CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Can the world cope with more tourists?

The environment was the focus at the annual summit of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) at Dubai this week, with an emphasis on the need to promote the tourism industry's green credentials. Meanwhile, at the XII United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Accra, Ghana, the UNWTO has presented a message that tourism offers the only sustainable development opportunity to many developing and least developed countries. But with international tourist numbers projected to double by 2020, can this increased traffic really be catered for in a sustainable way?

It's official - referees do favour the home team

While CABI is best known for its involvement in agriculture and the environment, the CAB Abstracts database also covers a range of other subjects, including leisure, tourism and sport. As one of the editors covering this subject area, from time to time I come across papers on subjects close to my heart. Most recently, football, and the bias of referees.

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

The sound of despondent Handpicked bloggers rang through the air at CABI this morning. The corridors were reverberating in despair at the New Zealand Herald's frightening headline 'Climate change could see pubs run dry'. Streuth!

Pedants among you who have checked the link will have noted that the story appeared in last week's Herald, but what with the time difference with the UK and a weekend spent in the pub, it was a little late in catching our attention. But this makes it all the more worrying. We are one week nearer to running dry!

Slum tourism: Pro-poor, or simple voyeurism?

A New York Times article published on 9 March on the questions of slum tourism has been generating hundreds of comments on the paper's website, and has been picked up by many bloggers and news sites. While slum tourism is now offered in an increasing number of places around the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg to Mumbai, the concept arouses strong opinions among both tourism and development experts, and the general public. Some see it as voyeurism of the worst kind, as rich Westerners view people living in poverty, as if they were animals in a zoo, before returning to their air-conditioned hotels. Others see it as generating valuable insight into how others live, and encouraging a spirit of entrepreneurship among the residents of the township and favelas.

Virgin flight fuels aviation and energy debates

The first flight by a commercial airline to be powered partly by biofuel has taken place. No passengers were on board, and just one of the aircraft's four engines ran on fuel comprising a 20% biofuel mix together with 80% normal aviation fuel. But with both aviation and biofuels arousing strong emotions among environmentalists, the flight has sparked debate on both these issues. Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Atlantic airline which conducted the flight, hailed it as a 'vital breakthrough,' while environmental groups dismissed it as a gimmick.

Review of 2007

Happy New Year and a big thank you to all those who subscribe or read our blog.

It was a good 2007 for the hand picked ... and carefully sorted with a full calendar year of blogging under our belt, turning 1 year old on 2nd November. We posted 167 articles on a variety of topics and had one of our posts, "Bluetongue virus:knocking at the door" by Robert Taylor, nominated for consideration towards the new edition of the Science Blogging Anthology, "Open Laboratory 2007".

Please read on for a monthly breakdown of all our posts.

Maps - Finding Our Place in the World

If you can't get to Chicago for the Festival of Maps which is currently underway, then why not pop along to the virtual gallery of the exhibition. Navteq have recreated the Chicago Field Museum Maps exhibit in interactive 3D, allowing you to tour the rooms where the maps are hung. By clicking on each of the small arrows gives a short information piece about each map or globe. Why not pop online for a quick tour.

Carbon offsets - whats the deal?

At the UNWTO Conference on Climate Change and Tourism I attended in Davos, Switzerland last week, participants were requested to offset the carbon dioxide emissions of their travel and accommodation. Not an unreasonable request given the subject matter of the conference, and the fact that the conference itself was free to attend. But as reported in this article on Swissinfo, the whole question of offsetting, and the lack of consistency and clarity in the many alternative schemes on offer, led to debate in and out of the Congress hall.

When one delegate said on the stage the amount he had paid to offset the 6 t of carbon the conference offsetting scheme calculated for a return flight from New York, Philippe Rochat from the Air Transport Action Group responded that he didn't know how the 6 t figure had been worked out, as it should actually be around 3 t. Checking just two offsetting companies while writing this article, Climatecare (used by British Airways) calculated emissions of just 1.43 tonnes of carbon dioxide for a return flight between New York and Zurich, at a cost of £10.74, when accessed via British Airways, and 1.76 t of CO2 when I went directly to the Climatecare website. Atmosfair.de, however, charge 83 Euros (approx £56) for a calculated 4.1 t of carbon dioxide.

World tourism leaders tackle climate change

Earlier this week, some 600 representatives from over 100 countries, representing all sectors of the tourism industry (public and private sector, NGOs and governments) met in the idyllic Swiss resort of Davos to debate the  global challenge of climate change as it affects and is affected by tourism, at the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change and Tourism. This meeting was organised by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) in collaboration with UNEP and the World Meteorological Organisation, and included many senior tourism figures. As CABI is a leading information provider in both environmental and tourism literature, I was lucky enough to be able to attend, both to learn more about the issues and consider what contribution CABI may be able to make in the area of information dissemination – one of the components of the Davos Declaration which was drafted at the end of the conference.

