December 2001

  This issue:

 


CHRISTMAS GREETINGS

The staff of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Accounting would like to wish our members, all sixty three Australian CRCs, our many stakeholders and everyone else with whom we have worked this year, a very Happy Christmas and New Year.


CRC NEWS

CSIRO Medal Awarded
Congratulations to CRC for Greenhouse Accounting scientist, Prof Graham Farquhar and his colleagues in CSIRO Plant Industry, who were the recent joint recipients of a 2001 CSIRO medal, awarded for collaborative research. The team's research led to the development and implementation of a new plant breeding technique based on a plant carbon isotope composition to improve crop performance in dry environments.


Australian Carbon Accounting Standards - Open for Comment
A draft Australian Standard on Carbon Accounting is now publicly available for public comment. The draft is designated DR 01338. Go to the main Standards Australia web page at http://www.standards.com.au - search on the number to obtain it electronically. Comment is open until 15 February 2002. If you have problems accessing this document due to the curiously labrynthine website, request a copy from rowena.mueller@greenhouse.crc.org.au


International Economy: North America to plan for trading in emissions
Financial Times; Dec 4, 2001(More at www.ft.com/bushwarming)
Representatives from the US, Canada and Mexico are to meet on Friday in Toronto to discuss initial steps towards the establishment of permit trading system to reduce greenhouse gases in North America.While the Bush administration has yet formally to endorse a regional trading system, the
president in July called for joint action on greenhouse gases in North America. Since then, the White House has been quietly formulating a long-awaited alternative to the Kyoto Protocol. Private sector advisers have urged that a regional permits trading scheme, conducted under the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), be included in its plans. The meeting on Friday, under the auspices of the North American Commission for Environment Co-operation, set up under Nafta, follows a symposium last weekend on the emerging North American Electricity Markets.According to a commission study, planned increases in electricity production could increase Mexico's carbon dioxide emission by as much as 76 per cent by 2007. Emissions in the US could rise as much as 38 per cent and Canada, 16 per cent.

But the Bush administration is planning to go well beyond emissions trading systems, said Frank Maisano, an environmental consultant close to the White House planners. It also is working on a blueprint for further scientific research and proposals for technological solutions.Robert MacFarlane, former US national security adviser and now head of an energy investment company, predicted that the US would announce a permits trading system for greenhouse gases in the next year. He said he expected regulators to establish limits on greenhouse gases and areas of non-compliance, and permit trading would follow.Many US companies are already preparing for regulations to reduce emissions, whether under Kyoto or some other programme.

Mr MacFarlane's company, Energy & Communications Solutions, which has planned projects in developing countries around the world, and Andrew Ertel of Evolution Markets, a privately held emissions trading brokerage, last week announced a partnership which will specialise in energy efficiency, renewables and rehabilitation of infrastructure. At the same it will create and monetise greenhouse gas emission reduction credits for their clients.


Forests Storing 700 Million tons of Carbon per year (UniSci 12-Dec-2001 Internet: http://unisci.com/stories/20014/1212012.htm)
NASA-developed satellite data indicate that forests in America, Europe and Russia have been storing nearly 700 million metric tons of carbon a year. This is about 2 percent of annual global carbon emissions from industrial activities during the 1980s and 1990s. American forests soaked up 140 million tons of carbon a year -- about 11 percent of the USA's annual emissions. With the exception of Canada's boreal forests, which were found to be losing carbon, most northern forests were storing carbon. Russia, the
country with the most forests, accounted for almost 40 percent of the biomass carbon sink.

"This is only a piece of the total carbon sink in the north which may be as large as 2 billion tons," said Compton Tucker of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, suggesting that more carbon may be stored in other pools in the north, such as the soils. Wood from forests is the raw material for a multi-billion dollar global industry. While sophisticated ground-based forest inventories are routinely done in some countries, vast tracts of forests in large countries such as Canada and Russia are rarely inventoried because of their remoteness.

