The US is fighting a proposal, backed according to France by least 100 countries, for transforming UNEP from a poorly noticed, second-string unit into a planetary super-agency.

Environmentalists have long complained that Nairobi-based UNEP, set up in 1972 as an office of the UN and with a membership of only 58 nations, lacks clout to deal with the globe's worsening ills.

These range from climate change, water stress and over-fishing to species loss, deforestion and ozone-layer depletion.

But the environmental mess also coincides with the crisis of capitalism, which greens say is blind to the cost for Nature in its relentless quest for growth.

The fateful intertwining of these problems points to a unique chance of a solution at the June 20-22 "Rio+20" conference, they argue.

With possibly scores of leaders in attendance, the 20-year follow-up to the famous Earth Summit has the declared aim of making growth both greener and sustainable.

"The new capitalism which emerges from the crisis has to be environmental, or it won't be new," French Ecology Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said on Tuesday.

The key vehicle would be UNEP, which according to the vaguely-worded French proposal would be changed into the World Environment Organisation.

It would become the UN's 16th "specialised" agency alongside the World Health Organisation (WHO), Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and so on.

To the outsider, this may sound at best like a bit of terminological tinkering -- at worst, just another bureaucracy-breeding machine.

Experts, though, say status change could be surprisingly far-reaching.

Specialised UN agencies have high degrees of autonomy, enabling them to set agendas, frame international norms, stir up interest in dormant issues and sometimes poke their noses into areas of national sovereignty.

At its most ambitious, a World Environment Organisation would embrace not just the member-states which fund it but also business, green and social groups, becoming a very loud voice indeed.

It could intrude into sensitive areas such as trans-border use of water resources, fishery quotas and habitat use -- and even monitor environmental standards for trade in goods and services.

According to Kosciusko-Morizet's ministry, more than 30 European countries back the French proposal, along with 54 countries in Africa, plus Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, Chile, Uruguay and others.

But in a US presidential election year where green issues -- especially foreign ones -- are easily trumped by domestic politics, Washington has set down a marker.

"We do not believe that international efforts on the environment and sustainable development would be improved by creating a new specialised agency on the environment," a State Department official told AFP.

"We prefer to work towards a strengthened role for UNEP, as well as better coordination across the UN system in integrating environment into development, and in working towards sustainable development."

Canada, like the US, says it prefers a smarter, better-connected UNEP.

Tensions over this are now emerging at preparatory talks on the "zero draft," a document that will be finessed into June's all-important summit communique.

"The Americans have come out guns blazing," said Farooq Ullah, head of policy and advocacy at a London-based NGO called Stakeholder Forum.

"The risk, of course, is not necessarily that they would veto it (a super-UNEP) but that they would pull out their funding for it. A big part of UNEP's funding comes from the Americans, so it would be a major blow," he stressed.

Could the dispute rip Rio apart? Or could it doom it to dismal compromise, as many view the outcome of 2009 Copenhagen climate summit?

"The biggest risk with these things that have a lot of interest is that if you push too far too quickly and it becomes too contentious, it will just be negotiated out," warned Ullah.

Lucien Chabason of a French thinktank, the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), said the outcome did not have to be dramatic.

"One can imagine a mixture of the two ideas, in which Rio adopts a position in principle to beef up UNEP and launch a negotiation process," he said.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST New Haven CT (SPX) Feb 06, 2012 - Spotted salamanders exposed to contaminated roadside ponds are adapting to their toxic environments, according to a Yale paper in Scientific Reports. This study provides the first documented evidence that a vertebrate has adapted to the negative effects of roads apparently by evolving rapidly.

Salamanders breeding in roadside ponds are exposed to a host of contaminants from road runoff. Chief among these is sodium chloride from road salt, which reaches average concentrations of 70 times higher in roadside ponds compared to woodland ponds located several hundred feet from the road.

"While the evolutionary consequences of roads are largely unknown, we know they are strong agents of natural selection and set the stage for fast evolution," said Steven Brady, the study's author and a doctoral student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

"These animals are growing up in harsh environments where they face a cocktail of contaminants, and it appears that they are evolving to cope with them."

Brady found that salamanders in roadside ponds have higher mortality, grow at a slower rate and are more than likely to develop L-shaped spines and other disfigurements. In roadside ponds, only 56 percent of salamander eggs survive the first 10 weeks of development, whereas 87 percent survive in the woodland ponds. As roadside ponds become more toxic, the surviving salamanders may develop a genetic advantage over their counterparts living in woodland ponds.

The salamanders that survive year after year in the roadside ponds appear to have adapted to the harsh conditions. "The animals that come from roadside ponds actually do better-substantially better-than the ones that originate from woodland ponds when they're raised together," Brady said.

