Hi again
Herewith, some snippets from various sources.
I appeal to you to send me items to distribute to our members for the Cleft Stick, the Game Ranger magazine and to be posted on the web site. These are your magazines and website, so ensure it gets the news that you would like to see in it.
Please let me have any changes to your physical address, phone no. or e-mail address to keep the database up to date. Remember this is the address we will send your Game Ranger Magazine to.
Thanks to all of you who have made the effort. Please will any of you who know of members who do not get this “electric” Cleft~Stick, & have access to e-mail, pass their address along to me.
Don Yunnie
7 Chalet Drive, Hilton, 3245, South Africa Local Tel & Fax (033) 343 1534 Int. Tel & Fax (+2733) 343 1534 cell 082 377 7562 E-mail dyunnie@xsinet.co.za.
If you do not wish to receive this e-mail newsletter please send a blank e-mail to me at the above address with the word “unsubscribe C~S ” as the message heading.
AGM & Committee Members nominations
As you may be aware half of the Africa Committee have to retire each year, after their two year term of office. We need to nominate professional members to the Committee at the AGM. If there is anyone out there you would like to nominate to sit on this committee, and guide how the GRAA operates, then please use the form below
The following members are entering their second year, and will continue on the committee.
Andre Botha
Drummond Densham
Johann Oelofse
John Turner
Paul Phelan
The following are reaching the end of their terms of office and need to be re-nominated if they wish to continue on the committee
Arrie Schreiber
Peter Coulon
Peter Scott
Tim Snow
Wayne Lotter
Please find below a nomination form
GAME RANGERS ASSOCIATION OF AFRICA
In terms of the constitution any nomination for Committee Member must reach the office of the Association no later than 14 (fourteen) days before the Annual General Meeting. Kindly submit your nomination to Don Yunnie before 1 February 2008 at:
Email: dyunnie@xsinet.co.za
Fax: (033 343 1534)
Mail: 7 Chalet Drive,
Hilton,
3245,
South Africa
NOMINATION FOR GRAA AFRICA COMMITTEE MEMBER 2008 – 2010
I do hereby propose;
(PLEASE PRINT FULL NAME)
being a Professional Member of the GRAA, to serve on the Africa Committee of the GRAA.
This nomination is proposed by
(PLEASE PRINT FULL NAME)
being a Professional Member of the GRAA.
The nominee accepts this nomination and undertakes to serve the Association in the capacity of Africa Committee Member for a period of 2 (two) years without remuneration.
Signature of Nominee:
Signed at this day of 2008.
Signature of Proposer:
Signed at this day of 2008.
Signature of Seconder:
Signed at this day of 2008.
Is the biofuel dream over?
From New Scientist Print Edition , Fred Pearce, Peter Aldhous, 15 December 2007
Can biofuels help save our planet from a climate catastrophe? Farmers and fuel companies certainly seem to think so, but fresh doubts have arisen about the wisdom of jumping wholesale onto the biofuels bandwagon.
The misgivings come as delegates from around the world gather in Bali, Indonesia, this week, to begin work on a tougher climate agreement to succeed the Kyoto protocol.
About 12 million hectares, or around 1 per cent of the world's fields, are currently devoted to growing biofuels. Sugar cane and maize, for example, are turned into bioethanol, a substitute for gasoline, while rapeseed and palm oil are made into biodiesel. That figure will grow because oil is so costly, and because biofuels supposedly emit fewer greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.
But a slew of new studies question the logic behind expanding biofuel production. For a start, there may not be enough land to grow the crops on or water to irrigate them, given other demands on global agriculture. Worse, any cuts in carbon dioxide emissions gained by burning less fossil fuels may be wiped out by increased emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide from fertilisers used on biofuel crops.
In parts of the world, shortage of water is already putting a brake on agricultural productivity. According to Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden, switching 50 per cent of the fossil fuels that will be devoted to electricity generation and transport by 2050 to biofuels would use between 4000 and 12,000 extra cubic kilometres of water per year. To put that in perspective, the total annual flow down the world's rivers is about 14,000 km3.
