France launches action plan to protect wild hamster

Three million euros (£2.5m) is being spent to help protect wild hamsters facing extinction in France.

The Great Hamster of Alsace, has been on the decline since farmers started planting crops like maize which the hamsters can't eat.

Population figures fell in 2001 to 1,167 and dropped to an all time low in 2007 to just 161.

The plan is for farmers to grow some of the hamsters' favoured food alfalfa as well as their other crops.

The aim is to bring the wild hamster back up to 1500 in five years.

France launched the plan two years after a top court in Europe told them they were not doing enough.

Authorities were keen to make changes that would protect the hamster while also letting the farmers grow profitable crops.

The Great Hamster of Alsace

The hamster has a brown and white face, black belly, white paws, round ears and can grow up to 25cm (10 inches) long.

It spends half of the year hibernating and lives mostly alone.

This type of hamster lives in only 14 zones in Alsace.

It has been a protected species since 1993.

Lack of food and loss of habitat have been blamed for the fall in their numbers.

From CBBC newsround

World cities are sinking say scientists

Some of the world's largest and busiest coastal cities are sinking, according to scientists.

Scientists say world cities are sinking

Gilles Erkens from the Deltares Research Institute said New Orleans, Bangkok and Jakarta could eventually sink below sea level unless action is taken.

It's well known that sea levels is rising, but in some cities the ground is sinking too.

Bangkok experienced flooding in 2011

In some areas land is sinking ten times faster than the sea level is rising.

North Jakarta in Indonesia has sunk four metres in the last 35 years.

Scientists use satellites to measure whether the ground is sinking. They can see changes as small as 1mm.

In some areas the ground sinks naturally but in this case one of the main reasons is manmade.

Some cities pump water from under the ground to use for drinking water. This can cause the land above it to sink.

How do you stop a city sinking?

Dr Gilles Erkens who worked on the study said: "The most rigorous solution and the best one is to stop pumping groundwater for drinking water."

The city of Tokyo sank two metres before water pumping there was stopped.

Countries who want to follow Tokyo's example would need to find a new way of sourcing drinking water. That's not always easy to do.

From CBBC newsround

Malta criticised for mass shooting of migratory birds

A leading British naturalist has accused the Maltese authorities of failing to prevent large-scale illegal shooting of migratory birds by hunters.

Maltese hunters can shoot turtle doves legally

Chris Packham, who is in Malta, said rare species were being targeted, and hunters were even shooting Montagu's harrier birds on the ground at night.

"It's a desperate situation," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

A Maltese wildlife official insisted that patrols to stop illegal hunting had been stepped up.

Malta has an exemption from the EU Birds Directive, allowing its hunters to shoot turtle doves and quail during the spring migration, a crucial stage in the birds' life cycle. But according to Mr Packham, turtle doves were vulnerable, with their numbers down by 95% in the UK.

Malta is the only EU country to have a recreational spring hunting season allowing birds to be shot.

Mr Packham, a presenter of TV documentaries on wildlife, said Maltese hunters were ignoring restrictions under the exemption, or "derogation" in EU jargon. He said they were killing many other birds which are supposed to be protected.

He is in Malta with the conservation group Birdlife Malta to draw attention to the annual spring shoot, which has been criticised by environmentalists for years.

"Yesterday I'm afraid to say I had a dead swift in my hand that had been illegally shot and also a dead little bittern," Mr Packham told Today.

Sergei Golovkin, head of Malta's Wild Birds Regulation Unit, insisted that the authorities were controlling the hunters.

He said enforcement of the restrictions had "improved dramatically in the last few years". Malta has "the highest ratio in Europe" of enforcement staff deployed against illegal hunting, he told Today.

Thirty-three MEPs have jointly lobbied the European Comission to put pressure on Malta over the hunting exemption. A British Liberal Democrat MEP, Catherine Bearder, says the EU must "stop Malta from breaking EU rules, by systematically failing to apply the derogation correctly".

From BBC News-Sci/Environment

Caged birds are kept to attract wild birds for shooting in Malta. Photograph: Chris Howes/Alamy

Steve Micklewright, executive director of BirdLife Malta, said: "The birds flying from Africa to northern Europe in the spring are the strong birds. They've survived the winter. If we don't allow these birds to breed, their populations stand no chance of recovery."

From The Guardianhttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/20/conservationists-marksmen-malta-bird-hunt

Earth Day is an annual event, celebrated on April 22, on which events are held worldwide to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It was first celebrated in 1970, and is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and celebrated in more than 192 countries each year.

In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, peace activist John McConnell proposed a day to honor the Earth and the concept of peace, to first be celebrated on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This day of nature's equipoise was later sanctioned in a Proclamation written by McConnell and signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations. A month later a separate Earth Day was founded by United States SenatorGaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. Nelson was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award in recognition of his work.^[While this April 22 Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. Numerous communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues.

in Wikipedia

Asian air pollution strengthens Pacific storms

Air pollution in China and other Asian countries is having far-reaching impacts on weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere, a study suggests.

A thick haze of pollution envelopes Beijing - but scientists say the toxic air travels much further afield

Researchers have found that pollutants are strengthening storms above the Pacific Ocean which feeds into weather systems in other parts of the world.

The effect was most pronounced during the winter.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Lead author Yuan Wang, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of technology, said: "The effects are quite dramatic. The pollution results in thicker and taller clouds and heavier precipitation."

Toxic atmosphere

Parts of Asia have some of the highest levels of air pollution in the world.

In China's capital, Beijing, pollutants frequently reach hazardous levels, while emissions in the Indian capital, Delhi, also regularly soar above those recommended by the World Health Organization.

This has dire consequences for the health of those living in these regions, but there is growing evidence that there are other impacts further afield.

To analyse this, researchers from the US and China used computer models to look at the effect of Asia's pollution on weather systems.

The team said that tiny polluting particles were blown towards the north Pacific where they interacted with water droplets in the air.

Researchers believe the tiny pollutant particles blow over to the north Pacific Ocean

This, the researchers said, caused clouds to grow denser, resulting in more intense storms above the ocean.

Dr Yuan Wang said: "Since the Pacific storm track is an important component in the global general circulation, the impacts of Asian pollution on the storm track tend to affect the weather patterns of other parts of the world during the wintertime, especially a downstream region [of the track] like North America."

Commenting on the study, Professor Ellie Highwood, a climate physicist at the University of Reading, said: "We are becoming increasingly aware that pollution in the atmosphere can have an impact both locally - wherever it is sitting over regions - and it can a remote impact in other parts of the world. This is a good example of that.

"There have also been suggestions that aerosols over the North Atlantic effect storms over the North Atlantic, and that aerosols in the monsoon region over South Asia can affect circulation around the whole of the world."