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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > Worldnews > Population]
UN report: World's biggest cities merging into 'mega-regions'

Trend towards 'endless cities' could significantly affect population and wealth in the next 50 years
John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 March 2010 17.50 GMT
Article history

The world's mega-cities are merging to form vast "mega-regions" which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be home to more than 100 million people, according to a major new UN report.

The phenomenon of the so-called "endless city" could be one of the most significant developments - and problems - in the way people live and economies grow in the next 50 years, says UN-Habitat, the agency for human settlements, which identifies the trend of developing mega-regions in its biannual State of World Cities report.

The largest of these, says the report - launched today at the World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro - is the Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou region in China, home to about 120 million people. Other mega-regions have formed in Japan and Brazil and are developing in India, west Africa and elsewhere.

The trend helped the world pass a tipping point in the last year, with more than half the world's people now living in cities.

The UN said that urbanisation is now "unstoppable". Anna Tibaijuka, outgoing director of UN-Habitat, said: "Just over half the world now lives in cities but by 2050, over 70% of the world will be urban dwellers. By then, only 14% of people in rich countries will live outside cities, and 33% in poor countries."

The development of mega-regions is regarded as generally positive, said the report's co-author Eduardo Lopez Moreno: "They [mega-regions], rather than countries, are now driving wealth."

"Research shows that the world's largest 40 mega-regions cover only a tiny fraction of the habitable surface of our planet and are home to fewer than 18% of the world's population [but] account for 66% of all economic activity and about 85% of technological and scientific innovation," said Moreno.

"The top 25 cities in the world account for more than half of the world's wealth," he added. "And the five largest cities in India and China now account for 50% of those countries' wealth."

The migration to cities, while making economic sense, is affecting the rural economy too: "Most of the wealth in rural areas already comes from people in urban areas sending money back," Moreno said.

The growth of mega-regions and cities is also leading to unprecedented urban sprawl, new slums, unbalanced development and income inequalities as more and more people move to satellite or dormitory cities.

"Cities like Los Angeles grew 45% in numbers between 1975-1990, but tripled their surface area in the same time. This sprawl is now increasingly happening in developing countries as real estate developers promote the image of a 'world-class lifestyle' outside the traditional city," say the authors.

Urban sprawl, they say, is the symptom of a divided, dysfunctional city. "It is not only wasteful, it adds to transport costs, increases energy consumption, requires more resources, and causes the loss of prime farmland."

"The more unequal that cities become, the higher the risk that economic disparities will result in social and political tension. The likelihood of urban unrest in unequal cities is high. The cities that are prospering the most are generally those that are reducing inequalities," said Moreno.

In a sample survey of world cities, the UN found the most unequal were in South Africa. Johannesburg was the least equal in the world, only marginally ahead of East London, Bloemfontein, and Pretoria.

Latin American, Asian and African cities were generally more equal, but mainly because they were uniformly poor, with a high level of slums and little sanitation. Some of the most the most egalitarian cities were found to be Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh.

The US emerged as one of the most unequal societies with cities like New York, Chicago and Washington less equal than places like Brazzaville in Congo-Brazzaville, Managua in Nicaragua and Davao City in the Phillippines.

"The marginalisation and segregation of specific groups [in the US] creates a city within a city. The richest 1% of households now earns more than 72 times the average income of the poorest 20% of the population. In the 'other America', poor black families are clustered in ghettoes lacking access to quality education, secure tenure, lucrative work and political power," says the report.

The never-ending city

Cities are pushing beyond their limits and are merging into new massive conurbations known as mega-regions, which are linked both physically and economically. Their expansion drives economic growth but also leads to urban sprawl, rising inequalities and urban unrest.

The biggest mega-regions, which are at the forefront of the rapid urbanisation sweeping the world, are:

> Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou, China, home to about 120 million people;

> Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe, Japan, expected to grow to 60 million people by 2015;

> Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo region with 43 million people in Brazil.