A more modest target of quadrupling world biofuel production to 140 billion litres a year by 2030 - enough to replace 7.5 per cent of current gasoline use, would require an extra 180 km3 of water to be extracted from rivers and underground reserves, calculates Charlotte de Fraiture at the International Water Management Institute, based near Columbo in Sri Lanka.
That target may be manageable across much of the globe. But in China and India, where water is in short supply and most crops require artificial irrigation, de Fraiture argues that there is not enough water even to meet existing government plans to expand biofuel production.
Another contentious issue is how much land is available to grow biofuels (New Scientist, 25 September 2006, p 36). And the answer appears to be not much, a point that Sten Nilsson, deputy director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, makes using a "cartographic strip-tease" based on a new global mapping study.
Beginning with a world map showing land not yet built upon or cultivated, Nilsson progressively strips forests, deserts and other non-vegetated areas, mountains, protected areas, land with an unsuitable climate, and pastures needed for grazing (see Maps). That leaves just 250 to 300 million hectares for growing biofuels, an area about the size of Argentina.
Even using a future generation of biofuel crops - woody plants with large amounts of cellulose that enable more biomass to be converted to fuel - Nilsson calculates that it will take 290 million hectares to meet a tenth of the world's projected energy demands in 2030. But another 200 million hectares will be needed by then to feed an extra 2 to 3 billion people, with a further 25 million hectares absorbed by expanding timber and pulp industries.
So if biofuels expand as much as Nilsson anticipates, there will be no choice but to impinge upon land needed for growing food, or to destroy forests and other pristine areas like peat bogs. That would release carbon now stashed away in forests and peat soils (New Scientist, 1 December, p 50), turning biofuels into a major contributor to global warming
De Fraiture is more optimistic. Her modest projection for a quadrupling of biofuel production assumes that maize production will be boosted by 20 per cent, sugar cane by 25 per cent and oil crops for biodiesel by 80 per cent. Assuming future improvements in crop yields, de Fraiture estimates that this might be done on just 30 million hectares of land - or 2.5 times the area now under cultivation.
Even today's biofuel yields depend on generous applications of nitrogen-containing fertiliser. That contributes to global warming, as some of the added nitrogen gets converted into nitrous oxide, which is a potent greenhouse gas. Over 100 years it creates 300 times the warming effect of CO2, molecule for molecule. And now researchers led by Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, who won a share of a Nobel prize for his work on the destruction of the ozone layer, claim that we have underestimated these emissions. Factor in their revised figures, and cuts in CO2 emissions as a result of replacing fossil fuels may be wiped out altogether.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that between 1 and 2 per cent of nitrogen added to fields gets converted to nitrous oxide, based on direct measurements of emissions from fertilised soils. But nitrogen from fertiliser also gets into water and moves around the environment, continuing to emit nitrous oxide as it goes. To estimate these "indirect" emissions, Crutzen and his colleagues calculated how much nitrogen has built up in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times, and estimated how much of this could be attributed to the use of fertilisers.
This suggested that between 3 and 5 per cent of the nitrogen added to the soil in fertilisers ends up in the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. Crucially, that would be enough to negate cuts in CO2 emissions made by replacing fossil fuels. Biodiesel from rapeseed came off worse - the warming caused by nitrous oxide emissions being 1 to 1.7 times as much as the cooling caused by replacing fossil fuels. For maize bioethanol, the range was 0.9 to 1.5. Only bioethanol from sugar cane came out with a net cooling effect, its nitrous oxide emissions causing between 0.5 and 0.9 times as much warming as the cooling due to fossil fuel replacement.
