Month: February 2019

Australia’s center-right government says it will re-open a controversial detention center on Christmas Island, after parliament voted to allow asylum-seekers on Nauru and Manus to come to Australia for medical treatment.

The passage of the bill was an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who says making it easier for sick migrants held offshore to be treated in Australia would encourage more asylum-seekers to come by sea.

“To anyone who thinks they should get on a boat, I’m here and I will stop you,” he said. “My job now is to do everything within my power and in the power of the government to ensure that what the parliament has done to weaken our borders does not result in boats coming to Australia.”

Critics see scare tactics

The detention center on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, is to be reopened. It had been in operation since 2003, but was closed last year.

Critics say the prime minister’s decision to reopen the facility 300 kilometers south of Indonesia is an attempt to scare voters about border security ahead of an election expected in May. Opponents point out that the medical evacuation law passed this week covers only people already detained offshore, and will not apply to new arrivals.

Professor Alex Riley from the University of Adelaide says many migrants will know the restrictions that Australia will impose.

“Refugees are much better at sourcing information. The availability of smartphones and the growing information on the internet means that people soon work out what the opportunities really are,” Riley said. “People absolutely will be looking at the details. Before you jump on a boat and risk your life going to another country with the prospect of spending years and years in detention on an island, you are going to look at the details of what the law really says.”

Since 2013, the Australian navy has been turning or towing back asylum-seeker boats.

There has been unrest at detention camps in the South Pacific, where other migrants intercepted at sea have been held. They have been told they will never be allowed to settle in Australia.

News is welcome, if temporary

On Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, refugees have welcomed news that they can go to Australia for medical treatment.

But Khalid Hamad who fled Sudan says his long-term future remains uncertain.

“It is not (a) permanent solution to us,” he said. “To go to Australia, yes, to get the treatment, that is it. What after that? It is not (a) permanent solution, just temporary solution.”

While the impassioned political debate has focused on migrants arriving by boat, whose numbers have dwindled in recent years, little attention is given to a record number of people, mostly from China and Malaysia, who arrive by plane seeking asylum in Australia.
…

your ad here

Australia’s center-right government says it will re-open a controversial detention center on Christmas Island, after parliament voted to allow asylum-seekers on Nauru and Manus to come to Australia for medical treatment.

The passage of the bill was an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who says making it easier for sick migrants held offshore to be treated in Australia would encourage more asylum-seekers to come by sea.

“To anyone who thinks they should get on a boat, I’m here and I will stop you,” he said. “My job now is to do everything within my power and in the power of the government to ensure that what the parliament has done to weaken our borders does not result in boats coming to Australia.”

Critics see scare tactics

The detention center on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, is to be reopened. It had been in operation since 2003, but was closed last year.

Critics say the prime minister’s decision to reopen the facility 300 kilometers south of Indonesia is an attempt to scare voters about border security ahead of an election expected in May. Opponents point out that the medical evacuation law passed this week covers only people already detained offshore, and will not apply to new arrivals.

Professor Alex Riley from the University of Adelaide says many migrants will know the restrictions that Australia will impose.

“Refugees are much better at sourcing information. The availability of smartphones and the growing information on the internet means that people soon work out what the opportunities really are,” Riley said. “People absolutely will be looking at the details. Before you jump on a boat and risk your life going to another country with the prospect of spending years and years in detention on an island, you are going to look at the details of what the law really says.”

Since 2013, the Australian navy has been turning or towing back asylum-seeker boats.

There has been unrest at detention camps in the South Pacific, where other migrants intercepted at sea have been held. They have been told they will never be allowed to settle in Australia.

News is welcome, if temporary

On Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, refugees have welcomed news that they can go to Australia for medical treatment.

But Khalid Hamad who fled Sudan says his long-term future remains uncertain.

“It is not (a) permanent solution to us,” he said. “To go to Australia, yes, to get the treatment, that is it. What after that? It is not (a) permanent solution, just temporary solution.”

While the impassioned political debate has focused on migrants arriving by boat, whose numbers have dwindled in recent years, little attention is given to a record number of people, mostly from China and Malaysia, who arrive by plane seeking asylum in Australia.
…

your ad here

Nearly the entire Mekong Delta in Vietnam — an area that helps feed about 200 million people — will sink underwater by the year 2100 at current rates, a new study predicts.