The same trend on an even larger scale is seen in fast-growing "urban corridors":

> West Africa: 600km of urbanisation linking Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana, and driving the entire region's economy;

> India: From Mumbai to Dehli;

> East Asia: Four connected megalopolises and 77 separate cities of over 200,000 people each occur from Beijing to Tokyo via Pyongyang and Seoul.

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[Environment > Food]
London receives £362,000 grant to save food from landfill

The funding will pay for the equivalent of 800,000 meals to be distributed to vulnerable groups by the FareShare network
Hélène Mulholland
guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 March 2010 16.35 GMT
Article history

London's recycling board has allocated cash to help divert 300,000 tonnes of edible food from costly landfill sites each year as part of a drive to reduce waste in the capital.

A £362,000 grant from the London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) will ensure that the equivalent of 800,000 meals is distributed to homeless and other vulnerable groups of Londoners rather than ending up in the bin.

The funding was announced as the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, hosts a three-day event involving delegates from cities around the world who have gathered to discuss how to minimise rubbish, boost recycling and look at the technologies for managing waste.

The FareShare Community Food Network provides a paid-for collection service to the food and drink industry to distribute food that no longer has a commercial value but is fit for purpose to local community groups. The funding will pay for a new depot in north-west London.

With an estimated 1.4m tonnes of food waste produced each year in the capital – 40% of which ends up dumped in landfill sites – the initiative is part of a wider effort to reduce waste in London as close to source as possible, according to James Cleverly, a Tory member of the London assembly who was previously Johnson's youth ambassador, and was appointed chair of the board after the mayor decided to stand aside.

He said the pan-London board's short-term plan to reduce waste is coupled with a longer term aim to set up the infrastructure necessary for mass waste recycling in the capital to avoid the "painful transition" when councils can no longer afford to send waste to landfill.

Working in conjunction with London boroughs, the board has a budget of £84m to spend by 2012 to improve waste management in the capital through increased recycling, minimising waste generation and finding more environmentally friendly ways to process rubbish.

The board also has a role to play in delivering the mayor's strategy on waste and recycling – currently out for consultation – which makes waste reduction aims explicit for the first time. The draft strategy also highlights measures to improve recycling rates, as figures show the capital lags behind both the rest of the UK and other international cities, with wide variations between boroughs across the capital.

With landfill rates set to increase from current associated costs of around £245m to £307m by 2013, Johnson wrote to London borough leaders earlier this year to press home the need to redouble their efforts in recycling to avoid extra pressure on council tax bills in the future.

The mayor wants the capital to be recycling at least 45% of its municipal waste (which includes street litter, grass cuttings and some waste from small businesses as well as household waste) by 2015, rising to 60% by 2031, sending "zero municipal waste" directly to landfill by 2025, with any residue from other waste processing being banned from landfill by 2031.

Cleverly said practical factors such as population density and high-rise flats were partly to blame for poor recycling rates in the capital. But he said there was a need for politicians to have the "political will" and be "gutsy" enough to confront a few bad headlines as councils seek to influence people's rubbish habits by, for example, reducing bin collections for general waste.

But he admitted that the push to improve recycling among residents needed to be coupled with moves to establish the facilities needed to turn waste into new sources of energy or into recycled products.

"I'm a Tory, we don't like waste," joked Cleverly when asked how to reduce landfill costs. "When waste reduction becomes a totally embedded habit we have to think what we do with the waste that will inevitably arise. At the moment we don't have the infrastructure to deal with waste as efficiently as we could do – and that's both financial efficiency and ecological efficiency so we do need to work on that."

Cleverly said landfill was quickly becoming a very expensive option, but without intervention there would be a long and financially painful gap until the market provides an alternative through large-scale recycling plants.

"People will build facilities when they feel they can make money, which is when the cost of landfill is so high. What we need to do – particularly at the moment with the economic situation – is make sure that the facilities are online and are ready to rock and roll sooner rather than later."

