Athens/Bonn, 17 August 2006 - At today’s meeting of the UN-affiliated International Maritime Organization (IMO), UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner, together with representatives of other UN Agencies and countries in the affected region, focused on how to contain the oil spill and the related environmental disaster caused by armed conflicts in Lebanon.
The CMS Family has offered to help countries in the region to cope with the environmental damage as it relates to migratory species. The Convention and two of its Agreements asked Mr. Steiner to convey their offers of technical assistance to the international high-level meeting that was working towards a coordinated UN response to the oil spill.
The actual impacts of the oil spill on migratory species have yet to confirmed. However, in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA), and in consultation with the Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans in the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and contiguous Atlantic area (ACCOBAMS), the CMS Partners and members of the CMS Scientific Council, the CMS Secretariat has undertaken a preliminary assessment of the potential impact of the Lebanese oil spill.
The results of the assessment have been compiled and are available in summary form.
Impacts to cetacean species are expected to be mainly indirect. ACCOBAMS has offered to provide an expert to advise the Lebanese authorities on possible cetacean-related impacts from the spill.
For waterbirds the situation could deteriorate in the very near future when the autumn migration starts and over-wintering marine and coastal birds (cormorants and gulls) start arriving in the affected region and other migrants utilize the coast for foraging. AEWA has offered access to its network of experts and would be ready to undertake a study to help identify potential risks posed by the oil spill on populations of breeding, migrating and wintering waterbird species in the region, if funds were made available.
The preliminary CMS assessment identifies green and loggerhead turtles and their nesting beaches in Lebanon and Syria as potentially at risk. Consequently, CMS has offered the affected countries access to its network of experts on marine turtles and has offered to contribute its global expertise to future coordination efforts on the spill and to any post-conflict environmental assessment.
For more information, please see http://www.cms.int/news/PRESS/nwPR2006/August/nw081706_oilspill.htm
Although water is an essential input for agriculture and industrial production, it is also scarce in many regions. When it crosses international borders via shared rivers, lakes and aquifers, it can become a source of conflict and contention. Yet while water can be a source of instability, especially in the face of climate change, it can also be a source or catalyst for cooperation and even peace.
The Gulf Cooperation Council’s grid operator is studying the feasibility of a cable to Ethiopia, which would run through currently war-torn Yemen.
Small Island States will be facing dramatically higher adaptation costs to build resilience against the kind of impacts the IPCC projects in its most recent Special Report. Thoriq Imbrahim, former Environment and Energy Minister of the Maldives, urges the international community to attend to the political demands of countries particularly exposed to the impacts of climate change and also confront loss and damage with renewed urgency.
Three years after the talks that delivered the Paris Agreement, the world is gathering in Poland to take stock of the progress that has been made and to raise its ambitions. But as new nationalist leaders take power, has the world lost its appetite for climate action?