"This study suggests the possibility of surveying forests from space and making wood volume maps across a wide variety of forests," said Ranga Myneni of Boston University. The results of this NASA-funded study will be published in the December 18th issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. An electronic version of this article appears today in an early edition of PNAS.

Part of the puzzle of greenhouse gases and climate change is determining where carbon dioxide (CO2) is absorbed, and what causes a region to become a "carbon sink." The land and oceans are known to store half of the 6.5 billion tons of carbon emitted annually from fossil fuel burning and industrial activities. The other half is accumulating as CO2 in the atmosphere, the increasing concentration of which is thought by many to be responsible for global warming.

Analyses of atmospheric CO2 concentration changes indicate a carbon sink of about 1 to 2 billion tons on land in the northerly regions. Elsewhere, the land is suggested to be neutral, which implies that emissions of another 1.5 billion tons of carbon a year from cutting and burning of tropical forests are nearly balanced by sinks of similar magnitude there. The geographical detail of the land carbon sink has, however, remained elusive. The researchers combined forest greenness observed from sensors on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites with wood volume data from forest inventories to produce high resolution maps of carbon stocked in about one and half billion hectares of
northern forests located above the 30th parallel.

They identified where forests were storing carbon and where they were losing carbon by comparing the carbon stock maps of the late 1990s and early 1980s. The researchers report that about 61 billion tons of carbon is contained in the wood of these northern forests. The American and European forests contained more carbon than the Canadian and Russian forests (56 versus 41 tons per hectare). Among the European countries, Austria, France and Germany had notably large stocks. The rate of storage, in tons carbon per hectare per year, varied from country to country during the 1980s and 1990s. It was highest in Europe (0.84) and America (0.66), and least in Canada and China (0.29), with values for Russia in between (0.44). Thus, the sink distribution between North America and Eurasia was roughly in proportion to the forest area.

The researchers suggest increased incidence of fires and infestations in Canada, forest cultivation in the Nordic countries, declining harvests in Russia, fire suppression and forest regrowth in the USA, and longer growing seasons from warming in the north as possible reasons for why some forests are storing carbon and others are losing it. "This means that we do not know whether these forests will continue to store carbon in the future or release it at some point. That is why we need to monitor them both from space and on the ground," said Jiarui Dong of Boston University. "This study has important scientific, economic and policy implications," remarked Robert Kaufmann of Boston University. The scientific implication is, it deconstructs the mystery of the land carbon sink by providing geographically detailed maps of forest carbon pools, sources and sinks. The economic implication is, the wood volume maps are valuable information to the forest industry.

The policy implication is, some of the carbon sinks identified are key to realizing the Kyoto Protocol, which is an agreement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the industrialized nations. The protocol allows counting certain carbon sinks as part of a nation's emissions reduction commitment, within some limits, and even trading of carbon sinks between nations. The team of authors from Austria, Finland, Russia and the USA includes Ranga Myneni, Jiarui Dong, Compton Tucker, Robert Kaufmann, Pekka Kauppi, Jari Liski, Liming Zhou, Vladislav Alexeyev and Malcolm Hughes. The paper was communicated by Academy member Charles Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The work was made possible by funding through NASA Headquarter's Earth Science Enterprise, a long-term research program
dedicated to understanding how human-induced and natural changes affect our global environment.


Selling Carbon Credits
From December 2001 the Carboncredits.nl tender for Joint Implementation is open. Until 4 March 2002 submit expressions of interest to sell carbon credits from projects in Central and Eastern Europe. A complete set of tender documents (Terms of Reference, Guidelines to make Baselines) can be downloaded from site at http://www.carboncredits.nl . Browse to tender information. An information meeting will be held in The Hague on 14 January from 10.00 -17.00. Please register with Mrs Jacqueline Hummel before 4 January 2002. e-mail mailto:carboncredits@senter.nl or fax +31 70 361 09 18. More info from : Senter Internationaal - Dutch government agency P.O. Box 30732 2500 GS DEN HAAG The Netherlands tel. +31 70 361 04 95 fax +31 70 361 09 18 e-mail carboncredits@senter.nl


WHATS ON THE WEB?