The delta, which is home to almost 18 million people and produces half of Vietnam’s food, faces this potential humanitarian crisis largely because the heavy extraction of groundwater is causing land to sink as sea levels simultaneously rise, the study found.

Researchers at Utrecht University created a delta-wide numerical model to track the impacts of groundwater exploitation over the past 25 years and use that as the basis of future predictions.

When combined with rates of sea-level increase because of climate change, they found that no matter what action was taken the vast low-lying delta plain will be lost — though changes to land use could salvage other areas.

“The results revealed that when groundwater extraction is allowed to increase continuously, as it did in the past decades, extraction-induced subsidence could potentially drown almost the entire Mekong delta,” they concluded.

Philip Minderhoud, a subsurface and groundwater systems researcher at Utrecht University who led the study, said groundwater extraction was one of the most important in a raft of factors causing the delta to sink on average by about 1 centimeter per year.

“The delta’s going to see a lot of changes in the coming decades,” he said.

Fueled by Vietnam’s transition to a market-based economy in 1986, groundwater extraction had accelerated from practically nothing 30 years ago to the 2.5 million cubic liters now sucked out of the delta’s water table every day.

The loss of water, he explained, reduced pressure in the underlying geology, causing the delta to sink.

“Of course the people in the delta, their development over the past decades, was partly possible because they had this groundwater source as a free resource of fresh water,” he said. “That is going to be a major challenge because you either accelerate the speed at which you’re drowning or you don’t have anything to drink and to water your crops with.”

At the same time, he said, the sea level is rising at a rate of about 3 to 4 millimeters per year.

Man-made burdens

The weight of structures on the delta, decreased upstream sediment flows and natural compaction are also contributing factors to the loss of delta land, he said.

“But it [groundwater extraction] is the only cause that you as a human can really actively change if you want to reduce the amount of subsidence,” he said.

While residents of the delta have proved themselves adept at raising houses and roads to deal with the problem, the impact to agriculture would be unavoidable and severe, he added.

Vietnam is the world’s second largest rice exporter, and 95 percent of it is produced in the Mekong delta, which also accounts for 60 percent of its fish exports.

Bui Chi Buu, a Vietnamese government adviser on rice production and former director-general of The Institute of Agricultural Science for Southern Vietnam, said the economic impacts of the land loss remained unclear.

“We worry about the future. The fresh water resource, it means the natural water resource come from the Mekong river in the dry season is not right,” he said.

Floods, drought, crop losses

In 2016, Vietnam lost more than $1.6 billion because of floods and drought that destroyed at least 300 million tons of rice in the delta, he said.

The immensely vivid and fertile region is known as Dong Bang Song Cuu Long in Vietnamese — the delta of nine dragons — after the nine branches of the Mekong that deposit rich sediment as they fan out into the ocean across the roughly 40,000 square kilometer area.

Those nine branches had now decreased to seven, Buu said.

“But in the future maybe we have four or five, I don’t know,” he added.

Lost sedimentation

Loss of naturally replenishing sediment is another critical factor in the sinking of the delta.

Upstream dams on the Mekong, which flows more than 4,000 kilometers from the Tibetan plateau in China through Laos and Cambodia before discharging through the delta, had led to about a 40 percent loss in sediment flow, he said.

A 2018 study by the Mekong River Commission found a catastrophic 97 percent of sediment flow to the delta would be lost by 2040 if all planned dams on the Mekong and its tributaries go ahead.

Buu said policy responses to the myriad forces eroding the delta, potentially including dikes and sluice gates, were in the works.

Pham Van Hung, deputy general director of the Division for Water Resource Planning and Investigation for the South of Vietnam, who also contributed to the study, said some groundwater extraction restrictions were recently introduced by the government.

Tens of millions of tons of sand were also being mined from the Mekong, including in the delta, every year, compounding the problem, said WWF-Greater Mekong’s Water Lead, Marc Goichot.

All of these forces impacted a dynamic equilibrium that naturally replenished the delta.

“What is clear is they all are contributing to the same thing,” he said. “The sinking of the delta is a huge issue.”
…

your ad here

Nearly the entire Mekong Delta in Vietnam — an area that helps feed about 200 million people — will sink underwater by the year 2100 at current rates, a new study predicts.

