World Archives - Page 1024 of 1962

UN raises alarm on Red Sea oil tanker 'time-bomb'

30 Aug 2022 30 Aug 2022

The UN appealed Tuesday for the last $14 million needed to try and prevent a stricken oil tanker from triggering a disaster off Yemen that could cost $20 billion to clean up.

The decaying 45-year-old FSO Safer, long used as a floating storage platform and now abandoned off the rebel-held Yemeni port of Hodeida, has not been serviced since Yemen was plunged into civil war more than seven years ago.

If it breaks up, it could unleash a potentially catastrophic spill in the Red Sea.

David Gressly, the United Nations’ resident and humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, leads UN efforts on the Safer.

“Less then $14 million is now needed to reach the $80 million target to start the emergency operation to transfer oil from the Safer to a safe vessel,” said Gressly’s communications advisor Russell Geekie.

“We’re deeply concerned. If the FSO Safer continues to decay, it could break up or explode at any time,” he told reporters in Geneva, via video-link from Sanaa.

“The volatile currents and strong winds from October to December will only increase the risk of disaster. If we don’t act, the ship will eventually break apart and a catastrophe will happen. It’s not a question of if, but when.”

He said the result would potentially be the fifth largest oil spill from a tanker in history, with the clean-up costs alone reaching $20 billion.

The Safer contains four times the amount of oil that was spilled by the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, one of the world’s worst ecological catastrophes, according to the UN.

“It would unleash an environmental, economic and humanitarian catastrophe,” said Geekie.

The ship contains 1.1 million barrels of oil. The UN has said a spill could destroy ecosystems, shut down the fishing industry and close the lifeline Hodeida port for six months.

The Safer is unusable, is fit only for scrappage and nothing on it works, said Geekie.

“This is a ticking time bomb,” he warned.

“You don’t want to go and smoke a cigarette on the deck, I can tell you that much.”

In shadow of abandoned US airbase, Bagram's economy withers

30 Aug 2022 31 Aug 2022

For years, the sprawling military base at Bagram, just north of Kabul, was a potent symbol of the United States’ two decades of war in Afghanistan.

The sprawling complex included an air base that was the linchpin of the US invasion; a prison where rights groups allege widespread violations occurred; and a residential area that featured swimming pools, cinemas and spas.

But weeks before Washington officially ended its military presence in Afghanistan last August, US troops left the airbase in the dead of night.

Today, the military base is occupied by the Taliban, who took over the country in a swift offensive as US forces were exiting.

The US departure from Bagram has also seen the collapse of the economy in the nearby town of the same name, an illustration of how Afghanistan’s fortunes were so heavily tied to the war and foreign aid.

“Today, I’m jobless. I don’t know much about politics, but the exit of US forces from the base is a big economic loss,” said Saifulrahman Faizi, one of the town’s 80,000 residents.

Faizi earned $30 a day when he was employed at the base, at a time when hundreds would queue for hours outside the compound in the hope of getting work.

“Now, nobody goes there. Everything has just crashed, everybody is struggling”, he said.

– Shuttered shops –

Nowhere is the town’s economic collapse more evident than in the main market.

It is marked by rows of shuttered shops and warehouses, and those that remain open have seen sales plummet.

Shah Wali, a 46-year-old grocery store keeper, said he used to earn an income of between 20,000 and 30,000 Afghanis ($230 and $340).

Today, he can barely pay his rent.

“With the Islamic Emirate (Taliban) coming to power, peace has returned but business has gone,” Wali told AFP, clutching his prayer beads.

At the peak of the US invasion, Bagram was home to tens of thousands of troops and contractors, with the town serving as a hub for tons of supplies that would service the base.

The airfield was first built by the Americans for their Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s.

The Soviet Union vastly expanded it after the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

After their withdrawal, the base was controlled by the Moscow-backed government, and later by the shaky mujahideen administration during the 1990s civil war.

With the Taliban seizing power last year, the airfield is now under their control.

– ‘Empty town’ –

When the US military pulled out, it took much of its military hardware home, but tons of civilian equipment was left behind.

For several months, the town managed to thrive on a booming scrap business, but residents say that now that, too, is dying.

Shops that sold used gym equipment, generators, air conditioners and spare car parts are either shut or receive few orders.

Several houses are now deserted, their residents having moved to Kabul or elsewhere in search of work.

Many who had worked at the base have also fled the country, fearing reprisals from the Taliban.

“Half the people have gone, the town feels so empty,” said Faizi.

Want to save carbon and land? Study suggests wooden cities

30 Aug 2022 30 Aug 2022

Housing people in homes made from wood instead of steel and concrete could save more than 100 billion tonnes of carbon emissions while preserving enough cropland to feed a booming population, research suggested Tuesday.

More than half of people globally currently live in cities and this proportion is set to rise markedly by 2050.

According to some estimates, the infrastructure needed to accommodate up to 10 billion people by mid-century could exceed that constructed since the dawn of the industrial era.

That places a huge emphasis on emissions from construction, one of the most polluting sectors and historically one of the trickiest to decarbonise.

Were all new construction projects carried out using steel and concrete, that could claim up to 60 percent of Earth’s remaining carbon budget for 2C of warming — that is, how much pollution the global economy can produce and still stay within the Paris Agreement temperature guardrail.

Scientists in Germany and Taiwan wanted to see how much carbon could be saved if firms switched to wood to build new homes instead.

They used an open-source land use model to simulate four different building scenarios: one with conventional materials like cement and steel, and three with additional demand for timber.

They also analysed how additional high wood demand could be satisfied, where it could be produced, and the impacts new tree plantations might have on biodiversity and crop production.

They found that housing people in timber homes could avoid more than 100 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2100 — that’s around 10 percent of the remaining 2C carbon budget, equivalent to nearly three years of global emissions.

Wood is known to be the least carbon-intensive building material as trees absorb CO2 as they grow, explained the study lead author Abhijeet Mishra, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

“Production of engineered wood releases much less CO2 than production of steel and cement,” he said. “Engineered wood also stores carbon, making timber cities a unique long-term carbon sink.”

He said that engineered wood was the ideal material for constructing “mid-rise” buildings — between four and 12 stories — to house growing urban populations.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that around 140 million hectares — an area larger than Peru — would be needed to grow new trees to meet the increased demand under the timber-led building scenario.

But the team calculated that these new plantations could be established on existing areas of harvest forest, and so not impact food supply by eating into crop land.

“We need farm land to grow food for the people –- using it to grow trees could potentially cause competition for the limited land resources,” said co-author Florian Humpenoder, from PIK.

The authors concluded that planting the necessary additional plantations was possible but would require “strong governance and careful planning” from governments in order to limit their impact on biodiversity.