Carbon-Based

The Arctic is already suffering the effects of a dangerous climate change

2012-02-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

Environmental Research Web: Two decades after the United Nations established the Framework Convention on Climate Change in order to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system", the Arctic shows the first signs of a dangerous climate change. A team of researchers led by CSIC assures so in an article published on the latest number of the Nature Climate Change magazine.

These researchers assert that the Arctic is already suffering some of the effects that, according to The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), correspond with a "dangerous climate change". Currently, the rate of climatic warming exceeds the rate of natural adaptation in arctic ecosystems. Furthermore, the Eskimo population is witnessing how their security, health and traditional cultural activities jeopardize.

The experts demand an effort in order to develop indicators that warn about these changes in good time, soften its causes, and re-enact the adaptation and recovery capacity of ecosystems and populations.

Carlos Duarte, CSIC researcher and author of the article, states: "We are facing the first clear evidence of a dangerous climate change. However, some of the researchers and some of the Media are plunged into a semantic debate about whether the Arctic Sea-Ice has reached a tipping point or not. This all is distracting the attention on the need to develop indicators that warn about the proximity of abrupt changes in the future, as well as on the policymaking to prevent them".

Tipping points are defined as critical points within a system, of which future condition may be qualitatively affected by small perturbations. On the other hand, tipping elements are defined as those components of the Earth system that may show tipping signs. According to the experts, the Arctic shows the largest concentration of potential tipping elements in Earth's Climate System: Arctic Sea-Ice; Greenland Ice-Sheet; North Atlantic deep water formation regions; boreal forests; plankton communities; permafrost; and marine methane hydrates among others.

Duarte maintains: "Due to all of this, the Arctic region is particularly prone to show abrupt changes and transfer them to the Global Earth System. It is necessary to find rapid alarm signs, which warn us about the proximity of tipping points, for the development and deployment of adaptive strategies. This all would help to adopt more preventive policies"....

Polar bear on the sea ice in the Beaufort Sea, Collection of Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colon, NOAA National Ice Center

Nature can help lessen flood impacts

2012-02-02T10:11:00.000-08:00

International Union for the Conservation of Nature: While flooding in the western division of Vitilevu in Fiji cannot be avoided or prevented, its impacts can be minimized if nature’s health is kept intact says IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

"Nature itself can help control the destruction caused by natural disasters such as flooding," says Taholo Kami, Regional Director of IUCN Oceania Regional Office. “Ecosystems such as forests, floodplains, wetlands including mangroves provide the natural infrastructure needed to lessen the impacts of flooding".

Previously affected by the floods of 2009, Nadi and its neighboring towns in the west are once again left with a trail of destruction affecting people, infrastructure and the environment.

The flooding has caused the death of six people, destroyed more than 100 homes and is estimated to have affected half the crops and livestock in western Viti Levu. The economic losses are estimated to be above FJD$17 million.

“We urge the government of Fiji and the town councils of Nadi, Ba and Rakiraki to strengthen their investment in proper management of forests, mangroves and other wetland areas,” says Dr. Milika Sobey, Water and Wetlands Programme Coordinator at IUCN Oceania Regional Office. “If we continue to give way to unsustainable land-use practises we risk losing nature’s ability to protect us against large floods.”...

The streets of Nadi in Fiji in 2007, after a heavy rain, shot by Cometstyles, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

New report reviews nitrogen pollution impacts and sollutions

2012-02-02T07:37:00.000-08:00

From the Nitrogen News, a website I just discovered that should be great source for us nitrogen-heads: The nitrogen cycle has been profoundly altered by human activities, and that in turn is affecting human health, air and water quality, and biodiversity in the U.S., according to a multi-disciplinary team of scientists writing in the 15th publication of the Ecological Society of America’s Issues in Ecology. In “Excess Nitrogen in the U.S Environment: Trends, Risks, and Solutions,” lead author Eric Davidson and 15 colleagues from universities, government, and the private sector review the major sources of reactive nitrogen in the U.S., resulting effects on health and the environment, and potential solutions. The report can be viewed at http://www.esa.org/science_resources/issues/FileEnglish/issuesinecology15.pdf

“Nitrogen pollution touches everyone’s lives,” said Eric Davidson, director of Woods Hole Research Center. “This report highlights the latest understanding of how it’s harming human health, choking estuaries with algal growth, and threatening biodiversity. It’s even changing how quickly trees such as red maple grow in our forests.”

There is good news: effective air quality regulation has reduced nitrogen pollution from U.S. energy and transportation sectors. On the other hand, agricultural emissions are increasing. Ammonia, a byproduct of livestock waste, remains mostly unregulated and is expected to increase unless better controls on ammonia emissions from livestock operations are implemented. Additionally, crop production agriculture is heavily dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to increase crop yields, but approximately half of all nitrogen fertilizer applied is not taken up by crops and is lost to the environment.

The report cites the following impacts from nitrogen pollution:

More than 1.5 million Americans drink well water contaminated with nitrate, a regulated drinking water pollutant, either above or near EPA standards, potentially placing them at increased risk of birth defects and cancer, which are noted in the report.
Agricultural and sewage system nutrient releases are likely linked to coral diseases, bird die-offs, fish diseases, and human diarrheal diseases and vector-borne infections transmitted by insects such as mosquitos and ticks.
Two-thirds of U.S. coastal systems are moderately to severely impaired due to nutrient loading. There are now nearly 300 hypoxic (low oxygen) zones along the U.S. coastline.
Air pollution continues to reduce biodiversity, with exotic, invasive species dominating native species that are sensitive to excess reactive nitrogen....

A toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie, shot by NASA

Cold snap tests Greece's depleted welfare services

2012-02-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

Terra Daily via AFP: A cold snap that has killed dozens of people across Europe is testing Greece's whittled-down welfare services, which have been grappling deep cuts amid the nation's ongoing fiscal crisis. In Athens, authorities have opened emergency shelters, including at the Olympic sports complex, to help warm the city's burgeoning ranks of poor and homeless people.

"We have a limited number of staff but we work round the clock, in addition to providing 1,250 free meals daily," said Dimitra Noussi, director of the city's homeless shelters and its solidarity support. Temperatures in the capital Wednesday dropped below five degrees Celsius -- the lowest this year -- and elsewhere in Greece, the mercury plunged far below freezing.

Unlike many public services, Noussi said her 55-member team had thankfully been spared government-imposed staffing cuts as Greece struggles to slash its payroll and rein in deficits that have exploded the country's debt.

But Dimitra Tsakiri, shelter supervisor in the port town of Piraeus, was not so fortunate. Her contract and those of seven colleagues were terminated last March and the shelter shut down in a government reform accompanied by spending cutbacks, Tsakiri said....

The city of Larissa in the snow, 2009, shot by larissacity, Wikimedia Commons

Tropical cyclones to cause greater damage

2012-02-02T07:22:00.000-08:00

Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies: Tropical cyclones will cause $109 billion in damages by 2100, according to Yale and MIT researchers in a paper published in Nature Climate Change. That figure represents an increased vulnerability from population and especially economic growth, as well as the effects of climate change. Greater vulnerability to cyclones is expected to increase global tropical damage to $56 billion by 2100—double the current damage—from the current rate of $26 billion per year if the present climate remains stable.

Climate change is predicted to add another $53 billion of damages. The damage caused by climate change is equal to 0.01 percent of GDP in 2100.

The United States and China will be hardest hit, incurring $25 billion and $15 billion of the additional damages from climate change, respectively, amounting to 75 percent of the global damages caused by climate change. Small islands, especially in the Caribbean, will also be hit hard, suffering the highest damages per unit of GDP.

The research reveals that more intense storms will become more frequent with climate change. “The biggest storms cause most of the damage,” said Robert Mendelsohn, the lead economist on the project. “With the present climate, almost 93 percent of tropical cyclone damage is caused by only 10 percent of the storms. Warming will increase the frequency of these high-intensity storms at least in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Ocean basins, causing most of the increase in damage.”

The authors based their estimates on a future global population of 9 billion and an annual increase of approximately 3 percent in gross world product until 2100. “More people making a lot more income will put more capital in harm’s way,” he said....

Storm tracks and minimum pressure for a sample of synthetic storms. The tracks show that storms are more frequent in the western Pacific. The minimum pressure (hpa) or storm intensity is measured by their color. Storm intensity is higher over the warm waters near the Equator and lower over the cooler waters towards the poles. Source: Mendelsohn, R., K. Emanuel, S. Chonabayashi, and L. Bakkensen.. 2012. "The Impact of Climate Change on Global Tropical Cyclone Damage" Nature Climate Change doi:10.1038/nclimate1357

Drought-hit Middle East ripe for conflict

2012-02-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

Ed King in RTCC.org: Drought, rising food prices and extreme poverty have all been attributed as factors that led to the Arab Spring. While not rated at extreme risk from climate change, the Middle East and North Africa region does suffer from severe water shortages, which could lead to conflict in the future.

Some academics attribute the collapse of the Egyptian Empire over 4,000 years ago to drought, causing ‘great riots and anarchy’. Limited adaptation planning and the lack of environmental awareness within countries’ economic models has further damaged the area’s ability to deal with prolonged weather events.

Between 2000-2011 Syria experienced four severe droughts, which the UN estimate left 2-3 million people in extreme poverty, and wiped out 80-85% of herders livestock. Poor rains could lead to two of Syria’s arterial rivers, the Jordan and Euphrates to lose more than half of their annual flow – potentially exacerbating an already febrile political atmosphere.

Last week UNICEF warned that half a million children could die ‘or suffer physical and mental damage’ unless the deadly trio of drought, conflict and poverty could be alleviated. And access to water is also one of the key negotiating positions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with research suggesting the area is set to become drier as a result of a changing climate....

Hauran near Izra', Syria, shot by Bertramz, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Flood defences are being overwhelmed by a whirlpool of spin

2012-02-01T07:19:00.000-08:00

I once saw a man filet a fish in mid-air. Damian Carrington does something similar with the UK's flooding policy, in his Environment Blog in the Guardian (UK): Examining the goverment's claims over its funding of flood defences means diving into some pretty murky waters, but someone's got to do it. So, pinching my nose, here goes.

First, let's remember the fundamental contradication of the goverment's position: it states that the risk of flooding is going up, thanks to climate change, but also accepts that spending on defences is going down. Let's also remember this is not a niche issue. Everyone agrees that over five million homes in England and Wales are at risk of flooding and a landmark study published by the department of environment (Defra) itself only last week forecast that the damage caused by floods could rise tenfold to over £10bn a year in coming decades.

But, said Defra, responding to Tuesday's damning report from the Public accounts committee: "We've reformed the funding system to allow the number of flood defence schemes to be increased and give local people greater choice and control over protecting their community from flooding." What that "reform" means is that local authorities, communities and businesses are now "allowed" to put their own money in to pay for flood defences. Perhaps that's a good idea, but will it "increase" the number of schemes?

