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FEATURED STORY
Call for Emergency Response to Catastrophe in the Philippines  PHILLIPINES - Victims of the catastrophic Typhoon Haiyan in the Phillipines need the world’s support to get through this once in a lifetime crisis. The latest estimates indicate that nearly 4.5 million people from 36 provinces have been affected with over 10,000 people feared dead. With wind speeds of up to 320 Km per hour, Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines early on 8 November. It is one of the strongest storms ever recorded, measuring a massive 600 Km wide. The coming days and weeks are critical with hundreds of thousands of people without shelter, food or clean water. Lack of effective sanitation means that the threat of illness from diseases such as cholera are rising, unless we can do something about it. READ MORE ASIA Kampot projects ‘threaten mangroves’  CAMBODIA - Mangrove forests along Cambodia’s coast in Kampot support more than 100,000 families and create a diverse ecosystem that is home to hundreds of unique species. But coastal development projects, coupled with locals’ reliance on the forest for their livelihoods, threaten to decimate more than 1,000 hectares of this lush environment, an NGO has said. The mangroves have been in decline for a decade due to human activities, including logging and filling the waterways with sand to create artificial land, according to Wildlife Conservation Cambodia. Fishing communities say their livelihoods are also being affected by a 1,000-hectare special economic zone under construction in the province. READ MORE Asian officials look at valuing nature in economic decision making THAILAND - Over 80 statisticians, economists, ecologists and senior policy makers across Asia began a three-day workshop at the United Nations in Bangkok on Tuesday to look at ways of valuing natural resources so they can be better protected. Current national accounting systems, used since 1950, produce numbers such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure the value of goods and services produced in a national economy. But such measures rarely value assets such as mangroves, wetlands, coral reefs or clean air and water, leading to decisions that degrade them and undermine poverty alleviation goals. READ MORE CSR BRIEFS : An effort to grow mangrove trees THAILAND - Thailand has lost more than half of its mangrove forests since 1960 due to agricultural expansion especially shrimp farming, urbanisation, roadways, marinas and other intrusive developments. Fortunately, efforts to save mangroves are becoming more popular as their benefits, such as protecting coastal areas from erosion, storm surge and tsunamis become more widely known. Community management has also been effective in mangroves reforestation. The Royal Thai Navy's 2,000 mangrove tree-planting efforts at Ban Lam Sing in the vicinity of Bangkok Naval Base has thus attracted cooperation from outsiders. One is Total Access Communication (Dtac), a management team from which was recently there led by Jon Eddy Abdullah, chief executive officer. READ MORE AFRICA New science further highlights the important mitigation potential of coastal ecosystems  SOUTH AFRICA - Coastal ecosystems – in particular mangrove forests, tidal marshes and seagrasses – are well recognised for their provision of essential ecosystem goods and services. Among other natural services, coastal ecosystems have the ability to sequester and store substantial amounts of carbon, both in their tree biomass, as well as in the deep mud that accumulates around their roots. The importance of these ecosystems, as both global carbon sinks and sources, makes ‘Blue Carbon’ important for many countries’ climate change strategies – not only in international forums such as the UNFCCC COPs, but also to fulfill their national mitigation pledges. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions released through poor management, degradation and loss of coastal habitats are not currently being fully accounted for in international climate change frameworks or in national GHG Inventory Submissions. This means that countries are underestimating their contribution towards anthropogenic emissions but also not including the carbon savings from measures to protect and restore coastal habitats into their international and national climate targets. READ MORE GU Sensitizes Coastal Care Project Beneficiaries On Environmental Conservation GAMBIA - Global Unification The Gambia (GU), a youth-led environmental civil society organization has organized a day's outreach to the coastal communities of Gunjur, Tanji and Sanyang to sensitise them about the impact of indiscriminate logging, littering, sand mining; the need to protect the mangrove ecosystem and