That animals adapt to human activities is not altogether new. For example, fish have begun to mature at smaller sizes in response to commercial fishing. But whereas humans directly utilize fish for consumption, salamanders are just bystanders to human activities.

This suggests that the majority of species, which are not specifically targeted for human use, may be experiencing profound evolutionary consequences. And it appears that even species not being driven to extinction-and seldom thought about-are changing.

"This adaptation is certainly encouraging for conservation," said Brady. "But our modern footprint is fundamentally changing species in ways we don't understand and, critically, we don't know if these adaptive responses will keep pace with environmental change."

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST Beijing (UPI) Feb 6, 2012 - China is paying a high price for pollution resulting from the country's soaring economic development fueled by low energy costs, an environmental report claims.

The average cost of China's resources output is $320 to $350 a ton and continues to decrease, states the China Green National Accounting Study Report by the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, an arm of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The document was noted in a China Daily report.

That compares with developed economies, which pay $2,500 to $3,500 a ton.

"This means we are consuming about 10 times more energy than the developed economies for the same amount," Ma Jun, director of China's Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a non-government organization protection agency, told the newspaper.

"The resources are too cheap here," Ma said of China, the world's largest energy consumer.

Many local governments, particularly in less economically developed areas of the country, are becoming hostage to heavy-pollution industries in their pursuit of a booming economy, he said.

"The pollution produced by companies, especially those in the steel, smelting, cement and chemical industries, is far beyond those cities' capacity to control (it)," said Ma.

"We enjoy the temporary prosperity and leave the burden to our next generation."

The report comes in the wake of a spill of toxic cadmium in southern China's Longjiang River. The spill threatens drinking water supplies for millions of people, sparking calls by environmental activists for stricter enforcement of the country's environmental regulations and more transparency in reporting of accidents when they occur.

"The damage to the environment not only results in health problems but in financial loss as well," said Ma.

The cost of environmental and ecological damage to China skyrocketed to nearly $222 billion in 2009, a 9.2 percent increase from the year before, the report states. As a result, China spent 3.8 percent of its gross domestic product for environmental cleanup.

"It's a vicious circle if we continue to strive for economic prosperity at the cost of huge energy consumption and environmental pollution and it's time we wake up and curb the trend," Ma said.

The report also states that China's carbon dioxide emissions had more than doubled from 3.5 billion tons in 2000 to 7.2 billion tons in 2009. By that time, China had overtaken the United States as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Ye Qi, a professor of environmental policy at Tsinghua University and director of the Climate Policy Initiative in Beijing, predicts that by 2015, China will emit nearly 50 percent more greenhouse gases than the U.S., Climatewire reports.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST Mexico City (AFP) Feb 3, 2012 - Roadside trash is piling up here and thousands who make a living picking through other people's garbage are staring at a bleak future after Mexico's largest open waste dump was shut down.

Authorities have been scrambling to find a permanent replacement for Bordo Poniente on the outskirts of Mexico City -- the main landfill site for nine million of the urban area's 20 million inhabitants.

And the closure has dealt a harsh blow to about 4,500 people, known as "pepenadores," who sift through the waste searching for any scraps that can be recycled and sold for money.

"The waste is our living. Bordo Poniente is our whole life. We work here to be able to buy a house or a car, for everything, but especially to send our children to school," Pablo Tellez, one leader of one of the group of trash recyclers, told AFP.

Tellez directs some 1,500 people who fan out over the vast site which contains almost 80 million metric tons of waste over 1,100 acres (450 hectares).

Opened more than 30 years ago, Bordo Poniente used to take in up to 12,000 tons of trash a day, and mountains of garbage still tower some 17 meters (yards) high around the site.

Each scavenger has their specialty -- from metals to paper or plastic bottles.

Gloria, a 54-year-old single mother who declined to give her surname, has worked at the site for 40 years. Three of her seven sons work alongside her.

As she trawls the foul-smelling trash, alongside stray dogs and mosquitoes, Gloria's violet sweater turns black in minutes. Like the other workers, she wears no mask nor gloves for protection.

"It's difficult work, especially as a woman, but unfortunately I have no other choice because I didn't have the chance to study," she said.

Workers have no fixed salary, but are paid for what they collect by intermediaries who sell the waste on.

-- Every-increasing waste --

"I work 12 hours per day and I can earn up to 800 pesos per week (around 60 dollars), depending on the type of material I find," Gloria said.

City officials shut down the dump a month ago under pressure from federal authorities wanting to reclaim land they say risks polluting the city's water system.