The government is meanwhile proposing a national ban on sending a list of common items to landfill: paper and card; food; textiles; metals; wood; garden waste; glass; plastics; and electrical and electronic equipment which together represent 84% of waste collected, according to the government's waste advisers, Wrap.

Last week, Wrap published its biggest-ever study of what should be done with waste. It found that in more than 80% of cases recycling was the best option, followed by incineration, and composting and anaerobic digestion.

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[Environment > Endangered species]
Large bloc of African countries oppose plan to relax 21-year ivory sales ban

Tanzania and Zambia proposed sale of more than 100 tonnes of ivory from natural deaths or controlled culling at UN meeting
Michael Casey, Doha
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 March 2010 11.40 GMT
Article history

Conservationists scored a rare victory at a UN wildlife summit yesterday when contentious proposals by Tanzania and Zambia to weaken the 21-year-old ban on ivory sales were defeated due to concerns it would further contribute to poaching.

The heated debate over the proposed sale of the two countries' ivory stocks divided Africa, as it has in years past, at the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).

Nearly two dozen central and east African countries came out against the proposals on the grounds that they would hurt already declining African elephant populations. Southern African countries, in contrast, argued the two nations should be rewarded for the conservation efforts undertaken and should have the right to manage their herds as they see fit.

"People born in 100 years, they should be able to see an elephant," said Kenya's ministry of forestry and wildlife Noah Wekesa, whose country opposed the sales and had called at one point for a 20-year moratorium on such auctions. "We have a duty to make sure we increase the numbers of elephants."

The ivory stocks the two nations wanted to sell come from natural deaths or controlled culling of problem animals.

Key to the defeat of the two proposals were concerns among many delegates and environmentalist that the sales would further exacerbate a poaching problem that some say is at its highest levels since the 1989 ivory ban.

Environmentalists welcomed the decision, which came on the same day that countries agreed on a conservation plan for African and Asian rhinos. Delegates agreed to step up enforcement against rhino poaching, which is at a 15-year high, and work to slow the demand in Asia mostly from traditional medicine markets.

Until the rhino and elephant votes, environmentalists had achieved little at Cites. A proposal to ban the export of Atlantic bluefin tuna was defeated along with a plan to regulate the coral trade and protect sharks.

"After the way the week went for marine species, today's decisions were much more positive, particularly the decision on rhinos, which was really a boost for conservation and morale," said Carlos Drew, head of the WWF delegation.

Tanzania was asking to sell almost 90,000kg of ivory that would have generated as much as $20m. It noted in its proposal that its elephant population has risen from about 55,000 in 1989 to almost 137,000, according to a 2007 study.

Zambia wanted to sell 21,700kg of ivory worth between $4m

and $8m. It withdrew a request for the ivory sale and offered a compromise to allow a regulated trade in elephant parts excluding ivory – a first step toward future tusk sales.

The two countries argued that their elephant populations had reached the point where they were trampling crops and killing too many people. They also said preventing them from selling the stocks would increase anger toward the beasts, which are seen increasingly as pests by affected communities.

Zambia's minister of tourism, environment and natural resources Catherine Namugala accused activists and other delegates of misrepresenting the poaching situation in her country and spreading rumours that it would spend the money raised from sales on election campaigns.

She also complained that her country was struggling to protect elephants even as it fails to provide its citizens with basic needs and should be able to sell its ivory just as its neighbours "were selling their gold and oil."

"We can't justify failure to take a child to school because we are using resources to conserve elephants," Namugala said. "I appeal to allow Zambia to utilize the natural resources given to us by God."

Opponents of the proposals said there was evidence to back claims that such sales worsen poaching.

For example, the poaching of elephants has risen sevenfold in Kenya since a one-time ivory sale was approved in 2007 by Cites for four African countries, Kenyan wildlife officials have said. Last year 271 Kenyan elephants were killed by poachers, compared with 37 in 2007.

Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring group, tracks ivory seizures and found that poaching and smuggling to markets mostly in Asia has risen steadily since 2004. They blame weak law enforcement in Africa and growing demand for ivory products like chopsticks and ivory jewellery mostly in China, Thailand and other Asian countries.

The price of ivory on the black market has risen from about $200 a kilogram in 2004 to as much as $1,500 now.

African elephants have seen their numbers drop in the past 40 years by more than half to 600,000 mostly due to poaching. The global ban briefly halted their slide. But conservationists said that poaching, especially in central Africa, now leads to the loss of as many as 60,000 elephants each year. Without intervention, the elephants could be nearly extinct by 2020.

Samuel K Wasser, director of the Centre for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, said there was a clear link between one-off sales and the rise in poaching. He said the sales revive dormant markets by sending consumers the message that it is acceptable in general to once again buy ivory and make it difficult to differentiate between legal and illegal products.

Associated Press

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 22 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.142
News
Safety oversight trimmed at US energy labs

Lab directors welcome efforts to tackle red tape, but others worry about lax nuclear security.
By Eric Hand

{{The Department of Energy wants to streamline safety requirements at its national labs by offering "near-term relief from specific low-value burdensome requirements".}
Department of Energy}

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is planning to streamline the way it oversees the safety and security of its national laboratories. The move comes as a relief to lab directors who think that the existing oversight system is too onerous, but it is raising the hackles of groups that worry about breaches of nuclear security.

Although other federal agencies are regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the DOE's 17 national laboratories — a few of which act as stewards for US nuclear weapons — are often held to higher standards by the department's Office of Health, Safety and Security (HSS).

A 16 March memo from Daniel Poneman, the deputy energy secretary, made public last week, outlines the plans for the HSS. It states that the department is aiming for "near-term relief from specific low-value burdensome requirements", and wants at least a 50% reduction in safety and security directives from the oversight office.

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO), a non-profit organization in Washington DC, which obtained the memo, says that high levels of oversight should be strengthened, not streamlined. Peter Stockton, a POGO investigator, cited recent security failures such as a mock terrorist attack staged in 2008, which was able to penetrate defences at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a nuclear weapons labs. Stockton says the oversight changes will mean fewer and less-independent assessments. "We think this is all wrong," he says.

But Robert Rosner, former director of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, welcomes the changes. He says that the national labs — government-owned but independently operated — have suffered in an environment that tolerates mountains of red tape but accepts no risk. Laboratories have devoted increasing amounts of money and manpower to comply with the bureaucracy of DOE oversight. Rosner says it is much easier to conduct an experiment at the University of Chicago, which operates Argonne National Laboratory, than it is to do the paperwork needed to start an experiment at Argonne. Rosner says the changes are "a great step forward". He adds that the non-nuclear weapons labs, such as Argonne, shouldn't be judged by the same standards as the weapons labs.

Safety failings

The record of the science labs is not spotless. For instance, in 2004 at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California, a contractor was severely burned when a 480-volt electric arc ignited his clothes. The lab's accelerators were shut down for months, and an investigation blamed management culture.

Some at the lab feel that the response to the accident went too far. In the aftermath, all staff had to take hours of electrical safety training, regardless of whether their jobs put them near a socket. They also had to file annual assessments of the hazards of their job — even if that job was sitting down at a desk to work on theoretical physics.

Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC, says that eliminating oversight bureaucracy would be a way of increasing scientific productivity. "Are you happy if you have 98% compliance, or do you have to have 99.9% compliance?" he asks. "Each time you push it up one more notch, the efficiency is going to be affected and the costs are going to go up."

The labs will be given more authority to design their safety programmes independently. Site visits by the federal office, say laboratory employees, are already switching from a culture focused on assessment, to one that aims to provide help in maintaining safety standards.

The extra independence does come with a price for the scientists, says Rosner. "They have to understand that now that DOE has done this, it's an additional level of responsibility on them to behave well."