The delta, which is home to almost 18 million people and produces half of Vietnam’s food, faces this potential humanitarian crisis largely because the heavy extraction of groundwater is causing land to sink as sea levels simultaneously rise, the study found.

Researchers at Utrecht University created a delta-wide numerical model to track the impacts of groundwater exploitation over the past 25 years and use that as the basis of future predictions.

When combined with rates of sea-level increase because of climate change, they found that no matter what action was taken the vast low-lying delta plain will be lost — though changes to land use could salvage other areas.

“The results revealed that when groundwater extraction is allowed to increase continuously, as it did in the past decades, extraction-induced subsidence could potentially drown almost the entire Mekong delta,” they concluded.

Philip Minderhoud, a subsurface and groundwater systems researcher at Utrecht University who led the study, said groundwater extraction was one of the most important in a raft of factors causing the delta to sink on average by about 1 centimeter per year.

“The delta’s going to see a lot of changes in the coming decades,” he said.

Fueled by Vietnam’s transition to a market-based economy in 1986, groundwater extraction had accelerated from practically nothing 30 years ago to the 2.5 million cubic liters now sucked out of the delta’s water table every day.

The loss of water, he explained, reduced pressure in the underlying geology, causing the delta to sink.

“Of course the people in the delta, their development over the past decades, was partly possible because they had this groundwater source as a free resource of fresh water,” he said. “That is going to be a major challenge because you either accelerate the speed at which you’re drowning or you don’t have anything to drink and to water your crops with.”

At the same time, he said, the sea level is rising at a rate of about 3 to 4 millimeters per year.

Man-made burdens

The weight of structures on the delta, decreased upstream sediment flows and natural compaction are also contributing factors to the loss of delta land, he said.

“But it [groundwater extraction] is the only cause that you as a human can really actively change if you want to reduce the amount of subsidence,” he said.

While residents of the delta have proved themselves adept at raising houses and roads to deal with the problem, the impact to agriculture would be unavoidable and severe, he added.

Vietnam is the world’s second largest rice exporter, and 95 percent of it is produced in the Mekong delta, which also accounts for 60 percent of its fish exports.

Bui Chi Buu, a Vietnamese government adviser on rice production and former director-general of The Institute of Agricultural Science for Southern Vietnam, said the economic impacts of the land loss remained unclear.

“We worry about the future. The fresh water resource, it means the natural water resource come from the Mekong river in the dry season is not right,” he said.

Floods, drought, crop losses

In 2016, Vietnam lost more than $1.6 billion because of floods and drought that destroyed at least 300 million tons of rice in the delta, he said.

The immensely vivid and fertile region is known as Dong Bang Song Cuu Long in Vietnamese — the delta of nine dragons — after the nine branches of the Mekong that deposit rich sediment as they fan out into the ocean across the roughly 40,000 square kilometer area.

Those nine branches had now decreased to seven, Buu said.

“But in the future maybe we have four or five, I don’t know,” he added.

Lost sedimentation

Loss of naturally replenishing sediment is another critical factor in the sinking of the delta.

Upstream dams on the Mekong, which flows more than 4,000 kilometers from the Tibetan plateau in China through Laos and Cambodia before discharging through the delta, had led to about a 40 percent loss in sediment flow, he said.

A 2018 study by the Mekong River Commission found a catastrophic 97 percent of sediment flow to the delta would be lost by 2040 if all planned dams on the Mekong and its tributaries go ahead.

Buu said policy responses to the myriad forces eroding the delta, potentially including dikes and sluice gates, were in the works.

Pham Van Hung, deputy general director of the Division for Water Resource Planning and Investigation for the South of Vietnam, who also contributed to the study, said some groundwater extraction restrictions were recently introduced by the government.

Tens of millions of tons of sand were also being mined from the Mekong, including in the delta, every year, compounding the problem, said WWF-Greater Mekong’s Water Lead, Marc Goichot.

All of these forces impacted a dynamic equilibrium that naturally replenished the delta.

“What is clear is they all are contributing to the same thing,” he said. “The sinking of the delta is a huge issue.”
…

your ad here

U.S. President Donald Trump is considering extending the March 1 deadline to impose higher tariffs on China, as the world’s two leading economies continue trade negotiations next week in Washington. State Department correspondent Nike Ching reports from the State Department.
…

your ad here