Green Earth Africa

It has been a bad year for rhinos in South Africa. Many more got killed than in 2010, the 333 toll of which was described with words like “shocking” and “outrageous”. Most thought it couldn’t get worse.

It’s got much worse. The tally for 2011 is at least 433. It could end up being higher, for even as the year drew to a close, reports kept coming in of more dead rhinos found with gruesome wounds or just stumps left where their horns had been.

• Friday, December 2 – two white rhinos found shot in a private park in a mountainous region north of Johannesburg;

• Saturday, December 3 – a black rhino found shot in the far north of South Africa near the border crossing into Zimbabwe;

 • Wednesday, December 7 – four white rhinos found killed in private reserves just outside the western boundary of South Africa’s flagship Kruger National Park, with the one victim’s calf so badly injured that it had to be put down;

• Friday, December 9 – the carcasses of five rhinos are found inside Kruger National Park, not far from one of its southern gates;

 • Monday, December 12 – a report appears on the front page of newspapers on a gruesome mutilation of a rhino bull and cow in a private reserve in the far south of South Africa. They were darted and had their horns hacked off with a machete. Both could be revived by having antidotes administered, but the cow had to have her unborn calf aborted. The owner told of how he found one of his female staff members crying and hugging the debilitated cow where she lay crumpled under a bush. The use of the specialized drug, called M99, or etorphine, to incapacitate the animals, has once more raised suspicions about the possible involvement of veterinarians or people connected to the service.

• Tuesday, December 13 – a suspected poacher was arrested after he got wounded in a fire-fight in Kruger National Park with park rangers and soldiers. Two other suspects escaped across the border into Mozambique. Four fresh rhino horns were recovered.

 The rising toll confirms a trend that is all the more alarming when considering that only 13 rhinos got poached in 2007. The 2011 spike in killings happened despite a multi-pronged strategy devised last year, involving park rangers, the police and the defense force, the prosecuting authorities and even revenue and customs services.

 In Kruger National Park, a special unit of soldiers was deployed in the beginning of the year to patrol the park’s 250-mile (400 km) border with Mozambique, which has become the main springboard for poaching sorties across the South African border.

 Despite the increased security presence, 244 rhinos were killed in Kruger National Park, which is home to about 10,000 to 12,000 white rhinos and about 500 black rhinos.

 Ken Maggs, head of the park’s anti-poaching unit, says 21 poachers were killed in skirmishes with park rangers and the soldiers, and 78 were arrested.

 “Unfortunately, the fatalities are a by-product of the value being put on rhino horn. The poachers come into the park armed with hunting rifles and assault weapons. We operate under the legal prescription of arrest, not to shoot to kill, but the poachers come prepared to fight. They switch tactics, such as coming in by night rather than by day. And in the dark, you need to make split-second decisions, or risk leaving your family without a father,” Maggs explained.

 He says he is an optimist and is sure the situation will be turned round. But, he adds, it cannot be a single-tool solution. It has to be a whole toolbox, and the bigger the better.

 Maggs was appointed head of the National Wildlife Crime Reaction Unit that was set up last year as an umbrella body to co-ordinate efforts between various state bodies and private reserve owners in the fight against the rhino killings.

 The poaching and rhino-horn smuggling, he explains, are operated at several levels, and each requires different types of expertise. It is a complex network which, tragically, even extends into wildlife-protection organizations and veterinary circles. 

 At the ground level there are the poachers who mostly come from nearby communities and who have the local knowledge about where their targets are and how best to get to them. It is the field operatives, the rangers and police and soldiers, who have to deal with them.

 At the next level are the recruiters, who find the poachers and pay them. This second and also the third level ensure that the booty gets moved as quickly as possible to the smuggling rings, which at the next level see that the horns reach the market countries, mostly China and Vietnam.

 While each category presents its own challenges, requiring particular sets of expertise to deal with, there is also a fifth category of intervention needed. This is at the highest political and diplomatic level to ensure that the support structures and legal framework are in place also to deal with the problem both in the neighboring countries from which the assaults are made and the far-away countries in which the rhino horns end up.

