The Environment in the News

Spanning the width and breadth of Canada — and present in the childhood memories of many — the national parks system has been an iconic institution for the last century.

And on Thursday, Parks Canada is celebrating its 100th birthday. The organization oversees 42 national parks, 167 historical sites, four national marine conservation areas and even the grave sites of former prime ministers.

Its mandate is to protect unique instances of Canada's cultural and natural landscapes and present those to Canadians — including future generations. Not surprisingly, this puts preservation of those landscapes high on its agenda.

Here is a look at 100 years of Parks Canada.

Photo of Two Jack Lake in Banff National Park from the Canada Press

In the past year floods have submerged cities as far apart as Nashville, Tenn., and Nowshera, Pakistan (and Central Canada). An epic heat wave touched off peat fires in Moscow that wreathed the capital in smoke. A drought in northeastern China ruined the wheat crop. Blizzards left the U.S. buried in snow—and collapsed the roof of a football stadium. “It is a reasonable question: Is human influence on climate anything to do with this nasty bit ofweather we’re having?” physicist Myles Allen of the University of Oxford said in a recent press briefing.

It hasn’t been an easy question to answer. But now, after years of research, scientists have begun to detect a human fingerprint in many extreme weather patterns.

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With extreme and destructive weather events occurring with greater and greater frequency, from violent tornadoes to extreme flooding, it is important that we consider the further implications of climate change. These extreme events are likely to make their way to our media outlets, however, the millions of climate refugees take the form of not only flood and storm refugees, but those escaping drought and desertification. Will the world's food supply be a next "wake-up" call for global action on climate change?

HIGH WATERS: Nashville, Tenn., on May 3, 2010. Image: Mark Humphrey, AP Photo

UNITED NATIONS — Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving "Mother Earth" the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country. The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to "dominate and exploit" — to the point that the "well-being and existence of many beings" is now threatened.

"If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) who have rights are humans or companies, then how can you reach balance?" Pablo Salon, Bolivia's ambassador to the UN, told Postmedia News. "But if you recognize that nature too has rights, and (if you provide) legal forms to protect and preserve those rights, then you can achieve balance."

Forests will spread north into areas of previously bleak tundra, and ice cover once thought to be permanent will retreat, uncovering new tundra by the end of this century, according to climate scientists from University of Nebraska-Lincoln and South Korea.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Climate Dynamics, used historic climate models and more than a century’s worth of observations to extrapolate how the Arctic will change as the earth warms up. Song Feng, research assistant professor in UNL's School of Natural Resources and the study's lead author, said up to up to half of the Arctic could become more temperate, and as trees spread north the warming effect will increase. Tundra regions will be reduced by 33 to 44 percent by the end of this century, with coniferous and needle-leaf trees moving in.

Global warming may cause human health problems due to microbes, bacteria, and toxic algae blooms in coming decades, new research suggests.

Scientists had already predicted more deaths and illnesses due to heat waves, natural disasters, and the expansion of tropical diseases such as malaria. But other, less obvious health threats will likely arise as warming changes the ecology of ocean and freshwater environments in coming decades, experts said in February at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C.

These include:

1) Contamination of seafood by toxic algae

2) Rapid growth of harmful ocean bacteria

3) Increased sewage which will taint drinking water

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Wednesday marks the 125th-anniversary Groundhog Day celebrations in Punsutawney, Pennsylvania. (See Groundhog Day pictures.)

As usual, revelers are expected to converge on the small Pennsylvania town to hear an overweight groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil predict the weather—despite a winter storm warning issued by the National Weather service.

"We might be running plows and snow blowers 15 minutes before the prognostication," Punxsutawney Phil caretaker Bill Deeley told the Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper Monday.

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The rate at which species are disappearing from Planet Earth is horrifying. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the rate is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural rate of extinction. This is largely due to human activity. The United Nations declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity to raise awareness of the critical role that biological diversity plays in sustaining life.

At the same time, nations are grappling with thorny questions of how to slow climate change. The UN is currently convening its 16th climate change conference in Cancún, Mexico, where bold steps may be taken to protect forests as a means of lowering carbon emissions.