...So, based on the only evidence we have so far, the government's "reform" of flood defence funding is not "increasing" the number of schemes. It is decreasing them. Defra say they expect to raise £70m from local authorities, businesses and communities in the next three years for defences, but can't tell me how much is actually in the bag...

A flooded field in Torbryan, UK, shot by Derek Harper, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Drought forces Texas town to truck in water

2012-02-01T07:11:00.000-08:00

CBS News via AP: Tanker trucks loaded with water have become the lifeline for a Texas lakefront village that came precariously close to becoming the state's first community to run out of drinking water during a historic drought.

Spicewood got its first delivery of water Monday under dark clouds and rain. The 8,000-gallon water delivery arrived after it became clear the village's wells could no longer produce enough water to meet the needs of the Lake Travis community's 1,100 residents and elementary school, said Clara Tuma, spokeswoman of the Lower Colorado River Authority.

The town uses wells, not the nearby lake, for its drinking water. Ryan Rowney, manager of water operations for the authority, said it plans to truck water into the Central Texas town for several more weeks while exploring alternatives, including drilling a new well or piping water from Lake Travis. But the agency doesn't want to rush into any project, and prefers for now to pay $200 per truckload of water while ensuring the tens of thousands of dollars it will cost to find a permanent solution are well-spent.

Several towns and villages in Texas have come close to running out of water during the driest year in Lone Star State history, but until now none has had to truck in water. Most found solutions to hold them over, often paying tens of thousands of dollars to avoid hauling water, a scenario that conjures up images from the early 1900s, when indoor plumbing was a novelty....

A water tower in Smyer, Texas, shot by Leaflet, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

China's disregard for the environment shows no sign of improving

2012-02-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

David Eimer in the Telegraph: China continues to struggle to balance the demands of growing its economy and lifting more of its 1.3 billion-plus people out of poverty, with the need to protect what is left of its environment.

Decades of loosely-regulated industrialisation has rendered vast swathes of China's land and waterways toxic. One-third of the Yellow River is not only incapable of supporting marine life but is so deadly it can't be used even for industrial purposes. The pollution that belches from coal-fired power plants and an ever-increasing number of cars has resulted in air quality in Beijing and other cities plunging.

Fields across the country are contaminated by the discharge from factories, while China's seas are also suffering. The massive oil spill in the Bohai Sea off the east coast last summer affected an area of 2400 square miles.

That's despite an increased recognition by China's leaders that there is an urgent need to conserve the environment. Every year, a raft of new regulations designed to enhance and enforce environmental protection are unveiled.

The problem is that there is a huge disconnect between central and local governments. In China, local officials are judged first and foremost by their success at improving the GDP of their regions. And no official seeking promotion wants to shut down a factory that is making money, even if it is spewing out pollution....

A factory on the Yangtze River, shot by High Contrast, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Germany license

Argentina tries to combat a drier future

2012-02-01T06:58:00.000-08:00

Ana Belluscio in AlertNet: For almost two months, an intense drought has been damaging crops in Argentina, especially corn and soy, threatening the economic and food security of a country where agriculture and livestock account for approximately 10 percent of GDP.

...According to specialists, the drought is the consequence of a recent La Nina episode - the cooling of the surface temperature of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that influences wind and rainfall. In Argentina, La Nina causes rainfall below normal levels, coupled with higher than average temperatures, especially during December and January, said Pablo Mercuri, director of the Institute of Weather and Water of the National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA).

Scientists are working to determine whether there is a correlation between the higher incidence of La Nina events in recent decades and climate change. Historical records show that La Nina-induced droughts formerly were not to be as long or severe as today’s, said Lucas di Pietro Paolo, climate change adaptation coordinator at the government’s Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development.

Although investigations are incomplete, Mercuri and his team have noted an increasing number of extreme climate events occurring in the country along with high climatic variability compared to recent decades. Both of these parameters are associated with climate change, the scientists say.

...Historical records show that La Nina-induced droughts formerly were not to be as long or severe as today’s, said Lucas di Pietro Paolo, climate change adaptation coordinator at the government’s Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development.

Salta province in Argentina, shot by Josh, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

China's largest freshwater lake dries up

2012-01-31T11:35:00.000-08:00

Harold Thibault in the Guardian (UK): For visitors expecting to see China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang is a desolate spectacle. Under normal circumstances it covers 3,500 sq km, but last month only 200 sq km were underwater. A dried-out plain stretches as far as the eye can see, leaving a pagoda perched on top of a hillock that is usually a little island. Wrapped in the mist characteristic of the lower reaches of the Yangtze river, the barges are moored close to the quayside beside a pitiful trickle of water. There is no work for the fisheries.

According to the state news agency Xinhua, the drought – the worst for 60 years – is due to the lack of rainfall in the area round Poyang and its tributaries. Poor weather conditions this year are partly responsible. But putting the blame on them overlooks the role played by the colossal Three Gorges reservoir, 500km upstream. The cause and effect is still not officially recognised, even if the government did admit last May that the planet's biggest dam had given rise to "problems that need to be solved very urgently".

"Every year, when the Three Gorges reservoir stores water – to power the dam's turbines during the winter – the flow rate in the Yangtze drops. This in turn increases the rate at which the level of Poyang lake falls, and the period of low water comes sooner," said Ye Xuchun, a researcher at China's Southwest University. In partnership with scientists at the Lake Science and Environment laboratory at Nanking University, he has published a comparative analysis of water levels in the Three Gorges basin and at the lake's northern extremity, near the city of Hukou, where the outflow from Poyang joins the Yangtze.

The authors conclude that the artificial regulation of the reservoir, which must be kept full to optimise electricity output, reduces the water level in the lower reaches of the Yangtze. This means that the big river no longer "plugs" the lake's northern outlet, so the other rivers feeding into Poyang simply pass through the dwindling lake and run on downstream...

Lake Poyang, seen from a NASA satellite

Ancient DNA holds clues to climate change adaptation

2012-01-31T11:20:00.000-08:00

University of Adelaide News: Thirty-thousand-year-old bison bones discovered in permafrost at a Canadian goldmine are helping scientists unravel the mystery about how animals adapt to rapid environmental change.

The bones play a key role in a world-first study, led by University of Adelaide researchers, which analyses special genetic modifications that turn genes on and off, without altering the DNA sequence itself. These 'epigenetic' changes can occur rapidly between generations - without requiring the time for standard evolutionary processes. Such epigenetic modifications could explain how animal species are able to respond to rapid climate change.

In a collaboration between the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and Sydney's Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, researchers have shown that it is possible to accurately measure epigenetic modifications in extinct animals and populations.

The team of researchers measured epigenetic modifications in 30,000-year-old permafrost bones from the Yukon region in Canada, and compared them to those in modern-day cattle, and a 30-year-old mummified cow from New Zealand.

Project leader Professor Alan Cooper, Director of ACAD, says: "Epigenetics is challenging some of our standard views of evolutionary adaptation, and the way we think about how animals use and inherit their DNA. In theory, such systems would be invaluable for a wide range of rapid evolutionary adaptation but it has not been possible to measure how or whether they are used in nature, or over evolutionary timescales."...

An American bison, copyrighted by Ted Lee Eubanks, Jr./FERMATA Inc., http://www.byways.org, found on Wikimedia Commons

Predatory pythons shift Everglades ecology

2012-01-31T10:44:00.000-08:00

Janet Raloff in Science News: Giant snakes are eating their way through the Everglades, leaving a drastically changed ecosystem in their wake, a new study shows.

The snakes, many of which measure 10 to 16 feet, are called Burmese pythons. But make no mistake: Virtually all of the roughly 30,000 living in southern Florida were born in the Everglades. Ecologists now report that populations of mammals have begun plummeting throughout the pythons’ expanding range. And the timing of these mammal losses matches the geographic spread of the snakes, which federal officials believe were initially released into the wild by snake fanciers, probably 15 to 30 years ago.

Raccoons, opossums, deer and other mammals, along with birds and gators, have all turned up in the stomachs of captured pythons, testifying to the snakes’ varied appetite, notes ecologist Michael Dorcas of Davidson College in North Carolina. “But until now, there hadn’t been any indication that the snakes were altering the ecosystem,” says Dorcas, who led the study.

The new data “make a persuasive case for cause and effect,” says herpetologist J. Whitfield Gibbons of the Savannah River Ecology Lab in Aiken, S.C., who was not affiliated with the new analysis. “The investigators take a convincing position that introduced predatory pythons are responsible for the decline in numbers of large- and medium-size mammals in the Everglades.”...

University of Florida scientists show off a 15-foot Burmese python, weighing more than 160 pounds, that was captured in the Everglades. Its stomach contained a 6-foot gator. Credit: Michael R. Rochford, University of Florida

Injecting sulfate particles into stratosphere won’t fully offset climate change

2012-01-31T08:26:00.000-08:00

Vince Stricherz in the University of Washington Today: As the reality and the impact of climate warming have become clearer in the last decade, researchers have looked for possible engineering solutions – such as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or directing the sun’s heat away from Earth – to help offset rising temperatures.

New University of Washington research demonstrates that one suggested method, injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere, would likely achieve only part of the desired effect, and could carry serious, if unintended, consequences.

The lower atmosphere already contains tiny sulfate and sea salt particles, called aerosols, that reflect energy from the sun into space. Some have suggested injecting sulfate particles directly into the stratosphere to enhance the effect, and also to reduce the rate of future warming that would result from continued increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

But a UW modeling study shows that sulfate particles in the stratosphere will not necessarily offset all the effects of future increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Additionally, there still is likely to be significant warming in regions where climate change impacts originally prompted a desire for geoengineered solutions, said Kelly McCusker, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences.

The modeling study shows that significant changes would still occur because even increased aerosol levels cannot balance changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation brought on by higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “There is no way to keep the climate the way it is now. Later this century, you would not be able to recreate present-day Earth just by adding sulfate aerosols to the atmosphere,” McCusker said...

An aerosol spray can, shot by PiccoloNamek, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Flood insurance argument could leave millions high and dry

2012-01-31T08:17:00.000-08:00

Mark King in the Guardian (UK): Up to 200,000 homes in England and Wales have been warned they will struggle to obtain adequate flood insurance after June 2013, when the insurance industry's voluntary flood agreement with the government ends. In 92 constituencies there are 1,000 or more homes at high flood risk, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) said after analysing the latest Environment Agency flood data.

Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire is the constituency with the most homes at significant risk of flooding, with 7,550 properties under threat, followed by the Vale of Clwyd (7,339 homes), Folkestone and Hythe (7,196), and Windsor (7,125). A property is defined as being at risk if it has a one in 75 chance of flooding in any given year.

The risk of households being unable to obtain cover is heightened by an ongoing row over who pays for the flood defences needed to maintain protection for the 5m homes at risk across the UK.

