The environment in the news

Other Environment News

Upon taking office, Mr Ban pledged to be a harmoniser and a bridge builder, who would restore trust in the UN. The BBC's Laura Trevelyan at the UN asks how the man with what has been called the most impossible job on earth has been doing.

It's not easy being UN secretary general - Kofi Annan was fond of quoting how it is often called the most impossible job on earth.

Ban Ki-moon has been installed in his suite of offices on the 38th floor of the towering UN secretariat building in Manhattan for three months now.

One senior aide to Kofi Annan predicted it would be a vertical take-off for the new man in charge - and so it has proved.

Mr Ban has gone from being South Korea's foreign minister to the head of an often fractious and divided world body with 192 different member states.

Not only that, but the UN is an organisation steeped in its own peculiar and highly specific sub culture - where resentments and tensions over geopolitics spill over into this building and manifest themselves in strange ways.

Asked about the frustrations of his first 100 days, Mr Ban told reporters: "Frustration? I have been trying to learn and adapt myself as fast and as well as possible. I have learned many lessons and I have been much encouraged by the strong support from my staff and member states."

The five permanent members of the Security Council - France, Britain, the US, China and Russia - effectively selected Mr Ban.

They had the power to veto the appointment and Mr Ban's pitch to reform the UN after a turbulent period in which the oil-for-food scandal had tarnished the organisation's reputation was well received.

But the new secretary general's sensible sounding plan to split the overstretched Department of Peacekeeping into two and reshape the Department of Disarmament ran straight into trouble. Jim Traub, author of Kofi Annan and the UN, explained why.

"The Disarmament Department hasn't succeeded in disarming anyone or anything but it doesn't matter because the Third World likes disarmament, so the Third World rose up as one against this change," he said.

"He was shocked to discover that what he thought was a purely institutional set of arrangements that needed to be made provoked a mighty uproar. In the aftermath he went about doing that kind of painstaking political work, ie grovelling, which he is apparently expected to do to make any changes."

Senior diplomats from Western and developing world nations do not usually agree on much but they are united in complaining privately that the new boss is too reliant on his South Korean advisers.

It's no way to run a world body, observed one ambassador. But Ed Luck, professor of international relations at Columbia University in New York, says such complaints are overblown.

"Partly the UN hasn't seen an Asian secretary general for 35 years, the style is a bit different and certainly he's had to get used to an organisation where the secretary general has enormously high profile but little power," he says.

"He can bark about lots of things but he can't force change in the organisation."

But on the key issues facing the world, says Ed Luck, Mr Ban is right where he should be.

"He's shown a lot of courage facing up to very tough issues, and a willingness to speak truth to power, as when he spoke to President Bush about the need to focus on global warming, when he tells the Sudanese that they have to do something about Darfur. He's been willing to be outspoken."

Priority issue

Mr Ban has soft power - the power to persuade, to preach from his pulpit, rather than the hard power of military might or economic force. Jim Traub says the new secretary general has clearly identified a pressing problem where he can use the soft power at his disposal.

"I think his one substantive priority has been global warming. Just as for Kofi Annan the one priority he singled out was Aids," he says.

"Global warming is well chosen not only in the sense that is it as immense and urgent an issue as Aids is, but also unlike let's say terrorism, it's more amenable to UN action."

For Ed Luck, Mr Ban has made a solid start and will only get stronger: "I think insiders probably fret more about all the little mistakes of one sort or another, these things really don't matter too much.

"I think what the world has seen is a secretary general who cares a great deal about the organisation, who's very energetic, who has a personal modesty which is refreshing and who is determined to make a difference. I think the people will stay with him and I think the governments will get used to him."

Mr Ban himself told reporters he is clear about what his priorities are in the days to come.

"I am going to step up my diplomatic efforts to resolve the Darfur situation, and Somalia, and try to contribute more to the Middle East peace process," he said.

"So, maybe you have to wait and see until you can see some of my achievements."

