts say if it is done according to best practice it is environmentally safe, but the technology still evokes much public concern, especially in Europe.

In the United States, shale gas has helped transform the energy market by lowering gas and coal prices, which are in turn helping to lure gas-intensive industries such as petrochemicals back to home soil thanks to the abundance of low-cost energy.

But in Europe, it has made far slower progress and has met with environmental concerns that have triggered bans on fracking in France and Bulgaria.

Shale Gas Europe, a lobby group, says Spanish shale gas reserves are among the biggest in the world.

"Spain's significant reserves, if technically recoverable, will transform its economy at a time when the country is struggling with a burgeoning debt and has been forced to adopt austerity measures," the group says.

Although there is no reliable data available, some analysts say Spain's shale gas reserves could be as high as 1.4 trillion cubic meters, enough to cover European Union demand for around three years.

Early estimates have, however, proven unreliable in other cases.

Poland, which had hoped to be sitting in some of Europe's biggest reserves, had to slash its initial estimates by 90 percent last year after detailed follow-up surveys and drillings disappointed.

Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant leaking contaminated water

Reuters — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 17:06:00 +0000

As much as 120 tons of radioactive water may have leaked from a storage tank at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, contaminating the surrounding ground, the Tokyo Electric Power Company said on Saturday.

The power company has yet to discover the cause of the leak, detected on one of seven tanks that store water used to cool the plants reactors, a spokesman for the company, Masayuki Ono, said at a press briefing.

The company plans to pump 13,000 cubic meters of water remaining in the tank to other vessels over the next two weeks.

Water from the leaking tank, which located 800 meters from the coast, is not expected to reach the sea, Kyodo news wire reported, earlier, citing unidentified officials from the utility.

The company did not say how long the tank had been leaking.

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant has faced a range of problems with controlling ground water and maintaining the massive cooling system built to keep the reactors stable.

The power company said on Friday said it lost the ability to cool radioactive fuel rods in one of the plant's reactors for about three hours. It was the second failure of the system to circulate seawater to cool spent fuel rods at the plant in the past three weeks.

The facility was the site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in March 2011 when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake triggered a tsunami that destroyed back-up generators and disabled its cooling system. Three of the reactors melted down.

The storage tanks, pits excavated at the site in the wake of the disaster, are lined with water proof sheets meant to keep the contaminated water from leaking into the soil

Work to decommission the plant is projected to take decades to complete.

Egyptian documentary on migratory birds selected by Al Jazeera Festival

Louise Sarant — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 14:50:00 +0000

Gabriel Mikhail is an Egyptian eco-architect, wildlife photographer and creator of “Egypt’s Wilderness,” the country’s first natural history channel on YouTube. He recently directed a 17-minute documentary on migratory soaring birds, “Soaring Legends,” which was first screened during a BirdLife World Congress on how to mitigate threats on birds caused by wind farms in December.

The documentary has been nominated for the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival (18-21 April in Doha) and approved to enter the final stage of the competition.

Mikhail’s film depicts, in a poetic way, the epic journey of migratory birds along the Red Sea flyway across Egypt, along deserts, lofty mountain chains and tumultuous seas. He also highlights the rising number of man-made barriers, which make the journey more dangerous every time.

The film was created through the collective effort of the Egyptian Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs, Birdlife International, the United Nations Development Program and Global Environmental Facility.

Exxon pipeline leaks thousands of barrels of Canadian oil in Arkansas

Reuters — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Exxon Mobil was working to clean up thousands of barrels of oil in Mayflower, Arkansas, after a pipeline carrying heavy Canadian crude ruptured, a major spill likely to stoke debate over transporting Canada's oil to the United States.

Exxon shut the Pegasus pipeline, which can carry more than 90,000 barrels per day of crude oil from Pakota, Illinois, to Nederland, Texas, after the leak was discovered on Friday afternoon, the company said in a statement.

Exxon, hit with a US$1.7 million fine by regulators this week over a 2011 spill in the Yellowstone River, said a few thousand barrels of oil had been observed.

A company spokesman confirmed the line was carrying Canadian Wabasca Heavy crude. That grade is a heavy bitumen crude diluted with lighter liquids to allow it to flow through pipelines, according to the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, which referred to Wabasca as "oil sands" in a report.

The spill occurred as the US State Department is considering the fate of the 800,000 barrels per day Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude from Canada's oil sands to the Gulf Coast. Environmentalists, concerned about the impact of developing the oil sands, have sought to block its approval.

Supporters say Keystone will help bring down the cost of fuel in the US.

The Arkansas spill was the second incident this week where Canadian crude has spilled in the US. On Wednesday, a train carrying Canadian crude derailed in Minnesota, spilling 15,000 gallons of oil.

Exxon expanded the Pegasus pipeline in 2009 to carry more Canadian crude from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast refining hub and installed what it called new "leak detection technology."

Exxon said federal, state and local officials were on site and the company said it was staging a response for a spill of more than 10,000 barrels "to be conservative." Cleanup crews had recovered approximately 4,500 barrels of oil and water.

"The air quality does not likely present a human health risk, with the exception of the high pooling areas, where cleanup crews are working with safety equipment," Exxon said in a statement.

US media said the spill was in a subdivision. Mayflower city police said the oil had not reached Lake Conway nearby.

The US Environmental Protection Agency categorized the rupture as a "major spill," Exxon said, and 22 homes were evacuated following the incident.

