Poland suffers first cases of African swine fever in pigs

Terra Daily via AFP: Poland on Wednesday confirmed its first cases of deadly swine fever in domestic pigs, as the World Trade Organisation reviewed a Russian embargo on EU pork imports imposed over the disease. "Test results showed the first outbreak of African swine fever on a farm with five pigs," in the eastern region of Bialystok bordering Belarus, Polish veterinary authorities said in a statement.

The animals were destroyed and 37 surrounding farms with 192 pigs were put under quarantine, it added. The development comes the day after fellow EU member Latvia declared a state of emergency in a second area of the Baltic state as efforts continued to contain an outbreak of the fever among pigs.

Lithuania ordered a mass cull of wild boar earlier this year, targeting 90 percent of the estimated 60,000 living on its territory, after the disease was detected in animals thought to have come from Belarus. Poland first imposed measures in February to safeguard its lucrative pork exports, worth 912 million euros ($1.2 billion) last year, after the disease was found in two wild boar....

Jatki (Old Abattoir alley) - "In Memory of Slaughter Animals" memorial. Shot by Julo, public domain

Poland dumps old garbage system for greener setup

Terra Daily via AFP: With too many people chucking their garbage into neighbours' bins -- or worse, the woods -- to avoid paying for disposal, Poland has taken on a massive overhaul of its laissez-faire waste management system. The new greener setup, which enters into force in July, will lower the incentive to litter by requiring everyone to pay a municipal disposal tax for a service that up to now has been left up to each household to coordinate.

While Poland has a long way to go to catch up to green superstars like Austria or Germany -- which recycle or compost over 60 percent of their rubbish -- the new system should help bring Warsaw into line with EU norms. "It will be revolutionary," says Tadeusz Arkit, head of a parliamentary commission in charge of waste management for the EU member of 38 million people.

Present laws leave it up to each household and business to sign a contract with one of the many garbage collection companies, but the model has proven difficult to implement and oversee. The system is "fair in theory" because everyone pays for his own share, Arkit told AFP. "But it's not effective since there are many people who, to avoid paying, dump their trash into others' garbage bins or toss it outdoors."

Last year, the European Commission rapped Poland and 11 other eastern and southern EU members for lagging on the environmental front....

A garbabe can in Brynow, Poland, shot by Piotrus, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Poland bans cultivation of GM maize, potatoes

Seed Daily via AFP: Poland on Wednesday imposed new bans on the cultivation of certain genetically modified strains of maize and potatoes, a day after an EU required green light for GM crops took effect.

The centre-right government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk imposed farming bans on German BASF's Amflora strain of potato and US firm Monsanto's MON 810 maize or corn, according to a government statement Wednesday.

The ban on specific strains essentially uses a legal loophole to circumvent the EU's acceptance of such products. Global environmental watchdog Greenpeace hailed the move, which will take effect on January 28...

Drought in Poland reveals 400-year-old sunken treasures

Dagmara Leszkowicz in Reuters: A huge cargo of elaborate marble stonework that sank to the bottom of Poland's Vistula river four centuries ago has re-appeared after a drought and record-low water levels revealed the masonry lying in the mud on the river bed.

Archaeologists believe the stonework was part of a trove which 17th-century Swedish invaders looted from Poland's rulers and loaded onto barges to transport home, only for the booty to go to the bottom when the vessels sank.

Researchers knew about the artefacts, on the river bed where the Vistula passes through the Polish capital but, before the drought, retrieving them was a painstaking task because they were under several feet of water.

Now though, the masonry - large blocks of carved marble which were used in the columns, fountains, and staircases of Polish palaces - is lying exposed apart from a coating of foul-smelling yellow mud.

"The drought helped us a lot because what had been lying underneath is now at the surface," said Hubert Kowalski, Deputy director of the University of Warsaw Museum, leading the effort to retrieve the marble stonework....

