Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The opposition Labor Party has called on the Australian government to prepare for a "flood" of refugees from the Pacific Islands as sea level rises. "Australia needs to establish an international coalition, particularly from Pacific rim countries, so that when a country does become uninhabitable Australia does its fair share," argued Anthony Albanese, opposition environment spokesman. "The Howard government can't continue to simply pretend that this is an issue that doesn't have to be dealt with in our region." Moreover, "we need to establish a United Nations charter in terms of refugee recognition which isn't there at the moment in terms of environmental refugees," he concluded.

The Australian government was quick to dismiss the call for action. "To start planning an evacuation of the Pacific is really a ludicrous policy," responded environment minister Ian Campbell. "We've established the world's leading sea-level change monitoring equipment across the Pacific, in cooperation with our Pacific neighbours and we work on a range of adaptation measures with them. But to be planning in the year 2006 for something that may not happen for 20, 30, 40 years, or may not happen at all (is wrong), when there are so many things that we need to be doing." Nevertheless, the Labor plan was welcomed by Pacific islanders. "Tuvalu does support the development of new policies that support the Pacific by any future Australian government," said Prime Minister Maatia Toafa. "The proposals... are very much in line with the Marshall Islands thinking," said the foreign minister Gerald Zachios of the Marshall Islands.

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• Yahoo
• ABC Online (with video report)
• ABC Online
• New Zealand Herald
• Press release, ALP

• The Australian

Research by a multi-institutional team has shown that large-scale plantations, while offsetting carbon emissions, can have adverse effects on the environment. "We believe that decreased stream flow and changes in soil and water quality are likely as plantations are increasingly grown for biological carbon sequestration," the ten authors concluded in a paper in the journal Science. The study, led by Duke University, was based on field data and modelling.

"After about ten years' growth under intensive plantations, about one-in-eight of the streams that were in the areas that we studied had no flow for a year or more, and overall there was a 50 per cent reduction in stream flow," reported Damien Barrett from CSIRO in Australia. Using plantations as a means of managing the carbon concentration in the atmosphere is "about trade-offs, it's about maximizing carbon sequestration benefit and minimizing the adverse flow-on effects by locating plantations in the landscape," he concludes.

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• ABC Online
• EO News
• Press release, Duke University

• Research paper, Duke University

A new study concludes that the world is running out of fertile land and that food production may fail to keep up with the planet's growing population. The results are based on maps of global land use derived from satellite information and agricultural census data. Navin Ramankutty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States said that "the maps show, very strikingly, that a large part of our planet (roughly 40 per cent) is being used for either growing crops or grazing cattle." "One of the major changes we see is the fast expansion of soybeans in Brazil and Argentina, grown for export to China and the EU," he continued.

There is concern that there is little space left for agricultural expansion. "Except for Latin America and Africa, all the places in the world where we could grow crops are already being cultivated. The remaining places are either too cold or too dry to grow crops," warned Ramankutty. The project will continue with the development of the Earth Collaboratory, an internet-based databank drawing on the expertise of scientists, environmentalists and the public world-wide.

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• Guardian
• National Geographic
• Press release, UW-Madison

• Global Land Use Database, UW-Madison