Adrian Webb of esure said there had been a "gentlemen's agreement" between insurers and the government since 1961. "The government of the time said government would be responsible for flood defences, and in turn the insurance industry would include flood cover as standard. At the end of the 1990s it was becoming clear that the government's side of the equation was not being met – and will not be met in future," he said...

Climate change a 'fundamental' health risk

2012-01-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

Julian Drape in the Sydney Morning Herald via AAP: A leading Australian disease expert says prompt action on climate change is paramount to our survival on earth. Epidemiologist Tony McMichael has conducted an historical study that suggests natural climate change over thousands of years has destabilised civilisations via food shortages, disease and unrest.

"We haven't really grasped the fact that a change in climate presents a quite fundamental threat to the foundations of population health," Prof McMichael, from the Australian National University told AAP. "These things have happened before in response to fairly modest changes to climate. Let's be aware that we really must take early action if we are going to maintain this planet as a liveable habitat for humans."

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof McMichael argues the world faces extreme climate change "without precedent" over the past 10,000 years. "With the exception of a few downward spikes of acute cooling due to massive volcanic eruptions, most of the changes have been within a band of about plus or minus three-quarters of a degree centigrade," he said on Monday.

"Yet we are talking about the likelihood this century of going beyond two degrees centigrade and quite probably, on current trajectory, reaching a global average increase of three to four degrees." Prof McMichael's paper states that the greatest recurring health risk over past millennia has been from food shortages mostly caused by drying and drought.

Warming also leads to an increase in infectious diseases as a result of better growth conditions for bacteria and the proliferation of mosquitoes....

This 1921 Soviet poster by I.V. Simakov says, "Remember the starving!"

Indonesian storm death toll rises to 14

2012-01-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

Terra Daily via AFP: The death toll from heavy rains and strong winds in Indonesia has risen to 14, an official said Sunday, with the victims of a tropical cyclone crushed by falling trees. "In total, 14 people died, 60 people were injured," National Disaster Management Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said in a text message to AFP. "The 14 killed were crushed by falling trees," he added.

More than 2,300 houses in 35 districts and cities across the central island of Java and resort destination of Bali were also damaged due to heavy rains in the last four days, Nugroho said. The "massive" rainstorms were brought about by Tropical Cyclone Iggy in the Indian Ocean, south of Bali and the nearby Nusa Tenggara islands, he added.

"But now the Tropical cyclone Iggy has weakened and it's moving away from Indonesia," the official added.

Last week, the Jakarta Globe newspaper reported a ferry carrying more than 200 people, including five Australians, heading to the Gili islands off Bali nearly capsized after being caught in waves up to three metres (10 feet) high, but there were no casualties...

The great northern migration -- of US cattle

2012-01-30T11:58:00.000-08:00

P.J. Huffstutter and Theopolis Waters in Reuters: For more than a century, through a dozen dry spells when lakes disappeared and the land died, thousands of cows from the Swenson Land & Cattle Co have roamed the fields of Texas. Yet the drought currently ravaging the southern Plains has done what the Dust Bowl could not: chased them off this land and driven them more than 600 miles north to Nebraska.

Now, as the worst drought in a century stretches into its second year, these ranchers and many of their peers are herding their animals in record numbers to the Cornhusker State and other points north, in search of grazing land that is not parched - a shift that is fueling a dramatic economic and cultural reshaping of the U.S. livestock industry.

...While some Texas ranchers hang on, selling off their stock at an unprecedented pace that has reduced America's cattle herd to the smallest in 60 years, many are carving new homesteads out of some of the richest grassland in North America, a bid for survival that falls somewhere between surrender and hope.

In cattle-car convoys that wind along routes cowboys used in the 1800s, this migration is also a stark illustration of the myriad threats facing the world's future food supply: intense competition for land; increasing demands on limited water resources; and the growing threat of volatile weather.

...While Nebraska offered solace for a first wave of bovine refugees, space is running out, forcing some even further north or west to less hospitable climes; virulent diseases could, if left unchecked, devastate local stock, a threat that has prompted officials to quarantine dozens of herds....

A cattle drive, photographed by the US Enivironmental Protection Agency

Floods close 71 schools in Namibia

2012-01-30T11:47:00.000-08:00

Oswald Shivute in AllAfrica.com via the Namibian: At least 71 schools have been closed and children sent home after recent rains pushed up water levels in the North. The acting director of education in the Omusati Region, Loide Shatiwa, says 64 Omusati schools, mainly in Okalongo and Anamulenge circuits, were closed because children and teachers cannot cross the deep water in the oshanas.

Initially 70 schools were closed in Omusati, but four have reopened. They are the Eengwena, Sheetekela, Elondo and John Shekudja primary schools.

Ohangwena senior education planner Elifas Nakale says only two schools have so far been closed in that region while his counterpart in Oshana, Paulinus Enkono, says they have closed five schools. In the Ompundja and Uuvudhiya constituencies of Oshana, tents have been pitched at three schools for pupils to stay in.

Enkono says the tent schools - Chief Ankama, Omulunga and Engombe - are in dire need of food. The Oshikoto Region is the only one where flood problems have not occurred at schools. Shatiwa says the education authorities in Omusati have not yet considered tent hostels at schools. They expect the floodwater to subside soon. Shatiwa says they already have plans for weekend classes to make up for the days lost during the closure.

Addressing an Oshana Regional Disaster Risk Management Committee meeting on Wednesday, the region's governor, Klemens Kashuupulw, rallied key players for a coordinated response to problems caused by floods....

2010-like flood likely in several Pakistan provinces

2012-01-30T11:38:00.000-08:00

The Nation (Pakistan): The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has cautioned about 2010-like floods situation in the Ravi and Satluj rivers this year, saying that the situation might deter with the start of pre-monsoon season.

"Punjab Chief Minister has been suggested to keep Rs5 billion budget specially for the areas adjacent to River and Sutlej to deal with expected situation," NDMA Chairman Zafar Qadar shared with TheNation here on Sunday.

The adjacent areas of Sutlej including Pakpatan, Sahiwal, Bhawalnagar, Okara, Nankana Sahib, Sheikupura and others could be under threat of heavy and proper arrangements are now need of hour to deal with it, he warned. The same kind of situation might be at the neighbouring of Ravi River where Kasur and Lahore could be at top of areas prone to floods, Zafar Qadir maintained.

"We have couple of months for preparation as pre-monsoon winds are likely to start by the mid of this year," he said adding that National Disaster Risk Reduction Policy (NDRRP) if prepared in time would be much beneficial....

Water rights shift in Florida could foreshadow debates to come

2012-01-29T17:18:00.000-08:00

Jim Malewitz in the Bellingham Herald (Florida): Is reclaimed water a basic public resource or a privately manufactured product? That's the question before the Florida legislature this session, as it decides how to classify the state's large supply of wastewater that's treated and used again, often for lawn irrigation or recharging aquifers.

Environmentalists are nervous as lawmakers prepare to enact the largest overhaul to state water law in 40 years, changing the state's very definition of water. Current Florida law subjects all state waters to permitting based upon "beneficial use" in the public interest. But the bill up for debate would exclude reclaimed water from "waters of the state," granting sole ownership of the resources to the utilities that produce it. Many of these utilities are public entities, but some are privately owned.

Under the bill, state water management districts could not dictate how reclaimed water is used, even during an emergency shortage. Backed by several powerful interest groups, the bill appears destined to become law. Supporters say the overhaul would protect Florida's dwindling water supply by incentivizing production and use of reclaimed water through eased restrictions.

"Local governments need the certainty," says state Rep. Dana Young, a Tampa Republican who teamed up with city representatives to write the bill. "If they build the system, they need guarantees that they can use the water as they see fit." But environmentalists describe the shift as a business-friendly legislature's attempt to erode state water protections, placing much of the resource in the hands of private interests....

Blue Hole in National Key Deer Refuge, Big Pine Key, Florida. Shot by Thierry Caro, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Low snowpack signals water crisis at Lake Mead

2012-01-29T16:39:00.000-08:00

Henry Brean in the Las Vegas Review-Journal: Mother Nature is a fickle mistress. One year removed from near-record snow levels that sent 4 trillion gallons of much-needed meltwater into Lake Mead, winter has gotten off to a terrible start in the mountains that feed the Colorado River. Conditions are so dry that water supply forecasters have slashed their projections for Lake Mead by a whopping 2.45 million acre-feet in the past month alone.

That's 24 vertical feet of water gone -- poof! -- from what had been a promising forecast for the valley's primary source of water. In December, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was predicting a roughly 11-foot rise in Lake Mead over the next year. Now the bureau expects the nation's largest man-made reservoir to shed about 13 feet by January 2013.

One acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons, which is enough water to supply two average valley homes for one year. At current consumption levels, the 2.45 million acre-foot reduction in Lake Mead's forecast since last month represents enough water to supply the entire Las Vegas Valley for a decade.

Randy Julander summed up this year's snowpack in two words: "It stinks."...

Lake Mead, seen from a NASA satellite

Farmers in Mozambique trying to adapt farming to climate change

2012-01-29T16:23:00.000-08:00

Public Radio International: As the rain and water in Mozambique becomes less predictable and less suited to subsistence farming, aid groups and the local government are trying to help some change the way they farm so they're not so paralyzed by a flood or a drought. But there's a lot of work to do.

Over the past two decades, Mozambique has suffered more than its fair share of weather disasters. The east African nation has seen more devastating cyclones, droughts and floods than any country on the continent. Farmers in Mozambique have been particularly hard hit. This year alone, torrential rains in the mountains sent flood waters onto fields below, submerging tens of thousands of acres of crops.

And now, farmers are in the midst of another rainy season, which started in December. Officials at Mozambique’s National Institute for Disaster Management have to prepare for rescue operations this time of year. Figueredo de Araujo, the institute's information manager, said the emergency operations center is equipped with rescue boats as well as warehouses with various goods for humanitarian assistance: maize flour, tents, tarps, boots and rain coats among them.

Caia, where Mozambique’s main highway crosses the Zambezi river, sits in the middle of a vast, flat, floodplain that is home to nearly a million people. In 2000, the area was hit by the worst flooding in memory. The floods killed 700 people, displaced 100,000, and cost Mozambique a 1.5 percent loss in GDP through destruction of crops....

Climate-driven heat peaks may shrink wheat crops

2012-01-29T16:08:00.000-08:00

PhysOrg: More intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world through premature ageing, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change. Current projections based on computer models underestimate the extent to which hotter weather in the future will accelerate this process, the researchers warned.

Wheat is harvested in temperate zones on more than 220 million hectares (545 million acres), making it the most widely grown crop on Earth. In some nations, the grain accounts for up to 50 percent of calorie intake and 20 percent of protein nutrition, according to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), near Mexico City.

In 2010, drought and wildfires in wheat-exporting Russia pushed world prices of the grain to two-year highs, underscoring the vulnerability of global supplies to weather- and climate-related disruptions. Greenhouse experiments have shown that unseasonably warm temperatures -- especially at the end of the growing season -- can cause senescence, the scientific term for accelerated ageing.

More intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world through premature ageing, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. Excess heat beyond the plant's tolerance zone damages photosynthetic cells. Fluctuations in wheat yields in India have also been attributed by farmers to temperature, most recently a heat wave in 2010 blamed for stunting plant productivity...

A wheat field shot by 3268zauber, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Risks of floods from glacial lakes highlighted

2012-01-29T15:19:00.000-08:00

Dawn.com (Pakistan): Natural scientists and environmentalists here on Saturday said that communities’ involvement could mitigate the negative effects of glacial lake outburst floods in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s higher regions, preventing loss of lives and properties.

...The project “Reducing Risks and Vulnerabilities from Glacier Lake Outburst Floods in Northern Pakistan”, funded by the UNDP, has been launched to minimise risks of natural disaster as a result of floods caused by a glacial lake outburst.

The minister said that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government had made it as its top priority to protect people’s lives from natural disasters by taking appropriate measures.

“Few avalanches, massive landslides, floods, and cloudbursts during the last one decade wreaked havoc in Pakistan and now the glacial lakes have been posing an imminent threat of floods,” said the minister. He said that the problem of climate change needed to be dealt with effectively on the part of provincial government, taking measures to minimise the risks of losses to human life, property, livestock and infrastructure....

A view of Dudipatsar Lake in Pakistan, shot by Chumer , Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

West Australia waits for Cyclone Iggy

2012-01-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

Samantha Healy and Emily Moulton in news.com.au (Australia): Residents in parts of the North-West Australia are on high alert last night as Tropical Cyclone Iggy edged closer to the coast On the other side of the nation, Queenslanders battered by heavy rainfall have been told to be on high alert for flooding.

Iggy formed early on Thursday and has been slowly moving southeast towards Mardie, Coral Bay, Exmouth and Onslow. Heavy rains and gales up to 125km/h are expected to hit the region as the category-two cyclone heads south.

The Fire and Emergency Services Authority has warned locals to review their family cyclone plan, prepare an emergency kit with a portable radio, torch and first-aid kit, as well as check the community alerts system.

An alert has also been issued for people living between Whim Creek and Mardie, Coral Bay to Cape Cuvier and adjacent inland parts of the west Pilbara. David Hall, whose Exmouth Diving Centre was badly damaged during tropical cyclone Vance in 1999, said locals were well prepared for Iggy, which is expected to intensify over the next 24 hours.

"You go to the shop there is not much milk or bread left. Everyone is stocking up on all the goods they need and they are just sort of hunkering down . . . the locals are used to it," he said.

Meanwhile,Central Queensland will remain on flood alert as a monsoonal low continues to march south across the state. Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Gavin Holcombe said the low was expected to move into NSW today and continue to decay...

Tropical Cyclone Iggy on January 26, 2012, from NASA

Women farmers in India adapt to climate change

2012-01-28T07:19:00.000-08:00

Aditi Kapoor in the the Deccan Herald (India): ...Innovative measures by women farmers across India are helping several poor families adapt better to climate change and keep hunger at bay. As Sursati from village Janakpur, district Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, explains, “Earlier, we could not produce enough food for a year because our village would get water-logged by the flood waters. Now, using early maturing paddy varieties and organic manure to revive soil fertility, we can at least eat for all 12 months from the same piece of land.”

Sursati is one of the many women being helped by a local NGO, Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG), in the flood-prone areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP), where climate vagaries have been impacting agricultural production for some years now. Many farmers in Gorakhpur district, for instance, have stopped growing pulses because “winters are so late and so short these days.” Yet, there are some women farmers like Kamlavati, from village Janakpur, who now train other women in adaptation techniques. “I go as a trainer to the government’s Agriculture Technology Management Agency (ATMA) farmer field school,” she reveals.

...There is an urgent need to focus on sound adaptation measures, especially those that benefit women directly. With gram panchayats now made responsible for village development plans, they can, in the wake of climate change, make ‘Local Action Plans on Adaptation’, or LAPAs, to climate-proof their development plans, much like poor, developing countries are today making NAPAs — National Action Plans on Adaptation — as part of the UN climate agreements.

Some women-friendly adaptation measures that can be promoted as part of LAPAs include village-level grain banks, which have proved popular in disaster-prone villages across states, including in Bengal and Odisha. Dakshin, a tribal woman farmer in the Kerandimal tribal area in Ganjam district, Odisha, puts it this way, “Grain banks mean our men will not migrate when the crops fail and that we will have enough to eat, too. We women have often starved because we preferred giving the available food to our husbands and our children.”...

Farm workers sorting eggplants in Sejwat, in Gujarat, shot by Arne Hückelheim, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Activists want climate change on TV weather reports

2012-01-28T07:11:00.000-08:00

Eric Berger in the Houston Chronicle: The fight for hearts and minds when it comes to climate change has moved to a new battleground: your television set. Climate change activists have launched a campaign, dubbed Forecast the Facts, that outs television meteorologists who are "deniers" of mainstream climate change science.

Led by several groups, including 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Citizen Engagement Lab, the campaign was spurred by recent surveys finding that half or more of TV forecasters hold contrarian climate change views. "TV meteorologists have as much, if not more, opportunity to talk to the American public about climate change than anyone," said Daniel Souweine, director of the Forecast the Facts drive.

"Ultimately, our goal is to change how the entire profession of meteorology reports on climate change," Souweine said. Specifically, he suggested, when a region is in the midst of a drought or heat wave, it is important to discuss the role climate change plays in amplifying such an event.

None of Houston's television forecasters made the campaign's list of "deniers," but it has nevertheless turned up the volume on the issue of climate change and television meteorology. Local forecaster Gene Norman of KHOU (Channel 11) said he doesn't welcome being dragged into what he calls the politicization of climate science.

"I'm concerned about this 'Forecast The Facts' campaign and the underlying assumption that TV meteorologists are somehow misleading the public and are espousing some kind of scientific heresy," Norman said....

Weatherman from the US Forest Service website

A climate change risk assessment and adaptation plan

2012-01-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

EGov Monitor via Natural England (UK): Differences in the speed with which species are adapting to climate change are an increasing threat to the functioning of ecosystems. This is just one of the findings of Natural England’s Climate Change Risk Assessment and Adaptation Plan published today.

...The Climate Change Act 2008 introduced a new power for the Secretary of State at Defra to direct providers of public services to prepare reports on how they are assessing and acting on the risks and opportunities arising from a changing climate. Natural England is voluntarily reporting under this framework.

....An important conclusion is that the threats will not be uniform and there are some areas in which multiple risks appear likely and my interact. These include coastal areas with soft coastlines such as dunes, and coastal wetlands; freshwater ecosystems such as rivers, lakes and wetlands; upland and lowland peatland; historic parklands and other woodland areas, and high upland areas. This finding reinforces the view that wetland, montane and coastal systems appear particularly vulnerable in the short term.

To address the threats we have identified, a five year Adaptation Plan has been developed, with specific commitments for different areas of our work. The plan is based on three principles;

An adaptive management approach - measures will be regularly reviewed and lessons learnt for future work;
An ecosystem approach - we will consider the full range of ecosystem services a healthy natural environment provides to people
Broad delivery partnerships to safeguard and enhance environmental benefits, involving government agencies, local authorities, non-government organisations, land managers and local community groups...

A view of the English countryside--Seave Green viewed from the descent of Cold Moor, shot by Scott Rimmer, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Geoengineering not a climate cure

2012-01-28T06:41:00.000-08:00

UPI: Geoengineering to combat global warming by injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere can't fully offset human-caused climate change, U.S. scientists say. Researchers at the University of Washington say that suggested method would likely achieve only part of the desired effect and could carry serious, if unintended, consequences.

Tiny sulfate and sea salt particles, called aerosols, are naturally present in the lower atmosphere and reflect energy from the sun into space. Some researchers have suggested injecting sulfate particles directly into the stratosphere to enhance the effect.

However, a UW modeling study shows sulfate particles in the stratosphere will not necessarily offset all the effects of future increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Significant changes would still occur because even increased aerosol levels cannot balance changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation brought on by higher levels of atmospheric CO2, researchers said....

An 1860 painting by Carl Spitzweg, "The Alchemist"

Big storms require big government

2012-01-27T08:31:00.000-08:00

In the indispensable Tom Dispatch, Christian Parenti makes a rousing call for strong regulation and vigorous government intervention in climate matters: ...Without constant government planning and subsidies, American capitalism simply could not have developed as it did, making ours the world’s largest economy....

...And here’s a curious thing: everybody more or less knows all this and yet it is almost never acknowledged. If one were to write the secret history of free enterprise in the United States, one would have to acknowledge that it has always been and remains at least a little bit socialist. However, it’s not considered proper to discuss government planning in open, realistic, and mature terms, so we fail to talk about what government could -- or rather, must -- do to help us meet the future of climate change.

The onset of ever more extreme and repeated weather events is likely to change how we think about the role of the state. But attitudes toward the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which stands behind state and local disaster responses, suggest that we’re hardly at that moment yet. In late 2011, with Americans beleaguered by weather disasters, FEMA came under attack from congressional Republicans, eager to starve it of funds. One look at FEMA explains why.
.
..The intensification of climate change means that we need to acknowledge the chaotic future we face and start planning for it. Think of what’s coming, if you will, as a kind of storm socialism. ...In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small “d” democracy and “community” may be key parts of a strong, functional, and fair society, volunteerism and “self-organization” alone will prove as incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges now beginning to unfold....

Holly Beach, Louisiana, October 3, 2005 - Ten miles west of Cameron, La., this Gulfside community once alled home by 300 residents now lies in shambles. Hurricane Rita destroyed numerous structures and severely damaged power and utility systems along a long stretch of Highway 27 in lower Cameron Parish. Win Henderson / FEMA

Pakistan's prime minister addresses climate risk

2012-01-27T08:16:00.000-08:00

The Nation (Pakistan): Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani Thursday called for a global approach to respond to climate risks in view of vulnerability and inability of developing nation to cope with the challenge.

Participating in an interactive Session on “Adapting to Climate Risk” that focused on how the communities, companies and countries were adapting to the risks posed by climate change, here at the annual 2012 World Economic Forum, Gilani told the participants “We strongly feel that the world must come together with renewed vigour.”

In his address, Gilani said Pakistan has been hit by ‘horrible’ droughts and floods last year and sought a ‘global fund’ to tackle the climate risk issues. He suggested that an important step in this regard would be channelling of finance to the Green Climate Fund, established in Durban last year. The United Nations proposed $100 billion Green Climate Fund was central to agreements reached in 2010 by UN treaty negotiators in Cancun, Mexico.

