Plan to Save the Oceans

The world has made lacklustre progress in meeting most of the commitments it made 20 years ago to safeguard the oceans, says a report. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, agreements were made on issues such as sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, capacity building, and biodiversity; later, the Johannesburg Summit in 2002 in South Africa set targets and timetables to achieve those goals.

But a report entitled Oceans at Rio+20 has rated both the effort and the achievements to date in protecting oceans and meeting these commitments as 'low to medium'. Meanwhile a separate, UN report says that at least 40 per cent of the global oceans are 'heavily affected' by human activities and that 60 per cent of the world's major marine ecosystems have been degraded or are being used unsustainably. It makes ten proposals for improvement. Oceans at Rio+20 calls for a string of actions, including more scientific research and capacity building in small island states, to try to tackle the problems. Read more Environment Clean Generations

Keep Reading...

Posted in: africa,earth,ecosystems,environment clean generations,ocean

Plenty Of Water For 21st Century

Over the last few decades, water shortages and conflicts over water rights sparked concerns that H2O could be the next oil. But there is plenty of water to go around for the next century to meet food, energy, industrial and the environmental needs said a recent report by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

The problem is that water is not distributed and used efficiently or fairly.

"Water scarcity is not affecting our ability to grow enough food today," said Alain Vidal, director of the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF), the division of CGIAR that completed the report released yesterday at the XIV World Water Congress. The report was also published in two special issues of the journal, Water International.

"Yes, there is scarcity in certain areas, but our findings show that the problem overall is a failure to make efficient and fair use of the water available in these river basins. This is ultimately a political challenge, not a resource concern," said Vidal in a press release.

"Huge volumes of rainwater are lost or never used," he added, "particularly in the rain-fed regions of sub-Saharan Africa. With modest improvements, we can generate two to three times more food than we are producing today.

Vidal and his colleagues studied 10 river basins: the Andes and São Francisco in South America; the Limpopo, Niger, Nile and Volta basins in Africa; and the Ganges, Indus, Karkheh, Mekong, and Yellow in Asia.

A river basin in the entire area, from highlands to lowlands, that drains into a river.

These 10 basins were selected because they represented the full range of challenges faced by watersheds in the developing world.

In fact they directly affect a large portion of the developing world. Altogether, the river basins cover 13.5 million square kilometers and are home to about 1.5 billion people, including 470 million of the world's poorest.

"The most surprising finding is that despite all of the pressures facing our basins today, there are relatively straightforward opportunities to satisfy our development needs and alleviate poverty for millions of people without exhausting our most precious natural resource," said Simon Cook, leader of the CPWF's Basin Focal Research Project.

"With a major push to intensify rainfed agriculture, we could feed the world without increasing the strain on river basins systems," said Cook.

Africa had the greatest opportunity for improvement. The report found that only about four percent of the rains down in Africa were captured and used to irrigate crops or quench the thirst of livestock.

The researchers also found that countries need to view whole river basins and watersheds as a whole and not focus on individual sectors of the economy in water use plans. Currently, too much emphasis has been placed on agriculture and not enough on fisheries and livestock.

For example, in the Niger basin, freshwater fisheries support 900,000 people, many of them struggling in dire poverty. Along the Mekong in South Asia, 40 million people depend on fish for at least part of the year. Back in Africa, in the Nile River basin, almost half of the water in the basin is involved in livestock operations.

Nations need to think beyond not just economic divisions in water use policy, but also their own political borders, said the report. Water has no respect for the lines humans draw on maps, and water use policies need to take this into account.

The CGIAR report echoes the words of John Wesley Powell, the indomitable, one-armed geographer who explored the Grand Canyon.

Powell said that a watershed is "that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community."

Finding common ground over water may be difficult, since it involves nations and regions that may not have the friendliest relationships, but in the long term people need to re-examine how they relate to water.

"In many cases, we need a complete rethink of how government ministries take advantage of the range of benefits coming from river basins, rather than focusing on one sector such as hydropower, irrigation or industry," the authors stated.

 by "environment clean generations"

Keep Reading...

Posted in: africa,earth,natural source,niger basin,Plenty Of Water For 21st Century,water shortage,water supply

Early Humans Had Sex With Mysterious Extinct Relatives

Our species may have bred with a now extinct lineage of humanity before leaving Africa, scientists say.

Although we modern humans are now the only surviving lineage of humanity, others once roamed the Earth, making their way out of Africa before our species did, including the familiar Neanderthals in West Asia and Europe and the newfound Denisovans in East Asia. Genetic analysis of fossils of these extinct lineages has revealed they once interbred with modern humans, unions that may have endowed our lineage with mutations that protected them as we began expanding across the world about 65,000 yeas ago.