To give a full picture of the debate at the conference, and the issues involved, would take a book rather than a blog entry. But I’ll try and give a very broad-brush overview of the issues and conclusions, and will be presenting more detail of some of the ideas presented in CABI’s subscription website, Leisuretourism.com, over the next few days for those whose institutions are subscribers. There were some very impressive presentations at Davos from some leading figures in both the public and private sector, and it was heartening to see areas where governments and private companies are starting to take real action. It was clear that the tourism sector recognises the need for action, not least to avoid being used as a scapegoat for climate change and the target for kneejerk response, as is increasingly the case in some European countries (the UK’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s ears may have been burning, as speaker after speaker attacked his doubling of Air Passenger Duty, without designating the revenue raised for any positive action on transport, the environment or climate).

Vote for the winner of the “Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting” icon contest

As mentioned in a previous article, there is growing debate in the blog sphere over the need for a means to identify the sources of science being reviewed or used as evidence by bloggers. Well, the authors of “Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting” or BP3 for short, devised an icon design competition for which CABI, along with other publishers have provided prizes for the winner of the competition. The entry deadline has now passed, the final three designs have been chosen and now BP3 need all interested bloggers and blog readers' help to vote on the winning design. So head across to BP3 and cast your vote for the icon that you wish to see at the top of posts which discuss peer-reviewed science <direct link>. The deadline for casting your vote is Monday 24th September. CABI would like to wish the best of luck to the final three designers.

Highlighting the use of evidence

I spotted this blog article on Friday morning and sent it on to one of my colleagues, and soon it was sent around all the blog team here at CABI. This whole topic of the use of an icon/logo to highlight the use of peer-reviewed evidence has caused a great deal of discussion and a mixture of feelings amongst the bloggers. I have given it a great deal of thought over the weekend and decided to report the issues and resulting discussions that have occurred.

Two pints of lager and a tin of sardines

Here's one for the pub this weekend: omega-3 fortified Bacardi Breezers, or maybe a Tropical Reef with the rest of the aquarium thrown in? Make mine an old-fashioned snowball made with omega-3 fortified eggs

What are my chances of catching an interesting parasite?

For most of the time that I have worked at CABI I have dealt, among other things, with articles on parasitology, and reading about some of the things that can be caught from undercooked meat or fish has made me tend to avoid it. However, on a recent holiday on the Trans-Siberian railway I stopped in Irkutsk near Lake Baikal, decided to try eating one of the local fish species, the Baikal Omul, Coregonus migratorius, and discovered that it was served raw. Reckoning that the risk was small and it would cause too much trouble to send it back, I ate it anyway, and found the taste not unpleasant, although I preferred the smoked form that I tried a couple of days later.

On my return, colleagues gleefully added to what I already knew about the tapeworm Diphyllobothrium latum, which can apparently reach 10 metres in length, and I decided to investigate what the risks were. Although C. migratorius is not widely distributed, there were a number of records in CAB Abstracts mentioning it (or synonymous names); I found some (for example Pronin, N. M. et al.: Meditsinskaya Parazitologiya i Parazitarnye Bolezni (1988) no. 4, pp. 64-67) indicating that a high proportion of fish were infected with larvae of species such as Diphyllobothrium dendriticum, but that these were mainly found in the viscera and not in the muscle which is what you eat. Having said that, fish roe also featured on the menu, and that can be infected.

Broadening the search to look for all mentions of Diphyllobothrium in people in Russia found many more records; most indicated prevalences of a few per cent in local populations, suggesting that the likelihood of becoming infected in a brief visit is small, although a few particular areas such as some lakeside villages have much higher prevalences. The main focus of D. latum is in north-western Russia but other species are found in Siberia. There were few records mentioning other tapeworms being transmitted by fish in Russia; broadening the search further, I found that the bile duct fluke Opisthorchis felineus is quite common, but that its main intermediate hosts are cyprinid fish (carp and their relatives) rather than salmonids like C. migratorius.

Looking up the symptoms of Diphyllobothrium infection in a textbook, I found that in the great majority of cases there are none (a few people suffer from pernicious anaemia, particularly if their intake of vitamin B₁₂ is inadequate), and that as Diphyllobothrium usually sheds microscopic eggs rather than complete segments, infected people are often unaware of being infected. The same book indicated that larvae can be killed by freezing fish before eating it, but I don’t know how often this is done.

