Category: Environment

Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, May 11, 2016 –With support from the African Development Bank (AfDB), Rwanda has won approval of a US $250,000 grant under the Climate Investment Funds’ Forest Investment Program (CIF FIP) to prepare its national-level FIP Investment Plan (IP).

Rwanda was selected by the CIF in May 2015 as part of a third round of countries approved for support by the FIP. With an ambitious target of covering 30% of its landmass by forests by 2020, the Government of Rwandais committed to transformingits rural sector into a more sustainable and low carbon economy through sustainable forest management and preservation of national forest ecosystems.

The country intends to use FIP funding to build upon this political momentum to ensure that it will effectively support and enhance its already robust forestry policies. In line with this, the IP will supply the country with an agroforestry action plan through 2020, along with analyses of national forest policies and strategies, deforestation and forest degradation status, and potential mitigation and adaptation measures.Support to the country for the IP development will be provided by the AfDB as lead and the World Bank.

“Rwanda was chosen by the FIP to receive Investment Plan support based on its potential to contribute to climate mitigationand generate enhanced development co-benefits, as well as its ability to implement funding,” stated Gareth Phillips, AfDB’s coordinator for the FIP.

“However, as there are currently no FIP resources to implement the plan, the Government will seek financial resources for implementation from the Green Climate Fund and other available resources. To support this, the AfDB and World Bank intend to develop two project concept notesto be submitted to various donor sources for operational funding. This is an important step in the integration of CIF-supported work with other sources of climate finance, and we applaud Rwanda’s foresight and ambition in pursuing this process.”

Rwanda is also serving a critical leading role in the CIF by acting as a bellwether for integration of different paths to climate sustainability with CIF support. In addition to the FIP, the country is developing plans under two other CIF programs. Through the Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) it is developing a national-level investment plan, called a Strategic Plan for Climate Resilience, to protect water resources and further develop its hydropower industry; and through the Program for Scaling Up Renewable Energy in Low Income Countries (SREP), it is developing an Investment Plan to scale up renewable energy generation.

In the process, the country is helping lead the way toward finding commonalities among its program goals and harmonizing its approach to the multi-dimensional process.Through each of these funds, the country intends to foster an enabling regulatory environment and an attractive investment climate for the private sector to reduce the barriers for transformational change.

{{About the Climate Investment Funds (CIF)}}

Established in 2008, as one of the largest fast-tracked climate financing instruments in the world, the $8.3 billion CIF provides developing countries with grants, concessional loans, risk mitigation instruments, and equity that leverage significant financing from the private sector, MDBs and other sources. Five MDBs – the African Development Bank (AfDB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and World Bank Group (WBG) – implement CIF-funded projects and programs.

The Forest Investment Program (FIP) within the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) is a targeted program established to support countries’ efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and promote sustainable forest management and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+).

{Rwanda National Police (RNP)’s Environmental Protection Unit (EPU), along with several other stakeholders have joined efforts in a new drive to sensitive people living along Gishwati and Mukura forests to stop and fight illegal mining activities and other environmental degradation activities in and around the reserves.}

On May 4, officers attached to EPU, Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF), along with officials from the Landscape Approach to Forest Restoration and Conservation (LAFREC) under Rwanda Environment Management Authority, Mining Inspection Department of the Rwanda Natural Resources Authority and RDB’s Tourism and Conservation department met with over 400 residents of Manihira and Rusebeya sectors of Rutsiro District in an awareness exercise to conserve the forests.

The official emphasized on the dangers of illegal mining and encouraged the residents to form cooperatives and acquire licenses if they are to continue or conduct any mining activity.

The Director of EPU Police’s Environment Protection Unit, Supt. Modeste Mbabazi observed that illegal mining is one of the major causes of soil erosion.

Experts say that illegal mining leads to loss of biodiversity and contamination of underground water by chemicals from the mines.

“Normally, those practicing illegal mining cut down trees and this has a major impact on the environment, which we should fight through information exchange. There are proper means set by the law of how and where to mine and penalties,” said Supt. Mbabazi.

Ill effects of environmental degradation, he noted, can be severe, irreversible and significant depending on the form of malpractice and warned that “irrespective of the magnitude of the impact, every crime if punishable by the law.”

Under article 438 of the penal code, any person, who undertakes illegal research or illegally carries out commercial activities in valuable minerals, shall be liable to imprisonment of up to one year and a fine of up to Rwf10million.

Earlier, 21 people were arrested after they were found mining illegally in a concession Remera in Remera Sector also in Rutsiro.

They are currently held at Gihango Police station.

“Having a license doesn’t exempt you from being penalised if you violated mining standards and encroach on the forests or conduct any activities that endanger the ecosystem,” Supt. Mbabazi warned.

The Environmental Protection Unit operates under the Criminal Investigation Department and is mandated to protect the environment in all aspects, including air space, forestry and biodiversity, as well as the enforcement of different legal instruments that protect environment.

Rwanda’s forest intensification programme aims at achieving a 30 percent forest cover in the country as provided for in Vision 2020.

So far, the country has achieved over 28 percent forest cover.

