Articles by Robert Delfs

Really

I'm in the last throes of getting camera and dive gear ready for a longish trip and a million other things, but I had to make the effort to let Gristmates know about this bit of news. This has been a contested issue -- up to now, at least. Perhaps now we can move on towards finding ways to protect wild salmon from the dangers posed by farming instead of arguing about whether those risks are real. They are.

And they’re rising, not falling

China's sulfur dioxide emissions in 2005 totalled 25.5 million tonnes, the highest volume of any country in the world in 2005, according to Li Xinmin, Deputy Director General of the Department of Pollution Control under the State Environment Protection Administration (SEPA), who was speaking at a press conference in Beijing on August 6.

Far from reaching its goal under the 10th Five Year Plan (FYP) to reduce SO2 emission by 20% between 2001 and 2005, Li said SO2 emissions actually increased by 27% over that period. The target for the 11th FYP is to reduce SO2 emissions by 10% to 22.95 million tonnes.

A superb series on India and water

There is an excellent series about India and water in The New York Times (and its global sister publication The International Herald Tribune), including separate articles by Somini Sengupta about the immense problems of flooding during monsoon rains, an intensifying agricultural crisis as wells dry up, and the Indian government's systemic inability to deliver sufficient water to the immense and growing populations of its cities, a crisis once largely limited to the urban poor but now broadly afflicting even the middle class in New Delhi, India's capital and richest city.

New report on aquaculture

"Nearly half the fish consumed as food worldwide are raised on fish farms rather than caught in the wild," according to a new FAO report. The State of World Aquaculture 2006 report, presented at a meeting of the the FAO Sub-Committee on Aquaculture held in New Delhi earlier this month, stated that fish consumed by human beings originating from aquaculture, just 9% in 1980, today constitutes 43%.

The hard numbers are 45.5 million tonnes of farmed fish, worth US$63 billion, eaten per year, versus 95 million tonnes from capture fisheries, of which 60 million tonnes goes to human consumption.

Those are bigger numbers than I would have thought.