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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[guardian.co.uk > News > World news > Pakistan]

Pakistan floods: UN urges world to step up aid efforts
Secretary general Ban Ki-moon visits affected regions and meets government leaders as fears of further flooding grow

Gethin Chamberlain, Saeed Shah in Islamabad and Sam Jones
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 August 2010 10.35 BST
Article history

{The UN says aid efforts to Pakistan need to be stepped up as fears of further flooding and cholera outbreaks grow. Photograph: Anjum Naveed/AP}

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has urged the world to speed up aid efforts to Pakistan as the country braces itself for further flooding with the waters of the swollen Indus river reaching critical levels.

Ban is in Pakistan to visit affected regions, meet government leaders and assess the scale of the disaster.

The UN has appealed for an initial £295m to provide relief, but only 20% of that has so far been given.

"I am here ... to share my sympathy and solidarity of the United Nations together with the people and government of Pakistan at this time of trial," Ban said. "I am here to see what more needs to be done and to urge the world community to speed up the assistance to the Pakistani people."

Ban has met the prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, and the president, Asif Ali Zardari, who was fiercely condemned for failing to cut short a European visit as the crisis deepened. The UN leader plans to visit flood-hit areas later today.

With more than 1,600 people confirmed dead and as many as 20 million made homeless, the country is reeling from the scale of the catastrophe brought by torrential monsoon rains.

Gilani said Pakistan now faced challenges similar to those during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, when as many as 500,000 people were killed. His warning came amid growing fears of social unrest or even a military takeover after the government's shambolic response to the floods. "The nation faced the situation successfully at that time of the partition and, God willing, we will emerge successful in this test," he said.

In the southern province of Sindh, 1.6 million people are stranded and half a million have been ordered to abandon their homes. The first case of cholera since the disaster began has been recorded in the northern Swat Valley, while survivors across the eastern state of Punjab are sleeping in the open without shelter.

The situation in some areas is threatening to spill over into violence, according to witnesses. An Associated Press correspondent in Sindh reported seeing survivors fighting over food, ripping at each other's clothes and causing such chaos that the distribution had to be abandoned. "The impatience of the people has deprived us of the little food that had come," Shaukat Ali, a flood victim waiting for food, said.

Although water levels are continuing to rise, offers of international aid remain small compared with recent disasters elsewhere, to the dismay of Pakistan's leaders and aid agencies. Only £96m has been pledged ‑ with £31m of that from the British government ‑ in response to the UN appeal.

International donations in the wake of the Haiti earthquake earlier in the year totalled £1.5bn. David Cameron's criticism of Pakistan as an exporter of terrorism has been blamed in part for the lack of public sympathy, as has Zardari's failure to cancel his visit to Britain.

India yesterday pledged £3.2m, the same amount it gave to Haiti, but not before its apparent hesitancy prompted claims that a recent political spat was overriding its humanitarian imperative. Critics said Pakistan did not hesitate to come to India's aid when the Gujarat earthquake killed 25,000 people in 2001. They said that India's offer was a tiny fraction of its £500m aid budget for this year.

China, which initially offered just £960,000, has now increased its contribution to £4.6m. Britain's Disasters Emergency Committee appeal has raised £12m from public donations.

Zamir Akram, Pakistan's ambassador to the UN, criticised the international response and claimed that the scale of the disaster was only just beginning to become apparent.

Late yesterday, there were no indications that the worst was over. Pakistan's flood control department warned that water in the upper reaches of the Indus was at "very high levels".

At some points along its course, the river was reported to be 15 miles wide, more than 25 times its normal size. Further flooding is now expected in Sindh province, which includes Karachi, the country's largest city.

The discovery of the first cholera case in Mingora, in the Swat valley, confirmed the fears of aid agencies who had been warning of the danger of disease. Cholera can lead to severe dehydration and death without prompt treatment, and containing cholera outbreaks is a priority following floods.

The UN said it feared the case was not isolated, adding that it was now treating 36,000 people as if they were suffering cholera. Aid agencies warned that 6 million children were at risk of life-threatening diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition and pneumonia.

"Don't ask me about the disease outbreak at this moment," Dr Tanveer Fatima, superintendent of a hospital in Rajanpur, said. "Our hospital is drowning in front of our eyes. The water is five to six feet high and rescue teams are shifting patients from this to other hospitals ... water is rising today."

A spokesman for the Disasters Emergency Committee said: "We are seeing the confirmation of our fears. The danger is that cholera is both deadly and spreads incredibly easily. Unfortunately the circumstances in Pakistan are against us."

A 28-year-old Save the Children worker, unnamed for security reasons, undertook a 30-mile trek to assist aid distribution programmes in the town of Kalam, in the Swat valley, after roads in the area were destroyed.

On his blog, he wrote: "We reached the first town, Adyan, after crossing two hills. The entire shape of the city had changed ‑ the floods created a river that went straight through the middle of town, completely destroying the main market.

"Mud and dust was everywhere, as were huge boulders that the flood had carried right into town. We finally reached a city, Bahrain, which used to be a big tourist destination with lots of hotels, restaurants, and beautiful riverside cafes. I was there five years ago on holiday with my family.

"The city is now unrecognisable. It is like something has taken a huge pile of rocks and mud and thrown it all over the city. The main bazaar is completely destroyed. Three-storey hotels have tumbled down and the main road through the town was covered in five feet of mud.

