The Environment Chronicle

On 3 November 2010 the European Commission proposed safety standards for disposing spent fuel and radioactive waste from nuclear power plants as well as from medicine or research. In this Directive Member States are asked to present national programmes, indicating when, where and how they will construct and manage final repositories aimed at guaranteeing the highest safety standards. With the Directive internationally agreed safety standards become legally binding and enforceable in the European Union.

On 1st April 2010, the British Government announced designation of the British Indian Ocean Territory – or Chagos Archipelago – as the world’s largest marine protected area (MPA). Commercial fishing around Chagos ended on 31 October 2010 making it officially the largest no-take marine protected area (MPA) in the world.

Marine species of November 2010 in the International Year of Biodiversity is the Stephos longipes – an ice copepod. Stephos longipes is a small neritic calanoid copepod that is native to waters surrounding the Antarctic continent. Copepods are crustaceans that range from less than one to twelve millimetres in size and occur in the ocean from the shallow shelf areas to the deepest depths. In most marine regions they represent both the most frequent and the most diverse species of zooplankton.

On 29 October 2010 the European Commission published guidelines for wind energy development in protected natural areas. The guidelines are aimed at avoiding conflict between wind energy development and biodiversity conservation in Natura 2000 protected areas. The guidelines apply to the Natura 2000 network, a cornerstone of EU biodiversity policy and a key tool to achieve the EU target of halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2020. Wind energy has an important role to play in meeting the EU target of 20% renewable energy in Europe’s total energy consumption by 2020, and its deployment in Natura 2000 areas is not automatically excluded. But such developments need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.

On 29 October 2010 some 18,000 participants representing the 193 Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and their partners closed the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit by adopting historic decisions that will permit the community of nations to meet the unprecedented challenges of the continued loss of biodiversity compounded by climate change. The meeting took decisions in three key areas: participants adopted a new target and an ambitious strategy on the global conservation of biological diversity from 2011 to 2020, set binding financing targets for its implementation and adopted internationally binding regulations for access to genetic resources and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from their utilization.

Despite public protests and angry diatribes from the opposition, the German parliament has approved legislation extending the lifespan of the country's nuclear power plants.

On 27 October 2010 the General Court of the European Union (EU) revoked a temporary suspension of the EU regulation banning the trade in seal products, allowing the full implementation of this momentous legislation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the special MIDORI Prize for biodiversity in recognition for her special contribution to saving biodiversity during the International Year of Biodiversity. The MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity was announced at an awards ceremony held 27 October at a reception hosted by the Japanese Minister of Environment in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, on the margins of the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention. The MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to conservation and sustainable use at local and global levels, and who have developmentally influenced various biodiversity-related efforts, as well as raising awareness about biodiversity.

From January 2011, petrol with a bioethanol share of up to 10 percent will be available at German filling stations in addition to the current types of petrol. On 27 October 2010 the Federal Cabinet adopted a corresponding ordinance, thus implementing the European Fuel Quality Directive.

The water level at the Three Gorges Dam in China reached its designed highest mark on 26 October 2010. The water level hit 175 meters at 9 a.m. Tuesday, said Cao Guangjing, chairman of the China Three Gorges Project Corporation (CTGPC), the developer of the project.

The German city of Freiburg has been elected Federal capital of climate protection 2010 (Hauptstadt im Klimaschutz) by the German Environmental Aid (Deutschen Umwelthilfe).

The Rio Negro river, one of the Amazon river's largest tributaries, registered historic draught levels on 24 October 2010. The government's geological service said that the Rio Negro was measured at a depth of 13.63 meters (44.72 feet) near the jungle city of Manaus, the lowest since a measuring system was implemented in 1902.

An electric car drove from Munich in southern Germany to Berlin without recharging its battery on on 26 October 2010, setting what organisers hailed as a new world distance record for an everyday vehicle.

On 20 October 2010 the final TEEB report was launched at the CBD COP10 meeting in Nagoya, Japan. "Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature" is the last of four reports produced by the U.N. Environmental Program over the past two years and aims to capture how habitats such as tropical forests and coral reefs contribute to countries' economic bottom lines.

The tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, hosted by the Government of Japan takes place from 18 to 29 October 2010.

Federal Cabinet adopted on 17 November 2010 the first report tracking indicators for the National Strategy on Biological Diversity. The report gives an account of the positive progress of nature conservation in Germany. In November 2007, the German Government adopted an internationally acclaimed National Strategy on Biological Diversity. It contains some 330 objectives and 430 specific actions that are assigned to both state and non-state actors. The report lays the foundation for a reliable and transparent performance review. It contains 19 indicators for this purpose, covering a wide range of topics.

