DAILY QUICK READ - JULY 15, 2016

Climate Change

The processes that drive droughts and massive wet weather happen on a global scale.  As the Sahel became drier and less capable of sustaining crops and herds, the blame was laid on human behavior.  There was a global response and project to prevent such events.  Guess what, they won’t work because the droughts were caused by climate change not the behavior of farmers and goat herds.

Since the great Sahelian droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, we’ve become familiar with the idea that humans cause environmental degradation and destruction on a huge scale.

Local people, usually herders and pastoralists with too many animals, strip the vegetation, blow the soils away and temperatures climb as the merciless sun shines down on the newly reflective landscape. Often, hunger and conflict ensues. This is a powerful metaphor – a morality tale – for what humankind is doing to the earth, and the answers to this simple narrative can seem as equally simple: move people and their animals into settlements, fence-off land and plant trees.

The desertification story has had enormous influence.

…the great Sahelian droughts of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s did not happen because unintelligent local people were over-exploiting their land but because of global climate changes brought about by fluctuations in the composition of atmospheric greenhouse gases and particulates.

North Korea’s Involvement

From the Conservation Action Trust - North Korean diplomats in Mozambique and South Africa are accused of involvement in all forms of smuggling and illegal behavior, including abetting poaching of rhino horns in the Kruger National Park.

The fatal breach in South Africa’s defence against rhino poaching in the Kruger National Park is Mozambique – and corrupt diplomats are continually widening it.

According to a study just released by Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, the country is incapable of disrupting the criminal syndicates that have turned it into a major trans-shipment point for rhino horn, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and dagga. The value of illegal drug trade in Mozambique, it claims, is probably greater than all foreign aid combined.

Global Initiative rhino investigator Julian Rademeyer found that the corruption permeating every level of the Mozambique state and the country’s leaky ports, airports and borders made it a smuggler’s paradise. Of great concern is what he describes as “dodgy diplomats”, particularly North Koreans, using this weakness to smuggle illicit products.

Once hailed as a post-civil war success story, Mozambique, he says, is a country in crisis, paralysed by rampant corruption, a weak judiciary, an ineffectual and criminally compromised police force, and powerful criminal syndicates with tentacles reaching into every level of the state.

The Global Initiative report highlights the increasing role and impunity of North Korean diplomats in criminal activities in the southern African region. An example was the arrest, in Maputo in May 2015, of a North Korean diplomat and a Taekwon-Do instructor after 4.5kg of rhino horn and $100,000 was found in their vehicle. Police detained them and impounded the vehicle.

Within hours of learning of the incident, the North Korean ambassador to South Africa, Yong Man-ho, was on a flight from Johannesburg to Maputo. The diplomats were released after paying $30,000 and the vehicle was returned to them.

WWF Plan to Save Sharks

Sharks are critical to the health of the Great Barrier Reef.  It’s a complex relationship, but sharks, like all apex predators are key contributor to healthy ecosystems.

“It’s a new approach to conservation,” WWF-Australia's Conservation Director Gilly Llewellyn said in a statement released Wednesday. “This is an opportunity for people to help stop a massive 1.2 km [0.7 mile] long net from sitting in Reef waters and indiscriminately killing almost everything that swims into it. These enormous nets kill tens of thousands of juvenile sharks each year.”

The license that the WWF is hoping to buy was, between 1993 and 2004, used to catch an average of 10,000 sharks per year. However, since then, the license — which its current owner has put up for purchase — has not been used even once.

“Someone could buy it tomorrow and go fishing with it in a couple of months' time and it could be catching sharks again,” Llewellyn told ABC News, in response to questions about how worthwhile the purchase would be.

Ecosystems Require Diversity

When humans take over the neighborhood things go to hell.   And, we will eventually pay the price.

In an ambitious study that represents the latest merger between big data approaches and the quest to conserve the planet, scientists have found that across a majority of the Earth’s land surface — including some of its most important types of terrain and its most populous regions — the abundance or overall number of animals and plants of different species has fallen below a “safe” level identified by biologists.

The reason is not exactly a surprise — from grasslands to tropical forests, humans are using more and more land for agriculture, to live on, to and build roads and infrastructure upon. When we take over, we clear the land or otherwise convert it for our purposes. This doesn’t always cause extinctions, but it does reduce the abundance of species and what researchers call the “intactness” of ecosystems — and when biodiversity levels fall too low, it can mean that larger ecosystems lose their resilience or even, at the extreme, cease to function.

The research is based on a “planetary boundaries” concept that “attempts to set some sort of safe limit to the amount of biodiversity we can lose, while biodiversity still supports important ecosystem functions,” said Newbold, the study’s lead author. And it is important to note that in the context of this analysis, safety actually means safe for humans, in significant part.

The concern is that species-anemic ecosystems will struggle or fail, and so become unable to provide us what we actually need in the form of stored carbon, filtered water, fertile soils and much else. Animals need these ecosystem “services,” to be sure, but so do humans.