Italy ignores pleas, ends boat migrant rescue operation

Terra Daily via AFP: Italy on Friday ignored the pleas of aid agencies and confirmed the end of its search and rescue operation "Mare Nostrum", responsible for saving tens of thousands of boat migrants stranded in the Mediterranean.

"From tomorrow a new operation called 'Triton' begins," deputy prime minister and interior minister Angelino Alfano told journalists at a press conference, referring to a much more limited mission led by the EU border agency Frontex. "Mare Nostrum ends. Italy has done its duty,"

He said the government had spent some 114 million euros ($142 million) on the massive naval operation since two deadly shipwrecks in October last year left over 400 people dead.

The decision comes after growing criticism both within Italy and Europe that the rescue mission was creating an unintended "pull factor" for more migrants in makeshift boats to attempt the dangerous sea crossings.

Although the op -- which has saved over 150,000 people -- is being shelved, Italy said it will abide by the laws of the sea under which ships that spot migrants in trouble are obliged to rescue them....

A 1945 boat rescue in the Mediterranean by the UK, not Italy

Scientists discover link between climate change and ocean currents during the last six million years

AlphaGalileo via Royal Hollaway, University of London: Scientists have discovered a relationship between climate change and ocean currents over the past six million years after analysing an area of the Atlantic near the Strait of Gibraltar, according to research published today (Friday, 13 June) in the journal Science.

An expedition of scientists, jointly led by Dr Javier Hernandez-Molina, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, examined core samples from the seabed off the coast of Spain and Portugal which provided proof of shifts of climate change over millions of years.

The team also discovered new evidence of a deep-earth tectonic pulse in the region, as well as thick layers of sand within mountains of mud in a vast sheet, spreading out nearly 100km into the Atlantic from the Gibraltar gateway. The quantity of sand is far more than was expected and has been caused by the strength, speed and long duration of bottom currents flowing through the Strait of Gibraltar from the Mediterranean.

“The sediments we examined show various shifts of climate change over millions of years”, Dr Hernandez-Molina said. “In addition, our findings could herald a significant shift in future targets for oil and gas exploration in deep-water settings. The thickness, extent and properties of these sands make them an ideal target in places where they are buried deep enough to allow for the trapping of hydrocarbons. The sand is especially clean and well sorted and therefore very porous and permeable.”

The expedition, carrying an international team of 35 scientists from 14 countries, recovered 5km of core samples from an area along the Gulf of Cadiz and west of Portugal.

The research found that a powerful cascade of Mediterranean water spilling into the Atlantic was scouring the rocky seafloor, carving deep-sea channels and building up mountains of mud. This is due to Mediterranean water being saltier than the Atlantic and therefore denser, causing it to plunge downwards.

Dr Hernandez-Molina added: “We set out to understand how the Strait of Gibraltar acted first as a barrier and then a gateway over the past six million years. The fascinating results we came back with have hugely increased our understanding of the Mediterranean Outflow Water (MOW) that flows through the Gibraltar gateway and have led to some key discoveries about the relationship between climatic shifts, deep-water circulation and plate tectonic events over a huge timescale.”...

NASA image of the Straits of Gibraltar

A New Mexico expert seeks alternative irrigation sources to save potable landscaping water

Angela Simental at the New Mexico State University News Center: New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service Specialist Bernd Leinauer is a turfgrass expert, studying and researching ways to preserve green spaces in places like New Mexico, where water scarcity is a big problem. “Our research is all about water conservation. We are focusing on water preservation in the landscape,”

Leinauer said. “We need water to grow plants in the desert, but when water is used for aesthetics instead of food, for example, it becomes questionable. So, how much water can we afford to use?” Leinauer found that approximately 50 percent of potable water usage during the summer in Las Cruces goes to irrigating the landscape.

“That is true for almost any city in the desert Southwest,” he said. “Which is considered non-essential, but I would argue that it is important because when we have green space, it contributes to our well-being and moderate climate, but at the end of the day, it is a large amount of water we use for the urban landscape.”

... Leinauer said cities are taking measures to keep landscaped spaces, especially in residential areas, but reducing the outdoor and landscaped area in new housing developments, which consequently reduces the area of irrigation. A second proposed conservation strategy is to have new developments receive two water lines: one for potable water and one for non-potable, treated water for outdoor irrigation, he added.