"Net Ecosystem Exchange" at http://www.greenhouse.crc.org.au/crc/products/nee2001.htm
The recent release of the 2001collection of workshop papers by the CRC was met with considerable demand for hard copies. Electronic versions (1 single pdf and chapter by chapter files) are now available free on the CRC's website at http://www.greenhouse.crc.org.au/crc/products/nee2001.htm
If you experience problems downloading them, please email rowena.mueller@greenhouse.crc.org.au or call our Centre on 02 6125 4020


C3 - http://www.climatechangecentral.com/resources/
Climate Change Central has a bi-monthly e-newsletter "C3". This month's edition is devoted to the issue of emissions trading. Some articles include: Alberta Industry Experiences Emissions Trading Complexities; A Platform of Dialog About Climate Change Challenges and Opportunities in Alberta; Emissions Trading: Refining the Future; Establishing the Tools Emissions Trading System; Domestic Robust Trading System Essential. Get more info about C3 from Anna Stefanowicz in Alberta, Canada:
astefano@climatechangecentral.com


Scepticism about the Sceptical Environmentalist
In a recent publication, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg claimed that global warming and other environmental worries are "phantom problems" created or inflated by the environmental movement for its own ends. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist,
and many other mainstream media outfits have praised the book -- but what do scientists think? Two critical articles recently appeared including one from the Daily Grist which asked some prominent experts to take a look, including EO Wilson and Steve Schneider. http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/books/lomborg121201.asp?source=daily>
AND ALSO from the opinion e-journal - Tompaine.com
http://www.tompaine.com/news/2001/12/07/index.html


OECD IEA/ETSAP (Energy Technology Systems Analysis Programme) at http://www.ecn.nl/unit_bs/etsap/
Recently updated with items such as:

  • ETSAP to Have Key Role in IEA Energy Technology Perspectives
  • Joint Meeting Held with Italy's Kyoto Club
  • Linking Local Air Pollution Control with Global Warming Policy
  • Concept Studied for Recycling CO2 from Vehicles


ENVIRONMENT-NEWS MAILING LIST
Subscribe to a regular email update of "Environment Australia" for their news, events and publications. Information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe may be found at: http://www.ea.gov.au/media/news/index.html#subscribe


ECOCARBON
The latest edition of EcoCarbon News and Information Review is now on their site at http://www.ecocarbon.org.au The 'Summary Report of the EcoCarbon Industry Roundtables on capacity building needs of industry with respect to market-based approaches to greenhouse gas reduction' is available on the EcoCarbon website (www.ecocarbon.org.au) under 'Papers'.


FOCUS ON SALT
The National Dryland Salinity Program has a quarterly newsletter found at http://www.ndsp.gov.au


NEW PUBLICATIONS

ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE: INEVITABLE SURPRISES - U.S. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES REPORT
Global warming is typically thought of as a gradual process, but a report released this week by the warns that greenhouse gases and other atmospheric pollutants could cause massive, sudden, and potentially disastrous climate shifts. The authors of the report relied on paleontological evidence, historical records and computer modelling to demonstrate that in the past, gradual climate change was punctuated by sudden temperature increases. For example, the report concluded that roughly half of the warming that has taken place in the northern Atlantic Ocean since the last ice age occurred in just one decade, triggering floods and droughts across the globe. See publication announcement and list of members of committee that compiled this report at http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/0309074347?OpenDocument


CICERO - Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research -Oslo
Two new papers below. Get more info from Andreas Tjernshaugen in Oslo: andreas.tjernshaugen@cicero.uio.no


PRODUCTIVITY COMMISSION AND PRIVATE SECTOR BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION
The productivity commission have released a new research paper looking into private sector conservation. The report found that governments could improve both biodiversity conservation and economic outcomes by removing unnecessarily restrictive regulatory constraints on private resource users and managers, while clarifying their rights and responsibilities for biodiversity conservation and establishing appropriate cost sharing frameworks. Check http://www.pc.gov.au/research/commres/hpscb/index.html for a copy of the report (More info: Alecia Jones MDB Newsline Ph: 02 6257 4010)


