Jakarta to open bicycle-only lanes

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailheadlines.asp?fileid=20070908.@03&irec=2


PEDAL POWER: A man escorts his four-year-old son after participating in an event Friday to mark the second anniversary of the group Bike To Work at City Hall, Jakarta. The group has successfully persuaded the city administration to build dedicated bicycle lanes in the city. JP/J. Adiguna

Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The group Bike to Work (B2W) won a victory after two years of campaigning Friday, with the Jakarta administration promising to provide special bicycle lanes along city streets.

"More people commuting to work by bike has pushed the city to build traffic lanes for cyclists," Deputy Governor Fauzi Bowo said at the climax of a series of events to commemorate the first-ever National Bike to Work Day on Aug. 25.

Fauzi, who will be sworn in as Jakarta's first directly elected governor in October, has been an advisor for B2W since its establishment in August 2005.

The group used the ceremony to hand Fauzi a specially designed bicycle. The same type of bicycle, valued at Rp 1.4 million, has also been given to, among others, State Minister for the Environment Rachmat Witoelar, Trade and Industry Minister Fahmi Idris and State Minister for Research and Technology Kusmayanto Kadiman.

Fauzi said pedaling to work could significantly help to solve the city's traffic problems.

"It will be an alternative (form of) transportation in the capital ... it makes us healthier, too," he said.

There are currently about 3,000 members of B2W in Jakarta, most of whom ride their bikes to work every day.

Despite the group's successes, its membership pales in comparison to the 3 million motorcycles and over 2.5 million private cars that travel on city streets every day.

Jakartans breathed "clean air" for only 45 days last year, according to the City Environment Management Agency.

The City Transportation Agency said that it would be able to set up special lanes for cyclists, including along Jl. Yos Sudarso in North Jakarta and Jl. Ahmad Yani and Jl. DI Pandjaitan in East Jakarta.

"As for the high density of traffic along Jl. Jend. Sudirman and Jl. MH Thamrin, we could apply a system such as in Bogota (Colombia) by taking 1.25 meters of the existing 3 meter pedestrian lanes for the cyclists," agency head Nurachman told Antara.

The administration has started building parking lots for cyclists to be integrated with the busway stops.

"We are now building parking facilities at busway stops in Kalideres (West Jakarta) as well as Kampung Rambutan (East Jakarta) and Ragunan (South Jakarta). We hope they will operate this year," Nurachman said.

B2W chairman Toto Sugito said he was optimistic about the construction of facilities for cyclists.

"We will continue boosting public awareness about switching to non-emitting vehicles to protect the city," he said

Toto said that B2W has also raised the issue of global warming as another way of making the public aware of the importance of reducing the use of private cars.

"We're not asking motorists to stop using their private cars but we are inviting them to bike at least one or two days a week," he said.

"By doing so, (we) will reduce fuel consumption and clean the city's air."

New tool to fight global warming: Endangered Species Act?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0907/p03s03-usgn.html?s=wklyenv

A recent deal to protect the habitat of endangered coral may offer US environmentalists new leverage.

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 7, 2007 edition

Elkhorn coral, whose decline is blamed on climate change, will now have its habitat safeguarded. US Geological Survey/AP/file

Environmentalists may have gained a powerful new legal weapon to fight global warming: the Endangered Species Act.

That's the fallout some expect from a settlement last week between environmentalists and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The government agency agreed to protect the "critical habitat" of elkhorn and staghorn coral, the first species to be recognized as threatened by global warming.

By protecting habitat, not just species, the federal government could be in a position to fight any threats to that habitat, including possibly, global warming, some environmentalists say. While no one expects the US to stop, say, a coal-fired power plant in the Midwest to save Florida coral, the settlement does expand the leverage of the 1973 law that protects species from extinction.

"We think this victory on coral critical habitat actually moves the entire Endangered Species Act [ESA] onto a firm legal foundation for challenging global-warming pollution," says Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group based in Tucson, Ariz., that filed both coral suits.

Indeed, the coral-protection victory may be just the beginning of a push to use the ESA to fight global warming, he and other environmentalists suggest.

The pair of coral species are struggling to survive because Florida's and the Caribbean's waters have become warmer and more acidic. Many scientists attribute the change to global warming.

Protected coral gets habitat safeguards

The elkhorn and staghorn coral won protected status under the ESA in May 2006. But it took a second legal battle to win a preservation of the corals' "critical habitat," part of last week's settlement between environmentalists and the US fisheries service.

The act's leverage will grow, environmentalists say, as climate change becomes recognized as a factor in species' decline. The number of species-recovery plans that cite global warming as a damaging factor has gone from zero as recently as 1990 to 141 today – with most of the growth since 2000.

While that's still just 9 percent of the 1,494 species listed at one time or another, the increase suggests that a large group of species still awaiting listing will have global warming cited as a major cause in their decline. The polar bear, 12 species of penguins, and the Kittlitz's Murrelet, an Alaskan bird that nests on the edges of glaciers, are all candidates, Mr. Suckling says.

Specific effects of warming speculative

Right now, any bid to fight the construction of a power plant by arguing that emissions might harm a species would probably be thrown out of court, because such climate-change effects remain speculative, Mr. Suckling concedes.

But in the next few years, if evidence of the threat of global warming on endangered species grows, so could the legal argument that the ESA be considered when a power plant or other carbon-intensive project is proposed, he adds.

Others are far less sure about that. Even some environmentalists are skeptical.

It is, for instance, unlikely that any judge will halt a power plant project just because its emissions contribute to a huge pool of global emissions that collectively harm coral, says Michael Bean, senior attorney at Environmental Defense, a Washington-based environmental group.

"The list of endangered species will in the future include many species threatened by global warming," he says. "But I'm skeptical that the [ESA] itself will be the source of any new restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions. I think those will come from new legislation."

While winning a place on the endangered species list is always a big step – it's only the first. Habitat loss is the primary cause of species loss.

But only about 38 percent of the 1,367 species on the federal endangered species list actually have the much tougher protection that mandates critical habitat protection. Under the law, no area designated as critical habitat can be destroyed or adversely modified.

Those legal protections have played a major role in limiting development in key areas of the country. Critical-habitat designations covering 80 million acres along the West Coast have sharply reduced fishing in the breeding grounds of the Steller Sea Lion, a move many credit for the recent rebound in the population.

First listed as "threatened" in May 2006, the two coral species have declined 80 to 98 percent across their range. This spring a study found that 10 percent of the Caribbean's 62 reef building corals were threatened, including elkhorn and staghorn corals that used to be prominent.

Scientists studying the decline of coral that used to be the dominant reef-builders off the Florida coast are cheering the new settlement. They say they hope the critical-habitat designation will restrict access to the last remaining coral stands – and help win the legal fight on global warming.

"It's pretty exciting to find that a lowly marine invertebrate might actually someday be the legal catalyst for rulings against greenhouse-gas emissions," says Andrew Baker, a University of Miami marine biologist specializing on climate change impact on coral. "It's like getting Al Capone for tax evasion."