Numerous reports comment on the water crisis that is escalating across Libya as consumption outpaces production. Some have noted the environmental context in regional water scarcity due to climate change.

But what they ignore is the fact that the complex national irrigation system that had been carefully built and maintained over decades to overcome this problem was targeted and disrupted by NATO.

During the 2011 military invasion, press reports surfaced, mostly citing pro-rebel sources, claiming that pro-Gaddafi loyalists had shut down the water supply system as a mechanism to win the war and punish civilians.

This is a lie.

But truth, after all, is the first casualty of war – especially for mainstream media journos who can’t be bothered to fact-check the claims of people they interview in war zones, while under pressure from editors to produce copy that doesn’t rock too many boats.

Critical water installations bombed – then blamed on Gaddafi

It was in fact NATO which debilitated Libya’s water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a water-pipe factory in Brega.

The factory, one of just two in the country (the other one being in Gaddafi’s home-town of Sirte), manufactured pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes for the Great Manmade River (GMR) project, an ingenious irrigation system transporting water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to about 70% of the population.

On 18th July, a rebel commander boasted that some of Gaddafi’s troops had holed up in industrial facilities in Brega, but that rebels had blocked their access to water: “Their food and water supplies are cut and they now will not be able to sleep.”

In other words, the rebels, not Gaddafi loyalists, had sabotaged the GMR water pipeline into Brega. On 22nd July, NATO followed up by bombing the Brega water-pipes factory on the pretext that it was a Gaddafi “military storage” facility concealing rocket launchers.

“Major parts of the plant have been damaged”, said Abdel-Hakim el-Shwehdy, head of the company running the project. “There could be major setback for the future projects.”

Legitimate military target left untouched in the attack

When asked to provide concrete evidence of Gaddafi loyalists firing from inside the water-pipe factory, NATO officials failed to answer. Instead, NATO satellite images shown to journalists confirm that a BM-21 rocket launcher identified near the facility days earlier, remained perfectly intact the day after the NATO attack.

Earlier, NATO forces had already bombed water facilities in Sirte, killing several “employees of the state water utility who were working during the attack.”

By August, UNICEF reported that the conflict had “put the Great Manmade River Authority, the primary distributor of potable water in Libya, at risk of failing to meet the country’s water needs.”

The same month, Agence France Presse reported that the GMR “could be crippled by the lack of spare parts and chemicals” – reinforced by NATO’s destruction of water installations critical to the GMR in Sirte and Brega.

The GMR is now “struggling to keep reservoirs at a level that can provide a sustainable supply”, UN officials said. “If the project were to fail, agencies fear a massive humanitarian emergency.”

Christian Balslev-Olesen, UNICEF Libya’s head of office, warned that the city faced “an absolute worst-case scenario” that “could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic” without resumption of water supplies.

Stratfor email: ‘So much shit doesn’t add up here’

While pro-rebel sources attempted to blame Gaddafi loyalists for the disruption of Libya’s water supply, leaked emails from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, which publicly endorsed these sources, show that the firm privately doubted its own claims.

“So much shit doesn’t add up here”, wrote Bayless Parsley, Stratfor’s Middle East analyst, in an email to executives. “I am pretty much not confident in ANY of the sources … If anything, just need to be very clear how contradictory all the information is on this project … a lot of the conclusions drawn from it are not really air tight.”

But the private US intelligence firm, which has played a key role in liaising with senior Pentagon officials in facilitating military intelligence operations, was keenly aware of what the shutdown of the GMR would mean for Libya’s population:

“Since the first phase of the ‘river’s’ construction in 1991, Libya’s population has doubled. Remove that river and, well, there would likely be a very rapid natural correction back to normal carrying capacities.”

“How often do Libyans bathe? You’d have drinking water for a month if you skipped a shower”, joked Kevin Stech, a Stratfor research director. “Seriously. Cut the baths and the showers and your well water should suffice for drinking and less-than-optional hygiene.”

The truth – government officials were trying to keep water flowing

Meanwhile, UNICEF confirmed that Libyan government officials were not sabotaging water facilities, but in fact working closely with a UN technical team to “facilitate an assessment of water wells, review urgent response options and identify alternatives for water sources.”

Nevertheless, by September, UNICEF reported that the disruption to the GMR had left 4 million Libyans without potable water.

The GMR remains disrupted to this day, and Libya’s national water crisis continues to escalate.

The deliberate destruction of a nation’s water infrastructure, with the knowledge that doing so would result in massive deaths of the population as a direct consequence, is not simply a war crime, but potentially a genocidal strategy.

It raises serious questions about the conventional mythology of a clean, humanitarian war in Libya – questions that mainstream journalists appear to be uninterested in, or unable to ask.

Nafeez Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. As well as writing for The Ecologist, he has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

See also Nafeez Ahmed’s blog: nafeezahmed.com/.

“Outrage as hundreds of seals are secretly slaughtered by Britain’s fish farming industry” was the front page headline in the Daily Mirror on the 20th April this year.

The annual commercial seal cull in Canada is rightly the subject of huge international concern, but it will come as a nasty shock to many people that hundreds of seals are also shot every year along Britain’s coastline, albeit for other reasons.

According to Scottish government data, 205 seals were legally killed under license in 2014 in Scotland; 80 to protect marine fish farms and 125 to protect wild fisheries.

However the true numbers killed across the UK could be far higher, according to wildlife campaigners, since the Scottish government’s figures relate only to those kills reported under the licensing scheme, and kills are not recorded for the rest of the UK.

Back in 1978, the Labour Government of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan planned a massive seal cull in Scotland. Large numbers of marksmen were brought in from Norway to undertake the cull and over 6,000 seals around Orkney were put on the target list. This resulted in a huge public outcry and following high profile campaigns from Greenpeace and other environmental groups it was called off.