SEMINARS & CONFERENCES

CLIMATE CHANGE; Science, Impacts and Policy Responses 15 - 19 April 2002 at Imperial College, London, UK.
This new 5-day modular programme aims to bring a diversity of professionals together to help them understand the underlying science and the business impact of climate change and responses. The programme will provide an in-depth understanding of various aspects of climate change in a
concentrated period and give those attending an opportunity to discuss the issues relevant to them. It will be delivered by a range of experts of international renown and experience, who can address this multifaceted issue from a variety of standpoints. This programme will be of interest to all who have a responsibility or obligation to understand the impact for their business. More at http://www.ad.ic.ac.uk/cpd/climate.htm. and Tel: 020 7594 6886, Fax: 020 7594 6883 or u.wernmark@ic.ac.uk.

ARTICLES & PRESS RELEASES OF INTEREST

30 YEARS ON THE SCIENCE POLICY MERRY GO ROUND
The main decisions have been made on the splitting of science from the federal industry portfolio with the changes now to be pushed through before Christmas. http://www.asto.com.au/News01/roundabout.htm


NEW KIND OF CRC NEEDED - CDC
A study into Australian entrepreneurship recommends the creation of a Cooperative Development Centre (CDC) Program, modelled on the successful Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) Program, and aimed at developing expertise in commercialising research output. http://www.asto.com.au/News01/entrepstudy.htm


NEW FED CABINET & COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP ANNOUNCED (FEDGOV RELEASE - 13
December 2001)
Cabinet Committees play an important role in the effectiveness of the Cabinet system, and this role will be enhanced in the Government third term by the creation of new committees for Policy and Priorities and for Sustainable Environment. These new committees will join those covering National Security, Employment and Infrastructure, Expenditure Review and Parliamentary Business. The Sustainable Environment Committee meets an election promise reflecting commitment to make the area covered by the Committee one of the most important whole of government priorities. Matters that will be considered by the Committee include greenhouse policy, the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality, land clearing, biodiversity and oceans policy.


MEMBERSHIP OF CABINET: Prime Minister;Mr Anderson;Mr Costello;Mr Vaile;Senator Hill;Senator Alston;Mr Downer;Mr Abbott;Mr Ruddock;Dr Kemp;Mr Williams;Senator Minchin;Mr Truss;Senator Vanstone;Dr Nelson;Senator Patterson;Mr Macfarlane;
MEMBERSHIP OF SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT COMMITTEE: Prime Minister (Chairman);Mr Anderson;Dr Kemp;Mr Truss;Dr Nelson;Mr Macfarlane;Senator Macdonald;


GOLD MEDAL TO FOREST PRODUCTS RESEARCHERS (MEDIA RELEASE - CSIRO 13
December, 2001)
An instrument that allows fast, non-destructive wood testing has won its developers the CSIRO Chairman's Medal for the year 2001. Read more at: http://www.csiro.au/page.asp?type=mediaRelease&id=2001Medals


REMOTE SENSING EXPERT ACCLAIMED (MEDIA RELEASE - CSIRO 29 November, 2001)
Australia is today among the world leaders in the use of remote sensing thanks in large part to innovative image and signal processing software developed by CSIRO scientist Dr Andy Green. Dr Bruce Hobbs, Deputy Chief Executive of CSIRO, today paid tribute to Dr Green's achievements as Dr Green retires after 31 years with the Organisation. http://www.csiro.au/page.asp?type=mediaRelease&id=AndyGreen

 

 

(c) 2002 CRC for Greenhouse Accounting

Please notify the webmaster@greenhouse.crc.org.au (Rowena Mueller, Mob: 0402 489 245) if you have public information suitable for this mailing list (or wish to subscribe/unsubscribe). The CRC and its partners cannot accept responsibility for the views contained in public information received and posted on this list. Please note the CRC attempts to reference the origin of the information provided in these news updates as accurately as possible to encourage Internet users to explore primary sources for themselves.

2002 - The International Year of EcoTourism