Leinauer’s research also explores alternative irrigation sources to using potable water while maintaining safety and aesthetics. “The treated effluent a city produces should be considered an alternative source of water. It’s not potable, and so far it is just put into the river and sent to El Paso and eventually on to Mexico,” he said. This water can potentially be used for irrigation in Las Cruces since other cities such as El Paso, Albuquerque and Santa Fe use it heavily for their parks and golf courses.

...Another part of the water conservation project is investigating new and more efficient irrigation systems. Leinauer has been looking at using subsurface water to decrease the waste of water. “This way you take irrigation out of sight and below ground, therefore, you are not throwing it in the air before it has to land on the ground,” he said. “One of the reasons we use so much water during the summer, especially in the residential sector, is that irrigation systems we have in place are extremely inefficient. You see water on the sidewalk or water running down the street. That is not efficient and beneficial use.” ...

A water meter on a church in Taos, New Mexico, shot by Brian Thomas, who is releasing this glamorous image into the public domain

EU needs to help stem regional water conflicts

MSNBC via Reuters: European governments must wield their influence and engineering skills more effectively to prevent conflicts over water supply that could threaten global security, the European Union's policy chief Catherine Ashton said.

The EU has a strategic interest in ensuring stability in regions with some of the world's biggest water problems, including North Africa after the Arab Spring revolts and Central Asia which holds crucial energy reserves. Ashton said the Nile basin was a particular concern.

"If managed well, the Nile holds the potential to catalyze regional integration and to help bring prosperity and stability to a vast area," she said in written responses received late on Friday to Reuters' questions.

"If handled poorly, each of the Nile countries could feel the negative consequences in their economic and social development."…

The Nile Delta from space. Yes, NASA was there

Mediterranean cities adapt to climate change

Annemarie Donkin the Topanga Messenger: ...The community of Topanga and the surrounding Santa Monica Mountains are biologically rich with large areas of grassland, chaparral, oak woodland, willow riparian, scrub oak woodlands and geologic volcanic rock outcrops.

Yet Mediterranean climates like ours are limited to just a few small areas on the planet: Southern California to northern Baja California; central Chile; the cape region of South Africa, southwestern Australia and the region bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

...But what if Topanga and its surrounding climates reach the tipping point of more hot days that increase the threat of floods and wildfires and decrease the snowpack, our main source of water? Scientists worldwide have clearly established links between climate change and more frequent and severe weather events such as larger storms, increased flooding, more and increasingly intense wildfires, longer droughts and sustained water shortages.

To discuss effective adaptation policies, “The Mediterranean City: A Conference on Climate Change Adaptation,” brought together an impressive network of more than 200 experts from academic, policy, business, public health and government sectors to the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown Hotel, from June 25-27, to offer more resources and knowledge to build long-term solutions.

“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time,” said Nancy Steele, Executive Director of the Council for Watershed Health, who sponsored the conference. “Earth has seen this before, we have not; how we adapt determines us as a species.”

...Steele said that those strategies, especially in the Mediterranean cities that house 80 percent of the world’s population, will affect everything including water, energy, biodiversity, open space, public health, governance and built environments....

Topanga, California, during some 2005 wildfires, shot by Nerval, public domain

Overfishing leaves swaths of Mediterranean barren

Terra Daily via SPX: Centuries of overexploitation of fish and other marine resources - as well as invasion of fish from the Red Sea - have turned some formerly healthy ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea into barren places, an unprecedented study of the Mediterranean concludes.

Research by an international team of scientists designed to measure the impact of marine reserves found that the healthiest places were in well-enforced marine reserves; fish biomass there had recovered from overfishing to levels five to 10 times greater than that of fished areas.

However, marine "protected" areas where some types of fishing are allowed did not do better than sites that were completely unprotected. This suggests that full recovery of Mediterranean marine life requires fully protected reserves, the scientists write in a paper published Feb. 29, 2012, in the journal PLoS ONE.

"We found a huge gradient, an enormous contrast. In reserves off Spain and Italy, we found the largest fish biomass in the Mediterranean," said National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala, the paper's lead author. "Unfortunately, around Turkey and Greece, the waters were bare."...