Since this time, the number of grey seals is estimated to have doubled to around 112,000 (three quarters of the global population), there are also thought to be around 37,000 common or harbour seals around the UK coastline.

However common seal numbers have plummeted by over a third in the last decade, with ecological changes and a shortage of wild fish thought to be key factors contributing to the decline.

Seals persecuted to protect salmon?

Adult seals eat a varied diet of fish and shellfish and do not only target prime fish stocks such as salmon and cod. Many fisherman and fish farmers claim they regularly raid their nets and could cause long term decline in fish stocks, but this is a highly controversial and a hotly disputed claim.

The Scottish salmon farming industry produces over 155,000 tonnes of fish a year and serves a critical economic need across the highlands and islands of Scotland. It employs thousands of people and generated exports valued in excess of £500 million in 2014.

The wild salmon netting industry and salmon angling sectors also contribute a further £100 million to the Scottish economy and remain important employers and revenue generators in rural communities.

Few question the importance of these sectors to the Scottish economy, but concerns remain that seals are being persecuted to protect them.

In response, the RSPCA has been working closely with industry over the last decade to improve animal welfare standards for salmon and trout under it Freedom Foods Scheme. Today 90% of farmed Scottish salmon are produced to the Freedom Foods standard – amounting to over 240 million fish in 2014.

Non-lethal protection the first option

The RSPCA welfare standards place a heavy emphasis on the need for management methods aimed at preventing stock predation, such as acoustic devices to deter seals, nets that are weighted to prevent seal incursion and good management techniques, such as the speedy removal of dead fish.

Only where other methods have demonstrably failed to prevent predation can seals be shot under the standards, and the farmers are required to justify any such incidents to Freedom Foods on a case by case basis.

However all these preventative measures do have limitations. In some areas acoustic devices can only be used sparingly due to their potential negative impact on local cetacean populations. Anti-seal nets are also limited by currents and tides and can lead to the drowning of sea birds, dolphins and seals.

And of course the RSCPCA Freedom Foods standards only apply to salmon aquaculture facilities, and not to capture fisheries.

In Scotland seal-shooting now requires a licence, but …

The Scottish Government has significantly increased the protection for seals with the introduction of the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010, which for the first time, makes it an offence to shoot seals without a licence at any time, unless to alleviate suffering.

There has reportedly been a 50% decline in the number of seals being shot around the Scottish coast, since the Act and new licensing system came into force. However the Scottish Government continues to issue licences to shoot seals to protect fish stocks and these are given to salmon farmers, salmon nets men and salmon angling organisations.

A total of 53 licenses were issued in 2014 alone, permitting the killing of over 1,000 individual seals (albeit that according to license returns, 205 were actually shot).

The licence holders are not monitored by any Government official when they are shooting seals and many wildlife protection campaigners question the accuracy of the license return figures published by the Government.

There is also no closed season for seal shooting, which can result in heavily pregnant seals being shot. Lactating mothers can also be shot, leaving their pups to suffer a slow painful death from starvation.

Shooting seals may not be the cheapest option after all

Many wildlife campaigners also claim that salmon farms are often unwilling to deploy effective predator exclusion methods in view of the expense – shooting seals, they say, is cheaper.

The Scottish Government has also found itself at a centre of a debate over freedom of information as it seeks to prevent the disclosure of information detailing where seals have been killed, in view of what it believes is a threat to the personal safety of the facility managers and marksmen involved from direct action protestors.

Another aspect of seal shooting which is causing growing concern is its impact on tourism. Marksmen will generally kill seals in isolated areas away from the public eye, but in some cases shot seals are turning up on Scotland’s beautiful beaches.

And that could become a serious problem for Scotland’s reputation as a haven for wildlife – which attracts millions of tourists every year from across the UK and around the world.

As public awareness and concern grows, direct action groups such as Sea Shepherd and the Hunt Saboteurs Association are taking to the shores of Scotland in an attempt to stop the shooting of seals by intervening between the marksmen and the animals.

This summer is likely to see a number of protests across Scotland against the shooting of seals and increased media interest as a result of the interventions of activists.

Applying the RSPCA approach to wild salmon fisheries

Ultimately it might be our willingness to pay more for seal friendly products that will be the key driver in bringing an end to the shooting of seals. RSPCA Freedom Foods has proved that consumers are willing to pay more for meat and fish products with higher animal welfare standards.

Freedom Foods certification has significantly reduced the number of seals shot by salmon farms and although more needs to done to reduce this figure further, the RSPCA deserves credit for its work with the salmon farming industry and food retail sector in this area.

The key challenge going forward will be to develop a similar animal welfare certification scheme aimed at also bringing about significant reductions in the number of seals shot by salmon netters and angling organisations.

This in my view would be the best outcome to protect both the future of the Scottish salmon farming, fishing and angling industry and our precious seals.

Dominic Dyer is Policy Advisor at the Born Free Foundation, which recently merged with Care for the Wild.

An international team of scientists has settled one puzzle of the Arctic permafrost and confirmed one long-standing fear: the vast amounts of carbon now preserved in the frozen soils could one day all get back into the atmosphere.

Since the Arctic is the fastest warming place on the planet, such a release of greenhouse gas could only accelerate global warming and precipitate catastrophic climate change.

That the circumpolar regions of the northern hemisphere hold vast amounts of deep-frozen carbon is not in question.

The latest estimate is 17 billion tonnes, which is twice the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and perhaps ten times the quantity put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

In recent weeks, researchers have already underlined the potential hazard. But the big question has been that if some of the trapped carbon must be escaping now, where is it going?

