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Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 12 August 2010
Madagascar is at risk of a significant plague of crop-eating locusts, FAO warned today.
 An average swarm eats the same as about 2 500 people in one day An unknown number of immature swarms of Malagasy Migratory Locust (Locusta migratoria capito) have formed up and moved out of the country’s south-western corner, where they are usually contained, and have begun to spread east and north, as far as Maintirano.
The government estimates that 460 000 rural families are potentially at risk.
A major, months-long control campaign will be necessary starting in advance of Madagascar’s upcoming rainy season, which begins in mid-October, to stop locust numbers from growing and prevent them from reaching plague proportions.
Madagascar is currently in its dry and cool season, which is unsuitable for locust breeding. But the wet and hot weather of the rainy season – which lasts until spring — will favour rapid reproduction.
Given suitable conditions, locusts can produce a new generation roughly every two months and up to four during one year. Continue reading Crop-eating locusts swarm over Madagascar
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 10 August 2010
Production of rice — the world’s most important crop for ensuring food security and addressing poverty — will be thwarted as temperatures increase in rice-growing areas with continued climate change, according to a new study by an international team of scientists.
The research team found evidence that the net impact of projected temperature increases will be to slow the growth of rice production in Asia. Rising temperatures during the past 25 years have already cut the yield growth rate by 10-20% in several locations.
Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) — a peer-reviewed, scientific journal from the United States — the report analyzed 6 years of data from 227 irrigated rice farms in six major rice-growing countries in Asia, which produces more than 90% of the world’s rice.
“We found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop,” said Mr. Jarrod Welch, lead author of the report and graduate student of economics at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Continue reading As nights get hotter – rice yields drop
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 28 July 2010
Invasive alien plants now infest 20-million hectares of South Africa – an area twice as large as previously estimated.
 Wattles have taken over more than 1.6-million hectares of South Africa The shock finding comes from an Agricultural Research Council (ARC) report commissioned by Water Affairs.
“The previous figure was 10 million hectares. We knew this was an under-estimate, but we didn’t think it was this big. It’s come as quite a shock,” the department’s natural resource management programme operations head, Christo Marais, told Sapa.
The ARC had briefed the department on the new estimate at a Working for Water (WfW) implementation meeting earlier this month.
Marais said it had long been obvious there was an under-estimation of the scale of the problem, particularly in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
Invasive alien vegetation, including various species of wattle, pine, poplar, weeping willow, gum trees, hakea and prickly pear, among others, pose a serious threat to South Africa’s water supply, as well as the country’s agricultural potential and biodiversity.
If the 20-million hectares of alien invasive vegetation across the country could be condensed into a single area, it would form a dense, impenetrable thicket about twice the size of the Kruger National Park. Continue reading Alien plant coverage shocks Water Affairs
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 08 June 2010
Around the world, governments are failing to prevent overfishing on the high seas. On World Ocean Day (June 8), WWF warns the plundering of the planet’s last great ecological frontier will have dire implications for food security and livelihoods for millions of people.
 Cold water coral - Lophelia pertusa The high seas, areas outside of national jurisdiction, account for over two-thirds of the world’s oceans and its rich biodiversity is as much under threat as within countries’ waters. Some 65 percent of straddling and high seas fish stocks are overfished and fragile cold water corals and sea mounts are bulldozed by indiscriminate fishing.
In many cases, legal fishing on the high seas fails to follow scientific advice while illegal fishers are looting with impunity, hauling up catches with an estimated value of $1.2 billion USD annually. Government subsidies are also a scourge, encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish. Subsidies prop up a bloated global fishing fleet 50 to 60 percent higher than it should be.
“It is high time that the high seas received more attention, and that countries take their responsibilities as the current stewards of this global commons seriously.” said Alistair Graham, High Seas Policy Advisor at WWF International. “Countries must ratify the Agreement on Port State Measures against illegal fishing and stop perverse subsidies that lead to ecosystem degradation.” Continue reading High seas fishing plunder
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 24 May 2010
How can communities develop economically and socially without damaging the fragile ecosystems they live in?
That was the primary question at a seminar hosted at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University on Friday by the national Department of Social Welfare, the UN’s Leadership for Environment and Development (Lead) programme and the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality.
 Agathosma serpyllacea - coastal fynbos, Western Cape The seminar is one of six set to take place over the next six months in preparation for the International Training Session on Population, Climate Change and Development Conference in Port Elizabeth, in October.
One of the speakers at Friday’s event, Schalk Potgieter, assistant director of strategic planning in the municipality’s human settlement unit, said the nexus of population development and critical ecosystems was a crucial one in Mandela Bay.
Five biomes or broad indigenous vegetation zones meet here and two, coastal fynbos and thicket, are particularly fragile.
These ecosystems are vulnerable to human development and also to climate change, which will likely result in rising seas and increasingly fierce and frequent storms – putting pressure especially on impoverished communities living on marginal land.
This can result in migration by “climate change refugees” and conflict, in turn, with people in the areas where they migrate to, and greater pressure on that land. Continue reading Fragile ecosystems under threat of growing communities
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