A fishing boat in Palermo, shot by Filippo, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Protecting France's Mediterranean salt marshes, a haven for migratory species

Anne Devailly in the Guardian (UK): Near the Mediterranean resort of Sète, on a 140-hectare expanse of wetland that used to be the Villeroy salt marsh and now belongs to France's Conservatoire du Littoral (CDL), a little island of seashells mixed with sand and salt has just been laid out for the birds. About 100 metres from the shore, it should accommodate a colony of migrating terns in the spring. The island cost the Thau conurbation, made up of eight localities around the southern side of the Etang de Thau, some €30,000 ($38,000).

Four similar amenities are planned but others might appear on other salt marshes in the Camargue, on the Etang de l'Or (near Montpellier), and on lagoons farther along the coast near Port la Nouvelle, Aude. Since 2007 the Compagnie des Salins du Midi (CSME), which used to work almost all the salt marshes along the south coast of France, has concentrated output at Aigues Mortes and sold all the other sites to the Conservatoire.

In exchange for about €12.4m the coastal conservation organisation is now responsible for some 1,240 hectares of wetland. Its acquisitions are set to continue, with more than 1,000 hectares round the Etang de Lairan, Gard, soon to follow. Each time the challenge is to find ways of turning former production facilities into top-grade centres for nature conservation.

"In 10 to 20 years," says Jean-Paul Salasse, the head of the Ecologistes de l'Euzière (EDE) organisation, "we can lure vibrant bird colonies back to these places, or see the return of the same plant life as everywhere else. But this won't happen on its own: we must continue to control the water level."...

Flamingos in the Camargue, shot by Barbarossa, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Human-caused climate change a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts

NOAA: Wintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible, according to a new analysis by NOAA scientists and colleagues at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). In the last 20 years, 10 of the driest 12 winters have taken place in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.

“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a paper published online in the Journal of Climate this month. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”

The Mediterranean region accumulates most of its precipitation during the winter, and Hoerling’s team uncovered a pattern of increasing wintertime dryness that stretched from Gibraltar to the Middle East. Scientists used observations and climate models to investigate several possible culprits, including natural variability, a cyclical climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and climate change caused by greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere during fossil fuel use and other human activities.

Climate change from greenhouse gases explained roughly half the increased dryness of 1902-2010, the team found. This means that other processes, none specifically identified in the new investigation, also have contributed to increasing drought frequency in the region. The team also found agreement between the observed increase in winter droughts and in the projections of climate models that include known increases in greenhouse gases. Both observations and model simulations show a sudden shift to drier conditions in the Mediterranean beginning in the 1970s. The analysis began with the year 1902, the first year of a recorded rainfall dataset....

Reds and oranges highlight lands around the Mediterranean that experienced significantly drier winters during 1971-2010 than the comparison period of 1902-2010. Map from NOAA

Forest fires are becoming larger and more frequent

Terra Daily: Research in which scientists from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) are participating analyzes the causes and characteristics of fires that have occurred in the Mediterranean basin in recent decades, and determines that rural exodus and changes in land use have increased the number and size of these fires.

The study, recently published in the journal Climatic Change, is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between two researchers: one is UC3M Professor Santiago Fernandez Munoz, who has worked in the area of geographic history under the direction of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid Professor Josefina Gomez Mendoza; the other is Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC - Spanish National Research Council) ecologist Juli Pausas.

Specifically, the authors constructed a complete database of historical fires in the province of Valencia in order to relate them to the evolution of the climate and societal and territorial transformations in the region.

The research that was carried out provides the most complete series of data on the evolution of fires in the Mediterranean basin to date...

Smoke from a 2009 wildfire in Greece, shot by Christos Loufopoulos, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Forests and climate change in the Mediterranean

UN Regional Information Centre for Western Europe: A new partnership for Mediterranean forests has been established to address major threats to the region's forests being exacerbated by the severe impact of climate change. The partnership was announced at the Second Mediterranean Forest Week, which is taking place in Avignon, France (5-8 April).

"The Collaborative Partnership on Mediterranean Forests will help raise awareness on the wealth of vital functions Mediterranean forests provide. These include soil and water protection, landscape values, carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. It is urgent that we join efforts to restore and preserve their functions for future generations," said Eduardo Rojas-Briales, Assistant Director-General of the FAO Forestry Department.