Answer – it reaches the atmosphere at breakneck speed

Researchers have checked the mouths of the Arctic rivers for the telltale evidence of ancient dissolved organic carbon – partly-rotted vegetable matter deep-frozen more than 20,000 years ago – and found surprisingly little.

Now Robert Spencer, an oceanographer at Florida State University, and colleagues from the US, UK, Russia, Switzerland and Germany report in Geophysical Research Letters that the answer lies in the soil – and in the headwater streams of the terrestrial Arctic regions.

Instead of flowing down towards the sea, the thawing peat and ancient leaf litter of the warming permafrost is being metabolised by microbes and released swiftly into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

The scientists conclude that the microbes, once they get a chance to work at all, act so fast that half of all the soil carbon they can get at is turned into carbon dioxide within a week. It gets into the atmosphere before it has much chance to flow downstream with the soil meltwater.

The researchers centred their study on Duvanny Yar in Siberia, where the Kolyma River sluices through a bank of permafrost to expose the frozen organic carbon.

They worked at 19 different sites – including places where the permafrost was more than 30 metres deep – and they found tributary streams made entirely of thawed permafrost.

Measurement of the carbon concentration confirmed that it was indeed ancient. The researchers analysed its form in the meltwater, then they bottled it with a selection of local microbes, and waited.

Used by microbes

“We found that decomposition converted 60% of the carbon in the thawed permafrost to carbon dioxide in two weeks”, says Aron Stubbins, assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. “This shows that permafrost carbon is definitely in a form that can be used by the microbes.”

The finding raises a new – and not yet considered – aspect of the carbon cycle jigsaw puzzle, because what happens to atmospheric and soil carbon is a huge element in all climate simulations.

At the moment, permafrost carbon is not a big factor in projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Dr Spencer says: “When you have a huge frozen store of carbon and it’s thawing, we have some big questions. The primary question is, when it thaws, what happens to it?

“Our research shows that this ancient carbon is rapidly utilised by microbes and transferred to the atmosphere, leading to further warming in the region, and therefore more thawing. So we get into a runaway effect.”

The paper: ‘Detecting the signature of permafrost thaw in Arctic rivers‘ is by Robert G. M. Spencer et al and published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Numerous reports comment on the water crisis that is escalating across Libya as consumption outpaces production. Some have noted the environmental context in regional water scarcity due to climate change.

But what they ignore is the fact that the complex national irrigation system that had been carefully built and maintained over decades to overcome this problem was targeted and disrupted by NATO.

During the 2011 military invasion, press reports surfaced, mostly citing pro-rebel sources, claiming that pro-Gaddafi loyalists had shut down the water supply system as a mechanism to win the war and punish civilians.

This is a lie.

But truth, after all, is the first casualty of war – especially for mainstream media journos who can’t be bothered to fact-check the claims of people they interview in war zones, while under pressure from editors to produce copy that doesn’t rock too many boats.

Critical water installations bombed – then blamed on Gaddafi

It was in fact NATO which debilitated Libya’s water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a water-pipe factory in Brega.

The factory, one of just two in the country (the other one being in Gaddafi’s home-town of Sirte), manufactured pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes for the Great Manmade River (GMR) project, an ingenious irrigation system transporting water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to about 70% of the population.

On 18th July, a rebel commander boasted that some of Gaddafi’s troops had holed up in industrial facilities in Brega, but that rebels had blocked their access to water: “Their food and water supplies are cut and they now will not be able to sleep.”

In other words, the rebels, not Gaddafi loyalists, had sabotaged the GMR water pipeline into Brega. On 22nd July, NATO followed up by bombing the Brega water-pipes factory on the pretext that it was a Gaddafi “military storage” facility concealing rocket launchers.

“Major parts of the plant have been damaged”, said Abdel-Hakim el-Shwehdy, head of the company running the project. “There could be major setback for the future projects.”

Legitimate military target left untouched in the attack

When asked to provide concrete evidence of Gaddafi loyalists firing from inside the water-pipe factory, NATO officials failed to answer. Instead, NATO satellite images shown to journalists confirm that a BM-21 rocket launcher identified near the facility days earlier, remained perfectly intact the day after the NATO attack.

Earlier, NATO forces had already bombed water facilities in Sirte, killing several “employees of the state water utility who were working during the attack.”

By August, UNICEF reported that the conflict had “put the Great Manmade River Authority, the primary distributor of potable water in Libya, at risk of failing to meet the country’s water needs.”

The same month, Agence France Presse reported that the GMR “could be crippled by the lack of spare parts and chemicals” – reinforced by NATO’s destruction of water installations critical to the GMR in Sirte and Brega.

The GMR is now “struggling to keep reservoirs at a level that can provide a sustainable supply”, UN officials said. “If the project were to fail, agencies fear a massive humanitarian emergency.”

Christian Balslev-Olesen, UNICEF Libya’s head of office, warned that the city faced “an absolute worst-case scenario” that “could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic” without resumption of water supplies.

Stratfor email: ‘So much shit doesn’t add up here’

While pro-rebel sources attempted to blame Gaddafi loyalists for the disruption of Libya’s water supply, leaked emails from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, which publicly endorsed these sources, show that the firm privately doubted its own claims.

“So much shit doesn’t add up here”, wrote Bayless Parsley, Stratfor’s Middle East analyst, in an email to executives. “I am pretty much not confident in ANY of the sources … If anything, just need to be very clear how contradictory all the information is on this project … a lot of the conclusions drawn from it are not really air tight.”

But the private US intelligence firm, which has played a key role in liaising with senior Pentagon officials in facilitating military intelligence operations, was keenly aware of what the shutdown of the GMR would mean for Libya’s population:

“Since the first phase of the ‘river’s’ construction in 1991, Libya’s population has doubled. Remove that river and, well, there would likely be a very rapid natural correction back to normal carrying capacities.”

