Himalayas may become a giant rubbish dump

There's nothing like waking up to bright clear skies with spectacular views of the Lhotseand Amu Dablam ranges — and a rubbish dump.

This heap of beer cans, mineral water bottles and other material was just a few minutes' walk outside the village ofTengboche.It represents about a season's rubbish.

The dump is not on the regular trekking trails which are, aside from the stray Fanta and instant noodle wrapper, admirably clean.

And most trekkers have no idea of their impact on the remote Everest landscape, said Alton Byers, who is leading our expedition as director of the Mountain Institute.

But the dump exposes the risks of Nepal's strategy of lifting itself out of poverty by expanding its tourism industry.

“At this altitude and in this environment, this [rubbish] will be here for 1,000 years,” Byers said.

The government has declared 2011 Nepal tourism year, and has sought to double the number of visitors to 1 million. But can remote communities handle those numbers? Only a fraction of tourists to Nepal make it to the Everest region — about 31,000 last year.

Thirty years ago

“Thirty years ago, there was no garbage. There was no plastic,” said Byers. Now, he said: “we see this in every village all the way up to Everest base camp.” Even the village of Namche Bazaar, the biggest in the region, does not have a waste treatment system.

Sewage from the 45 lodges is dumped directly into a canal, which eventually feeds into the Khosi river, according to Orenlla Puschiasis, a researcher from the University of Paris West-Nanterre, who is working on water quality in the region. “There is nothing sustainable about it,” she said.

“To be sustainable they have to think about the future and manage the waste and the sewage water.”

Trekking companies are supposed to carry their rubbish out with them — but most do not. Lodge operators balk at the idea of paying to cart out beer cans by yak. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2011

Source: The Hindu, 14-9-2011

The lion-tailed macaque faces habitat destruction

PALAKKAD: Nelliampathy, the second biggest abode of the most endangered lion-tailed macaque after the famous Silent Valley National Park, is facing destruction of its habitat due to “unregulated plantation activities, fragmentation and conversion of forest land.”

A recent study on “ecology and behaviour of the arboreal mammals of Nelliampathy” found a total of 13 lion-tailed macaque troops with 200 individuals in the area.

Thus it is the second biggest population of one of the most endangered primates. The Silent Valley has 250 members of the species.

Mass campaign

One of the main reasons for preserving the Silent Valley evergreen forests as a National Park — after a decade-long mass campaign led by leading environmentalists and spearheaded by the media against construction of a hydel project — was to protect the habitat of the lion-tailed macaque.

The study by K.K. Ramachandran and R. Suganthasakthivel of the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) said the total population of the animal in the wild is estimated to be less than 4,000 distributed in the forests of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Being habitat specialists, the animals are much restricted to moist forests.

Commercial plantations

Commercial plantations of tea and coffee and hydro-electric dams have resulted in habitat loss and fragmentation of the once contiguous forests, and this has directly affected the population dynamics of the primates.

Limited connectivity

The study found that “nearly two-third of evergreen formation in Nelliampathy plateau was cleared for tea cultivation almost 60 years ago. The remaining natural forests on either side, to the south-west and the north-east, are connected by a mosaic of coffee and cardamom. The land use practices resulting in a mosaic type of vegetation offer limited connectivity through canopy. Coffee plantations are often heavily manipulated to create gaps in canopy for more sunlight, which gives a better yield.”

Alterations in canopy

“Though not drastic as coffee, cardamom plantation is also subjected to alterations in canopy. What has resulted is creation of more gaps in canopy, which has directly affected the arboreal pathways of the lion-tailed macaques, the Nilgiri langurs and the Malabar giant squirrel.”

Moreover, trends in current land use practices are that cardamom plantations are either abandoned or converted into coffee.

Felling practices

The study found that the lion-tailed macaque “had to traverse vast unsuitable patches to find a new food resource and hence more time was spent for finding food. The evergreen forests at some patches in the plateau near coffee and cardamom plantations had undergone two selection felling series. This could have been negatively affecting the feeding behaviour of the macaques with availability of quality food resources-trees selected and removed by the felling practices in the past.

Recent evidence (Sigh et al - 2010) suggests that the macaque males have a bonded and aggressively organised social system unlike what was previously thought.

The present study by the KFRI also shows that macaque troops in Nelliampathy spent a relatively larger time in social interactive activities such as playing, grooming and mating.

Among sub-adult and juvenile males, homosexual behaviour was also observed several times.

The sub-adults males engaged in same sex courtship and mounted several times during the study period.

This particular same sex-mating behaviour of female and male sexes was earlier observed directly in macaque societies with several lines of evidences (Vasey and Jiskoot - 2009), the study said.

Source: The Hindu, 6-9-2011

Ice samples show climate capable of abrupt changes

LONDON: Samples drilled from Greenland’s ice sheets have thrown up initial clues that our climate is capable of very rapid and rather abrupt changes, according to an international team of scientists.

Such evidence is provided by the accumulation of layers of ancient snow, compacting to form the ice—sheets we see today.

Each ice layer can reveal past temperatures and even evidence for the timing and magnitude of distant storms or volcanic eruptions.

Until now such temperature records from Greenland have covered only the last 100,000 years or so, the journal Science reports.

An international team, led by Stephen Barker of Cardiff University, has produced a prediction of what climate records from Greenland might look like over the last 800,000 years, according to a Cardiff statement.

Barker is reported saying: “Our approach is based on an earlier suggestion that the record of Antarctic temperature variability could be derived from the Greenland record.

“However, we turned this idea on its head to derive a much longer record for Greenland using the available records from Antarctica,” added Baker.

The research demonstrates that abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer term climate variability.

Source: The Hindu, 13-9-2011

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis on the rise, says WHO report

LONDON: Cases of tuberculosis (TB) resistant to a multitude of drug treatments are rising “at an alarming rate” across Europe, with an estimated 81,000 new cases every year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a report published Wednesday.

Fifteen of the 27 countries with the highest incidence of multidrug-resistant TB are in eastern Europe, but Asia has also been hit hard by the disease.

Almost 12 per cent of newly diagnosed patients with TB have the multidrug-resistant form, as do 37 per cent of those who have previously been treated for TB, the report said.

While countries in eastern Europe and central Asia were hardest-hit by drug-resistant TB, their treatment success rate of 65 per cent was greater than that in western Europe.

“In western Europe TB is widely perceived as a problem of the past, but the disease remains active, mainly in cities,” said the WHO report, presented in London.

It said 3,500 new cases were reported in London every year - more than anywhere else in western Europe. Across Britain, there were around 9,000 cases annually.

Almost 50 per cent of patients affected by the multidrug-resistant form of TB will die because no drugs are strong enough to treat them, said the WHO.

The organization has launched a multi-billion-dollar action plan aimed at saving 120,000 lives in the period up to 2015.

Source: The Hindu, 14-9-2011