It seems therefore that the risk of my catching anything is small, and the chance of knowing about it is even smaller; in most respects this is good news, but it might deprive me of an interesting subject for a future blog entry.

Hug fat trees

The ancient tree hunt is on.  I heard a story on the radio this morning about a tree, the Fortingall Yew (Taxus baccata) in Perthsire, which is guestimated to be 5000 years old.  It was around when Stonehenge was built, had already been standing for 3000 years when the Romans invaded, and is thought to be the oldest living thing in Europe.
We, the public, are now being asked to help locate and record ancient trees (the UK is thought to have more than any other part of Europe) just like this.  The aim is to produce an official register, as there isn’t one at the moment, and treat these trees the way should be treated - as historical monuments. 

The ancient tree hunt began in 2004 and has collected more than 6000 records, with the aim of recording more than 100,000 trees by 2011.  Funding has been secured from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, amongst others, to help find and protect these important features of our heritage.  Ancient trees also play a vital ecological role, often supporting hundreds of different species.

Go here to get involved and find, measure and record ancient trees.  If a tree is old, fat and gnarled then you should record it.  You can start by hugging - 3 hugs is about right for an ancient oak. You can also search for ancient trees on this Woodland Trust database, to find out which ones you can easily visit.
For more info about the Fortingall Yew go here or here, and, if you have access, go to CAB Abstracts or the Forest Science Database (formerly TreeCD) - a search of the latter for ‘ancient’ and ‘tree’ gave 310 records.

Ticks: be aware, but don't panic

Over Easter I took the opportunity for a few days’ break in the Scottish Highlands; although it’s a bit too early in the year for blood-sucking arthropods to be a problem, I was reminded of the publication a few months ago of a new edition of ‘Ticks: your pets, your family and you’, by Alison Blackwell, George Hendry and Darrel Ho-Yen (for details see the publisher’s website at http://www.mercatpress.com). George Hendry is the author of the best-selling ‘Midges in Scotland’, and the newer book provides a similar account of ticks in the UK, scientifically rigorous but easily readable by the general public. It aims to make people aware of the dangers of tickborne diseases while reassuring anyone who might have been alarmed by exaggerated rumours. While researching this article I also discovered that the week before Easter was Tick Prevention Week in the UK – see http://www.tickpreventionweek.org.

Tick populations can reach hundreds of thousands per hectare (tens per square metre), and are not confined to upland areas – indeed mountain tops are too exposed for them, and they are present in London’s Richmond and Bushy Parks. In many years of hill-walking I have only noticed a few tick bites, perhaps a couple of dozen at most; but looking at the life-size illustrations of tick larvae and nymphs in the book I wonder how many times I’ve been bitten by a tick too small to notice.

The best known tickborne disease is probably Lyme disease; I get the impression that this is perceived to be a much bigger problem in North America than in the UK, and the book confirms that much more public information is available there. I wondered how much this reflected a true difference in the prevalence of infection and how much it was just perception, so I did some investigation in CAB Abstracts. This revealed an interesting article (Davidson, M. M. et al: Scottish Medical Journal (2003) 48 (1), pp. 6-9) indicating among other things that the annual incidence in Scotland had been calculated at between 1.25 and 16.5 per 100 000, but that even in areas with significant numbers of infected ticks the risk of infection is low. Further investigation revealed that although the incidence in the USA as a whole is comparable to that in Scotland, the disease there shows a strong geographic concentration in the north-east and north-central regions, where the incidence in some states is much higher – over 130 per 100 000 in Connecticut in 2002 (Bacon, R. M. et al.: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (2004) 53 (17), pp. 365-369). On both sides of the Atlantic there is suspicion that the recorded figures may be underestimates.

There are of course other tickborne diseases in Britain, North America and elsewhere (at least we in the UK don’t have to worry about the tickborne encephalitis that lurks not far away in Central Europe), and climate change may increase the risks (ticks flourish in warm wet climates) but it appears that although the comparative lack of concern about Lyme disease in Britain may need to be addressed, it is not purely due to complacency. This would support the overall message of Blackwell et al’s book, which could perhaps be summarised as ‘be aware, and take precautions, but don’t panic’.

Tourism threat to cradle of evolution

The pressures on one of the world's most famous centres of biodiversity, the Galapagos Islands where Darwin studied his famous finches which contributed to the theory of evolution, have been highlighted by Ecuador's President and Unesco, the UN's scientific and cultural body. The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has warned that he is considering a temporary suspension of tourist permits to the heavily-visited Galapagos islands and enforcing rigorous population restrictions to prevent further environmental harm. Tourism and fishing are both bringing massive pressure on the fragile islands.