“How often do Libyans bathe? You’d have drinking water for a month if you skipped a shower”, joked Kevin Stech, a Stratfor research director. “Seriously. Cut the baths and the showers and your well water should suffice for drinking and less-than-optional hygiene.”

The truth – government officials were trying to keep water flowing

Meanwhile, UNICEF confirmed that Libyan government officials were not sabotaging water facilities, but in fact working closely with a UN technical team to “facilitate an assessment of water wells, review urgent response options and identify alternatives for water sources.”

Nevertheless, by September, UNICEF reported that the disruption to the GMR had left 4 million Libyans without potable water.

The GMR remains disrupted to this day, and Libya’s national water crisis continues to escalate.

The deliberate destruction of a nation’s water infrastructure, with the knowledge that doing so would result in massive deaths of the population as a direct consequence, is not simply a war crime, but potentially a genocidal strategy.

It raises serious questions about the conventional mythology of a clean, humanitarian war in Libya – questions that mainstream journalists appear to be uninterested in, or unable to ask.

Nafeez Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. As well as writing for The Ecologist, he has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

See also Nafeez Ahmed’s blog: nafeezahmed.com/.

“Outrage as hundreds of seals are secretly slaughtered by Britain’s fish farming industry” was the front page headline in the Daily Mirror on the 20th April this year.

The annual commercial seal cull in Canada is rightly the subject of huge international concern, but it will come as a nasty shock to many people that hundreds of seals are also shot every year along Britain’s coastline, albeit for other reasons.

According to Scottish government data, 205 seals were legally killed under license in 2014 in Scotland; 80 to protect marine fish farms and 125 to protect wild fisheries.

However the true numbers killed across the UK could be far higher, according to wildlife campaigners, since the Scottish government’s figures relate only to those kills reported under the licensing scheme, and kills are not recorded for the rest of the UK.

Back in 1978, the Labour Government of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan planned a massive seal cull in Scotland. Large numbers of marksmen were brought in from Norway to undertake the cull and over 6,000 seals around Orkney were put on the target list. This resulted in a huge public outcry and following high profile campaigns from Greenpeace and other environmental groups it was called off.

Since this time, the number of grey seals is estimated to have doubled to around 112,000 (three quarters of the global population), there are also thought to be around 37,000 common or harbour seals around the UK coastline.

However common seal numbers have plummeted by over a third in the last decade, with ecological changes and a shortage of wild fish thought to be key factors contributing to the decline.

Seals persecuted to protect salmon?

Adult seals eat a varied diet of fish and shellfish and do not only target prime fish stocks such as salmon and cod. Many fisherman and fish farmers claim they regularly raid their nets and could cause long term decline in fish stocks, but this is a highly controversial and a hotly disputed claim.

The Scottish salmon farming industry produces over 155,000 tonnes of fish a year and serves a critical economic need across the highlands and islands of Scotland. It employs thousands of people and generated exports valued in excess of £500 million in 2014.

The wild salmon netting industry and salmon angling sectors also contribute a further £100 million to the Scottish economy and remain important employers and revenue generators in rural communities.

Few question the importance of these sectors to the Scottish economy, but concerns remain that seals are being persecuted to protect them.

In response, the RSPCA has been working closely with industry over the last decade to improve animal welfare standards for salmon and trout under it Freedom Foods Scheme. Today 90% of farmed Scottish salmon are produced to the Freedom Foods standard – amounting to over 240 million fish in 2014.

Non-lethal protection the first option

The RSPCA welfare standards place a heavy emphasis on the need for management methods aimed at preventing stock predation, such as acoustic devices to deter seals, nets that are weighted to prevent seal incursion and good management techniques, such as the speedy removal of dead fish.

Only where other methods have demonstrably failed to prevent predation can seals be shot under the standards, and the farmers are required to justify any such incidents to Freedom Foods on a case by case basis.

However all these preventative measures do have limitations. In some areas acoustic devices can only be used sparingly due to their potential negative impact on local cetacean populations. Anti-seal nets are also limited by currents and tides and can lead to the drowning of sea birds, dolphins and seals.

And of course the RSCPCA Freedom Foods standards only apply to salmon aquaculture facilities, and not to capture fisheries.

In Scotland seal-shooting now requires a licence, but …

The Scottish Government has significantly increased the protection for seals with the introduction of the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010, which for the first time, makes it an offence to shoot seals without a licence at any time, unless to alleviate suffering.

There has reportedly been a 50% decline in the number of seals being shot around the Scottish coast, since the Act and new licensing system came into force. However the Scottish Government continues to issue licences to shoot seals to protect fish stocks and these are given to salmon farmers, salmon nets men and salmon angling organisations.

A total of 53 licenses were issued in 2014 alone, permitting the killing of over 1,000 individual seals (albeit that according to license returns, 205 were actually shot).

The licence holders are not monitored by any Government official when they are shooting seals and many wildlife protection campaigners question the accuracy of the license return figures published by the Government.

There is also no closed season for seal shooting, which can result in heavily pregnant seals being shot. Lactating mothers can also be shot, leaving their pups to suffer a slow painful death from starvation.

Shooting seals may not be the cheapest option after all

Many wildlife campaigners also claim that salmon farms are often unwilling to deploy effective predator exclusion methods in view of the expense – shooting seals, they say, is cheaper.

The Scottish Government has also found itself at a centre of a debate over freedom of information as it seeks to prevent the disclosure of information detailing where seals have been killed, in view of what it believes is a threat to the personal safety of the facility managers and marksmen involved from direct action protestors.