 “Unfortunately, there are still too many people who think of the target as just a rhino and therefore of such killings as simply another wildlife crime. It should in fact be seen as organized crime and get treated in the same way as gun-running, armed robbery, heists and hijacking. It is not surprising that, considering the odds of getting caught or killed when committing those other crimes, more and more criminals are getting into the rhino-poaching business,” says Maggs.

 Already there is close co-operation between South Africa’s parks authorities, the police, the military and the prosecuting authorities. But Maggs believes the situation can only be properly addressed if the co-operation gets extended to Mozambique’s police and military. That, however, requires intervention at government level.

 Dr David Mabunda, chief executive of South African National Parks, indicated that the next big step in the unfolding strategy may well be to get such co-operation going between the security forces of the two countries. He suggested South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe and the national minister of environmental affairs, Edna Molewa, were due to have talks with the Mozambican government.

 “In 95 percent of the cases – no, even more – Mozambicans are involved in the poaching. Many return in body bags. We don’t boast about killing people. Our purpose is to arrest them, also to gather information. They should know the risk by now, but still they keep coming and the gangs keep multiplying.

 “The answer should come through joint operations between the South African and Mozambican security forces. Their Limpopo National Park (which forms part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park with Kruger National Park) is supposed to serve as a buffer. It isn’t, and we need to talk to them about it,” he said.

 As for the market-end of the brutal trade, he said South Africa’s Presidency and the country’s department of international relations were discussing the rhino question with China and Vietnam and he believed progress was being made.

 WWF’s African Rhino Program co-ordinator, Dr Joseph Okori, has also called for more coordinated international efforts. He said last month:  “Vietnam should follow South Africa’s example and start sending poachers, traders, smugglers and sellers to jail. In order to save rhinos from extinction, the criminal syndicates operating between South Africa and Vietnam must be uncovered and shut down for good.”

Gram for gram, rhino horn is worth more than gold.

So it is little surprise the animal is being hunted to extinction, which is why conservationists are pushing to create rhino-horn farms in a bid to save the creature.

Currently, horn sells for about US$60,000 (Dh220,392) a kilogram – gold is trading a shade below that at about $57,000 for the same measure – making it a prize very much worth chasing.

South Africa National Parks has lost a record 340 rhino this year, despite doubling its anti-poaching patrols.

In the past, poached rhino horns ended up in Yemen, where they were turned into traditional daggers called jambiyas. But over the past decade, demand has shifted to Asia, where they are prized as a tonic in traditional medicine.

In the past year alone Africa’s Western black rhino, and Vietnam’s Javan rhino have been hunted to oblivion. It is a trend that is set to accelerate unless the failed tactic of banning trade in rhino products is replaced, say conservationists.

“I do believe that conservationists need to investigate a legal trade in rhino horn as the current approach [trade ban] is not working, and appears unlikely to work in the foreseeable future,” says Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, a conservation economist based in Johannesburg.

“The key to the rhino’s survival is to make the animal more valuable alive than dead to the people who control its destiny,” he says.

The idea is now being cautiously investigated by the South African government, and enjoys widespread backing among local conservationists, wildlife farmers and economists.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, an international body that regulates wildlife trade, is circulating a paper that discusses the idea.

Wildlife authorities are coming to realise that banning the sale of horn has failed. As rhinos decrease in number, horn becomes more valuable, and the incentive to poach increases.

A single horn can earn a poor Mozambican labourer 200,000 rand (Dh86,815) – as much as he can hope to earn in 10 years.

Poaching is also becoming more sophisticated. Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese syndicates frequently hire professional hunters to do the killing. Using helicopters, night-vision goggles and high-power rifles fitted with silencers, they outgun underfunded national park rangers.

“The demand is for around 900 horns a year, which we could easily supply without harming an animal,” says Michael Eustace, an investment manager and wildlife economist.

Cropping of horns, which does not cause the animal any pain, and those harvested from animals that die naturally, together with existing stockpiles held by national parks, would provide the supply.