The partnership involves 12 institutions and organizations including FAO and will focus primarily on six countries in the southern and eastern Mediterranean: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. The new partnership offers a way for stakeholders in the region to address the mounting challenges facing Mediterranean forests and draw greater attention to their value and the urgent need to protect them.

The Mediterranean Basin every year loses between 0.7 and one million hectares of forests due to fires, corresponding to an economic loss of an estimated €1 billion. The Mediterranean region is confronted with a considerable increase in longer and more frequent drought and heat waves, resulting in the growing risk of large scale forest fires as well as more water scarcity, affecting both rural and urban populations….

El Picacho, a forest in Cadiz, Spain, shot by Josesanchez, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version

Israeli fire typical of climate change

Joshua S. Hill in Planetsave: Recent fires to sweep through the Carmel Mountains near Haifa in Israel are a typical example of the effects of climate change and a bitter taste of the future according to Dr. Guy Pe’er.

Pe’er and other members of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of the Environmental Protection have prepared Israel’s first report to the United Nations on climate change. Entitled “Israel’s National Report on Climate Change”, the report notes that the frequency, intensity, and the extent of fires will increase due to the extension of droughts, the increase in water evaporation, and an increase in the number of intense heat waves….

Mount Carmel forest fire in Israel, 2010, shot by Hanay, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Greece, Turkey spearhead efforts to fight climate change in the Mediterranean

Kostis Geropoulos in New Europe: Greece and Turkey may disagree on many issues but are brought together in the fight against global warming. Athens and Ankara agreed on 22 October to join forces to combat climate change in the Mediterranean.

In an idyllic setting at a luxury south coast resort near Vouliagmeni, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, together with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Maltese Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, as well as environmental representatives from neighboring Mediterranean countries signed a political declaration on 22 October. The agreement launches the Mediterranean Climate Change Initiative (MCC) in collaboration with leaders from across the Mediterranean and with the support of the European Investment Bank (EIB), which aims to accelerate environmental cooperation in the region, protect the fragile ecosystem and promote and implement low-carbon development projects in the region.

…The deputy foreign minister reminded that the Mediterranean Green Development Investors Forum was due to take place here on 23 October on the subject of “Financing profitable green initiatives and investments across the Mediterranean.” The forum was expected to allow key policy-makers, technology providers, business and finance leaders and international investors to discuss the initiatives and investments for a sustainable green economy across the Mediterranean. Kouvelis said business and investment can give a further impetus to the whole effort in the fight against climate change and Green Development.

…Opening the Mediterranean Climate Change Initiative conference, Papandreou said that from within the "bad scenarios" for climate change appearing to be coming true in the southeastern Mediterranean with increasingly frequent extreme weather phenomena and threats to the region's unique agricultural production, "which is a capital for its culture," an opportunity arises that of taking advantage of the cooperation among the regional countries "to develop a new growth model, making use of the region's resources, to create new green industries."

Near Vouliagmeni, shot by Charski A.V.

The western Mediterranean has warmed for more than a century

Science Daily: The longest sequences of temperature and salinity data analyzed (from 1900 to present), have confirmed the gradual warming of the waters of the western Mediterranean. The warming has accelerated since the mid 1970's.

Researchers from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) in collaboration with the Institute of Marine Sciences of Barcelona (ICM, CSIC), have demonstrated that the waters of the Western Mediterranean have been warming progressively throughout the twentieth century, this warming being more pronounced since the mid seventies and during the current twenty first century. The rate of warming is around one thousandth per year.

This work, published this May in the Journal of Marine Systems, has reconstructed the longest time series of temperature and salinity in the western Mediterranean, from 1900 to 2008. In addition, the study shows that the way in which the temperature of the Western Mediterranean deep layer increases is well correlated with the air temperature in the northern hemisphere and with the heat absorbed by the Atlantic Ocean.

Thus, the Western Mediterranean is presented as an excellent indicator of the changes that are occurring in the Earth's climate on a larger scale, and, therefore, the observing systems developed by the IEO and the ICM become very useful tools in the study of climate change….

Torre des Matzoc (Torre d'Aubarca), Artà, Mallorca, Spain, shot by Olaf Tausch, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Climate change threatens health by Mediterranean

Alister Doyle in Reuters: People in cities around the Mediterranean including Athens, Rome and Marseilles are likely to suffer most in Europe from ever more scorching heatwaves this century caused by climate change, scientists said on Sunday.