Another aspect of seal shooting which is causing growing concern is its impact on tourism. Marksmen will generally kill seals in isolated areas away from the public eye, but in some cases shot seals are turning up on Scotland’s beautiful beaches.

And that could become a serious problem for Scotland’s reputation as a haven for wildlife – which attracts millions of tourists every year from across the UK and around the world.

As public awareness and concern grows, direct action groups such as Sea Shepherd and the Hunt Saboteurs Association are taking to the shores of Scotland in an attempt to stop the shooting of seals by intervening between the marksmen and the animals.

This summer is likely to see a number of protests across Scotland against the shooting of seals and increased media interest as a result of the interventions of activists.

Applying the RSPCA approach to wild salmon fisheries

Ultimately it might be our willingness to pay more for seal friendly products that will be the key driver in bringing an end to the shooting of seals. RSPCA Freedom Foods has proved that consumers are willing to pay more for meat and fish products with higher animal welfare standards.

Freedom Foods certification has significantly reduced the number of seals shot by salmon farms and although more needs to done to reduce this figure further, the RSPCA deserves credit for its work with the salmon farming industry and food retail sector in this area.

The key challenge going forward will be to develop a similar animal welfare certification scheme aimed at also bringing about significant reductions in the number of seals shot by salmon netters and angling organisations.

This in my view would be the best outcome to protect both the future of the Scottish salmon farming, fishing and angling industry and our precious seals.

Dominic Dyer is Policy Advisor at the Born Free Foundation, which recently merged with Care for the Wild.

An international team of scientists has settled one puzzle of the Arctic permafrost and confirmed one long-standing fear: the vast amounts of carbon now preserved in the frozen soils could one day all get back into the atmosphere.

Since the Arctic is the fastest warming place on the planet, such a release of greenhouse gas could only accelerate global warming and precipitate catastrophic climate change.

That the circumpolar regions of the northern hemisphere hold vast amounts of deep-frozen carbon is not in question.

The latest estimate is 17 billion tonnes, which is twice the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and perhaps ten times the quantity put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

In recent weeks, researchers have already underlined the potential hazard. But the big question has been that if some of the trapped carbon must be escaping now, where is it going?

Answer – it reaches the atmosphere at breakneck speed

Researchers have checked the mouths of the Arctic rivers for the telltale evidence of ancient dissolved organic carbon – partly-rotted vegetable matter deep-frozen more than 20,000 years ago – and found surprisingly little.

Now Robert Spencer, an oceanographer at Florida State University, and colleagues from the US, UK, Russia, Switzerland and Germany report in Geophysical Research Letters that the answer lies in the soil – and in the headwater streams of the terrestrial Arctic regions.

Instead of flowing down towards the sea, the thawing peat and ancient leaf litter of the warming permafrost is being metabolised by microbes and released swiftly into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

The scientists conclude that the microbes, once they get a chance to work at all, act so fast that half of all the soil carbon they can get at is turned into carbon dioxide within a week. It gets into the atmosphere before it has much chance to flow downstream with the soil meltwater.

The researchers centred their study on Duvanny Yar in Siberia, where the Kolyma River sluices through a bank of permafrost to expose the frozen organic carbon.

They worked at 19 different sites – including places where the permafrost was more than 30 metres deep – and they found tributary streams made entirely of thawed permafrost.

Measurement of the carbon concentration confirmed that it was indeed ancient. The researchers analysed its form in the meltwater, then they bottled it with a selection of local microbes, and waited.

Used by microbes

“We found that decomposition converted 60% of the carbon in the thawed permafrost to carbon dioxide in two weeks”, says Aron Stubbins, assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. “This shows that permafrost carbon is definitely in a form that can be used by the microbes.”

The finding raises a new – and not yet considered – aspect of the carbon cycle jigsaw puzzle, because what happens to atmospheric and soil carbon is a huge element in all climate simulations.

At the moment, permafrost carbon is not a big factor in projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Dr Spencer says: “When you have a huge frozen store of carbon and it’s thawing, we have some big questions. The primary question is, when it thaws, what happens to it?

“Our research shows that this ancient carbon is rapidly utilised by microbes and transferred to the atmosphere, leading to further warming in the region, and therefore more thawing. So we get into a runaway effect.”

The paper: ‘Detecting the signature of permafrost thaw in Arctic rivers‘ is by Robert G. M. Spencer et al and published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Numerous reports comment on the water crisis that is escalating across Libya as consumption outpaces production. Some have noted the environmental context in regional water scarcity due to climate change.

But what they ignore is the fact that the complex national irrigation system that had been carefully built and maintained over decades to overcome this problem was targeted and disrupted by NATO.

During the 2011 military invasion, press reports surfaced, mostly citing pro-rebel sources, claiming that pro-Gaddafi loyalists had shut down the water supply system as a mechanism to win the war and punish civilians.

This is a lie.

But truth, after all, is the first casualty of war – especially for mainstream media journos who can’t be bothered to fact-check the claims of people they interview in war zones, while under pressure from editors to produce copy that doesn’t rock too many boats.

Critical water installations bombed – then blamed on Gaddafi

It was in fact NATO which debilitated Libya’s water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a water-pipe factory in Brega.

The factory, one of just two in the country (the other one being in Gaddafi’s home-town of Sirte), manufactured pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes for the Great Manmade River (GMR) project, an ingenious irrigation system transporting water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to about 70% of the population.

On 18th July, a rebel commander boasted that some of Gaddafi’s troops had holed up in industrial facilities in Brega, but that rebels had blocked their access to water: “Their food and water supplies are cut and they now will not be able to sleep.”