The Vistula, in Krakow, shot by Radosław Drożdżewski (Zwiadowca21), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Europe begins to run short of water

Pavol Stracansky in IPS: Half of the Czech Republic’s population could face water shortages because of climate change, a top climate change expert has warned. The country has become one of the driest in the EU, according to local media, and climatologists say the land, and crucial underground water supplies, are drying up.

Professor Michal Marek, head of the EU-funded CzechGlobe climate change research project, told IPS: "The Czech Republic is already seeing the effects of climate change in more frequent extreme weather events and changes in biodiversity.

"But possibly the most important change is in the increasing drying out of the landscape as drier periods get longer and are followed by bursts of intense rainfall which the dry soil cannot absorb. This has a very significant effect on underground water supplies."

Climatologists and meteorologists in central Europe have said that the region is seeing more and more extreme weather including long periods of dry and hot weather in the summer, severe flooding and bitter winter weather.

While not all parts of central and Eastern Europe will necessarily have the same problems as the Czech Republic with underground water supplies because of local geological conditions and other factors, heavy rains falling on ground dried out by long periods of hot weather and unable to absorb water can increase the risk of flooding.

Poland, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Germany have all been hit by devastating floods in the last two years….

NASA study shows role of melt in Arctic sea ice loss

NASA/JPL: A NASA analysis of satellite data has quantified, for the first time, the amount of older and thicker "multiyear" sea ice lost from the Arctic Ocean due to melting. Since the start of the satellite record in 1979, scientists have observed the continued disappearance of older "multiyear" sea ice that survives more than one summer melt season. Some scientists suspected that this loss was due entirely to wind pushing the ice out of the Arctic Basin -- a process that scientists refer to as "export." In this study, Ron Kwok and Glenn Cunningham at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used a suite of satellite data to clarify the relative role of export versus melt within the Arctic Ocean.

Kwok and Cunningham show that between 1993 and 2009, a significant amount of multiyear ice -- 1,400 cubic kilometers (336 cubic miles) -- was lost due to melt, not export. "The paper shows that there is indeed melt of old ice within the Arctic basin and the melt area has been increasing over the past several years," Kwok said. "The story is always more complicated -- there is melt as well as export -- but this is another step in calculating the mass and area balance of the Arctic ice cover."

The results have implications for understanding how Arctic sea ice gets redistributed, where melt occurs in the Arctic Ocean, and how the ocean, ice and atmosphere interact as a system to affect Earth's climate. The study was published in October 2010 in Geophysical Research Letters.

….They found that over the 17-year period, an area of 947,000 square kilometers (365,639 square miles), or about 32 percent of the decline in multiyear sea ice area, was lost in the Beaufort Sea due to melt. A similar calculation using thickness estimates from NASA's ICESat from 2004 to 2009 show a volume loss of 1,400 cubic kilometers (336 cubic miles), or about 20 percent of the total loss by volume….

A mosaic of satellite images shows the movement of fragmented ice away from ice edges, which scientists use to track the loss of multiyear ice due to melt. Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Warsaw braces for flood, Slovakia and Hungary reel

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Warsaw braced Monday for a new flood crest on the mighty Vistula river, as Budapest sandbagged its tourist quarter against the swollen Danube and Slovakia reeled from its worst flood in centuries. Heavy rains pounding central and eastern Europe have broken defences all along the Vistula, Poland's largest river which winds from the mountainous south to the Baltic Sea in the north, causing weeks of flooding.

The crest, or high point of the flood, is moving north and is forecast to surge into the Polish capital in the early hours of Wednesday, two weeks after a first giant wave washed through the capital. "The second large wave will arrive in Warsaw around 0300 CET (0100 GMT) at 7.8 metres (8.5 yards)," Mieczyslaw Ostojski, head of the IMGW weather institute, told reporters.

Warsaw officials launched a new alert for the city of two million, which was spared serious damage from the flood in May….

This image, taken by astronauts on-board the International Space Station, shows widespread flooding along the Vistula River in south-eastern Poland. Several towns have been completely or partially inundated including Gorzyce, Sokolniki, and Trześń in addition to large numbers of agricultural fields (normally green as visible at image top and bottom right).