The number of heatwaves was likely to surge to almost 3 each summer from 2071-2100 in the Mediterranean region from just one every third year from 1961-1990, it said. Most other parts of Europe would suffer far less. The number of Mediterranean summer days with temperatures above 105 Fahrenheit (40.6C), a threshold in the United States for public health warnings, would rise to about 16 a year from 1.6 in the same period.

Heat-related health problems would be felt most by people living near the coast or in low-lying river valleys, according to scientists in Switzerland and the United States writing in the journal Nature Geoscience about health and heat projections.

"Some of the most densely populated European regions, such as the urban areas of Athens, Bucharest, Marseilles, Milan, Rome and Naples, would experience the severest changes in health indicators," they wrote. About 40,000 people died in an extreme heatwave in Europe in 2003. But Erich Fischer, lead author of the study at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich, said it was uncertain how deadly future heatwaves would be.

Air pollution might aggravate health risks for people with respiratory or heart problems in hotter temperatures, he said. And he said the study did not consider that cities can act as "heat islands" -- often warmer than surrounding countryside. On the other hand, improved weather forecasts can help ensure that people at risk -- especially the elderly and the very young -- stay in the shade and drink more on hot days. And air conditioning might become more efficient and widely used….

The old port in Marseille, shot by Jddmano, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Climate change brings drought to eastern Mediterranean

Christine Piravolakis in Monsters & Critics: At first glance, the water flowing into Cyprus' largest reservoir looks like a raging torrent. But in reality, the volume of water that runs from the Kouris River into the dam represents a trickle of what the nearby city of Limassol actually needs. Huge sand dunes dot the landscape and the fish and birds have disappeared as a crippling drought has made reservoirs, like the Kouros dam, resemble parched dirt bowls during the summer.

Water was once in abundance on the eastern Mediterranean island, which started promoting itself as a tourist haven - complete with resorts, golf courses and gardens - in the 1960s. But analysts say the rise in temperature and fall in rainfall will likely turn the once relatively lush island into a Saudi Arabian-like desert by the end of this century as it feels the brunt of climate change. The sun, once the island's key selling point as a tourism destination, could turn into a major problem if forecasts on changing weather patterns throughout the eastern Mediterranean prove to be correct.

Costas Papastavros, an agriculture and natural resources ministry official, says freshwater has always been a scarce commodity in the semi-arid Mediterranean. Now Cyprus is joining a group of countries where there will be an increased level of drought and desertification due to climate change. 'Statistics clearly show that over the last 100 years the average yearly rainfall on the island has decreased by about 90 millimetres,' says Papastavros.

Experts estimate that the rise in summer temperatures on Cyprus will average between two and four degrees this century, when compared with average 1960s temperatures of 20.1 Centigrade. Temperatures already exceed 35 degrees Celsius at the height of summer….

On a jetty with a view of Limassol, shot by Kükedi, Tamás, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Malta eyes water shortages and the coast

Caroline Muscat in the Times of Malta: What do tiny Malta and the entire African continent have in common? Their contribution to climate change is negligible but they will be among the hardest hit. Malta lies in the middle of the two most vulnerable regions to threats imposed by climate change, according to a European Commission White Paper published earlier this year. Being a small island state, Malta's threats are exacerbated, a fact acknowledged by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi during a recent parliamentary debate on the subject:

"The impact on small island states - particularly water shortages and sea level rise - is no joke. Because of sea level rise, we could lose a high percentage of our coast." However, the European Environment Agency (EEA) told The Sunday Times that Malta had still not forwarded any plans regarding climate change impact, vulnerability and adaptation, in contrast with other Mediterranean countries that "have prepared quite extensive climate change assessments".

In a report entitled "Impacts of Europe's Changing Climate", the EEA outlines the Mediterranean's vulnerability. The threats include an increased risk of floods and droughts, losses of biodiversity, threats to health, and damage to economic sectors such as energy, transport, forestry, agriculture and tourism.

…As an island nation that draws most of its water supply from the sea through desalination plants at considerable cost, fresh water is a precious resource. The Malta Resources Authority (MRA), the country's regulator, acknowledges that Malta is one of those Mediterranean countries under the 'constant pressure' of water scarcity….