In other words, the rebels, not Gaddafi loyalists, had sabotaged the GMR water pipeline into Brega. On 22nd July, NATO followed up by bombing the Brega water-pipes factory on the pretext that it was a Gaddafi “military storage” facility concealing rocket launchers.

“Major parts of the plant have been damaged”, said Abdel-Hakim el-Shwehdy, head of the company running the project. “There could be major setback for the future projects.”

Legitimate military target left untouched in the attack

When asked to provide concrete evidence of Gaddafi loyalists firing from inside the water-pipe factory, NATO officials failed to answer. Instead, NATO satellite images shown to journalists confirm that a BM-21 rocket launcher identified near the facility days earlier, remained perfectly intact the day after the NATO attack.

Earlier, NATO forces had already bombed water facilities in Sirte, killing several “employees of the state water utility who were working during the attack.”

By August, UNICEF reported that the conflict had “put the Great Manmade River Authority, the primary distributor of potable water in Libya, at risk of failing to meet the country’s water needs.”

The same month, Agence France Presse reported that the GMR “could be crippled by the lack of spare parts and chemicals” – reinforced by NATO’s destruction of water installations critical to the GMR in Sirte and Brega.

The GMR is now “struggling to keep reservoirs at a level that can provide a sustainable supply”, UN officials said. “If the project were to fail, agencies fear a massive humanitarian emergency.”

Christian Balslev-Olesen, UNICEF Libya’s head of office, warned that the city faced “an absolute worst-case scenario” that “could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic” without resumption of water supplies.

Stratfor email: ‘So much shit doesn’t add up here’

While pro-rebel sources attempted to blame Gaddafi loyalists for the disruption of Libya’s water supply, leaked emails from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, which publicly endorsed these sources, show that the firm privately doubted its own claims.

“So much shit doesn’t add up here”, wrote Bayless Parsley, Stratfor’s Middle East analyst, in an email to executives. “I am pretty much not confident in ANY of the sources … If anything, just need to be very clear how contradictory all the information is on this project … a lot of the conclusions drawn from it are not really air tight.”

But the private US intelligence firm, which has played a key role in liaising with senior Pentagon officials in facilitating military intelligence operations, was keenly aware of what the shutdown of the GMR would mean for Libya’s population:

“Since the first phase of the ‘river’s’ construction in 1991, Libya’s population has doubled. Remove that river and, well, there would likely be a very rapid natural correction back to normal carrying capacities.”

“How often do Libyans bathe? You’d have drinking water for a month if you skipped a shower”, joked Kevin Stech, a Stratfor research director. “Seriously. Cut the baths and the showers and your well water should suffice for drinking and less-than-optional hygiene.”

The truth – government officials were trying to keep water flowing

Meanwhile, UNICEF confirmed that Libyan government officials were not sabotaging water facilities, but in fact working closely with a UN technical team to “facilitate an assessment of water wells, review urgent response options and identify alternatives for water sources.”

Nevertheless, by September, UNICEF reported that the disruption to the GMR had left 4 million Libyans without potable water.

The GMR remains disrupted to this day, and Libya’s national water crisis continues to escalate.

The deliberate destruction of a nation’s water infrastructure, with the knowledge that doing so would result in massive deaths of the population as a direct consequence, is not simply a war crime, but potentially a genocidal strategy.

It raises serious questions about the conventional mythology of a clean, humanitarian war in Libya – questions that mainstream journalists appear to be uninterested in, or unable to ask.

Nafeez Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. As well as writing for The Ecologist, he has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

See also Nafeez Ahmed’s blog: nafeezahmed.com/.

“Outrage as hundreds of seals are secretly slaughtered by Britain’s fish farming industry” was the front page headline in the Daily Mirror on the 20th April this year.

The annual commercial seal cull in Canada is rightly the subject of huge international concern, but it will come as a nasty shock to many people that hundreds of seals are also shot every year along Britain’s coastline, albeit for other reasons.

According to Scottish government data, 205 seals were legally killed under license in 2014 in Scotland; 80 to protect marine fish farms and 125 to protect wild fisheries.

However the true numbers killed across the UK could be far higher, according to wildlife campaigners, since the Scottish government’s figures relate only to those kills reported under the licensing scheme, and kills are not recorded for the rest of the UK.

Back in 1978, the Labour Government of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan planned a massive seal cull in Scotland. Large numbers of marksmen were brought in from Norway to undertake the cull and over 6,000 seals around Orkney were put on the target list. This resulted in a huge public outcry and following high profile campaigns from Greenpeace and other environmental groups it was called off.

Since this time, the number of grey seals is estimated to have doubled to around 112,000 (three quarters of the global population), there are also thought to be around 37,000 common or harbour seals around the UK coastline.

However common seal numbers have plummeted by over a third in the last decade, with ecological changes and a shortage of wild fish thought to be key factors contributing to the decline.

Seals persecuted to protect salmon?

Adult seals eat a varied diet of fish and shellfish and do not only target prime fish stocks such as salmon and cod. Many fisherman and fish farmers claim they regularly raid their nets and could cause long term decline in fish stocks, but this is a highly controversial and a hotly disputed claim.

The Scottish salmon farming industry produces over 155,000 tonnes of fish a year and serves a critical economic need across the highlands and islands of Scotland. It employs thousands of people and generated exports valued in excess of £500 million in 2014.

The wild salmon netting industry and salmon angling sectors also contribute a further £100 million to the Scottish economy and remain important employers and revenue generators in rural communities.

Few question the importance of these sectors to the Scottish economy, but concerns remain that seals are being persecuted to protect them.

In response, the RSPCA has been working closely with industry over the last decade to improve animal welfare standards for salmon and trout under it Freedom Foods Scheme. Today 90% of farmed Scottish salmon are produced to the Freedom Foods standard – amounting to over 240 million fish in 2014.