Poland counts losses caused by flooding

Polish Market Online: Poland is experiencing the worst floods for a century. As flood waters move north toward the Baltic sea, the Polish government estimates losses caused by catastrophic flooding to be in excess of 2.5 billion euros. The two main rivers the Vistula and the Odra burst their banks in numerous places inundating huge swathes of land in southern and central regions. Thousands of residents were moved to higher ground.

…The authorities moved swiftly to organize a relief effort. In his capacity as acting president, parliamentary speaker Bronislaw Komorowski has called for quick changes to Poland’s flood relief legislation to introduce streamlined administrative procedures that will allow individual communities to more efficiently get aid to those who need it. Opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski promised to champion a more effective flood prevention programme in the future.

But serious questions are being asked whether enough has been done since the last flooding in 1997 and 2001. Hydrologist Zbigniew Kundzewicz of the Polish Academy of Sciences says that spatial planning leaves a lot to be desired, both on the local and national level, what with new houses being built on floodplains that suffered flooding twice in the past 13 years: ‘Why has the flood damage grown? There are a number of reasons: due to changes in socio economic system, like land use change increasing exposure and damage potential, flood plain development, growing wealth in flood prone areas. Land use change results in land cover change. elimination of natural inundation areas: wetlands, flood plains and so on.’…

A scene after the 2009 flooding in Poland, from the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, Wikimedia Commons, terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Beavers blamed in deadly Poland floods: minister

Our old enemies, the beavers, are working their evil magic in Poland, according to this story in Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Beavers who tunnel through vital defences protecting Polish cities are partly to blame for devastating floods that have swept the country killing 15 people, Poland's interior minister said Tuesday. "The greatest enemy of the flood defences is an animal called the beaver. They live everywhere along the levees on the Vistula (river) and cause a lot of damage to them," Jerzy Miller told reporters.

An estimated 50,000 of the large, mostly nocturnal, semi-aquatic rodents live in Poland where they enjoy a degree of protection, animal welfare services say. But local authorities have upped hunting quotas for the animals in the wake of the floods. "Beavers dig tunnels in the flood defences, weakening them from inside. But they are not alone, there are also water voles," Pawel Fratczak, Poland's national fire brigade spokesman said.

Torrential rain in Poland's mountainous south have caused rivers, including the Vistula, Poland's largest, swell to levels unseen in more than a century. Flood defences have already given way near the southeastern town of Sandomierz and in Plock, central Poland, causing flooding in several locations in those regions….

"Nice flood plain you got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it." A yearling beaver, shot by Cheryl Reyndolds, courtesy of Worth a Dam, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Poland battles rising flood waters

Deutsche Welle: Flooding in Poland has killed 12 people in the past week and continues to wreak havoc as the river running through the capitol burst through the riverbank on Monday. The Vistula River spewed over the riverbanks in a nonresidential area of Warsaw, flooding 18 Polish communities about 100 kilometers northwest of the Polish capitol. Emergency workers and residents erected sandbags and deposited debris to try to stop the flow of water.

The situation is worse than expected, said Polish Interior Minister Jerzy Miller. An area of 8,000 hectares was underwater, according to the PAP news agency, forcing the evacuation of 4,000 people and 5,000 animals. In the worst case scenario, the residents of neighboring Gabin and Slubice- about 10,000 people total-would have to be evacuated.

In Plock, a city in central Poland, water began seeping through some 50 meters of a flood barrier, forcing the evacuation of 160 residents. The nearby village of Swiniary was flooded, with water rising nearly to the rooftops, according to a report from broadcaster TVN 24. City officials have alerted those in high-risk areas that they should be ready to evacuate on a moment's notice; however, many people want to remain in their homes as long as possible, fearing robbers…..

Flood on the Vistula in 2004, near Warsaw, shot by pl:Wikipedysta:Flegi , Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License