Now researchers analyzing the human genome find evidence that our species hybridized with a hitherto unknown human lineage even before leaving Africa, with approximately 2 percent of contemporary African DNA perhaps coming from this lineage. In comparison, recent estimates suggest that Neanderthal DNA makes up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes and Denisovan DNA makes up 4 percent to 6 percent of modern Melanesian genomes.

"We need to modify the standard model of human origins in which a single population transitioned to the anatomically modern state in isolation — a garden of Eden somewhere in Africa — and replaced all other archaic forms both within Africa and outside Africa without interbreeding," researcher Michael Hammer, a population geneticist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told LiveScience. "We now need to consider models in which gene flow occurred over time."

Haplotype hints

Hammer and his colleagues gathered DNA samples from the Center for the Study of Human Polymorphisms in Paris and sequenced about 60 regions of the human genome that apparently have no function. These genes are less subject than functional DNA to change as a result of recent evolutionary pressures driving the survival of the fittest; in such a way, they can give a clearer view of how populations might have mixed or not in the past.

The investigators focused on three populations that presented a good sample of the geographic and cultural diversity of sub-Saharan Africa — Mandenka farmers in western Africa, Biaka Pygmies in west-central Africa, and San Bushmen of southern Africa — looking for unusual patterns that suggested ancient interbreeding with other lineages. This included a hunt for long haplotypes, or sets of DNA sequences, not seen in other modern human groups, the idea being that while short haplotypes could potentially be explained by a few chance mutations within these modern human populations, comparatively long haplotypes were instead likely inherited from a significantly different lineage.

 "If interbreeding occurs, it's going to bring in a whole chromosome," Hammer explained. Although this genetic contribution would have dwindled over time, remnants would still exist as shorter, unusual fragments, and "by looking at how long they are, we can get an estimate of how far back the interbreeding event happened." (The longer these odd haplotypes are, the more recently they occurred, having less time to get diminished by other genetic inputs.)

The researchers discovered especially strong evidence for such genetic mixing in the Biaka and San, in the form of a trio of unusual haplotypes. By comparing these sets of genes with those from comparable modern human ones, the investigators estimated the unusual genes may have come from a lineage that first diverged from the ancestors of modern humans about 700,000 years ago. For context, the Neanderthal lineage diverged from ours within the past 500,000 years, while the first signs of anatomically modern human features appeared only about 200,000 years ago.

"The populations that interbred in Africa were on a similar scale of divergence as the expanding modern population and Neanderthals were outside of Africa," Hammer said. "They were similar enough biologically so that they were able to produce fertile offspring, thus allowing genes to flow from one population to the other."

The length of the exotic haplotypes from this extinct lineage suggests interbreeding might still have occurred until as recently as 35,000 years ago.

"We think there were probably thousands of interbreeding events," Hammer said. "It happened relatively extensively and regularly."

Homeland of extinct lineage

A broader survey of where this trio of exotic haplotypes from this extinct lineage might now be found revealed they could be seen in modern human groups across sub-Saharan Africa, but apparently just one central African population of Pygmies, the Mbuti, had all three. Since this group is relatively isolated from other modern human populations, including other Pygmies, the scientists conjecture that central Africa may have been the homeland of this extinct lineage.

In the future, Hammer's team wants to look at the entire genome sequences of several modern human groups in Africa to get a better picture of how interbreeding might have occurred.

"Did it occur in a single burst in a single locale, or was admixture an ongoing process such that genes were flowing over large geographic distances and long periods of time?" Hammer asked. "This has many implications for how modern humans acquired the features that make them unique."

The researchers also want to look for ancient DNA from this extinct lineage that might have conferred some evolutionary advantage to hybrids with modern humans. This process of modern humans interbreeding with other lineages as they expanded across the world "may have accelerated the evolutionary process by allowing genes that are beneficial in one locale to spread to a new population that has not yet had time to adapt to those new conditions," Hammer said. "This may be a major mode of acquiring novel characteristics and one of the ways that we became the species that we are today."

So far no traces of the haplotypes from this newfound lineage have been seen in modern human groups outside of Africa. However, "we can't be sure until we do a better job of searching for them," Hammer said. "Another question for the future."

by "environment clean generations" 

Keep Reading...

Posted in: africa,biology,DNA,Early Humans Had Sex With Mysterious Extinct Relatives,earth,interbreeding,species