Non-lethal protection the first option

The RSPCA welfare standards place a heavy emphasis on the need for management methods aimed at preventing stock predation, such as acoustic devices to deter seals, nets that are weighted to prevent seal incursion and good management techniques, such as the speedy removal of dead fish.

Only where other methods have demonstrably failed to prevent predation can seals be shot under the standards, and the farmers are required to justify any such incidents to Freedom Foods on a case by case basis.

However all these preventative measures do have limitations. In some areas acoustic devices can only be used sparingly due to their potential negative impact on local cetacean populations. Anti-seal nets are also limited by currents and tides and can lead to the drowning of sea birds, dolphins and seals.

And of course the RSCPCA Freedom Foods standards only apply to salmon aquaculture facilities, and not to capture fisheries.

In Scotland seal-shooting now requires a licence, but …

The Scottish Government has significantly increased the protection for seals with the introduction of the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010, which for the first time, makes it an offence to shoot seals without a licence at any time, unless to alleviate suffering.

There has reportedly been a 50% decline in the number of seals being shot around the Scottish coast, since the Act and new licensing system came into force. However the Scottish Government continues to issue licences to shoot seals to protect fish stocks and these are given to salmon farmers, salmon nets men and salmon angling organisations.

A total of 53 licenses were issued in 2014 alone, permitting the killing of over 1,000 individual seals (albeit that according to license returns, 205 were actually shot).

The licence holders are not monitored by any Government official when they are shooting seals and many wildlife protection campaigners question the accuracy of the license return figures published by the Government.

There is also no closed season for seal shooting, which can result in heavily pregnant seals being shot. Lactating mothers can also be shot, leaving their pups to suffer a slow painful death from starvation.

Shooting seals may not be the cheapest option after all

Many wildlife campaigners also claim that salmon farms are often unwilling to deploy effective predator exclusion methods in view of the expense – shooting seals, they say, is cheaper.

The Scottish Government has also found itself at a centre of a debate over freedom of information as it seeks to prevent the disclosure of information detailing where seals have been killed, in view of what it believes is a threat to the personal safety of the facility managers and marksmen involved from direct action protestors.

Another aspect of seal shooting which is causing growing concern is its impact on tourism. Marksmen will generally kill seals in isolated areas away from the public eye, but in some cases shot seals are turning up on Scotland’s beautiful beaches.

And that could become a serious problem for Scotland’s reputation as a haven for wildlife – which attracts millions of tourists every year from across the UK and around the world.

As public awareness and concern grows, direct action groups such as Sea Shepherd and the Hunt Saboteurs Association are taking to the shores of Scotland in an attempt to stop the shooting of seals by intervening between the marksmen and the animals.

This summer is likely to see a number of protests across Scotland against the shooting of seals and increased media interest as a result of the interventions of activists.

Applying the RSPCA approach to wild salmon fisheries

Ultimately it might be our willingness to pay more for seal friendly products that will be the key driver in bringing an end to the shooting of seals. RSPCA Freedom Foods has proved that consumers are willing to pay more for meat and fish products with higher animal welfare standards.

Freedom Foods certification has significantly reduced the number of seals shot by salmon farms and although more needs to done to reduce this figure further, the RSPCA deserves credit for its work with the salmon farming industry and food retail sector in this area.

The key challenge going forward will be to develop a similar animal welfare certification scheme aimed at also bringing about significant reductions in the number of seals shot by salmon netters and angling organisations.

This in my view would be the best outcome to protect both the future of the Scottish salmon farming, fishing and angling industry and our precious seals.

Dominic Dyer is Policy Advisor at the Born Free Foundation, which recently merged with Care for the Wild.

An international team of scientists has settled one puzzle of the Arctic permafrost and confirmed one long-standing fear: the vast amounts of carbon now preserved in the frozen soils could one day all get back into the atmosphere.

Since the Arctic is the fastest warming place on the planet, such a release of greenhouse gas could only accelerate global warming and precipitate catastrophic climate change.

That the circumpolar regions of the northern hemisphere hold vast amounts of deep-frozen carbon is not in question.

The latest estimate is 17 billion tonnes, which is twice the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and perhaps ten times the quantity put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

In recent weeks, researchers have already underlined the potential hazard. But the big question has been that if some of the trapped carbon must be escaping now, where is it going?

Answer – it reaches the atmosphere at breakneck speed

Researchers have checked the mouths of the Arctic rivers for the telltale evidence of ancient dissolved organic carbon – partly-rotted vegetable matter deep-frozen more than 20,000 years ago – and found surprisingly little.

Now Robert Spencer, an oceanographer at Florida State University, and colleagues from the US, UK, Russia, Switzerland and Germany report in Geophysical Research Letters that the answer lies in the soil – and in the headwater streams of the terrestrial Arctic regions.

Instead of flowing down towards the sea, the thawing peat and ancient leaf litter of the warming permafrost is being metabolised by microbes and released swiftly into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

The scientists conclude that the microbes, once they get a chance to work at all, act so fast that half of all the soil carbon they can get at is turned into carbon dioxide within a week. It gets into the atmosphere before it has much chance to flow downstream with the soil meltwater.

The researchers centred their study on Duvanny Yar in Siberia, where the Kolyma River sluices through a bank of permafrost to expose the frozen organic carbon.

They worked at 19 different sites – including places where the permafrost was more than 30 metres deep – and they found tributary streams made entirely of thawed permafrost.

Measurement of the carbon concentration confirmed that it was indeed ancient. The researchers analysed its form in the meltwater, then they bottled it with a selection of local microbes, and waited.