These simple calculations, which set increased nitrous oxide emissions against reductions in CO2 emissions caused by replacing gasoline or diesel with biofuels, do not account for all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing, processing and distributing the various fuels. Now Michael Wang of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has taken Crutzen's upper estimate for nitrous oxide emissions and plugged it into a sophisticated computer model which does just that. When he did so, bioethanol from maize went from giving about a 20 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions, compared to gasoline, to providing no advantage at all. Still, Wang suspects that Crutzen's method may overestimate nitrous oxide emissions. "It is a very interesting approach," he says. "But there may be systematic biases."
Crutzen stresses that his paper is still being revised in response to comments he has received since August, when a preliminary version appeared online. "Here and there the numbers may change. But the principle doesn't," he says. "It's really telling us about a general problem with our lack of knowledge about the nitrogen cycle."
With governments and businesses backing biofuels as part of a "green" future, that represents a disturbing gap in our knowledge.
Weblinks
* Johan Rockström's study on water use http://www.worldwaterweek.org/Downloads/2007%20presentations/Sun/Hall%20A%20SIWI%20seminar/Rockström%20SIWI.pdf
* Charlotte de Fraiture's study of water use http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/EWMA/files/papers/Biofuels%20-%20Charlotte.pdf
* Sten Nilsson's global map study http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/conf35/docs/speakers/speech/ppts/nilsson.pdf
* Paul Crutzen's study on nitrous oxide emissions http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11191/2007/acpd-7-11191-2007.pdf
From issue 2634 of New Scientist magazine, 15 December 2007, page 6-7
Sierra Leone – Gola Forest National Park
Country Establishes New National Park, from GUARDAPARQUE December 9, 2007
BBC’s African service is reporting that the country has set up a new forest park:
Sierra Leone's president is launching a scheme to save part of an endangered rainforest, which campaigners say will help fight climate change. People living near the Gola Forest, near the border with Liberia, are to be paid annually, to compensate for the loss of royalties from logging firms. The 75,000 hectare park is home to 50 species of mammals, including leopards, chimpanzees and forest buffalos.
President Ernest Bai Koroma hopes the new national park will boost tourism. Sierra Leone is recovering from a brutal decade-long civil war, which ended in 2002, and supporters say that without official protection, the Gola Forest would have been destroyed within 10 years, as Sierra Leone tries to raise living standards.
Aid agencies, the European Commission and France are setting up a $12m (£6m) trust fund to pay for the park's running costs and to make annual payments to some 100,000 people. It is to become Sierra Leone's second national park.
The Gola Forest is also home to 274 bird species, 14 of which are close to extinction, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is helping to fund the scheme. "We are helping the government turn a logging forest into a protected forest," said the RSPB's Alistair Gammell. "Huge amounts of carbon will be saved and the site is an excellent example to those now involved in climate talks in Bali."
Why the Mineral Resources Commodities (MRC) proposal to mine the Wild Coast is not an option for sustainable development.
Given the regional backlog of delivery of basic services in Eastern Cape, it is understandable that high on the list of Wild Coast community priorities are basic services such as potable water, electricity, healthcare, schooling and decent roads. The situation has created a vacuum of frustration which allows statements such as those of MRC CEO John Barnes that "nobody else has tabled an alternative plan that will bring employment, water, power, improved roads, healthcare and education’ to have an alluring ring with certain communities, as well as with local government agents whose history of delivery of services is not beyond reproach and who see such promises as an easy answer to electorates questions.
However, pro–mining activists repeated calls that ‘people are more important than butterflies’ and for DME to ‘ignore the calls of environmentalists’ while simultaneously demanding that DME assess whether the mining is ‘a sustainable development’ show a depressing lack of insight into what constitutes sustainable development.
For a development to be sustainable it must allow for the overall long term social, economic and environmental prosperity of a region. The inclusion of the environmental aspect is not to hinder development, or to exclude economic or social development, but in recognition that natural processes provide essential services to human societies, without which those societies cannot flourish. In effect, if the environment becomes degraded, this has long term consequences that invariably eventually impede economic and social development. For a development to be sustainable a key question is then ‘Does the development promote long term economic and social justice, while at the same time uphold the integrity of the natural resource base?’
