Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The inaugural meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP-6) took place in Sydney, Australia, January 11-12th 2006. The six nations involved are Australia, China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United States. The aim of the partnership, according to United States energy secretary Samuel Bodman, is to "work together with the private sector... to take concrete action to meet energy and environment needs while securing a more prosperous future for our citizens." In a statement issued at the end of the meeting, outlining the partnership's strategy, the group said that it recognized that "fossil fuels underpin our economies, and will be an enduring reality for our lifetimes and beyond. It is therefore critical that we work together to develop, demonstrate and implement cleaner and lower emissions technologies that allow for the continued economic use of fossil fuels while addressing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions." At the meeting, both China and India stressed the role of technology transfer and poverty alleviation.

The partners have stressed that the alliance rests on a non-binding compact designed to complement rather than replace the Kyoto Protocol. "While Kyoto puddles on nicely, the real reductions will come from technology," claimed Ian Macfarlane, Australia's Minister for Industry. "This is not a diplomatic love-in. It's a hard-edged business plan with targets and reporting duties," he continued. Catherine Fitzpatrick of Greenpeace reckons that the new agreement is more a trade pact than an environmental solution. "The short-term interests of the fossil-fuel sector have been put ahead of the long-term health and welfare of ordinary people," she concluded. The inaugural meeting set up task forces covering cleaner fossil-fuel energy, renewable energy, power generation, steel, aluminium, cement, coal mining, and buildings and appliances.

More information

• Yahoo
• Christian Science Monitor

• Press release, AP-6/Scoop
• Outcomes documents, AP-6

Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues claim to have discovered a new source for methane, arguing that plants may produce up to a third of this greenhouse gas. "We suggest that this newly identified source may have important implications for the global methane budget and may call for a reconsideration of the role of natural methane sources in past climate change," they write in a Nature article. It had previously been thought that methane could only be produced in environments that lack oxygen, but laboratory experiments demonstrated that plants emit methane even under normal, oxygen-rich conditions. "Until now all the textbooks have said that biogenic methane can only be produced in the absence of oxygen," Keppler says. "For that simple reason, nobody looked closely at this."

The results could bring into question the effectiveness of tree planting to soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide. "We now have the spectre that new forests might increase greenhouse warming through methane emissions rather than decrease it by being 'sinks' for carbon dioxide," noted David Lowe of New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. Craig Trotter, at Landcare Research, based in Lincoln, New Zealand, questioned whether methane emissions from forests occur from all species under all conditions or only when trees were under stress. "Even if such small emissions do occur, there remain major benefits in using forests to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions," he said, estimating that New Zealand's plantation forests would remain between 95 per cent and 99 per cent effective at offsetting greenhouse gas emissions even taking into account the methane handicap.

More information

• Stuff
• Guardian
• SciDev.Net

• Link to Nature paper, SciDev.Net

A fungal disease driven by climate change threatens hundreds of species of amphibians, according to a recent report. "Disease is the bullet that's killing the frogs," said the study's lead scientist J Alan Pounds of the Tropical Science Center's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica. "But climate change is pulling the trigger. Global warming is wreaking havoc on amphibians and soon will cause staggering losses of biodiversity," he concluded.

The mechanism identified by the research lies in the effect of climate warming on the dynamics of the fungal infection. Higher temperatures lead to greater cloud cover and hence cooler days but warmer nights, which moderates the temperature range and favours the disease. Extremes in temperature kill the fungus. According to the 2004 Global Amphibian Assessment, nearly one-third of the world's 6,000 or so species of frogs, toads and salamanders face extinction as a result of a diverse range of pressures.

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Background

• New York Times
• Independent
• Press release, NSF

• Chytrid fungus, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service