Used by microbes

“We found that decomposition converted 60% of the carbon in the thawed permafrost to carbon dioxide in two weeks”, says Aron Stubbins, assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. “This shows that permafrost carbon is definitely in a form that can be used by the microbes.”

The finding raises a new – and not yet considered – aspect of the carbon cycle jigsaw puzzle, because what happens to atmospheric and soil carbon is a huge element in all climate simulations.

At the moment, permafrost carbon is not a big factor in projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Dr Spencer says: “When you have a huge frozen store of carbon and it’s thawing, we have some big questions. The primary question is, when it thaws, what happens to it?

“Our research shows that this ancient carbon is rapidly utilised by microbes and transferred to the atmosphere, leading to further warming in the region, and therefore more thawing. So we get into a runaway effect.”

The paper: ‘Detecting the signature of permafrost thaw in Arctic rivers‘ is by Robert G. M. Spencer et al and published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Numerous reports comment on the water crisis that is escalating across Libya as consumption outpaces production. Some have noted the environmental context in regional water scarcity due to climate change.

But what they ignore is the fact that the complex national irrigation system that had been carefully built and maintained over decades to overcome this problem was targeted and disrupted by NATO.

During the 2011 military invasion, press reports surfaced, mostly citing pro-rebel sources, claiming that pro-Gaddafi loyalists had shut down the water supply system as a mechanism to win the war and punish civilians.

This is a lie.

But truth, after all, is the first casualty of war – especially for mainstream media journos who can’t be bothered to fact-check the claims of people they interview in war zones, while under pressure from editors to produce copy that doesn’t rock too many boats.

Critical water installations bombed – then blamed on Gaddafi

It was in fact NATO which debilitated Libya’s water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a water-pipe factory in Brega.

The factory, one of just two in the country (the other one being in Gaddafi’s home-town of Sirte), manufactured pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes for the Great Manmade River (GMR) project, an ingenious irrigation system transporting water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to about 70% of the population.

On 18th July, a rebel commander boasted that some of Gaddafi’s troops had holed up in industrial facilities in Brega, but that rebels had blocked their access to water: “Their food and water supplies are cut and they now will not be able to sleep.”

In other words, the rebels, not Gaddafi loyalists, had sabotaged the GMR water pipeline into Brega. On 22nd July, NATO followed up by bombing the Brega water-pipes factory on the pretext that it was a Gaddafi “military storage” facility concealing rocket launchers.

“Major parts of the plant have been damaged”, said Abdel-Hakim el-Shwehdy, head of the company running the project. “There could be major setback for the future projects.”

Legitimate military target left untouched in the attack

When asked to provide concrete evidence of Gaddafi loyalists firing from inside the water-pipe factory, NATO officials failed to answer. Instead, NATO satellite images shown to journalists confirm that a BM-21 rocket launcher identified near the facility days earlier, remained perfectly intact the day after the NATO attack.

Earlier, NATO forces had already bombed water facilities in Sirte, killing several “employees of the state water utility who were working during the attack.”

By August, UNICEF reported that the conflict had “put the Great Manmade River Authority, the primary distributor of potable water in Libya, at risk of failing to meet the country’s water needs.”

The same month, Agence France Presse reported that the GMR “could be crippled by the lack of spare parts and chemicals” – reinforced by NATO’s destruction of water installations critical to the GMR in Sirte and Brega.

The GMR is now “struggling to keep reservoirs at a level that can provide a sustainable supply”, UN officials said. “If the project were to fail, agencies fear a massive humanitarian emergency.”

Christian Balslev-Olesen, UNICEF Libya’s head of office, warned that the city faced “an absolute worst-case scenario” that “could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic” without resumption of water supplies.

Stratfor email: ‘So much shit doesn’t add up here’

While pro-rebel sources attempted to blame Gaddafi loyalists for the disruption of Libya’s water supply, leaked emails from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, which publicly endorsed these sources, show that the firm privately doubted its own claims.

“So much shit doesn’t add up here”, wrote Bayless Parsley, Stratfor’s Middle East analyst, in an email to executives. “I am pretty much not confident in ANY of the sources … If anything, just need to be very clear how contradictory all the information is on this project … a lot of the conclusions drawn from it are not really air tight.”

But the private US intelligence firm, which has played a key role in liaising with senior Pentagon officials in facilitating military intelligence operations, was keenly aware of what the shutdown of the GMR would mean for Libya’s population:

“Since the first phase of the ‘river’s’ construction in 1991, Libya’s population has doubled. Remove that river and, well, there would likely be a very rapid natural correction back to normal carrying capacities.”

“How often do Libyans bathe? You’d have drinking water for a month if you skipped a shower”, joked Kevin Stech, a Stratfor research director. “Seriously. Cut the baths and the showers and your well water should suffice for drinking and less-than-optional hygiene.”

The truth – government officials were trying to keep water flowing

Meanwhile, UNICEF confirmed that Libyan government officials were not sabotaging water facilities, but in fact working closely with a UN technical team to “facilitate an assessment of water wells, review urgent response options and identify alternatives for water sources.”

Nevertheless, by September, UNICEF reported that the disruption to the GMR had left 4 million Libyans without potable water.

The GMR remains disrupted to this day, and Libya’s national water crisis continues to escalate.

The deliberate destruction of a nation’s water infrastructure, with the knowledge that doing so would result in massive deaths of the population as a direct consequence, is not simply a war crime, but potentially a genocidal strategy.

It raises serious questions about the conventional mythology of a clean, humanitarian war in Libya – questions that mainstream journalists appear to be uninterested in, or unable to ask.

Nafeez Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. As well as writing for The Ecologist, he has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

See also Nafeez Ahmed’s blog: nafeezahmed.com/.