"In Kalam, 90% of the main market, which provides a livelihood for so many people, was completely destroyed. It looked like it might have 100 years ago: no cars ‑ they had all washed away ‑ no clean water supply, which was previously run by an electric pumping station, now destroyed."

news20100815gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[guardian.co.uk > Environment > Climate change]

Climate scientists in race to predict where natural disaster will strike next
Conference in Boulder will step up world's efforts to establish an early warning system for extreme weather events

Robin McKie
The Observer, Sunday 15 August 2010
Article history

{A woman grieves near her relative's body after dozens of people were killed in landslides in China's Gansu province last week. Photograph: Aly Song/Reuters}

The world's leading climate scientists will gather this week in the United States to hammer out plans to set up an early warning system that would predict future meteorological disasters caused by global warming.

The meeting, in Boulder, Colorado, has been arranged at diplomatic level amid fears that storms, hurricanes, droughts, flooding and other extreme weather events now threaten to trigger widespread devastation in coming decades. A series of meteorological catastrophes have dominated headlines in recent weeks, while scientists have warned that figures so far for this year suggest 2010 will be the hottest on record.

Recent events include a record-breaking heatwave that has seen Moscow blanketed with smog from burning peatlands, the splintering of a giant island of ice from the Greenland ice cap, and floods in Pakistan that have claimed the lives of at least 1,600 people and left 20 million homeless.

Scientists say events like these will become more severe and more frequent over the rest of the century as rising greenhouse gas emissions trap the sun's heat in the lower atmosphere and bring change to Earth's climate and weather systems. However, their ability to pinpoint exactly where and when the worst devastation will occur is still limited. The aim of the Colorado meeting is to develop more precise predictive techniques to help pinpoint the location and severity of droughts, floods, and heatwaves before they happen and so save thousands of lives.

"The events in Moscow and Pakistan are going to focus our minds very carefully when we meet in Colorado," said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office. "On both sides of the Atlantic we have been monitoring what has been going on with the aim of understanding their precise causes so that we can provide better warnings of future disasters."

The meeting in Boulder will be the first full session of Ace, the Attribution of Climate-related Events, which has been set up by scientists from the world's three leading meteorological organisations: the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the UK Met Office and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The aim, said Stott, would be to develop a modelling package that would allow scientists to forecast the kind of events that the world has been witnessing over the past few weeks – before they struck. The fact that the Foreign Office has been closely involved in setting up Ace reveals how seriously the issue is taken by politicians.

Meteorologists have developed remarkably effective techniques for predicting global climate changes caused by greenhouse gases. One paper, by Stott and Myles Allen of Oxford University, predicted in 1999, using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, that by 2010 global temperatures would rise by 0.8C from their second world war level. This is precisely what has happened.

But although meteorologists have developed powerful techniques for forecasting general climatic trends – which indicate that weather patterns will be warmer and wetter in many areas – their ability to predict specific outcomes remains limited. It is this problem that will be tackled, as a matter of urgency, at the Ace meeting in Boulder.

An example of the complexity that faces meteorologists is provided by the weather system that scorched Moscow, said Stott. "Moscow has a stable high pressure system over it, much like the one that brought a heatwave to Europe in 2003. However, for a while the land around the city acted as a natural air conditioner, keeping the air cool through evaporation of moisture from the ground. But the land eventually dried out and there was no more cooling. Hence the soaring temperatures."

To forecast an event like that, scientists need to be able to quantify all the variables involved and also develop a very precise model of the land surface, added Stott.

"These are the sorts of things we need to understand. We need to be able to forecast events weeks or months ahead of their occurrence so people can mitigate their worst impacts. We also need to consider the longer-term context and see if we need to build better sea defences at a particular location and assess how high dykes or walls need to be. Certainly, one thing is clear: there is no time to waste. The effects of global warming are already upon us."


[guardian.co.uk > Business > BP]

BP yet to update emergency plan three months after Deepwater Horizon spill
Lawyers say response strategy should have been refiled 15 days after "significant change in worst-case scenario", but BP disagrees

Tim Webb
The Observer, Sunday 15 August 2010
Article history

{Rigs drilling a relief well and preparing a 'static kill' are seen at the site of the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. Photograph: AFP/Getty}

BP has failed to update its oil spill emergency plan in the Gulf of Mexico more than three months after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in apparent violation of federal regulations, the Observer has learned.

The company was lambasted by US politicians for having a response plan which, even before the explosion, appeared to have serious flaws. Errors included a proposal highlighting the need to protect sea walruses, even though none exist in the Gulf, and listing one wildlife expert who died four years before the plan was approved.

BP has admitted it has still not revised the plan. Yet according to the federal agency responsible for offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service (MMS, now renamed BOEM), operators must submit a revised plan within 15 days if "a change occurs which significantly reduces your response capabilities" and if "a significant change occurs in the worst case discharge scenario".

Both these conditions apply to BP, according to one Texas law firm. Mikal Watts of Watts Guerra Craft said: "After a catastrophe like Deepwater Horizon, MMS regulations require that BP submit a revised oil response plan. BP hasn't, and the Gulf of Mexico continues to be at risk because of BP's failure to follow the law."

Politicians also said that the disaster had exposed the plan's worst-case discharge scenario as inaccurate. Under BP's plan, the worst case envisaged was a spill of 250,000 barrels a day 30 miles off the shore of Louisiana. Even though the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill was much smaller, BP was still unable to prevent the oil from hitting the coast.

A BP spokesman denied the company needed to file a revised plan, saying: "An incident does not trigger automatic re-submittal of an oil spill response plan… Once we have gathered the learnings from the Deepwater Horizon incident, we will update our plan and submit it."

Asked about the BOEM regulation to revise the plan within 15 days in changed circumstances, the spokesman said, "we believe we are in compliance with the regulation". BOEM said it was still reviewing BP's original plan, and that the company had not submitted a revised version.

Congressional hearings into the oil disaster have heard that MMS routinely failed to enforce its own laws in the Gulf. President Obama has promised to tighten up the regime.