Patrick Nsabimana, the coordinator of LAFREC, who highlighted the progress made so far in the restoration of the two forests, urged residents to be part of the efforts to increase forest cover, restore indigenous woodland in deforested areas and enhance the biodiversity of the degraded forest reserves.

LAFREC is a US$9.5 million five-year project that is mandated to restore the highly degraded Gishwati-Mukura landscape, boosting land management of the two forests and improving local livelihoods, environment and climate resilience within the area.

Jean d’Amour Bagirijabo, an official from Rwanda Natural Resources Authority dwelt his address on the advantages of streamlining and regulating the mining industry, and echoed similar message of forming cooperatives as one of the easiest means to acquire a mining license.

{Long-necked sauropod dinosaurs include the largest animals ever to walk on land.}

Long-necked sauropod dinosaurs include the largest animals ever to walk on land, but they hatched from eggs no bigger than a soccer ball.

Long-necked sauropod dinosaurs include the largest animals ever to walk on land, but they hatched from eggs no bigger than a soccer ball.

A lack of young sauropod fossils, however, has left the earliest lives of these giants shrouded in mystery. Did they require parental care after hatching like some other dinosaurs, or were they self-reliant?

Research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by Kristi Curry Rogers of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, sheds the first light on the life of a young Rapetosaurus, a titanosaurian sauropod buried in the Upper Cretaceous Maevarano Formation of Madagascar.

The findings are published today in the journal Science.

Active at birth

The baby behemoths were active, capable of a wider array of maneuvers than adult members of their species, and didn’t need parental care after hatching.

“These scientists employed several lines of evidence to investigate growth strategies in the smallest known post-hatching sauropod dinosaur,” said Judy Skog, a program director in NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research along with NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology.

Skog said the researchers developed tests that could be applied to other perinatal dinosaurs.

“It’s intriguing that these animals developed quickly to function on their own, much like some birds and herding mammals of today,” she said.

The preserved partial skeleton was so small that its bones were originally mistaken for those of a fossil crocodile, said Curry Rogers.

“This baby’s limbs at birth were built for its later adult mass; as an infant, however, it weighed just a fraction of its future size,” Curry Rogers said. “This is our first opportunity to explore the life of a sauropod just after hatching, at the earliest stage of its life.”

Along with researchers Megan Whitney of the University of Washington, Mike D’Emic of Adelphi University, and Brian Bagley of the University of Minnesota, the team studied thin-sections of the tibia and used a high-powered CT scanner to get a closer look at the microstructures preserved inside the limb bones.

Microscopic bone features

The detailed microscopic features of the Rapetosaurus bones revealed patterns similar to those of living animals and made it possible for the scientists to reconstruct the beginning of the dinosaur’s post-hatching life.

“We looked at the preserved patterns of blood supply, growth cartilages at the ends of limb bones, and at bone remodeling,” Curry Rogers said. “These features indicate that Rapetosaurus grew as rapidly as a newborn mammal and was only a few weeks old when it died.”

The tiny titanosaur was mobile at hatching and less reliant on parental care than other animals. Baby sauropods like Rapetosaurus were somewhat like miniature adults, Curry Rogers said.

The team also observed microscopic zones deep within the bones. They proved similar to the hatching lines in today’s reptiles, and to neonatal growth lines in extant mammals.

The zones indicate the time of hatching in Rapetosaurus, and allowed the scientists to estimate the weight of the newly hatched Rapetosaurus — around 7.7 pounds.

{{Demise in a drought}}

What caused the demise of this baby Rapetosaurus?

Clues came from its cartilage growth plates, which bear a striking resemblance to the modified growth cartilages that occur during starvation among living vertebrates.

When taken in the context of the intensely drought-stressed ecosystem represented in the Maevarano Formation, it’s clear that this Rapetosaurus had it rough, Curry Rogers said.

“Between its hatching and death just a few weeks later,” she said, “this baby Rapetosaurus fended for itself in a harsh and unforgiving environment.”

{Nyungwe National Park comprises a diversity of flora and fauna including chimpanzee, birds and plants.}

16 years ago, the park had an elephant but poachers in 1999 trapped and killed the only elephant of this ecosystem. The Skelton of this killed elephant is kept in the museum of the forest as part of preservation of history that the elephant existed in the forest.

Research is being done so seek whether another elephant can be introduced in Nyungwe National Park as explained by Rugerinyange Louis, the manager of Nyungwe National Park.

“Research carried out has identified the kind of elephant that can adapt to the climate of the park. It is not an elephant of dense forest” he said.

The research was carried in collaboration with Nyungwe National Park and Wildlife Conservation Society since 2005.

Rugerinyange says that the research findings outcomes are relayed to one of United States’ laboratories for evaluation.

Nyungwe National Park earned more than Rwf 200,000,000 in 2015.The reintroduction of the elephant is expected to boost revenues.