“It (climate change) is quite visible in my country. We have suffered both drought and heavy rains in past one year. It was horrible, not just by our estimates but also as per the estimates of World Bank and Asian Development Bank,” Gilani said. “There has to be global solution to these problems. The first step we can take is establishing a global fund to tackle the climate risk issues and Pakistan would be happy to partner,” Gilani said. “If the glaciers in Himalayas melt, there will be huge floods in Pakistan.“

...Stressing that developing countries were particularly vulnerable and unable to cope, at their own, with the natural calamities in terms of massive losses to lives and property, the prime minister urged the international community to cooperate in transfer of green technologies and capacity building, besides provision of financial assistance for adaptation projects....

Indus river Flood in Alipur, District Muzaffar Garh, Pakistan- The 2010 Pakistan floods began in late July 2010, resulting from heavy monsoon rains in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan regions of Pakistan and affected the Indus River basin. Shot by Aamir Shahzad, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

NASA infrared satellite instrument sees Tropical Storm Iggy growing in strength

2012-01-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

Science Daily: The AIRS infrared instrument that flies on NASA's Aqua satellite has been providing forecasters with the cloud top temperatures in the Southern Indian Ocean's ninth tropical cyclone, which has officially been renamed Iggy. AIRS data showed that the area of strong thunderstorms around Iggy's center has expanded in area over the last day.

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument provided an infrared snapshot of Iggy's cloud top temperatures on January 26, 2012 at 0611 UTC (1:11 a.m. EST). The AIRS image showed a large and rounded area of high, cold clouds, around the entire center of circulation. The data also showed that strongest convection (rapidly rising air that condenses and forms the thunderstorms that make up the cyclone) is located slightly to the west of the center, because of easterly wind shear. The temperatures of those high cloud tops were colder than -63 Fahrenheit (-51.7 Celsius), which is a threshold scientists use to identify strong thunderstorms with heavy rainfall. This is an indication that Iggy will continue to strengthen.

The AIRS image also showed clouds to the southeast of Iggy that are associated with another low pressure area. That area of disturbed weather is over land and located south-southwest of Darwin.

Iggy is currently located in the Southern Indian Ocean, northwest of Western Australia. At 1500 UTC (10 a.m. EST), Tropical Cyclone Iggy was about 430 nautical miles (~495 miles/~796 km) northwest of Learmonth, Australia, near 16.8 South and 109.0 East. It was moving slowly to the southeast at 5 knots (~6 mph/~9 kph). Iggy's maximum sustained winds are near 45 knots (~52 mph/~83 kph) and it is classified as a tropical storm. Those tropical-storm-force winds extend out to 110 miles (177 km) from the center....

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Cyclone Iggy (left) on January 26 at 611 UTC (1:11 a.m. EST) the AIRS instrument measured the cloud (purple) top temperatures. Thunderstorm cloud tops around the entire center of circulation were colder than -63 Fahrenheit (-52.7 Celsius) indicating strong storms. The purple area to the far right is from clouds and showers associated with a low pressure area south-southwest of Darwin, Australia. Credit: NASA/JPL, Ed Olsen

Will West Africa’s drought be a repeat disaster?

2012-01-27T07:18:00.000-08:00

Geoffrey York in the Globe and Mail (Toronto): After thousands died needlessly because of the slow response to the Somalia famine last year, the world’s donor nations now face another crisis: a drought in West Africa where up to 500,000 could die if no help arrives.

Failed harvests and lack of rain are affecting millions of people in the Sahel region of eight countries in West Africa. The crisis is made worse by rising food prices and the exodus of 200,000 migrant workers from Libya and Ivory Coast after the wars there.

The United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, says it needs $100-million this year to save the lives of 500,000 children in the Sahel. It wants to provide food to a million people in the region, and so far it only has the resources to feed half of them.

“We’re buying food as quickly as we can,” said David Gressly, the regional director of UNICEF in West Africa. “Everyone has learned a lesson from the Horn of Africa famine. We’re acting much more quickly this time. We’re going to react in time and save a large number of lives.”...

Singapore raises sea defences against tide of climate change

2012-01-27T07:12:00.000-08:00

David Fogarty in Reuters: A 15-km (10 mile) stretch of crisp white beach is one of the key battlegrounds in Singapore's campaign to defend its hard-won territory against rising sea levels linked to climate change.

Stone breakwaters are being enlarged on the low-lying island state's man-made east coast and their heights raised. Barges carrying imported sand top up the beach, which is regularly breached by high tides.

Singapore, the world's second most densely populated country after Monaco, covers 715 square km (276 sq miles). It has already reclaimed large areas to expand its economy and population -- boosting its land area by more than 20 percent since 1960.

But the new land is now the frontline in a long-term battle against the sea. Every square metre is precious in Singapore....

A night view of Bishan in Singapore, shot by Eustaquio Santimano, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Extreme droughts in Spain could increase 15% by 2050

2012-01-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

Environmental Protection Online: A team at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena has designed a new method for calculating drought trends. Initial results suggest that by the year 2050 there could be a 15 percent increase compared to the droughts seen in 1990 in the Segura river basin.

At the beginning of 2011, water levels in Spain's reservoirs reached an average of 77.83% of total capacity. However, the lack of rain last year has now reduced the average to 62.01 percent. The droughts that Spain experiences year on year are one of the main concerns of agricultural workers who use up to 80 percent of a reservoir's water for their crops.

A new study at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) has combined recorded data with the results from state-of-the-art regional climate change models to calculate the maximum length of droughts in detail. The results, which have been applied to the Segura river basin, show how "drought periods since the 1980's onwards have notably intensified," according to Sandra García Galiano, one of the authors of the study.

For García Galiano and her team from the UPCT's Water Resources R&D&i group, "semiarid basins, like that of the Segura river, are vulnerable to changes in rainfall. This creates uncertainty for agriculture." The purpose of the study is to "deepen knowledge of plausible draught trends so that this information can then be used to strike a better balance between adaptation and mitigation measures."...

The Bardenas desert, in Navarre. Spain. Shot by Flipao, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Disaster aid faces value-for-money test

2012-01-26T08:49:00.000-08:00

Katie Nguyen and Megan Rowling in AlertNet: Picture this: a terrible drought forces you to abandon your meagre plot of farmland, so you migrate to a city where the jobs are, only to end up living in a slum regularly submerged by floods. It's a scenario that's going to become more and more familiar in coming years as climate change and rapid urbanisation play an ever-greater role in shaping humanitarian crises, according to an AlertNet poll of the world's biggest aid organisations.

To adapt to the new reality, aid agencies will need to invest more in disaster prevention and learn a trick or two from the private sector about how to make more efficient use of limited resources, the survey of 41 relief organisations shows. "The rising trend in the number of disasters over the past five years shows no sign of slowing down," said Gareth Owen, humanitarian director at Save the Children UK.

"Year on year, we are responding more frequently and on a larger scale to increasing numbers of disasters." Asked to rank the factors most likely to intensify humanitarian needs, 28 of 41 aid agencies put the risk of more frequent and destructive climate-related floods, droughts and storms at the top.

This was followed by mass displacement due to climate change and environmental damage, urbanisation, high and volatile food prices, and the expectation of more failing states. With needs expected to grow and national budgets squeezed by the global financial crisis, some rich donor states are pressing the charities they fund to boost value for money in relief efforts.

...More than half the agencies said focusing more on disaster risk reduction (DRR) -- everything from building more durable houses and schools in safer places to teaching children to swim -- would help the sector cope better in the long run....

A woman in Sri Lanka rescued during 2008 flooding, shot by trokilinochchi, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Flooding rated as worst climate change threat facing UK

2012-01-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

Juliette Jowitt in the Guardian (UK): Flooding is the greatest threat to the UK posed by climate change, with up to 3.6 million people at risk by the middle of the century, according to a report published on Thursday by the environment department.

The first comprehensive climate change risk assessment for the UK identifies hundreds of ways rising global temperatures will have an impact if no action is taken. They include the financial damage caused by flooding, which would increase to £2bn-£10bn a year by 2080, more deaths in heatwaves, and large-scale water shortages by mid-century.

Unusually for such documents, it also highlighted ways in which the country could benefit from milder winters and drier summers, such as fewer cold-related deaths, better wheat crops and a more attractive climate for tourists. "If you had to pick one particular issue I think the flooding issue is the most dominant," said Sir Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Lord John Krebs, chairman of the adaptation committee of the independent advisory group Committee on Climate Change, said that without planning and investment to deal with the threats the UK would "sleepwalk into disaster". ... Scientists and other experts, led by Defra, identified 700 impacts of climate change in the UK, including the possibility of refugees arriving from wars over dwindling water and food....

A flooded oast house in Littlebourne, in the UK floods of 2000, shot by Nick Smith, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Drought threatens Argentina

2012-01-26T08:26:00.000-08:00

Marcela Valente in IPS: The low humidity in Argentina's most agriculturally productive region has already caused a decline in grain yield - in particular corn and soybean - with ensuing losses for producers and the government.

So far, this austral summer's drought has been less intense than the one that affected the 2008-2009 harvest. That drought, which was the worst in the last 100 years, caused a more than 37-percent drop in agricultural production and resulted in livestock losses. However, and even with the respite afforded by the rains that finally fell in recent days, grain production, exports and revenue collection are expected to fall.

Cereals account for 38 percent of all foreign sales in Argentina, not counting agricultural processed goods. "A record production of 111 million tonnes of grain had been projected for this year, but with the current lack of rainfall, estimates are down to 97 million for now," analyst Gustavo López, of the consultancy firm Agritrend Argentina, told IPS.

López said that right now the "most compromised" grain was corn, with marked losses that could not be reversed even if heavy rains came, and he could not rule out the possibility that the 2008-2009 losses would be repeated. Argentina is the second largest corn exporter in the world after the United States. In 2011, 23 million tonnes of corn were harvested, and 29 million were initially projected for this year, but López said a more accurate estimate now would be 22 million, at best....

Corn growing in Argentina, shot by Maggilautaro, Wikimedia Commons, nder the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Even worse Thai flood crisis this year unless government is decisive

2012-01-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

Asia One: Water experts yesterday urged the government to be decisive about flood-prevention measures in order to prevent a repeat of last year's severe flooding, as the La Nina phenomenon is expected to bring early rains and more storms this year. They expressed concern that a lack of clear decisions from the government would leave the flood-prevention efforts in disarray.

Seree Supharatid, director of Rangsit University's Centre on Climate Change and Disaster, warned that due to the La Nina climatic phenomenon, early rainfalls were expected between March and May, which would force dams to release water from their reservoirs. He said major dams such as Bhumibol and Sirikit were holding water at 90 per cent of their capacity.

Although there would be fewer rains between September and November, storms were likely towards the latter part of the year, given the statistics over the past five decades. "There will also be many storms this year," Seree said.

"If this year's water volume is as much as last year's, I believe floods will be inevitable. We cannot implement flood-prevention measures in the short term. The negotiation over floodways has hit snags," he said, referring to opposition to a plan to designate certain farming areas as floodways....