"We are pushing for a series of actions to overcome the huge institutional, environmental and social crisis in the islands," said Correa after signing an emergency decree on tuesday April 10.

Mr Correa called on his cabinet and local authorities to meet urgently to find ways of better preserving the country’s most popular tourist destination. He did not provide any details about the possible restrictions, but said the country would consider suspending some tourism permits.

Penalty kicks: are they all in the mind?

For English soccer fans, it is an all too familiar story. The national side gets to a major tournament with high hopes, get through to the knockout stages, battle through a match plus extra time after something goes wrong (usually, it seems, a player sent off) - and then go crashing out with a dismal display of penalty taking. The England team has one of the worst records in international soccer, winning only one out of six penalty shootouts in the World Cup and Euro Championships. The Germans, on the other hand, have the opposite record: not losing a shootout in major tournaments since going out to Czechoslovakia in Euro 76, they now have a 5-1 record of wins, including two against England. As former England striker Gary Lineker once put it "Football is a game with 22 people and in the end the Germans win on penalties".

But can research be used to increase the chances of scoring those all-important spot kicks?

Can ecotourism help save 'Planet Earth?'

For the last few Sunday nights, a significant proportion of the British population has been glued to the mesmerising BBC wildlife series 'Planet Earth'. An accompanying series on the digital channel BBC4, on the challenges faced by wildlife and habitats from increasing human population, will have been seen by far fewer people, but it may be the more important series as it looks at what the future may hold for the wonderful creatures featured in the Planet Earth programmes. Last nights programme looked at the concept of 'sustainable development', and the challenge of preserving what remains of the worlds' wilderness while still allowing local populations to improve their livelihoods.

Much of the programme examined the concept of using nature as an economic resource, either for ecotourism or, more controversially, for trophy hunting. These are issues I have frequently wrestled with while writing articles for the CABI website Leisuretourism.com. Tourism has frequently in the past been a cause of environmental degradation, and still is in many regions: the 'concrete coasts' that disfigure much of the Mediterranean are cases in point. However, in developing countries it is also frequently one of the major sources of foreign exchange, and if managed properly is seen as a way in which people living in poverty could find income and employment.

At one time, local farmers and pastoralists were seen as a problem for wildlife, despite often having lived side-by-side with it for millenia, and game parks would erect high fences and employ militias to keep local people from poaching animals or chopping down trees. But in doing so, conflict was ever-present, as pastoralists were evicted from their ancestral grazing lands in favour of rich foreign tourists coming to look at the wild animals. Gaining no benefit from tourism, locals would have no incentive to conserve wildlife: rather the opposite, as wildlife was seen as what kept them from making their traditional living from farming and pastoralism.

How 'green' are green taxes?

With environmental issues taking an increasing profile in politics, and the major British parties competing as to who can appear the most 'green', Chancellor Gordon Brown took the opportunity in his pre-Budget statement yesterday to raise air passenger duty from £5 to £10 for most flights. After the Stern report highlighted the contribution of aviation to global emissions and the possible cost of climate change caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases, it is easy to present this as a 'green' tax, but will it really have any impact on the amount we travel, and are there better ways to deal with the contribution of air travel to climate change?

The likely effects of climate change on tourism, and the contribution of the travel and tourism industries to global warming, have been regularly featured in articles on Leisuretourism.com, the CABI database and website featuring the leisure, travel and tourism industries. Last week the site reported on a voluntary carbon offset scheme which the tourism industry is planning to introduce in March 2007, in which holidaymakers will be encouraged to offset the carbon costs of their trips by funding renewable energy and energy conservation schemes in developing countries. It was hoped that the scheme would demonstrate to the government that the travel industry is taking global warming seriously and persuade it not to increase Air Passenger Duty in the budget, although some industry leaders admitted that it was likely Chancellor Brown was likely to go ahead and increase the tax anyway.

Partly in efforts to stave off what may be increasing tax levels in the future, the airline industry has lately become generally supportive of plans to include air travel in emissions trading schemes which are becoming the preferred way to encourage industry to be more environmentally responsible. Rather than the comparatively 'blunt instrument' of taxation per head, emissions trading would reward airlines that have more efficient aircraft and fuller planes, and penalise those that emit more carbon per passenger.

Will a £5 increase in air tax have any effect on how much we fly? Somehow, it seems unlikely. Few doubt these days the importance of acting on climate change and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, but encouraging airlines to be more carbon-efficient, and passengers to offset the 'carbon footprint' of their journeys, may be better ways than a modest increase in air passenger duty.

Climate change receives wide coverage on CAB Abstracts, and the relationship to the travel and tourism industries is an important subject area within Leisuretourism.com. The effects of air travel are featured in this abstract from a paper published last year.