_____________________________________________________________________
BBC: Monster warning to protect oceans
12 April 2007

The landing of a colossal squid by New Zealand fishermen earlier this year offered a rare glimpse into the mysterious world deep beneath the waves. Scientist Mark Norman uses this week's Green Room to argue that it also shows how marine life is being destroyed before it is understood.

In the era of super science, nothing shows up how little we know of our own planet as finding massive "sea monsters".

The largest single invertebrate animal ever found was recently captured by longline fishermen in Antarctic seas. Known as a colossal squid, it weighed 450kg (990lb), about twice the weight of the largest squid previously captured.

This event highlights two points; firstly, that our knowledge of the most common habitat on our planet - the deep sea - is still in its infancy, and secondly that such scientific discoveries indicate the scale and reach of global fisheries exploitation.

This squid is a very impressive animal. It is has eyes larger than a blue whale's, a sharp slicing beak as big as a rockmelon and a tongue covered in sharp teeth.

Its eight arms and two longer feeding tentacles are armed with toothed suckers and sharp hooks.

It swims with muscular fins and a big funnel for jet propulsion, and the undersides of its eyes have rows of lights like truck running lights.

It is only the fourth non-juvenile of this squid species ever examined by scientists, yet colossal squid are considered the most abundant Antarctic squid by weight.

Their beaks have frequently been found in toothed whale stomachs and juveniles are regularly captured in trawls but nothing is known about the creatures' behaviour in the wild.

Unfortunately, I cannot see this as a highpoint of scientific discovery drawn from the distant reaches of our wild oceans.

Accidentally caught on a commercial fishing line, it is instead a symptom of the massive, and largely unnoticed, overexploitation of our deep seas.

This squid was captured on deep-sea longlines, which are baited and barbed fishing lures attached to kilometres of monofilament line, set as deep as 2km down to catch Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish.

Often marketed as Chilean sea bass or mero, commercial quantities of this fish were only discovered in the early 1980's. Since then, huge harvests throughout the Southern Ocean have lead to a massive collapse of stocks.

For more than a decade, conservation groups have been trying to get protection for such deep-sea fishes. Illegal harvests account for more than half of these catches.

One illegal ship seized off Heard Island in the southern Indian Ocean last year had more than $2m dollars (£1m) worth of toothfish in its freezers.

Throughout the world, longlining for fish has come at a high cost. Not only the fish themselves but also the countless albatross, other seabirds and marine mammals, attracted to and drowned on these baited lines.

Recent initiatives in some regions are reducing these casualties, but only for the legal fisheries.

Much of our knowledge of the world's next largest invertebrate, the giant squid, comes from similarly destructive fisheries.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, the frenzy to trawl lucrative stocks of orange roughy (marketed as deep-sea perch) off the tops of seamounts also caught giant squid.

Fisheries scientists soon realised however that such hauls were to be short-lived. Orange roughy were found to live for 150 years and take several decades to reach reproductive age.

Because trawlers targeted large breeding aggregations, adult orange roughy yet to breed were removed from the system. As a result, stocks around the world collapsed.

At the peak of this frenzy, giant squid specimens incidentally caught in these trawls came in thick and fast from the fishery hotspots: South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

In New Zealand alone, more than 30 giant squid were caught during the 80s and 90s - more than the world total for the previous 150 years. Both the fisheries and the flow of giant squid specimens subsequently dived.

This strip-mining of the deep ocean has gone largely unnoticed, aided by consumers who really don't want to know that their Chilean sea bass, sea perch or trevalla have come courtesy of the clearance of deep-sea coral forests or drowned albatrosses.

Shoppers may also rather not know that their tasty dish may have been swimming around before the American Civil War.

So when the capture of the colossal squid came to light, part of me marvelled at the pictures in the newspapers of this wonderful sea monster, but a larger part of me saw it as yet another casualty of our short-sighted wanton plundering of the deep ocean.