Sustainability is a difficult concept to appraise, one reason being because the effects of unsustainability are often not immediately obvious. As far as the MRC mining proposal goes, the EIA indicates that even with strict mitigation measures in place, and even if stated rehabilitation measure are wholly successful, the mining is going to have a high long term impact on the ecological integrity of the mined area. The mining, in the heart of an internationally recognized botanical ‘hotspot’ is contradictory to various local, national and international policies to that promote natural resource conservation. Nature will therefore pay a high price for the mining area.
Minerals are a non-renewable natural resource. That is, once they are mined, nature cannot replenish them within a period relevant to human timeframes. Mining as an economic activity therefore has no intergenerational sustainability. There are numerous ‘ghost towns’ scattered throughout South Africa and Namibia which demonstrate the consequences of short lived ‘economic booms’ driven by unsustainable mining activities.
Without plans in place by which short term mining activities can generate long term economic and social development , and given the short lifespan of this mining proposal (25 years), mining is not a sustainable activity.
The MRC proposal has a BEE component, Xolco, which holds a 26% shareholding in TEM, the South African subsidiary of MRC. However, to acquire the shareholding, Xolco has a loan agreement with MRC of US $18 million to be paid back as the mining progresses, which seems perverse given that communities residing on land to be mined have to buy shares in MRC in order to become owner beneficiaries of the project, and the negative effects the mining will have on communal land. Xolco is also not democratically representative of communal interests.
Wild Coast communities will lose subsistence farming facilities such as grazing and crop lands, as well as various natural resources that contribute to a traditional subsistence way of life. There are no agreements in place that outline how communities will be compensated for these losses. There are no plans in place to beneficiate the raw materials on site, so most of the cost benefit accrued in processing will take place out of the region, if not out of the country.
If authorities and pro –mining activists are really interested in sustainable development, as opposed to short term private capital gains, they would not be so quick to condemn the environmental point of view. They would also ensure that enough of the proceeds of the mining are invested in projects that are not mine dependent to ensure a thriving society once the mineral resource is depleted.
Val Payn
Communication Coordinator and a founder member of the NGO Sustaining the Wild Coast.
Can anyone help this Lass?
Hello, I got your email address from Wayne Lotter. I'm a US university student, and I'm currently researching the bushmeat trade in a variety of regions in Africa. I just arrived in South Africa, and I'll be here through the end of February. I'm not doing any quantitative research; instead, I'm trying to gain a general understanding by talking to NGOs, game scouts, government agencies, researchers, and anyone else involved. If you have any information that might be helpful, that
would be great! I'd love to meet to discuss the topic in more detail. Also, if you know of any other contacts who might be helpful, I'd really appreciate it.
Cheer and happy new year! -Caitlin McDonald [caitlinannmcdonald@gmail.com]
Tailpiece-
THE BEST COMEBACK LINE for 2007
For those that don't know him, Major General Peter Cosgrove is an "Australian treasure!"
General Cosgrove was interviewed on the radio recently. You'll love his reply to the lady who interviewed him concerning guns and children. Regardless of how you feel about gun laws you gotta love this! This is one of the best comeback lines of all time.
It is a portion of an ABC interview between a female broadcaster and General Cosgrove who was about to sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military headquarters.
FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
So, General Cosgrove, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base?
GENERAL COSGROVE:
We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery and shooting.
FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it?
GENERAL COSGROVE:
I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the rifle range.
FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?
GENERAL COSGROVE:
I don't see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm.
FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
But you're equipping them to become violent killers.
GENERAL COSGROVE:
Well, Ma'am, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you?
The radio went silent and the interview ended.
Matter of Fact
This is an electronic newsletter of the Game Rangers' Association of Africa. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the Association, nor of the Editor. This is intended to be an exchange of news snips, ideas and communication between members. Newsletter content may be copied and re-distributed without authorisation. Correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at dyunnie@xsinet.co.za