[naturenews]
Published online 22 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.140
News
Bizarre models for human diseases

Plants shed light on disfigured faces, and yeast and blood vessels find common ground.
By Janelle Weaver

{{Yeast could help model diseases affecting the growth of blood vessels in humans.}
C. Larabell/ University of California/ San Francisco / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory}

The search for models of human diseases might just have become easier, thanks to a data-mining technique that screens genetic databases to find subtle links to organisms as distant from humans as plants.

The new tool integrates information from existing databases that associate gene mutations with observable traits in a range of species, including humans, mice, yeast, worms and plants. And the method identifies genes in the non-human species that are more likely than by chance to contribute to human disease.

Mutations in the same gene can cause dramatically different effects in humans from those seen in other species. For instance, mutations in the RB1 gene are associated with eye cancer in humans but cause worm genitalia to develop in the wrong place. Although such genes remain conserved across species, they evolve different functions, says Edward Marcotte, a systems biologist at the University of Texas, Austin.

On the basis of this principle, Marcotte and his colleagues set out to identify obscure gene candidates for human diseases. After screening a human database and identifying genes implicated in breast cancer, he searched for their function in the worm database and found that they were involved in producing male progeny. Moreover, he uncovered 13 genes in this worm network that might contribute to breast cancer in humans; nine of them had not previously been implicated in the disease. His findings are published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Strange models

Marcotte found other unusual patterns. Genes responsible for sensing gravity in plants were linked to those associated with a developmental disorder in humans called Waardenburg syndrome, which causes abnormal pigmentation in the skin and hair, cleft palate and lip, and hearing loss. His analysis indicated that three genes in the plant 'gravity' network might be linked to the human syndrome. To investigate this further, he examined gene-expression patterns in frog embryos. One gene, sec23ip, was expressed in neural-crest cells, which are precursors of pigment cells and cranial tissue. Reducing the expression of the gene caused severe defects in the migration patterns of neural-crest cells. These results suggest that SEC23IP might be involved in Waardenburg syndrome.

{“Plants don't have heads, but they help us predict genes that are involved in the correct formation of the head.”}

Marcotte also found that genes underlying blood-vessel growth in mice influence how well yeast grow in the presence of the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin. His analysis pulled out 62 genes associated with lovastatin sensitivity in yeast that may relate to angiogenesis — the formation of new blood vessels. Five out of 59 genes that had not previously been implicated in blood-vessel growth were expressed in the developing blood vessels of frogs. Reducing the expression of one gene, sox13, led to severe defects in vascular development in frogs and human cells. The findings suggest that yeast can be used to model the development of blood vessels in humans.

"Yeast don't have blood or blood vessels, but they inform us about how the vasculature forms. And plants don't have heads, but they help us predict genes that are involved in the correct formation of the head," Marcotte says.

"It's a nice illustration of how evolution completely co-opted entire genetic and molecular pathways," says Nipam Patel, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "I was surprised how well it worked over that kind of evolutionary distance."

Disease databases

The impact of the study comes from the scope of the data mining — the integration and analysis of existing data sets, which altogether encompass more than 200,000 associations between genes and observable traits.

"I hope this study will encourage people to painstakingly annotate gene functions, which is not done universally," says Paul Sternberg, a molecular geneticist who studies worm development at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He estimates that less than 5% of known gene functions are entered into databases.

The approach will be most useful for identifying subtle associations related to complex diseases, Sternberg says. It might also speed up the identification of disease pathways and drug discovery, because carrying out experiments on organisms such as plants and yeast is cheaper and faster than studying mice and humans.

But as the method relies entirely on statistics, there's no guarantee of accurate results. "It remains to be seen how well the technique will work for a range of diseases," Patel says. "It may not work for everything, but even if it works for a reasonable number of human diseases, it will still be exciting."

References
1. McGary, K. L. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi: 10.1073/pnas.0910200107 (2010).