“It’s not a biological issue – it’s a market issue of supply and demand,” says Mr Eustace.

Trade could be managed through a central selling organisation (CSO) such as the one operated by De Beers that for years controlled the flow of diamonds on to the market. A CSO would only trade in legally acquired horns, and sell to registered buyers, such as Chinese state pharmaceutical companies.

Horn sales could earn southern African wildlife conservation almost 800 million rand a year, according to Mr Eustace.

The CSO would supply companies directly, cutting out middlemen and ensuring only horn from legitimate supplies were sold.

“SA alone could easily supply 400 horns a year from natural deaths, 400 from stocks and 600 from farmers cropping half their horn”, says Mr Eustace. “Based on current prices for horn, this could raise 784m rand a year for parks and wildlife.”

But it will be an uphill struggle to convince international wildlife organisations, such as the WWF, that depend on wealthy European and US donors who are less likely to support such an idea. Critics say current examples of farmed animals to serve the Asian market, such as bears and tigers, are rife with abuse and cruelty.

“If you consider the plight of tigers at the moment, which are extensively ‘farmed’ in China, there appears to be no advantage for conservation of the species,” says Francesca Shapland of the UK’s Save the Rhino foundation.

Mr Eustace dismisses the comparison. “Rhinos are not harmed in harvesting horn, which grows back. There’s no need to injure or kill the animal.”

As the killing continues, the drive to legitimise the selling of their horns is likely to gain momentum.

Flickr/CC BY 3.0

The Wrong Kind of Status Symbol

In many parts of Asia, shark fin soup is considered a delicacy. It is traditionally served at weddings, but it’s also a way for the newly wealthy to show their status. The problem is, the number of people in Asia who are entering the middle-class and can now afford to eat more shark fin soup has grown exponentially in the past decades and – as Jaymi explains in her post about shark finning - there are between 73 and 100 million sharks killed every year, mostly just for their fins. Because sharks are top predators, they are crucial to oceanic ecosystems.

Conservationists have long tried to either ban or at least regulate the practice, with various levels of success, and to convince people living where the most shark fin soup is consumed to leave it off the menu. There has been some signs of progress, as Alex wrote about last April:

A new survey has encouraging results for those concerned about the fate of world shark populations: it looks like the consumption of shark fin soup is dropping. The dish is considered a luxury status-symbol and usually served at weddings and other formal occasions. But now, of 1,000 residents of Hong Kong, 78% responded that they found it “acceptable” or “very acceptable” to leave the delicacy off the menu at a wedding.

Flickr/CC BY 3.0

This is important because Hong Kong is the shark fin capital of the world. A lot of it is traded through the city, with most of it going to mainland China.

“The catches are not tracked at all, and there is no species monitoring or labelling,” said Stanley Shea, a campaigner with the marine environment group Bloom Association, to the Guardian. She conducted last year the most comprehensive survey to date of shark fin consumption in Hong Kong. “We don’t even know how much of it is eaten here or ends up in mainland China.”

DNA analysis showed that 40% of shark fin auctioned in Hong Kong comes from 14 species, all of which appear on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s “red list” of endangered species.

Education + Regulation

Some hotels in Hong Kong offer various discounts to couples who don’t serve shark fin soup at their weddings, and there are various campaigns encouraging people to stop eating shark fins. But traditions always take a while to change, and the question is: Will it change fast enough to save many species of sharks from extinction. One option would be to use sustainable fishing practices, but I have a hard time imagining how that would work exactly. People don’t seem very interested by the rest of the shark (they usually dump the mutilated body back in the water, leaving it to die from its wound), and I don’t think sharks can be farmed (they can roam over very large areas).

As with many things, the best cure is probably information. A lot of people who eat shark fin soup probably wouldn’t if they knew more about the problems that it causes.

WHILE Denmark earns the biggest share of its national revenue from producing windmills and other clean technologies, no country can match China’s pace of growth in the clean-tech sector, according to a new report.