In October, 2011, volunteers and members of the Royal Thai Army, military police, fill and place sandbags to redirect flooding in the northern Sai Mai district.U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Robert J. Maurer

Unprecedented, man-made trends in oceans acidity

2012-01-25T07:14:00.000-08:00

The Hawaii Reporter: Nearly one-third of CO2 emissions due to human activities enters the world’s oceans. By reacting with seawater, CO2 increases the water’s acidity, which may significantly reduce the calcification rate of such marine organisms as corals and mollusks, resulting in the potential loss of ecosystems. The extent to which human activities have raised the surface level of acidity, however, has been difficult to detect on regional scales because it varies naturally from one season and one year to the next, and between regions, and direct observations go back only 30 years.

By combining computer modeling with observations, an international team of scientists concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions, resulting from the influence of human beings, over the last 100 to 200 years have already raised ocean acidity far beyond the range of natural variations. The study is published in the January 22, 2012 online issue of Nature Climate Change.

The team of climate modelers, marine conservationists, ocean chemists, biologists and ecologists, led by Tobias Friedrich and Axel Timmermann at the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, came to their conclusions by using Earth system models that simulate climate and ocean conditions 21,000 years back in time, to the Last Glacial Maximum, and forward in time to the end of the 21st century. In their models, they studied changes in the saturation level of aragonite (a form of calcium carbonate) typically used to measure ocean acidification.

As acidity of seawater rises, the saturation level of aragonite drops. Their models captured the current observed seasonal and annual variations in this quantity in several key coral reef regions.

Today’s levels of aragonite saturation in these locations have already dropped five times below the pre-industrial range of natural variability. For example, if the yearly cycle in aragonite saturation varied between 4.7 and 4.8, it varies now between 4.2 and 4.3, which – based on another recent study – may translate into a decrease in overall calcification rates of corals and other aragonite shell-forming organisms by 15%. Given the continued human use of fossil fuels, the saturation levels will drop further, potentially reducing calcification rates of some marine organisms by more than 40% of their pre-industrial values within the next 90 years.

“Any significant drop below the minimum level of aragonite to which the organisms have been exposed to for thousands of years and have successfully adapted will very likely stress them and their associated ecosystems,” said lead author Friedrich...

An illustration of some coral from the Austrian National Library, Kommentar von Otto Mazal (S. 47 und 52) in: Pedanius Dioscorides – Der Wiener Dioskurides, Codex medicus Graecus 1 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt 1998 (Band 2). ISBN 3-201-01725-6

Restored wetlands rarely equal condition of original wetlands

2012-01-25T06:57:00.000-08:00

Science Daily: Wetland restoration is a billion-dollar-a-year industry in the United States that aims to create ecosystems similar to those that disappeared over the past century. But a new analysis of restoration projects shows that restored wetlands seldom reach the quality of a natural wetland.

"Once you degrade a wetland, it doesn't recover its normal assemblage of plants or its rich stores of organic soil carbon, which both affect natural cycles of water and nutrients, for many years," said David Moreno-Mateos, a University of California, Berkeley, postdoctoral fellow. "Even after 100 years, the restored wetland is still different from what was there before, and it may never recover."

Moreno-Mateos's analysis calls into question a common mitigation strategy exploited by land developers: create a new wetland to replace a wetland that will be destroyed and the land put to other uses. At a time of accelerated climate change caused by increased carbon entering the atmosphere, carbon storage in wetlands is increasingly important, he said.

"Wetlands accumulate a lot of carbon, so when you dry up a wetland for agricultural use or to build houses, you are just pouring this carbon into the atmosphere," he said. "If we keep degrading or destroying wetlands, for example through the use of mitigation banks, it is going to take centuries to recover the carbon we are losing."

...Wetlands provide many societal benefits, Moreno-Mateos noted, such as biodiversity conservation, fish production, water purification, erosion control and carbon storage...

A wetlands in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, shot by Graph Geo, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Advancing agricultural adaptation and mitigation

2012-01-25T06:39:00.000-08:00

SciDev.net: [A] policy brief, published by Science, examines how agricultural science can help improve policies for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Global food production must rise to meet global food needs, but predicted increases in extreme weather events — combined with stresses such as poverty, conflict and weak governance — threaten food security. At the same time, agricultural practices such as inappropriate fertiliser use and land clearing release greenhouse gases and exacerbate climate change.

Agricultural practices that can reduce emissions and improve yields under extreme weather conditions exist — but progress on national and global policies to support them has been sluggish, say the authors, led by John Beddington. ...Looking ahead, the brief suggests six areas where science can contribute to policy progress along the lines of priorities identified by the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change.

First, it calls for common definitions on widely used terms such as "climate-smart agriculture" and "sustainable intensification", to contribute to a common understanding of how they help achieve adaptation and mitigation goals. And as agriculture is considered a driver of deforestation, scientists must be clearer when describing strategies involving both agriculture and forestry.

Global monitoring and new information systems will be needed to provide location-specific estimates of the risks and benefits of proposed policies, say the authors. ... Scientists will also need to document how farmers, industry, consumers and governments can scale up the benefits they receive from sustainable farming practices — and this will need integrated research and a better understanding of what works in different regions.

Finally, science can help develop processes that allow climate funds to be invested into agricultural adaptation and mitigation, steering investments towards "climate-smart" agriculture at a national level....

A plowed field in Poland, shot by Krzysztof T. miw, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Nigeria's eroding coast

2012-01-25T06:32:00.000-08:00

Jude Njoku in AllAfrica.com via the Vanguard (Nigeria): Mr. Azuka Ezemakam lived in Alpha Beach Estate in the highbrow Lekki Peninsula area of Lagos until June last year, when coastal erosion in the once serene neighbourhood forced him to relocate from the estate he had lived in for eight years.

..."It happened at the time the first phase of Eko Atlantic City project was being commissioned. I left for my safety because the surge was too much. All the access roads to the estate have vanished; electricity poles were taken away and you must drive through people's houses to get access to your own building. It came to a point that I wasn't sure of my safety any more.

...Mr. Ezemakam spoke at a one-day Roundtable on Climate Change Adaptation in Lagos: Eko Atlantic City- Dream for Few or Nightmare for Many? organised by Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Nigeria. Mr. Gbenga Okunsanyo of the Ocean Surge Committee, Goshen Beach Estate also painted a similar picture of the plight of residents of the estate, allegedly due to the ongoing reclamation of land for the building of highbrow multi-billion dollar Eko Atlantic City.

But a climatologist, Prof. Emmanuel Oladipo stated that it would be wrong to attribute the plight of residents of both estates to the ongoing reclamation of land for the Eko Atlantic City project, because coastal erosion had started in both estates prior to the commencement of work at Eko Atlantic. He however agreed that when one area is eroded, another area is bound to benefit as sand is deposited in the new area....

The Atlantic coastline in Lagos, shot by Contimm, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Coping with climate change, through resilience

2012-01-25T06:24:00.000-08:00

IRIN: In the past five years, “resilience” (the ability to absorb shocks and recover) has become quite a buzzword in the aid community. Discussions on adapting to a changing climate are increasingly peppered with the “need to build resilience” of people, infrastructure and governments in the face of shocks such as soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, severe storms and flooding.

...What does resilience mean in the aid world? Some call it just another addition to the growing aid jargon. But mostly people call it a new approach, a “lens”, which has given new meaning to “sustainable development”.

Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre and co-ordinating lead author of the summary of the special report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change (SREX) produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2011 explains it thus: Under the conventional sustainable development approach, if a road had to be constructed in a rural area, benefits - such as the impact on the lives of the communities living alongside, creation of job opportunities from the maintenance of the road and development of markets for the farming community - would have been taken into consideration.

This is what Peter Walker, a leading aid expert, calls the “linear” approach. The old development models “made projections into the future from recent trends and assumed that, all other things being equal, life would get better”.

But with a resilience lens on, the government or aid agency responsible for the road will consider the possibility of external shocks or unexpected developments that might affect the road and people’s lives. “What if the area becomes prone to floods or if there is an earthquake, what if food prices increase because the contractors are better off than the local population? [These] would be some of the factors that the project would now consider,” explains Van Aalst....

Two ducks, shot by Gilbert Liu, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Major study of ocean acidification helps scientists evaluate effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide on marine life

2012-01-24T08:59:00.000-08:00

UC Santa Barbara Office of Public Affairs: Might a penguin's next meal be affected by the exhaust from your tailpipe? The answer may be yes, when you add your exhaust fumes to the total amount of carbon dioxide lofted into the atmosphere by humans since the industrial revolution. One-third of that carbon dioxide is absorbed by the world's oceans, making them more acidic and affecting marine life.

A UC Santa Barbara marine scientist and a team of 18 other researchers have reported results of the broadest worldwide study of ocean acidification to date. Acidification is known to be a direct result of the increasing amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The scientists used sensors developed at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to measure the acidity of 15 ocean locations, including seawater in the Antarctic, and in temperate and tropical waters.

As oceans become more acidic, with a lower pH, marine organisms are stressed and entire ecosystems are affected, according to the scientists. Gretchen E. Hofmann, an eco-physiologist and professor in UCSB's Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology, is lead author of the recent article in PLoS ONE that describes the research.

..."The emerging pH data from sensors allows us to design lab experiments that have a present-day environmental context," said Hofmann. "The experiments will allow us to see how organisms are adapted now, and how they might respond to climate change in the future."

....The researchers found that, in some places such as Antarctica and the Line Islands of the South Pacific, the range of pH variance is much more limited than in areas of the California coast that are subject to large vertical movements of water, known as upwellings. In some of the study areas, the researchers found that the decrease in seawater pH being caused by greenhouse gas emissions is still within the bounds of natural pH fluctuation. Other areas already experience daily acidity levels that scientists had expected would only be reached at the end of this century.....

UCSB graduate student Emily Rivest positions a SeaFET pH sensor in a coral reef off the island of Moorea, in French Polynesia. TThe reefs surrounding the island of Moorea are home to UCSB's Coral Reef Long-Term Ecological Research site (MCR LTER). Credit: Anderson Mayfield

Definite trend of underinsurance in South African agriculture

2012-01-24T08:43:00.000-08:00

Janine Noble in ITINews via CIB Insurance Administrators (South Africa): Severe weather conditions recently recorded throughout South Africa, such as the heat wave and fires in the Western Cape and erratic rainfall in the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces, has highlighted the urgent need for farmers to reassess their risk management processes.

This is according to Jonjon Smit, Director at CIB Insurance Administrators, who says that climate change and unpredictable weather patterns will continue to threaten the financial survival of farmers who do not have effective risk management policies in place in 2012.

...He says that underestimating the replacement value of farming equipment, combined with a failure to regularly review their policies, means that the percentage of South Africa's farmers who are underinsured could be as high as 70%.