[CANCUN, MEXICO] Bamboo, a wild grass that grows in Africa, Asia and Latin America, could help tackle climate change and provide income for local communities, a conference has heard.

It can sequester carbon faster than similar fast-growing tree species such as Chinese fir and eucalyptus when properly managed, said Coosje Hoogendoorn, director-general of International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), based in Beijing, China.

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Learn more about Climate Change and Forests

A new study in Science has found that the incredible biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest goes back much further than expected, perhaps upending old ideas about how the Amazon basin became arguably the world's most biodiverse ecosystem. According to the study, the origin of rich biodiversity in the Amazon likely goes back more than 20 million years when the Andean mountains were rising.

"The Andean mountain building profoundly affected the diversity and evolution of the Amazonian biota. It would be difficult to name any major group of Amazonian plants or animals whose fate had not been touched in some way by the formation of the vast Andean mountain chain," William Laurance, a conservation biologist at James Cook University who has spent decades working in the tropics, told mongabay.com. Laurance was not involved with the study.

Let that sink in for a second: Over a period of 18 hours and 40 minutes on September 29th, Muhammed Yousuf Jamil, a Lance Naik (Lance Corporal) in the Pakistani Army single-handedly planted 20,101 tree saplings--a new Guinness World Record, set at the pace of over 18 trees a minute. Now that's the spirit! The total would have been higher, but monitoring officials disqualified some 400 saplings on the grounds that they were "poorly planted".

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Numerous small oil spills along B.C.'s coast might not cause the same level of damage as BP's massive oil spill in the southern U.S., but a University of Victoria researcher on Vancouver Island says they still pose a threat to wildlife.

Graduate student Norma Serra-Sogas examined data from Transport Canada surveillance flights that spotted what they believed to be oil. In the 10 years of data, there were more than 500 spills along B.C.'s coast.

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In a pioneering use of computed tomography (CT) scans, scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have discovered that carbon dioxide (CO2)-induced global warming is in the process of killing off a major coral species in the Red Sea. As summer sea surface temperatures have remained about 1.5 degrees Celsius above ambient over the last 10 years, growth of the coral, Diploastrea heliopora, has declined by 30% and "could cease growing altogether by 2070" or sooner, they report in the July 16 issue of the journal Science.

"The warming in the Red Sea and the resultant decline in the health of this coral is a clear regional impact of global warming," said Neal E. Cantin, a WHOI postdoctoral investigator and co-lead researcher on the project. In the 1980s, he said, "the average summer [water] temperatures were below 30 degrees Celsius. In 2008 they were approaching 31 degrees."  

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Why are tropical forests so biologically rich? Smithsonian researchers have new evidence that the answer to one of life's great unsolved mysteries lies underground, according to a study published in the journal, Nature.

What determines plant diversity in a forest? It's a question even Charles Darwin wanted to unravel. But most research into forest diversity demonstrates only patterns of species survival and abundance rather than the reason for them -- until now.

A team of researchers led by biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) has shown that soil-borne pathogens are one important mechanism that can maintain species diversity and explain patterns of tree abundance in a forest.

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                       (Credit: Marcos Guerra--STRI)

GULF SHORES, Ala. (AP) -- Dolphins and sharks are showing up in surprisingly shallow water off Florida beaches, like forest animals fleeing a fire. Mullets, crabs, rays and small fish congregate by the thousands off an Alabama pier. Birds covered in oil are crawling deep into marshes, never to be seen again.

Marine scientists studying the effects of the BP disaster are seeing some strange phenomena.

Fish and other wildlife seem to be fleeing the oil out in the Gulf and clustering in cleaner waters along the coast in a trend that some researchers see as a potentially troubling sign.

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OTTAWA — Forestry companies announced Tuesday a pact with environmentalists to stop logging huge swathes of Canada's boreal forest and protect caribou herds in exchange for suspending protests.