to involve more in environmental conservation in general. The outreach programme, which took the form of a caravan, is part of the organization's Coastal Communities' Resilience Enhancing (Coastal CARE) project -a mangrove planting and environmental education project that targets the aforementioned coastal communities, with a view to replenishing the largely damaged mangrove ecosystems on the Gambian coastline. The day long tour started in Gunjur, then Sanyang and finally in Tanji, and culminated into meetings in the respective project communities. READ MORE AMERICAS David Suzuki helps develop insect-based fish food  CANADA - Long a vocal critic of British Columbia’s conventional fish-farming industry, environmentalist David Suzuki has helped create a new product being tested as feed for farmed salmon. Suzuki and Brad Marchant, CEO of the Vancouver-based start-up company Enterra, coined the idea of using maggots fed on food waste to create a sustainable source of protein while fly fishing in Yukon. “For years we’ve been fighting salmon aquaculture, not because we are against aquaculture, but we felt that [conventional] aquaculture was the wrong way to do it,” Suzuki told The Vancouver Sun. “First of all, the salmon are grown in open nets, so you are using the ocean as a sewer. Closed containment is the way it has to go.” Suzuki said he would oppose using the feed in open-net salmon aquaculture. READ MORE Government reactivates fresh shrimp exports to Mexico HONDURAS - The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (SAG) signed a ministerial agreement that, by a sanitary measure protocol, will reactivate fresh shrimp exports to the Mexican market. One of the main objectives of the Government is to prevent early mortality disease (EMS) in shrimp from spreading to Honduras. "We are signing this ministerial agreement that amends fresh shrimp export closure to Mexico, which will make it possible to do it with a sanitary measure protocol that reduces the risk of contamination and prevents the disease from entering the country," explained SAG head, Jacobo Regalado. READ MORE World's major wetland restorations earn "mid-term grades" USA - In an editorial published in the scientific journal Ecological Engineering, wetlands expert and Ecological Engineering editor-in-chief Dr. William J. Mitsch gave academic “midterm” grades to six of the longest-term, largest -scale wetland restoration projects in the world. The grades ranged from good to poor on the six projects. Mitsch used the following criteria in assigning the grades: 1) the project had to show progress, 2) the project had to provide measurable markers of improvement, 3) the basic principles of ecological engineering had to be applied, and 4) the restoration had to demonstrate sustainability. Mitsch has observed these six wetland restorations for a decade or more as they have developed, and summarized them in this editorial entitled “When will ecologists learn engineering and engineers learn ecology?” Two wetland projects, the Mesopotamian Marshland wetland restoration in southern Iraq and the Delaware Bay salt marsh restoration in New Jersey, USA, received good grades (A’s in the American grading system) because of their lack of “over-engineered” solutions and because of their reliance on self-design concepts that will make these restoration projects ultimately sustainable. READ MORE LAST WORD Tales from Tae Pae Yoi - Koh Phra Thong I have been lucky enough to be out in the field with MAP many times and it is my favourite part of volunteering. I am so grateful to the villagers, visiting professionals and extended MAP family for the opportunity to take part in their work. I feel very privileged to see and experience Thailand this way, meeting real people with real issues and hearing their voices and opinions on the things that matter to them most. READ MORE VOLUNTEERS NEEDED ~ WE WELOCME YOUR LETTERS - If you’d like to have the last word on this or any other mangrove related topic, please send us your submission for upcoming newsletters. We’ll choose one per issue to have “the last word”. While we can’t promise to publish everyone’s letter, we do encourage anyone to post comments on our Blog at www. mangroveactionproject.blogspot.com BACK TO TOP Not yet a subscriber? Click here to subscribe. Please cut and paste these news alerts/ action alerts on to your own lists and contacts. Help us spread the word and further generate letters of concern, as this can make a big difference in helping to halt a wrongdoing or encourage correct action. |
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MAP provides the grassroots training and education programs needed to effectively protect these vital ecosystems – now and into the future.
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