China’s production of green technologies has grown by 77 per cent a year, according to the report commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, which is being unveiled today at an industry conference in Amsterdam.

“The Chinese have made, on the political level, a conscious decision to capture this market and to develop this market aggressively,” said Donald Pols, an economist with the WWF.

Denmark, a longtime leader in wind energy, derives 3.1 percent of its gross domestic product from renewable energy technology and energy efficiency, or about 6.5 billion euros (US$9.4 billion), according to the report.

China is the largest producer in money terms, earning more than 44 billion euros, or 1.4 percent of its gross domestic product, the report said.

The United States ranks 17 in the production of clean technologies with 0.3 percent of GDP, or 31.5 billion euros, but those industries have been expanding at a rate of 28 percent per year since 2008.

“The US is growing substantially, so it seems the policy of President Barack Obama is working,” Pols said. But the US cannot compare with China, he added.

“When you speak to the Chinese, climate change is not an ideological issue. It’s just a fact of life. While we debate climate change and the transition to a low carbon economy, the debate is passed in China,” Pols said. “For them it’s implementation. It’s a growth sector, and they want to capture this sector.”

The report was prepared by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, a global firm based in Germany. It gathered data on 38 countries from energy associations, bank and brokerage reports, investor presentations, the International Energy Agency and a score of other sources. 

It measured the earnings from producing renewables such as biofuels, wind turbines and thermal equipment, and energy efficiency technology such as low-energy lighting and insulation.

“Clean technologies are really growing fast, but China is responsible for the majority of that growth,” said Ward van den Berg, who compiled and analyzed the data for the consultancy firm.

Until recently, Chinese massive production of solar cells was aimed at the export market, but they are now making solar systems for the home market, as they have been doing for several years in wind energy, Van den Berg said.

Following Denmark and China, other countries in the top five clean-tech producers, in terms of percentage of GDP, are Germany, Brazil and Lithuania, the report said.

China pushes ahead with an emissions trading scheme, while American initiatives remain sunk in Congressional quicksand

A power plant in Pinghu, China. A cap-and-trade system would help China to reduce carbon emissions by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2020. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Schengchang, a new Chinese clean air company, recognized that China had become the largest CO2 emitter in the world by 2008. Because of its rapid development, China had become dependent on coal, which was detrimental for the environment and contributing to toxic air pollution.

To combat this problem, Shengchang, developed Biomass technology. Biomass, which significantly reduces carbon emissions, uses agricultural waste from farmers and is considered “clean fuel.” In fact, burning 10,000 pounds of biomass instead of coal reduces about 14,000 tons of CO2 per day. This both lessens air pollution and increases the income of farmers, who are paid in exchange for their waste. The company has developed six types of Biomass “briquettes” that are used for boilers and stoves.

Schenghang’s technological developments are both innovative and promising for the future of China’s environment.

photo by Globovisión (Flickr Creative Commons)

On Saturday heavy rains fell on Gansu province in northern China, resulting in landslides which buried at least three villages.

The death toll from the mudslides has now reached 702, according to Chinese officials, with more than 1,000 people still missing.

China has been experiencing its most severe flooding in a decade – and more rain is forecast for later in the week.

Rescue efforts are at their most intense in Zhouqu county, the area worst hit by the floods.

From an AFP report:

More than 7,000 soldiers and rescuers were hunting around-the-clock for survivors in Zhouqu, the county seat, where homes were torn apart and streets buried in mud as deep as two metres (six feet) in spots.

The mudslide pushed earth, streets, houses and cars into the Bailong River in Zhouqu, blocking its flow and causing flooding. A 5 km (3 mile) long and 500 meter-wide area was flattened and half the county submerged.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, some 1,500 people have died during two weeks of the South Asian country’s worst flooding ever.

From report by the Associated Press:

The United Nations said the government’s estimate of 13.8 million people affected by the country’s worst-ever floods exceeded the combined total of three recent megadisasters — the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Besides China and Pakistan, areas in India and North Korea have also experienced death and destruction due to the floods.