City officials say the closure will reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly and have announced a plan to set up a bio-gas plant at the site.

But they have yet to produce a long-term solution for dealing with the ever-increasing waste.

"They didn't have a 'Plan A' and they don't have a 'Plan B' either," said sociologist Hector Castillo from the UNAM university, who has studied Mexico's waste industry for several decades.

"They need large pieces of land that they don't have in the city."

For now, authorities have made deals with smaller private dumps in the neighboring state. Since they are further away, collection has been disrupted and makeshift dumps have appeared in parks and on streets.

Despite some ambitious plans, new waste disposal systems are a challenge to apply in a metropolitan area where more than half of some 50,000 waste industry employees work informally.

"It's very complicated," Castillo said.

The pepenadores and their sometimes mafia-like bosses are battling to remain part of the lucrative industry as it slowly evolves.

For now, rubbish trucks illegally continue to dump waste at Bordo Poniente, providing temporary relief for the scavengers who swarm over each new arrival.

"Mexico is a very large city. Household waste won't stop from one day to the next," Tellez said. "All that we ask of the government is ... that they let us work."

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST New Delhi (AFP) Feb 2, 2012 - India has the worst air quality in the world, beating even its neighbour China, according to an annual survey based at Yale and Columbia universities in the United States.

Of all the countries surveyed in the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which measures the effects of polluted air on human health, India ranked the lowest at 132.

The study used satellite data to measure air pollution concentrations.

The level of fine particulate matter in India is nearly five times the limit where it becomes unsafe for humans, said the study released at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Health experts say particulate matter is one of the main causes of acute lower respiratory infections and even cancer.

India scored a meagre 3.73 out of a possible 100 points in the air analysis, lagging way behind Bangladesh, the next-worst performer, which scored 13.66.

The region fared poorly with Nepal, Pakistan and China taking up the remaining spots in the bottom five of the rankings.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST Shanghai (AFP) Feb 2, 2012 - China has detained another company official, bringing the total to eight, over a massive river pollution case in the country's south, the government and state media said Thursday.

Industrial waste -- including toxic cadmium -- polluted up to a 300-kilometre (190-mile) section of the Longjiang River in the Guangxi region and threatened drinking water supplies for millions of people.

Police have detained eight executives from two firms, Jinhe Mining Co. and Jinchengjiang Hongquan Lithopone Materials Factory, according to a statement from Hechi city, where the pollution originated.

Authorities were seeking another four people who had fled, the Shanghai Daily newspaper quoted Hechi Mayor He Xinxing as saying. The government said earlier this week that seven people had been taken into custody.

A Hechi city spokeswoman did not answer phone calls on Thursday.

Jinhe Mining was involved in processing cadmium, a carcinogen which can seriously damage the kidneys, bones and respiratory system.

Jinchengjiang Hongquan was producing the metal indium, outside its business scope, and dumping waste directly into the ground, reports said. Indium can cause lung and other organ damage.

Guangxi claims to have brought the pollution, which was first discovered on January 15, under control amid criticism from state media and environmental groups for poor industry supervision.

In Liuzhou city, downstream from the original spill, the local government said cadmium levels in the river remained at 2.6 times the recommended limit on Thursday morning.

Readings for the heavy metal spiked to 80 times the government limit immediately after the incident, but have fallen after authorities dumped chemical neutralisers and opened sluice gates to increase water flow.

Guangxi has launched a region-wide probe of industry, so far inspecting 145 companies and shutting down 11, state media said. Environmental authorities have also ordered 90 waste disposal sites closed.

Many waterways in China have become heavily contaminated with toxic waste from factories and farms, pollution blamed on three decades of rapid economic growth and lax enforcement of environmental protection laws.

Activists say officials in China often turn a blind eye to industrial pollution or even collude with companies, as they seek to boost local economic development.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST Shanghai (AFP) Feb 1, 2012 - Chinese media on Wednesday blasted local officials for poor supervision after industrial waste in a southern river threatened the drinking water for millions of people.

Up to a 300-kilometre (190-mile) stretch of the Longjiang River in the Guangxi region could be contaminated by toxic cadmium and other industrial waste dumped by polluting factories.

Authorities claimed late Tuesday they had brought the pollution under control but the China Daily newspaper said that better supervision of industry was needed and the work of local officials left "much to be desired".

"Local authorities need to investigate thoroughly the root cause of the incident. This incident should be a wake-up call to the rest of the country," it said in an editorial.

Seven company executives deemed responsible for the contamination have been detained.

The Guangxi government said efforts to dilute the pollution by adding chemical neutralisers and allowing a greater volume of water had achieved "clear results", according to a statement.