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 22 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.141
News
Worries over electronic waste from the developing world

Millions of computers heading for unregulated recyclers could poison water and soil.
By Richard A. Lovett

{{Electronic waste from developing countries is forecast to overtake that from the developed world.}
Huguette Roe/iStockphoto}

Public-health problems and environmental degradation caused by recycling of old computer equipment could skyrocket in the next two decades, as increasingly wealthy consumers in countries such as India and China ditch their obsolete hardware.

Within six to eight years, developing countries will be disposing of more old computers than the developed world, suggests a study published today in Environmental Science & Technology1. And by 2030, these nations will be disposing of two to three times as many computers as the developed world, perhaps resulting in up to 1 billion computers being dumped worldwide every year ┄ up from a global total of around 180 million units per year now.

What this means, says study author Eric Williams, an environmental engineer at Arizona State University, Tempe, is that even if the flow of obsolete computers exported from the developed world for recycling is completely shut off, the developing world will still have to cope with a massive amount of domestic electronic waste.

The problem comes from efforts to reclaim precious metals from circuit boards and wires using "very primitive" methods, Williams says. To obtain copper, for example, informal 'backyard' recyclers in the developing world simply burn off the insulation, producing a host of toxic chemicals from the burning plastic. And to obtain gold and other metals from circuit boards, they simply treat them with litres of nitric acid and cyanide. "There's no proper way to dispose of the waste acid and cyanide, which ends up being dumped into local water or soils," Williams says.

Process not product

To estimate how many domestic computers the developing world will be adding to the current stream of electronic waste from the developed world, Williams and his colleagues looked at computer sales data from the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the United Nations headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. This allowed them to assess how quickly computers are being adopted by people in various countries. They then factored in the average computer's lifespan to come up with estimates of how many would be sent for recycling.

Forecasts like this, Williams admits, are subject to uncertainty — if only because they assume that no new invention will supersede computers. "But it has worked quite well for other technologies," he says, naming refrigerators, televisions, mobile phones and washing machines as examples.

"For me, this was a surprising result," Williams says. "The big take-home message is that if we want to deal with the environmental problem, the trade bans we've been working on just aren't going to work." Nor, he argues, will it help to take toxic materials out of computers in the future, unless developing-world recyclers change their methods. "The toxics generated in the recycling processes were not originally present in the equipment," he says. "It's a problem in the recycling process, not the product."

Destructive distraction?

Ted Smith, chair of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition — a non-governmental organization in San Francisco, California, that campaigns for responsible recycling within the computer industry — sees Williams's projections as an important finding. "The numbers are staggering," he says, especially considering that the study dealt only with computers. "When you add in televisions, cell phones, MP3 players, faxes, copy machines — everything else — you've got to multiply it by several times to get the overall picture."

But environmental campaigner Jim Puckett thinks that the latest study simply "states the obvious". Puckett, who co-founded the Basel Action Network in Seattle, Washington, to promote the Basel Convention — an international agreement that controls trade in hazardous waste — says that the study deflects attention from current problems.

"Right now, overwhelmingly, the feedstock for this informal recycling is exports from developed countries," he says. "It's pouring in by the truckload every day. This study is doing a huge disservice to those who want to enforce the Basel Convention."

Even if locally generated electronic waste increases, he says, today's flow of waste from the developed world allows backyard recyclers to outcompete anyone attempting to do a better job. "Until you stop that cheap and dirty dumping, we're never going to create good infrastructures for recycling," he says.

Williams agrees that improved recycling processes are key, but thinks that it is important to work within the affected countries themselves. He and his team are now preparing a paper on proposals to buy up used circuit boards and wiring to send them for processing at facilities that have better environmental controls and more sophisticated techniques for recovering precious metals. "We're doing economic analyses of this idea," he says. "It looks like it's a pretty cheap system to implement."

References
1. Yu, J., Williams, E., Ju, M. & Yang, Y. Environ. Sci. Technol. advance online publication doi:10.1021/es903350q (2010).