"There is a definite trend of underinsurance in the agriculture industry," says Smit. "Based on our claims experience, we estimate that between 60% and 70% of farmers are underinsuring their key assets. The result is that many farmers could face financial ruin if they are unable to afford to replace these assets."...

A pumpkin harvest in South Africa, shot by NJR ZA, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Agriculture in a changing environment

2012-01-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

IRIN: Agriculture has been seen either as a cause or victim of global warming at the UN climate change talks over the past few years - something that has thwarted efforts to attract the investment it needs, say scientists.

Some at the talks see a more dominant role for agriculture - an emitter of major greenhouses gases such as nitrous oxide and methane - in reducing global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates agricultural emissions account for 13.5 percent of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

At the same time, poor countries want more money and better technology to help farmers adapt to the impact of climate change such as frequent droughts, flooding and increased salinity. “It is really a bad split for agriculture,” said John Beddington, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, and one of the authors of a paper calling for a more integrated approach, combining mitigation and adaptation efforts.

The paper, published in the current edition of Science with contributions from several scientists, calls for a better understanding of agricultural practices with the aim of delivering multiple benefits - reducing emissions, helping agriculture to adapt, and using limited resources (like water) efficiently.

One model to emulate could be Denmark, where one of the world’s strictest agriculture control systems is in place - including, for example, the use of environmentally friendly practices such as substituting pig slurry (pig waste and water) for artificial fertilizers. The country has managed not only to reduce emissions from agriculture by 28 percent but also increase productivity. This kind of win-win agriculture would attract more funding from a wider range of sources, said Beddington....

A 1948 photo of a Danish farm

New study predicts declining range land in California

2012-01-24T08:21:00.000-08:00

David Gabel in Environmental News Network: Duke University researchers have predicted that climate change in California will result in a declining percentage of rangeland. Such a change will have widespread impact on the state's large cattle industry of California's Central Valley. No matter if climate change will cause wetter or drier weather, available pasture will decline. Forage areas, known as one of nature's free services, may no longer be so free. The grasses will either wither as arid conditions creep north, or be pushed out as inedible shrubs and brush take over.

The study has been published in the journal, Climatic Change, by Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment in conjunction with the Environmental Defense Fund. The change in the rangeland ecosystem is expected to occur gradually over the coming century. Total costs expected to hit California ranchers over the next sixty years may be as high as $209 million a year if the ecosystem dries up.

Less grazing land will mean smaller herds, and less productive herds. Movement of cattle will also be much more difficult because of highways and suburban sprawl....

A black cow in Fremont, California, shot by Mark J Sebastian, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Sources of flash floods

2012-01-24T07:56:00.000-08:00

Borneo Post via Bernama (Indonesia): ...Flash floods being a recurring phenomenon to city dwellers, they have become part of their lives. However, encountering a flash flood can still cause them nightmares. Many motorists who use Jalan Tun Razak, particularly the stretch near the National Library, still remember what happened on Dec 13, 2011.

Exceptionally heavy rain, which lasted for about two hours, caused a flash flood, trapping thousands of motorists heading home from work. The flash flood occurred when Sungai Bunus overflowed its banks and the water spilled onto Jalan Tun Razak and the surrounding areas.

...Flash floods happen suddenly, after which the water level recedes within a short period of time. But what actually causes the flash floods? ... Many point their fingers at local authorities. Others blame narrow rivers and clogged drains. Some say it is due to climate change.

To environmental activist S Piarapakaran, it is unfair to blame climate change for flash floods. Climate change, he said, takes place because of human greed in destroying nature. “It is like when we have fever due to infection. Likewise, it is just natural for earth to adapt to changes in the surroundings. Climate change cannot be stopped. It will continue until equilibrium is achieved. “But with technology we can be more prepared to mitigate the effects of climate change,” he said.

Piarapakaran said flash flooding is closely related to the clearing of forests to fulfill the country’s growth and development. ... “This has directly increased the surface water flow (rain water that flows on top of earth’s surface) during rainfall,” he explains....

A 1900 Tropenmuseum image of a flood in Western Sumatra, via Wikimedia Commons

Western Arctic Ocean freshwater storage increased by wind-driven spin-up of the Beaufort Gyre

2012-01-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

Center for Polar Observation and Modeling (CPOM) at the Natural Environment Research Council (UK): CPOM scientists have discovered that the freshwater stored in the western Arctic Ocean has increased by 8000 km3 between the mid 1990s and 2010 by looking at changes in the sea surface height measured by the European Space Agency Satellites ERS-2 and Envisat.

This increase in fresh water corresponds to an increase in the anti-cyclonicity (clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere) of the wind over the western Arctic. Anti-cyclonic winds move the surface waters so that they pile up in the centre of the anti-cyclone, doming the sea surface. These findings are reported in Nature Geoscience (publication date - 22rd Jan 2012). Models had suggested that the action of the wind on the sea surface could cause a raised dome of freshwater to form in the middle of the Beaufort Gyre, but until now, there had been no continuous observations of sea-surface height to categorically demonstrate this. A reversal of the wind could lead to the release of this fresh water into the rest of the Arctic Ocean and possibly beyond.

Lead author, Katharine Giles says “We were surprised to find that our results also suggested that something else was going on. When we looked at our data on a year-to-year basis we noticed that the changes in the sea surface height did not always follow what the wind was doing so we thought about reasons as to why this might happen. One idea is that sea ice forms a barrier between the atmosphere and the ocean. So, as the sea-ice cover changes, the effect of the wind on the ocean might also change.”...

Flood-tolerant rice leads Guyana farm adaptation push

2012-01-23T09:23:00.000-08:00

Johann Earle in Alertnet: George Griffith is pleased with his harvest. Improved farming techniques and a different variety of rice have helped the 70-year-old farmer reap 103 bags of rice from his two-and-a-half acre (one hectare) field in this coastal village. ...“The land of itself is fertile, very fertile, (but the harvest) has a lot to do with the preparation of the land,” he said. Preparation and adaptation are the key words as Guyana’s farmers seek to increase their incomes while adapting to unpredictable weather conditions. The pressures of a changing climate are forcing a rethink of agricultural practices by individual farmers and the government.

Griffith, for instance, has been able to maximise his production using a new variety of rice, and minimise losses from climate-related flooding through adaptive measures in the field. At his farm, Griffith must deal with flooding caused by heavy spring ocean tides as well as increasingly heavy rainfall. Efforts to improve drainage have helped address the problem, but now Griffith also maintains protective banks around his fields to keep out excess water...

...To deal with wetter conditions, Griffith also is trying out a rice variety called GRDB 10. It is specially adapted to wet conditions and can survive for a few days underwater, which means that the farmer need not wait for the land to be completely drained before planting. An additional advantage of a rice plant that can endure being underwater is that it does not face as much competition from weeds and other plants, which are killed by standing water.

...Getting such crop transitions is crucial for Guyana’s rice and sugar industries, which are key contributors to the South American nation’s food security, large employers and a major source of foreign exchange for the country...

Niger braces itself for year of food and aid emergency

2012-01-23T09:10:00.000-08:00

Mark Tran in the Guardian's "globaldevelopment" blog: As Niger braces itself for a food emergency after late and erratic rains last year and a surge in food prices, humanitarian agencies are stepping up malnutrition screening so that children receive swift treatment to prevent permanent damage. It is also much less costly.

At the best of times this vast landlocked country – whose estimated 14.7 million people mostly live along a narrow strip of arable land on its southern border – has trouble feeding itself. Even in "non-crisis" years, 300,000 children are treated for malnutrition – 15% of the world total. This year threatens to be particularly severe.

Humanitarian organisations estimate that 1.3 million people are suffering from acute malnutrition across the Sahel, a belt of countries from Mauritania and Senegal on the Atlantic to Chad in central Africa, taking in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. These countries suffer from chronic food insecurity – families without enough money to meet their food needs – and 300,000 children die in a normal year from malnutrition or its related causes.

Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, on Sunday announced emergency aid for the Sahel and urged others to step up efforts. The UK is providing therapeutic food for 68,000 children in Chad, Niger and Mali as well as fodder and vaccinations for livestock. "British support will help those in the most immediate danger but other nations must take up the baton to ensure that the international response is fast and effective," Mitchell said. "We then need to improve conditions for these people to withstand future droughts."...

Tracking microclimates could help feed the world

2012-01-23T08:35:00.000-08:00

Rinat Harash and Ari Rabinovitch in Reuters: Scientists in Israel have developed a way of using satellite images to help farmers detect small-scale changes in climate and improve their harvests, a method that could bolster food supplies for an increasingly hungry world population. Rather than analyze the weather and topography of large swathes of land, the new system divides fields into smaller microclimates that guide farmers on the best way to work each individual plot.

It tells them when it is best to plant seeds, when to spray pesticides and even which crop is most suitable for each square-kilometer field, said Uri Dayan, a climatologist from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since the method was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in September, Dayan and co-developer Itamar Lensky have been working to develop it into a global interface that will help farmers on any continent.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said that global food output must increase by 70 percent by 2050 to meet the needs of an expected 9.1 billion people. Crops are very sensitive to their environment and even the slightest changes can ruin a harvest. Factors like pests, pathogens and weeds cause the loss of more than 40 percent of the world's food supply, the FAO says....

From NASA, a false-color image of irrigated fields near Garden City, Kansas, taken by the Landsat-7 satellite. This image is approximately 10 miles wide (16 km)

Efforts to control Mississippi River result in flooded farmland and permanent damage

2012-01-23T08:30:00.000-08:00

Terra Daily via SPX: When the water in the Mississippi River rose to 58 feet with a forecast of 60 feet or higher in May 2011, the emergency plan to naturally or intentionally breach the levees, established over 80 years prior, was put in motion. The flood of 1937 did top the frontline levee and water passed into and through the New Madrid Floodway, but being floodfree since then caused area landowners to oppose the plan being put into action.

..."The initial additional force and depth of floodwater caused more damage to buildings and more deep land scouring than was predicted. The strong current and sweep of water through the Birds Point, Missouri, breach created deep gullies in 133,000 acres of Missouri farmland, displaced tons of soil, and damaged irrigation equipment, farms, and homes."

Olson has followed the drama of the deliberate flooding closely and believes it will create long-lasting, if not permanent, agricultural damage to hundreds of acres of land. The rushing water gouged large deep gullies on parcels of land adjacent to the blown levees and on some distant fields. The land was also covered with a thick sand deposit and in some areas adjacent to where new crater lakes were formed.

"Reclamation efforts by the Corps of Engineers included patching the frontline and fuse plugs levees with the sand, and topsoil was trucked in," Olson said. "...Proper drainage in the area has been restored, but the unanticipated fields with large and deep gullies located five miles from the levee breaches will not be repaired very easily." Olson believes that even if the fields of gullies are reclaimed, the soils are likely to have lower productivity.

"The resulting land surface will have less soil aggregation, less organic carbon, and be more sloping, making it difficult to farm the land," he said. "Some of this lost cropland could be restored as wetlands and wildlife habitat adjacent to the patched levees."...