{Using a new model, researchers predict that many forests across the US are ill-suited to withstand drought conditions likely to face the country in the coming century. Furthermore, in the Pacific Northwest, and across much of the US southern border, conditions may well require the development of new forest types not currently seen in the US.}

Drought could render the U.S. Northeast’s mixed forests unsustainable after 2050 while Washington’s Cascade Mountains may require tropical and subtropical forest species, according to researchers using a new type of mathematical model at Washington State University.

The Tolerance Distribution Model (TDM) is the first to use the tolerances of different types of forests to drought, flood and shade to determine how the forests may respond to future climate change. In contrast to existing methods, the new approach can be applied at a continental scale while maintaining a direct link to ecologically relevant stressors.

Details of the WSU team’s work are available online in Global Change Biology.

Changes in Northeast, Rockies, Texas, Gulf

WSU Vancouver mathematicians Jean Liénard and Nikolay Strigul, and ecologist John Harrison, predict the Pacific Northwest’s climate may be warmer and wetter, requiring the establishment of forest types seen in places like southeastern China, southern Brazil or sub-Saharan Africa.

In the northeastern U.S., the model projects forests of maple/beech/birch, spruce/fir and white/red/jack pine combinations will be ill-suited to withstand predicted drought conditions by the latter half of the 21st century. Other forested areas that were identified as being at risk from drought included the northern Great Plains and the higher elevations of the Rocky Mountains.

Meanwhile, low altitude areas of Texas may eventually host tropical dry forests similar to regions of eastern Mexico. Moist, deciduous forests found in locations like Cuba could one day thrive along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

“Until now, our ability to predict exactly how and where forest characteristics and distributions are likely to be altered as a result of climate change has been rather limited,” said Liénard, a postdoctoral researcher and the paper’s first author. “With our model, it is possible to identify which forests are at the greatest risk from future environmental stressors. Forest managers and private landowners could then take steps like planting drought tolerant seedlings and saplings to prepare.”

Other continents, ecosystems to be modeled

To create the forest tolerance model, the researchers collected physiological data on the abilities of U.S. tree species to cope with drought, varying levels of sunlight and flooding. They assigned tolerance rankings to each of the 400,000 forest plots in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forestry Inventory and Analysis Program based on the composition of the trees in each plot and their corresponding physiological characteristics.

They integrated data on the projected changes in annual U.S. temperature and precipitation from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine how each plot is likely to fare in response to changing climatic conditions through the end of the century.

The researchers plan to develop versions of the TDM that can be applied to agricultural systems as well as other terrestrial and aquatic ecological systems.

“We are working on modeling other continents and have already gained access to European and Asian forest data,” Strigul said. “Our work is really just getting started.”

{Researchers have uncovered dozens of fossilized teeth in Kuwajima, Japan, and identified this as a new species of tritylodontid, an animal family that links the evolution of mammals from reptiles. The finding suggests that tritylodontids co-existed with some of the earliest mammal species for millions of years, overturning beliefs that mammals wiped out mammal-like reptiles soon after they emerged.}

Teeth can reveal a lot, such as how the earliest mammals lived with their neighbors. Researchers have uncovered dozens of fossilized teeth in Kuwajima, Japan and identified this as a new species of tritylodontid, an animal family that links the evolution of mammals from reptiles. This finding suggests that tritylodontids co-existed with some of the earliest mammal species for millions of years, overturning beliefs that mammals wiped out mammal-like reptiles soon after they emerged.

Tritylodontids are the last known family of near-mammalian reptiles, before mammals with features such as advanced hearing evolved.

“Tritylodontids were herbivores with unique sets of teeth which intersect when they bite,” explains study author Hiroshige Matsuoka, based at Kyoto University. “They had pretty much the same features as mammals — for instance they were most likely warm-blooded — but taxonomically speaking they were reptiles, because in their jaws they still had a bone that in mammals is used for hearing.”

While excavating a geologic layer from the Cretaceous era in Kuwajima, researchers found fossils of dinosaurs, turtles, lizards, fish, many types of plants, and Mesozoic mammals. Among these were more than 250 tritylodontid teeth, the first to be found in Japan.

Tritylodontids lived in the Jurassic era and proliferated worldwide, but were thought to have died out as herbivorous mammals took over their ecological role in the late Jurassic. “This made sense, because otherwise tritylodontids and the herbivorous mammals would have competed for the same niche,” says Matsuoka.

But according to the team’s finding, trytylodontids seem to have survived at least 30 million years longer than what paleontologists had believed.

“This raises new questions about how tritylodontids and their mammalian neighbors shared or separated ecological roles,” says Matsuoka.

The study is also the first of its kind to depend solely on details from teeth to determine whether the species is new, and also where it sits on the evolutionary tree.

“Usually fossils are identified as a new species only when a relatively complete set of structures like a jaw bone are found. In these cases, characteristics of teeth tend to be described only briefly,” adds Matsuoka. “Tritylodontid teeth have three rows of 2-3 cusps. This time we paid attention to fine details like the size and shape of each cusp. By using this method it should be possible to characterize other species on the evolutionary tree as well.”

“Because fossils of so many diverse families of animals are to be found in Kuwajima, we’d like to keep investigating the site to uncover things not just about individual species, but also about entire ecological dynamics.”