Twenty-one members of the Forest Products Association of Canada, who manage two-thirds of Canada's forests, agreed to suspend new logging on nearly 29 million hectares of the boreal forest.

They also will adopt strict new environmentally-sensitive forestry practices in an area twice the size of Germany, or 72 million hectares, and develop conservation plans for endangered species in this region, including caribou.

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According to Purdue, professor Guofan Shao started to notice something strange in their data. He studies this reserve to understand the impacts of biodiversity on the ecology, economy, and sociology and reduce biodiversity loss in 551 sites worldwide. Mount Paekdu has one of the world's highest levels of plant biodiversity and is home to the endangered Siberian tiger, which means he and his colleagues watch this area like hawks. So when NASA satellite data showed changes happening to the land, he turned to Google Earth to get high resolution images to see what was going on. READ MORE

Planet Earth’s oceans now have a second confirmed garbage patch filled with plastic detritus.

The discovery of the first garbage patch is credited to Charles Moore, an ocean researcher who discovered the large patch of plastic floating in the Pacific in 1997. Now, the Atlantic can lay claim to a human produced waste patch of its own.

Wife and husband team Anna Cummins and Marcus Eriksen sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in February between Bermuda and Portugal’s mid-Atlantic Azores Islands. In the middle of the Atlantic is the Sargasso Sea, an area surrounded by various ocean currents, including the well known Gulf Stream. The pair took samples every 100 miles (160 kilometres) and each time they pulled up their trawl it was full of plastic. 

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One of the fondest memories of my honeymoon was kayaking through the mangrove forests on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. The trees were mystical, something out of a fairy tale. That's why I was more than a little saddened to learn that forests of this kind all over the world are in serious decline. In fact, many of them are threatened with extinction.

The first ever global assessment of the world's mangrove forests found that 11 of the 70 species of mangrove trees are threatened with extinction. They've been added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species™. According to the study, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Central America, where as many as 40 percent of mangrove species are found, have experienced the most serious declines.

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Coral reefs are dying, and scientists and governments around the world are contemplating what will happen if they disappear altogether.

The idea positively scares them.

Coral reefs are part of the foundation of the ocean food chain. Nearly half the fish the world eats make their homes around them. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide — by some estimates, 1 billion across Asia alone — depend on them for their food and their livelihoods.

If the reefs vanished, experts say, hunger, poverty and political instability could ensue.

"Whole nations will be threatened in terms of their existence," said Carl Gustaf Lundin of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. 

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Delegates at a global wildlife conservation conference voted Sunday to protect a coveted salamander but rejected a more sweeping proposal that would have regulated the trade of red and pink corals worldwide.

The latest round of voting at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) underscored nations' unwillingness to forgo immediate economic gains from exploiting natural resources, even when these activities are putting plants and animals under intense pressure.

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As any TreeHugger worth his or her epiphytes knows, preserving tropical rainforests is a major part of preventing the worst of climate change--deforestation itself causing nearly as many carbon emissions as the entire transportation sector. But over the past year there have been a number of studies all essentially claiming that one particular type of forest or another stored more carbon than rainforests and why aren't we trying hard to protect them too? Which is a fair enough question to ask. So let's quickly sort it out a bit and provide some context. 

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It's easy to be cynical or pessimistic about the spotting of a rare type of bird, the creation of a national park, or the establishment of a protected species list in a country such as Afghanistan. Where violence and poverty are rife, why should time, money, and energy be spent protecting animals or landscapes? Isn't such work at best futile, at worst detracting from meeting real needs? To such questions, the founder of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)'s Afghanistan Program has offered a compelling defense.

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Most people wouldn’t consider an earthquake to be an environmental issue. But while the tremors that shattered Haiti early this month have nothing to do with the island’s degradation, the extent of the suffering they unleashed is a direct result of the country’s ecological woes.

The reason can be seen from the sky. The devastated nation shares its island with the Dominican Republic, but misfortune always seems to strike on its side of a border that is demarcated by an abrupt shift from lush green to bare brown. While the Dominican Republic has largely managed to preserve its trees, Haiti has lost 98 percent of its forest cover.

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