On 16 October 1990, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands signed the first Agreement under the Bonn Convention. The Agreement on the Conservation of Seals in the Wadden Sea was concluded after the first distemper in 1988, when almost 60% of the seal population in the Wadden Sea died. The recovery of seals in the Wadden Sea is a true success story of the Agreement. For Seal numbers in the trilateral Wadden Sea are on the rise. In total, about 21,600 Harbour Seals were counted in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands during the seal census in 2009. Also for the Grey Seals, though formally not covered by the Agreement on the Conservation of Seals in the Wadden Sea but protected indirectly through the Agreement, the increasing population trend has continued during the last years. In 2009, around 2,800 Grey Seals were counted in the entire Wadden Sea area.

On 15 October 2010 a new international treaty, “the Nagoya – Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol on Liability and Redress to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety”, was adopted at one of the largest intergovernmental meetings ever held on the safe use of modern biotechnology in Nagoya, Japan. The adoption of the new treaty came at the end of the five-day meeting of the governing body of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (known as the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Protocol or COP-MOP 5) and concluded six years of negotiations. The new supplementary Protocol provides international rules and procedure on liability and redress for damage to biodiversity resulting from living modified organisms (LMO). The new treaty shall be open for signature at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from 7 March 2011 to 6 March 2012 and will enter into force 90 days after being ratified by at least 40 Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.

Real time maps of air, ground and water pollution can now be made available to everyone thanks to an EU-funded research project called INTAMAP. The INTAMAP project has developed open specifications software to draw up contour maps that not only show the exact location of polluted areas but also illustrate where pollution is coming from and where it is headed. Such information enables public authorities to decide more quickly on appropriate action to tackle the source of the pollution and allows individuals to avoid it. Researchers from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands and the UK worked on the project which received some €1.8 million in EU funding. Applying ICT research to benefit Europe's citizens and businesses is a key element of the Digital Agenda for Europe adopted by the Commission in May 2010.

On 9 October tens of thousands of people took part in Munich anti-nuclear protest. A focus of the protest was the formation of a human chain, about 10 kilometers long, through the center of the city. Organizers said that some 50,000 people in all took part in the day's events, while police put the number at around 25,000. The event was the largest of its kind in Bavaria for more than two decades.

A new species of small carnivore, known as Durrell’s vontsira (Salanoia durrelli) has been identified by researchers from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Natural History Museum, London, Nature Heritage, Jersey, and Conservation International (CI). The small, cat-sized, speckled brown carnivore from the marshes of the Lac Alaotra wetlands in central eastern Madagascar weighs just over half a kilogramme and belongs to a family of carnivores only known from Madagascar.

Brüssel, 07 October 2010: With easy-to-reach oil becoming harder to find, there has been an increase in potentially hazardous deep-sea exploration and drilling. While the Environment Committee and many MEPs favoured a moratorium on any new deep-sea drilling in the EU, a majority (323 votes to 285) considered this a step too far.

On October 4, 2010 at 12:30 the western dam of cassette X of the sludge reservoir, owned by Magyar Alumínium ZRt (Hungarian Aluminum Co), had ruptured. Due to the ruptured dam, a mixture of 600-700 thousand m3 of red sludge and water inundated the lower sections of the settlements of Kolontár, Devecser and Somlóvásárhely via the Torna creek.

Forests and other wooded areas occupy almost 40% of the total area of the EU, cropland nearly a quarter and grassland a further fifth, while built-up and other artificial areas, such as roads and railways, account for 4%. Regarding socio-economic use, over 40% of the land in the EU is used for agriculture and almost 30% for forestry. The use of land for residential, commercial and industrial purposes accounts for just over 10% of the total area of the EU. These data are published for the first time by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union and are based on a large scale land survey, the Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS), conducted in 2009.

The huge 10-year study involved 2,700 scientists from 80 nations and has revealed what, where, and how much marine life there is in the world’s oceans. The variety of life uncovered in the census is much more than many experts had imagined. So far, 1,200 new species have been officially named and there are 5000 more awaiting descriptions. The total number of marine species described is now about 244,000, but experts estimate there could be more than 1 million. And new species are being described at a rate of about 1,900 per year. The scientific results were reported on October 4, 2010.

Ursula Heinen-Esser, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Environment Ministry accepted the UNESCO certificate recognising the German-Dutch Wadden Sea as World Natural Heritage on behalf of the German government on 2 Oktober 2010. The ceremony took place aboard a ship in the German Wadden Sea.