The government would maintain flow of tap water to Liuzhou city, the statement said, following earlier worries authorities would have to stop supply to some of the city's 3.7 million residents.

Pollution would not affect areas beyond Liuzhou, it added.

"After two weeks of clean-up, the pollution is under control," Feng Zhennian, a local environmental official, was quoted by the official Xinhua news agency as saying.

The Liuzhou government said pollution in some areas was still 2.6 times the national standard for cadmium at midday on Wednesday.

Many waterways in China have become heavily contaminated with toxic waste from factories and farms, pollution blamed on three decades of rapid economic growth and lax enforcement of environmental protection laws.

Activists say officials in China often turn a blind eye to industrial pollution or even collude with companies, as they seek to push forward local economic development at all costs.

Jinhe Mining Co. has been blamed for dumping cadmium, a carcinogen which can seriously damage the kidneys, bones and respiratory system, into the river in a spill that was discovered on January 15.

Another implicated company, Jinchengjiang Hongquan Lithopone Materials Factory, was producing the metal indium and disposing of waste directly into the ground, state media said.

A doctor at Liuzhou's main hospital said there had been no reports of cadmium poisoning yet and denied doctors had been asked to cover up cases, after accusations the facility would not diagnose such sickness.

He said suspected cases would be reported by the hospital to the local disease control centre. "So far no such patients have been reported," the doctor of the Liuzhou People's Hospital, who declined to be named, told AFP.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST Shanghai (AFP) Jan 31, 2012 - China said on Tuesday that it had detained seven company executives after tonnes of industrial waste including a toxic metal polluted a river, threatening water supplies for millions of people.

A 300-kilometre (190-mile) stretch of the Longjiang River in the southern region of Guangxi could eventually be contaminated, sparking panic buying of bottled water in nearby cities, state media said.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted unnamed experts as saying that the amount of illegally released waste in the waterway was unprecedented at an estimated 20 tonnes.

Jinhe Mining Co. has been blamed for dumping cadmium, a carcinogen which can seriously damage the kidneys, bones and respiratory system, into the river in a spill that was discovered on January 15.

The government has decided to go after other polluters, inspecting more than a dozen factories on the river and stopping production at seven plants, the China Daily newspaper said.

Authorities have taken into custody seven executives from companies deemed responsible for polluting the river, according to a Guangxi government statement provided to AFP on Tuesday.

The firms include the Jinchengjiang Hongquan Lithopone Materials Factory, it said, without naming the others. Lithopone is a pigment used in paint.

The initial discharge happened in Hechi city but was now flowing downstream, endangering drinking water for 1.5 million people in Liujiang city, state media said. It was also approaching Liuzhou city, with a population of 3.7 million.

Guangxi officials and spokesmen for Hechi and Liuzhou declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

But Hechi mayor He Xinxing was quoted as saying by Xinhua: "It is a critical time right now because downstream drinking water safety is in jeopardy."

A supermarket worker in Liuzhou said his store had been selling 2,000 bottles of water a day as frightened residents stocked up despite government pledges that the city's tap water was safe for now.

"Sales have been like this for a week. In wintertime, normal daily sales of bottled water are 100 to 200 bottles," he told AFP.

Activists say officials in China often turn a blind eye to industrial pollution or even collude with companies, as they seek to push forward local economic development at all costs.

Authorities have mobilised thousands of soldiers to dump chemical neutralisers into the river to dilute the cadmium, but levels of the metal were still over 25 times higher than the official limit in some parts on Monday.

State television showed workers in protective yellow suits dumping bags of powder, identified as aluminium chloride, into the water to act against the cadmium.

Environmentalists criticised local officials, saying poor supervision triggered the pollution in the first place.

"Oversight before the incident was seriously inadequate," Greenpeace said in a statement. "The problem lies in poor supervision on a day-to-day basis."

Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said pollution involving cadmium -- widely used in batteries -- is alarming.

"This water pollution can be very severe, since it was caused by a kind of heavy metal that cannot dissolve naturally and is highly toxic, which could make the pollution last for quite a long period," he told AFP.

In its latest update on Tuesday afternoon, the Liuzhou city government said cadmium levels were two times higher than the government standard.

Many waterways in China have become heavily contaminated with toxic waste from factories and farms, pollution blamed on three decades of rapid economic growth and lax enforcement of environmental protection laws.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST Amherst, MA (SPX) Jan 31, 2012 - A research team led by University of Massachusetts Amherst resource economist Sylvia Brandt, with colleagues in California and Switzerland, have revised the cost burden sharply upward for childhood asthma and for the first time include the number of cases attributable to air pollution, in a study released this week in the early online version of the European Respiratory Journal.

