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Ivory trade nations face threat of sanctions

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Top conservation organizations warned Wednesday that the illegal ivory trade is hastening the decline of Africa‘s already endangered elephant population, and said they are ready to punish nations that are lax in fighting the problem.

“Globally, illegal ivory trade activity has more than doubled since 2007, and is now over three times larger than it was in 1998,” said a report issued in Bangkok at a meeting of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

CITES has put three African and five Asian nations on notice that they have failed to adequately crack down on the ivory trade, and that by next week they must come up with a detailed and credible plan of action for curbing the trade across and within their borders. They must also meet those targets or face trade sanctions next year.

The nations threatened with sanctions are Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and China. Sanctions would keep those nations from trading even in legal wildlife products by barring other CITES member nations from buying from them.

A CITES-led project that monitors about 40 percent of Africa‘s elephant population estimated that 17,000 elephants were illegally killed in 2011, and the numbers are probably the same or greater for last year, said the report, produced by CITES, the U.N. Environment Program, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, better known as TRAFFIC.

The report said the increased poaching and loss of habitat threaten the survival of elephant populations in Central Africa and undermine previously more secure populations in West, Southern and East Africa.

Curbing the ivory trade is a major topic for the CITES meeting, attended by about 2,000 delegates representing 178 governments, businesses, non-governmental organizations and groups speaking for indigenous peoples.

The report, “Elephants in the Dust — The African Elephant Crisis,” said criminal networks are increasingly active and entrenched in the trafficking of ivory between Africa and Asia. “Training of enforcement officers in the use of tracking, intelligence networks and innovative techniques, such as forensic analysis, is urgently needed,” it said.

Officials from the conservation groups said CITES is also putting pressure on governments of nations found to be key links in the chain of the illegal ivory trade.

Tom Milliken, TRAFFIC‘s ivory expert, said he …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News

News, Politics, Government

UN finds rising mercury emissions, need for treaty

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Mercury pollution in the top layer of the world’s oceans has doubled in the past century, part of a man-made problem that will require international cooperation to fix, the U.N.’s environment agency said Thursday.

The report by the U.N. Environment Program showed for the first time that hundreds of tons of mercury have leaked from the soil into rivers and lakes around the world.

As a result of rising emissions, communities in developing countries face increasing health and environmental risks linked to exposure to mercury, the U.N. agency says.

Mercury, a toxic metal, is widely used in chemical production and small-scale mining, particularly gold. It is a naturally occurring element that is found in air, water and soil, and it cannot be created or destroyed.

Mercury emissions come from sources such as coal burning and the use of mercury to separate metal from ore in small-scale gold mining, and mercury pollution also comes from discarded electronic and other consumer products. Mercury in the air settles into soil from where it can then seep into water.

The report, an update on its previous global tallies of mercury in 2002 and 2007, comes in advance of talks in Geneva next week between nations negotiating a new legally binding treaty to reduce mercury emissions worldwide.

Such a treaty would represent a major reversal from previous years when major powers including the United States, China and India sought voluntary reductions.

Mercury concentrations accumulate in fish and go up the food chain, posing the greatest risk of nerve damage to pregnant women, women of childbearing age and young children.

The report says parts of Africa, Asia and South America could see increasing emissions of mercury into the environment mainly due to small-scale gold mining, and through coal burning for electricity. It found that mercury emissions from artisanal gold mining had doubled since 2005 due to factors such as rising gold prices and better reporting on the emissions.

Asia accounts for just under half of all global releases of mercury, the report said.

Over the past 100 years, mercury found in the top 100 meters of the world’s oceans has doubled and concentrations in waters deeper than that have gone up by 25 percent, the U.N. agency said, while rivers and lakes contain an estimated 260 metric tons of mercury that was previously held in soils.

UNEP‘s executive director, Achim Steiner, said mercury pollution remains “a major global, regional and national challenge in terms of threats to human health and the environment” but new technologies can reduce the risks.

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News