Marine species of October 2010 in the International Year of Biodiversity is the Southern Elephant Seal (Mirounga leonina). The southern elephant seal, Mirounga leonina, is the biggest species of seal and its total number is estimated at 750,000 animals. To gain an insight into the underwater world of the seals, marine biologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven have been using special satellite transmitters on the animals for several years. The data obtained in this way are of the utmost interest for oceanographers as well.

The world's rivers are in crisis, according to a study by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology and the City College of New York (CCNY) that is published in the Sept. 30, 2010 issue of the scientific journal Nature. The study, led by UW-Madison limnologist and professor of zoology Peter McIntyre and CCNY modeler Charles Vörösmarty, combines, for the first time, indices of water security and biodiversity for all of the world's rivers, many of which are severely degraded due to issues of pollution, water diversion and introduced species.

The European Commission is urging five Member States to comply with EU air quality standards. Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia have so far failed to effectively tackle excess emissions of tiny airborne particles known as PM10. The Member States have two months to comply with the reasoned opinion under EU infringement procedures. In the absence of satisfactory responses from the Member States concerned, the Commission may refer them to the European Court of Justice. Airborne particles (PM10) are mainly present in pollutant emissions from industry, traffic and domestic heating. They can cause asthma, cardiovascular problems, lung cancer and premature death.

Environmental organisations in Argentina are celebrating the passage of a law restricting the extraction of minerals, oil and gas near glaciers, in order to protect these vast freshwater reserves. By a vote of 35 to 33, the Senate in Argentina approved a bill to preserve glaciers and their surrounding areas on 30 September 2010. The new law stipulates that glaciers are "public goods" and forbids "destroying or moving" the huge ice masses.

On 28 September 2010, the German Government adopted its new Energy Concept for the period until 2050.

On 27 September 2010,the world’s largest solar boat MS TÛRANOR PlanetSolar started on its journey around the world in Monaco. With this expedition, the iniatiors of this project would like to focus the public awareness on the importance of renewable energies for environmental protection.

On 24 September 2010, the Contracting Parties to the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) designated the first ever network of marine protected areas in the high seas beyond national jurisdiction. With the decisions, the area covered by marine protected areas in the North-East Atlantic has been expanded to 433,000 square kilometres, which is equal in size to the Baltic Sea. Now a total of around 3 percent of the North-East Atlantic is under protection. Two of the six areas designated today lie beyond national jurisdiction in the high seas.

On 23 September 2010, Vattenfall inaugurated the Thanet Offshore Wind Farm, off the south east coast of England, currently the largest offshore wind farm in the world. With its 100 turbines, the Thanet Offshore Wind Farm has a combined energy capacity corresponding to the annual electricity needs of over 200,000 households.

As a contribution to the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity, which the General Assembly proclaimed in 2006 to stress the necessity to reverse the continued loss of biodiversity (A/RES/61/203 ), the General Assembly convened a high-level meeting on biodiversity on 22 September 2010.

The EU needs to halt biodiversity loss by 2020 and to restore biodiversity wherever feasible, says Parliament in a resolution approved on 21 September 2010. MEPs deeply regret that the aim of halting biodiversity loss by 2010 has not been met and they believe that biodiversity conservation should be mainstreamed in all EU policy areas. The resolution was approved by a show of hands.

Tens of thousands demonstrated in Berlin on 18 September 2010 against plans by the government to extend the lifetimes of Germany's nuclear power stations. Organizers said the protest drew 100,000 people. Police put the figure much lower, at around 40,000 according to initial estimates. Opposition party leaders joined the peaceful march around Berlin's government district.

Scientists from the German Primate Center (DPZ) in Göttingen have identified a new species: the northern buffed-cheeked gibbon, Nomascus annamensis. Researchers were able to identify it through its characteristic vocalizations. An analysis of the frequency and tempo of their calls, along with genetic research, show that this is, in fact, a new species. Crested gibbons, a monogamous species that live in the tree tops of tropical jungles, are among the most endangered primate species in the world. Knowledge of their biology and distribution is of great importance for their conservation (Vietnamese Journal of Primatology 1(4), 2010). Crested gibbons are only found in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and southern China. Until now, it has been assumed that there are six different species, their territories separated by rivers. The German-American-Vietnamese research team led by Christian Roos has now been able to identify a seventh species.

In 2010, the summer sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean will reach one of its lowest levels in the past 20 years. This is shown in analyses of satellite pictures carried out by Prof. Dr. Lars Kaleschke at the University of Hamburg's KlimaCampus. The average expected for this September is one of the four lowest figures shown since satellite analyses were first carried out early in the 1970s. Scientist registered the lowest expansion of sea ice at 4.2 million square kilometers in 2007. The minimum expanse of sea ice fluctuates considerably from one year to the next; on a statistical average, the area has been reduced by around eight per cent every ten years since 1970.