A spokesperson for the US Department of Transportation confirmed that an inspector from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration had been sent to the scene to determine what caused the failure. The Environmental Protection Agency is the federal on-scene coordinator for the spill.

Some environmentalists argue that oil sands crudes are more corrosive than conventional oil, although a CEPA report, put together by oil and gas consultancy Penspen, argued diluted bitumen is no more corrosive than other heavy crude.

The US Department of Transportation earlier this week proposed a fine of 1.7 million for Exxon over pipeline safety violations relating to a 2011 oil spill in the Yellowstone River. Exxon's Silvertip pipeline, which carries 40,000 barrels per day of crude in Montana, leaked about 1,500 barrels of oil into the river in July 2011 after heavy flooding in the area.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez supertanker struck a reef in Prince William Sound off Alaska and spilled 250,000 barrels of crude oil.

Monsanto, DuPont settle antitrust, patent lawsuits

Reuters — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:42:00 +0000

Monsanto Co and DuPont have settled a bitter legal battle over rights to technology for genetically modified seeds and will drop antitrust and patent lawsuits against each other in US federal court, the companies said on Tuesday.

The deal tosses out a $1 billion verdict that DuPont owed Monsanto. Instead, it calls for DuPont to make at least $1.75 billion in royalty payments over several years while giving its Pioneer agricultural seeds unit broad access to develop products using Monsanto's leading genetic technology.

"This is a smart deal for DuPont," Paul Schickler, president of DuPont Pioneer, said in an interview. "We've got access to two additional technologies that we can now combine with our existing technologies as well as the technologies that are in our pipeline."

DuPont will have broad rights that include stacking of traits, Schickler said.

DuPont is to pay Monsanto four annual fixed royalty payments totaling $802 million from 2014 to 2017.

Beginning in 2018, it will also pay royalties on a per-unit basis for Genuity Roundup Ready 2 Yield soybean technology and Genuity Roundup Ready 2 Xtend for the life of the agreement for continued technology access. Annual minimum payments through 2023 will total $950 million.

The Xtend soybeans are seen as part of a key next wave of herbicide-resistant crop technology to deal with a wave of herbicide-resistant weeds spreading across US farmland.

The announcement of a settlement comes after last August a jury in the US District Court in St. Louis awarded Monsanto $1 billion, agreeing with the company that DuPont and Pioneer violated a licensing agreement for use of the Roundup Ready trait by trying to stack several traits together.

DuPont was pursuing a separate case against Monsanto alleging anti-competitive behavior.

Under the settlement, both sides are dropping their claims against the other.

Both DuPont and Monsanto hold strong positions in the US seed industry and have been racing against each other and other competitors to develop improved crops through genetic modifications and other means.

Monsanto introduced its Roundup Ready soybean technology in 1996. Roundup Ready crops can tolerate sprayings of Roundup, or glyphosate-based, herbicide. The technology has become a foundation for many key crops, including corn, alfalfa, cotton, canola and sugar beets.

Warming temperatures could multiply Katrina-like hurricanes: study

Reuters — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:25:00 +0000

The number of Atlantic storms with magnitude similar to killer Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, could rise sharply this century, environmental researchers reported on Monday.

Scientists have long studied the relationship between warmer sea surface temperatures and cyclonic, slowly spinning storms in the Atlantic Ocean, but the new study attempts to project how many of the most damaging hurricanes could result from warming air temperatures as well.

The extreme storms are highly sensitive to temperature changes, and the number of Katrina-magnitude events could double due to the increase in global temperatures that occurred in the 20th century, the researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If temperatures continue to warm in the 21st century, as many climate scientists project, the number of Katrina-strength hurricanes could at least double, and possibly rise much more, with every 1.8 degree F (1 degree C) rise in global temperatures, the researchers said.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has run computer simulations suggesting global temperatures could rise by between 3.6 degrees and 10.8 degrees F (2 degrees and 6 degrees C) by century's end.

To figure out how many of the most extreme hurricanes these higher temperatures might spawn, Aslak Grinsted of the Center for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen and his co-authors looked at storm surges, which are often the most damaging aspect of these monster storms.

A storm surge is the abnormal rise in water, over and above normal high tide, pushed toward shore by the winds whipping around a big cyclonic storm. Much of the damage from Hurricane Katrina, an estimated $108 billion, was caused by high storm surges across a wide area of the Gulf of Mexico coast, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Superstorm Sandy, which plowed into the northeastern U.S. coast with hurricane-strength winds last year, cost an estimated $75 billion, NOAA said.

The researchers looked at storm surges going back to 1923, and related those to how warm air temperatures were when the surges occurred. Then, using computer models, they projected how storm surges might be influenced by future warming.

Storm surges can be a more accurate gauge of a hurricane's severity than wind speed, like those on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, Grinsted said by phone from Denmark.

"When people talk about (hurricane) intensity normally, then they mean wind speed," he said. "But that is not what is causing the most damage only. Sometimes it's about how fast it is traveling."

He said that was the case with Sandy, which traveled so slowly and stretched over such a wide area that its impact was intense, even though wind speeds abated somewhat by landfall.

Previous research on the link between climate change and hurricanes has suggested that there may be fewer hurricanes overall but more stronger ones as global temperatures rise.

This study indicates there will be an increase of hurricanes of all magnitudes, but the increase will be greatest for the most extreme events.