The total cost of asthma due to pollution is much higher than past traditional risk assessments have indicated and there is growing evidence that exposure to traffic-related air pollution is a cause of asthma and a trigger for attacks, so it should be included, say the authors.

They conducted the study in Long Beach and Riverside, Calif., communities with high regional air pollution levels and large roads near residential neighborhoods.

Total additional asthma-specific costs there due to traffic-related pollution is about $18 million per year, almost half of which is due to new asthma cases caused by pollution, they report. Brandt worked with researchers at the University of Basel, Switzerland, Sonoma Technology, Inc. and the University of Southern California.

Using updated techniques that count asthma cases attributable to air pollution for the first time and including a broader range of health care costs such as parents' missed work days, extra doctor visits and travel time along with prescriptions, the researchers found that a single episode of bronchitic symptoms cost an average $972 in Riverside and $915 in Long Beach.

Bronchitic symptoms (daily cough, congestion or phlegm, or bronchitis for three months in a row) are a critical outcome for children with asthma.

Further, people who live in cities with high traffic-related air pollution bear a higher burden of these costs than those in less polluted areas, they say.

Brandt and colleagues say the total annual cost for a typical asthma case was $3,819 in Long Beach and $4,063 in Riverside, and "the largest share of the cost of an asthma case was the indirect cost of asthma-related school absences." School absences are an important economic consequence, they add, because "they often lead to parents or caregivers missing work."

Overall, Brandt points out that the results are relevant and applicable to many settings and "families with children who have asthma are bearing a high cost.

The total annual estimate between $3,800 and $4,000 represents 7 percent of median household income in our study in these two communities. This is troublesome because that is higher than the 5 percent considered to be a bearable or sustainable level of health care costs for a family."

Riverside and Long Beach account for about 7 percent of the total population of California, the authors say, which suggests that state-wide costs of asthma related to air pollution are "truly substantial."

For this work, Brandt and colleagues analyzed several surveys on health care visits by children with asthma and their previous estimates of the number of asthma cases attributable to pollution to estimate the annual costs of childhood asthma.

They also estimated the cost of asthma exacerbation due to regional air pollutants. They feel the new method does a better job of accounting for the full impact of traffic-related pollution and will be widely applicable in urban areas.

She points out, "Traditional risk assessment methods for air pollution have underestimated both the overall burden of asthma and the cost of the disease associated with air pollution. Our findings suggest the cost has been substantially underestimated and steps must be taken to reduce the burden of traffic-related pollution."

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST Paris (AFP) Jan 31, 2012 - More than a hundred countries now support a French proposal to create a "World Environment Organisation" at the upcoming 20th anniversary conference of the Rio Summit, France's ecology minister said on Tuesday.

"More than 100 countries have now associated themselves with the proposal," Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said at a conference in Paris aimed at stimulating ideas for June 20-22 global gathering.

The idea is to beef up the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which critics say lacks muscle for dealing with the world's worsening environmental crisis.

But rather than be just a branch of the UN, the proposed agency would help implement international environmental standards and include grassroots groups and business, according to the proposal.

Speaking afterwards to reporters, Kosciusko-Morizet said the United States "has yet to back" to the proposal, citing questions of sovereignty.

"However, we have already overcome the north-south divide in terms of numbers," she said.

Kosciusko-Morizet said the new agency was a key to the success of the "Rio+20" conference, designed to assess the two decades that have elapsed since the Rio Summit which nailed the environment to the political agenda.

It should be part of a rethink of the world's economy, in which green issues and social questions should be integrated into the search for profit, she said.

"The new capitalism which emerges from the crisis has to be environmental, or it won't be new," she said.

"We are looking for a new kind of environmental governance, something more inclusive, in which all parties have a stake and it's not just governments which have the right to speak."

She insisted on the word "World" in the organisation's name, saying it was an important nuance compared with "international," meaning an exclusive focus on nations.

The Paris conference gathered several hundred representatives from national and local government, thinktanks and civil society with the declared aim of gingering up a programme, called "draft zero," that is being hammered out for Rio.

According to a background document issued by the ecology ministry, countries that are supporting the French idea comprise more than 30 European countries and the 54 members of the African Union, as well as Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, Chile and Uruguay.

Based in Nairobi, UNEP was set up in 1972 as an office of the UN, but as a "programme" it does not have the scope of an agency.

Its mission, according to its website, is "to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations."

Many environmental experts believe UNEP is too underpowered for dealing with a crisis that now ranges from climate change and ozone depletion to overfishing, pollution and deforestation.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:07:38 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D