The civil ensign of Malta

Egypt: Climate change sees dark future

Bikya Masr: Egypt could be heading for disaster. Although numerous scenarios are being espoused, two things are certain in all of them: Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city will disappear and the North African is in for some troublesome years ahead.

“Many of the towns and urban areas in the north of the Delta will suffer from the rise in the level of the Mediterranean with effect from 2020 and about 15 percent of Delta land is under threat from the rising sea level and the seepage into the ground water,” Environment Minister George Maged told a parliamentary committee earlier this year. He said joint studies by his ministry and the United Nations have assessed the situation to be urgent, adding that Egypt is planning to start an international campaign for solutions.

Is he being too hasty with predictions that in less than 15 years portions of the Delta region in northern Egypt will be submerged? Analysts tend to think just that.

“Of course this is exaggerated. I think it’s a gross misunderstanding,” Mostapha Saleh, head of Environment Quality International in Egypt, said. He says the minister was over stating the realities in order to create international awareness of the situation facing the country, which he says could become “critical.” Saleh believes the situation facing Egypt is in need of attention, but according to the data he has seen “if sea levels rise by one meter that would bring water inland 60 to 70 kilometers (35 miles), so it is not necessarily a large portion of the Delta.”
According to Mohamed Al Raey of Alexandria University, the threat to the Delta region – an alluvial plain that sits only a few meters (about 8 feet) above sea level – needs to be watched. He says in an article in Al Ahram Weekly that climate change could lead “to an increase in the frequency and severity of sandstorms, and longer periods of drought followed by more intense flooding. This is expected to lead to public health problems, including the spread of epidemics, especially in poorer regions.”…

The fortifications of Alexandria, from Coureurs des mers, Poivre d'Arvor.

One in six Mediterranean mammals face extinction

Asia One via Agence France-Presse: One in six Mediterranean mammals is threatened with extinction at the regional level, mainly due to the destruction of their habitat from urbanization, agriculture and climate change, nature body IUCN said Tuesday in a new study. Of the 320 mammal species assessed by the Geneva-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 49 were threatened, including 20 that can be found nowhere else in the world, it said in a statement.

Three percent are "critically endangered", including the Mediterranean monk seal and the Iberian lynx, another five percent are "endangered" and eight percent are "vulnerable". "The number one threat is habitat destruction, which affects 90 percent of the threatened species," said IUCN expert Annabelle Cuttelod, co-author of the report, in a statement released in Spain.

"We need international action to protect key areas and preserve natural habitats to ensure we don't lose the rich biodiversity in this area," she added. High concentrations of threatened species are found in the mountains of Turkey, northwestern Africa and the Levant, the ancient land now comprising Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories….

The Iberian lynx, (c) Programa de Conservación Ex-situ del Lince Ibérico www.lynxexsitu.es, Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

Deserts crossing the Mediterranean

ANSA (Italy): The Sahara Desert is crossing the Mediterranean, according to Italian environmental protection group Legambiente which warns that the livelihoods of 6.5 million people living along its shores could be at risk. ''Desertification isn't limited to Africa,'' said Legambiente Vice President Sebastiano Venneri.

''Without a serious change of direction in economic and environmental policies, the risk will become concrete and irreversible.'' A recent report by Legambiente estimated that 74 million acres of fertile land along the Mediterranean were turning to desert as the result of overexploited land and water resources.

Legambiente said that southern Italy was at severe risk in addition to the islands of Sicily and Sardinia where 11% of all arable land showed signs of drying up. ''Semi-arid coastal regions like southern Italy are prone to the effects of desertification due to farmers' dependence on water from underground aquifers instead of rainfall,'' said Legambiente spokesman Giorgio Zampetti. According to Zampetti, pumping too much fresh water out of these underground deposits can result in seawater leaking in to replace it, effectively poisoning the groundwater.

As an example of the long-term consequences, Legambiente pointed to Egypt where it said brackish groundwater had compromised half the country's farmland.

''The south of Italy isn't the only part of the country at risk,'' added Zampetti. ''Aquifers around the Po Delta in northern Italy have also begun showing signs of saltwater contamination.'' Experts said that the Po River, which is Italy's longest waterway and nearly dries up in parts when industrial consumption peaks, is one of the most visible examples of desertifying climate change in Italy. Italy is not the only country in Europe losing fertile land....

Mount Etna seen from Castelmola above Taormina, Sicily, shot by Arnold Paul, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License