BBC Environment – A long-running drought in Australia’s main food-growing region, the Murray-Darling river basin, has worsened, a new report says. Three months of dry weather and the driest June on record have plunged the area back into drought, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission says.

Crossing much of south-east Australia, the Murray-Darling is the country’s most important river system. The basin produces 40% of Australia’s fruit, vegetables and grain.

Experts say the drought will hit irrigated crops like rice and grapes the hardest, because other crops, such as wheat, depend more on rainfall during specific periods.

Corey Watts, of the Australian Conservation Foundation in Melbourne, told the BBC that drought was becoming a regular occurrence instead of happening once every 20 to 25 years. “We’ve had a string of reports, official reports, over the last fortnight painting a pretty grim picture for the climate and the future of our economy and our environment,” he said. “So now we’re looking at a future in the next few decades where drought will occur once every two years.”

The Chief Executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Wendy Craik, said that until there was significant rain and run-off, prospects for irrigation remained grim.

Dr Craik warned that while human demand along the Murray Darling river would still be met, other water requirements might not. “If the sort of climatic regime we’ve had in the past couple of years becomes a feature of the future, it’s pretty clear we don’t have the volume of water available that we’ve had in the past. Clearly the basin is not going to be the same,” she said. …

Scientists say that without sufficient water flow by October, the unique ecology of the lower reaches of the river system will be irreversibly damaged. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has already admitted that his government’s new conservation plan will not produce results fast enough to meet this deadline.

Large swathes of Australia have been affected by the worst drought in a century, hindering the country’s economic growth. It is estimated that the parched conditions have forced 10,000 farming families off the land in the past five years, and many of those who have decided to stay have introduced more water efficient cropping methods. (07/10/08)
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BBC Community — Could growing fresh vegetables help save crumbling inner cities around the world and tackle hunger?

That is the ambitious aim of a charity called Urban Farming, which has its headquarters in Detroit, the capital of the US’s wilting car industry. The idea is very simple: turn wasteland into free vegetable gardens and feed the poor people who live nearby. Motown has lost more than a million residents since its heyday in the 1950s and it is common to see downtown residential streets with just a few houses left standing.

Taja Sevelle saw the hundreds of hectares of vacant land in the city and came up with the idea of creating an organic self-help movement that would be “affordable (and) practical”. …

Visiting one of the largest allotments, on a site that had been
derelict since Detroit’s infamous 1967 riots, locals spoke about an
astonishing transformation.

“There is something that every hand in this area can do,” said Rose
Stallard, who is keen to enlist as many volunteers as possible to help
tend the garden and its precious crops. As she organises a band of eager helpers to pull greens from
the rich top-soil, Ms Stallard says food is more expensive than ever
and neighbourhood shops are scarce. “That’s one cucumber you didn’t have to pay 69 cents for,” she adds, with a smile.

There are no fences but one local said greed had not been a problem. “People are only taking what they need, because they know it’s for everybody,” he said. …

The idea of permanent social change, away from the old industrial core, is something that Detroit sorely needs, according to the editorial page editor of the Detroit News, Nolan Finley. “Today’s reality is that we have a lot of vacant space, and not much economic opportunity,” he said. “You could have urban farming - you could have livestock in some of these stretches of empty land. You could reforest it into tree farms so you’re not maintaining a sidewalk, a power line, for a street that has two houses on it.”

The conversion from Motown to Growtown may seem far-fetched, but given Detroit’s economic woes, marketable ideas are in big demand. (07/10/08)
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Concerns over climate change and energy depletion are increasing exponentially. Mainstream solutions still assume a panacea that will cure our climate ills without requiring any serious modification to our way of life.

A new book by Pat Murphy, Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change, explores the risks inherent in trying to continue our energy-intensive lifestyle. Using dirtier fossil fuels (Plan A) or switching to renewable energy sources (Plan B) allows people to remain complacent in the face of potential global catastrophe. Dramatic lifestyle change is the only way to begin to create a sustainable, equitable world.

The converging crises of Peak Oil, Climate Change and increasing inequity are pre-sented in a clear, concise manner, as are the twin solutions of community (where cooperation replaces competition) and curtailment (deliberately reducing consumption of consumer goods). Plan C shows how each person’s individual choices can dramatically reduce CO2 emissions. It offers specific strategies in the areas of food, transportation and housing.

Plan C is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in living a lower-energy, saner, and sustainable lifestyle. (07/10/08)
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BBC Earth Science – A third of the world’s reef-building coral species are facing extinction. That is the stark conclusion from the first global study to assess the extinction risks of corals. …

“The picture is frightening,” said Alex Rogers from the Zoological Society of London, one of 39 scientists involved in the assessment. “It’s not just the fact that something like a third of all reef-forming corals are threatened, but that we could be facing the loss of large areas of these ecosystems within 50 to 100 years. The implications of that are absolutely staggering - not only for biodiversity, but also for economics.” …

When water temperatures rise, coral polyps - tiny animals that build the reefs - expel the algae that usually live with them in a symbiotic relationship. The corals lose their colour, with reefs taking on a bleached appearance, and begin to die off because the algae are not there to provide nutrients. The new analysis shows that before 1998, only 13 of the 704 coral species assessed would have been classified as threatened. Now, the number is 231.

“It was a devastating event in terms of the destruction of corals, with 16% of reefs irreversibly destroyed - an incredible amount,” said Kent Carpenter from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, in the US. The big problem is that if these bleaching events become more frequent as temperatures rise, as we suspect will happen, then we will see whole tracts of coral wiped out.” (07/10/08)
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