Water flows from the Missouri River over levee L-550, located north of Highway 136 in Atchison County, Mo., June 19. The local sponsor reported overtopping of the levee to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the morning of June 19. The levee is in the Federal Program (PL 84-99) and is operated and maintained by a non-federal sponsor. It was constructed by the Corps in the late 1940s. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Carlos J. Lazo)

Drought returns to Sahel, bringing hunger

2012-01-22T10:59:00.000-08:00

Rukmini Callimachi in the San Francisco Chronicle, via the Associated Press: For the third time in the past decade, drought has returned to the arid, western shoulder of Africa, bringing hunger to millions. Aid agencies are warning that if action is not taken now, the region known as the Sahel could slip into crisis.

More than 1 million children in the eight affected countries are expected to face life-threatening malnutrition this year, according to the United Nations Children's Fund. The region has not yet recovered from the last drought two years ago, and many families lost their herds which means that they will not have assets to purchase food.

Aid workers also worry that donors are suffering from "famine fatigue," as the looming West African crisis comes just six months after Somalia's capital was declared a famine zone. "I think there is a real risk that people may think this is the kind of thing that just happens every few years," Stephen Cockburn, the West Africa regional campaign manager for Oxfam, said of the droughts in the Sahel.

Earlier this week, aid agencies revealed that thousands of people died needlessly in the Horn of Africa because donors waited until people started dying to respond. The warning signs were there as early as August 2010 but aid wasn't ramped up until July 2011.

Signs of the looming famine in the Sahel were first detected late last year, according to the report released Wednesday by Oxfam and Save the Children. The lessons of Somalia and the Horn of Africa, where as many as 100,000 people died, are front and center in how aid agencies are responding to the potential famine in West Africa...

Locator map of the Sahel by Altatoron, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Winds arrive in storm-weary Pacific Northwest

2012-01-22T10:50:00.000-08:00

Manuel Valdes and Nigel Duara in the Seattle Times: Strong winds descended on the storm-weary Pacific Northwest and thousands of people remained without power Saturday after a winter storm left a tangle of fallen trees and damaged power lines. Around 195,000 customers remained without electricity, reported Puget Sound Energy, one of the region's largest utilities. That was down from a peak of more than 260,000 customers.

Wind gusts close to 50 mph arrived in much of the region, which could combine with the remaining snow to bring down more trees. Four snowmobilers were rescued from near-whiteout conditions in Todd Lake, west of Bend.

"It's a recipe for more down branches and potential power outages," said National Weather Service meteorologist Dennis D'Amico. "The good news is that we've had above freezing temperatures for over 24 hours. We're on our way to melting the snow."

In Oregon, worries about flooding and high winds subsided Saturday. Highways along the coast were closed for several hours as high water crept over roadways, but warnings of potential flooding in Benton County proved unfounded...

Des Moines, Washington seen from Point Robinson, Maury Island, Washington, shot by Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The biodiversity crisis: Worse than climate change

2012-01-22T10:37:00.000-08:00

University of Copenhagen News: Biodiversity is declining rapidly throughout the world. The challenges of conserving the world’s species are perhaps even larger than mitigating the negative effects of global climate change. Dealing with the biodiversity crisis requires political will and needs to be based on a solid scientific knowledge if we are to ensure a safe future for the planet. This is the main conclusion from scientists from University of Copenhagen, after 100 researchers and policy experts from EU countries were gathered this week at the University of Copenhagen to discuss how to organise the future UN Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES - an equivalent to the UN panel on climate change (IPCC).

Species extinction and the degradation of ecosystems are proceeding rapidly and the pace is accelerating. The world is losing species at a rate that is 100 to 1000 times faster than the natural extinction rate.

Mass extinctions of species have occurred five times previously in the history of the world – last time was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs and many other species disappeared. Previous periods of mass extinction and ecosystem change were driven by global changes in climate and in atmospheric chemistry, impacts by asteroids and volcanism. Now we are in the 6th mass extinction event, which is a result of a competition for resources between one species on the planet – humans – and all others. The process towards extinction is mainly caused by habitat degradation, whose effect on biodiversity is worsened by the ongoing human-induced climate change.

"The biodiversity crisis – i.e. the rapid loss of species and the rapid degradation of ecosystems – is probably a greater threat than global climate change to the stability and prosperous future of mankind on Earth. There is a need for scientists, politicians and government authorities to closely collaborate if we are to solve this crisis. This makes the need to establish IPBES very urgent, which may happen at a UN meeting in Panama City in April," says professor Carsten Rahbek, Director for the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen....

A cemetery for extinct animals (location unknown, though the caption reads as follows -- 灭绝动物公墓雕塑，位于北京南海子麋鹿苑, shot by Shizhao, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Climate plan aims to help ecosystems adapt to change

2012-01-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

Staci Matlock in the Santa Fe New Mexican: The debate over the causes of climate change continues to rage, but federal, state and tribal agencies aren't waiting around for the argument to be settled. They believe climate change is here, and they're working on ways to help wildlife, land and communities adapt. Two federal agencies and a state wildlife department have developed a broad plan for helping ecosystems become more resilient as the climate changes.

The National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy was released Friday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the New York Division of Fish and Wildlife and Marine Resources. The public has until March 5 to comment on the plan.

"Climate change is already here," according to the coalition's website. "It is clear from current trends and future projections that we are now committed to a certain amount of changes and impacts, making climate adaptation planning a critical part of responding to this complex challenge."

Massive wildfires, rising sea levels and increasing numbers of catastrophic natural disasters such as floods and drought are all symptoms of a changing climate, according to scientists. While all those events have happened repeatedly in the past, the severity and frequency of them in the last decade are what worry climate watchers.

Impacts of climate change vary by region. In the Southwest, scientists are seeing a long-term trend toward less snowpack in the mountains, faster snowmelts, warmer winter night temperatures and drier summers.

....The website for the Wildlife Adaptation Strategy is packed with the latest studies, international reports and information on what states and tribes are doing to plan for climate change. One link (www.cakex.org/case-studies) goes to the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange, where groups and governments can check out what other communities are doing....

The White Sands National Monument, shot by David Jones, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Drought worsening in Argentina, Paraguay

2012-01-22T07:40:00.000-08:00

Terra Daily via UPI: Drought conditions are worsening in Latin America, especially Argentina and Paraguay, and may become a flash point for political and rural unrest, latest data and sector analysis said. In Argentina's politically fraught agriculture sector, anger over what farmers' representatives see as ineffective policies of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner surfaced again in pronouncements by farmers' representatives.

Fernandez is accused of refusing to increase a state emergency fund for tackling the drought. The president has also turned down pleas for a fiscal review to ease the tax burden of farmer communities. "Farmers are always expected to pay up but are never entitled to government help," Argentine Agrarian Federation chief Eduardo Buzzi said. "The government wants farmers approaching the counter in order to pay, not asking for money."

Farmers' representatives say Fernandez is even less responsive to their demands and expectations since last year's landslide victory. Buzzi said the distressed farmers, especially those with small or medium-sized holdings, expected the government to drop export duties on grain and oilseed exports....

A field of soy in Paso de La Arena, Argentina, shot by Arielex, public domain

‘Floods have exposed govt machinery’s failure’ in Pakistan

2012-01-21T18:16:00.000-08:00

The News (Pakistan): It shows the failure of the government machinery to deal with disasters killing hundreds of people as human right activists and other experts involved in rehabilitation of affected people are now asking the state to fulfil its duties in ensuring the right to life in Pakistan in accordance with the relevant constitutional provisions.

A seminar, titled, “Disaster Management, Development Structure Challenges and Capacity Issues”, jointly organised by Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler) and Pakistan Fisherfolk’s Forum (PFF) at the PILER Centre discussed at length the question of protection of lives of citizens and failure of the institutions in Pakistan and concluded that there was dire to hold a continuous public debate on the issue of flood-affected people.

Senior economists, professionals, civil society experts, and those working on the relief and rehabilitation of flood-affected people noticed that the disasters occurred because of the failure of the state institutions. The speakers underlined the aspects of the lives of the flood- and rain-affected people, their rehabilitation in relation to their citizenship rights, and a lack of adequate measures on the part of the State.

Dr Kaiser Bengali, a senior economist and former Advisor to the Sindh Chief Minister on Planning and Development, said that the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) in Sindh remained ineffective during the recent floods. Being Advisor, he said he visited the flood-affected areas in Kashmor and Shikarpur in 2010 and designed guidelines to build shelters to avoid losses in case of disasters in the future. Villages should have roads and drains to avert flooding. He said the provincial government constructed houses in model villages and provided brick roads and drains and during 2011 heavy rains and no flooding occurred there. He said that the district disaster management authorities were not effective in any district, which caused problems in relief distribution....

Indus river Flood in Alipur, Muzaffar Garh, Pakistan- The 2010 Pakistan floods began in late July 2010, resulting from heavy monsoon rains in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan regions of Pakistan and affected the Indus River basin

How the Dutch make 'room for the river' by redesigning downtown

2012-01-21T16:14:00.000-08:00

E&E Publishing via ClimateWire: For centuries, the Dutch have built higher and higher dikes to keep waters at bay in a country where 55 percent of housing is located in areas prone to flooding. But climate change has convinced them this approach will no longer work, so the country is embarking on a mammoth task of moving dozens of dikes back to make room for swelling rivers.

Now the oldest city in the Netherlands is being hailed for its plans to move the country's biggest river, building more efficient flood defenses and at the same time creating more sustainable urban living space. The city of Nijmegen's "Room for the River" plan has received the "Excellence on the Waterfront Honor Award 2011" from the Washington, D.C.-based Waterfront Center for combining flood safety with construction of a riverside park with the close involvement of the local community.

"We are proud that Nijmegen now features on this list of world cities," said Ingwer de Boer, "Room for the River" program director. "The award demonstrates that Dutch water management expertise remains a powerful factor at international level. We're improving flood safety and giving a new lease of life to these areas."

The €359 million ($460 million) project involves pushing a dike 350 meters inland, digging a new channel for the river Waal and thus creating a new island and an urban river park in the heart of Nijmegen. The river Waal bends sharply near Nijmegen and narrows to form a bottleneck prone to floods. A dike exists, but high water levels in 1993 and 1995 that prompted the evacuation of 250,000 people convinced authorities that climate change required additional measures.

"After 800 years of building dikes, we've been making them higher and higher," said Gert-Jan Meulepas, project manager at Royal Haskoning, an engineering and environmental consultancy that developed the project. "But if something goes wrong, the damage will be greater." After the floods in the 1990s, the government decided to no longer raise the dikes, but move them back. "We need to remain flexible in adapting to climate change, so now we try to remove the bottlenecks," Meulepas said....

A bridge over the River Waal in Nijmegen, shot by de:Benutzer:DoubleH, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The next Carbon Based annual is here!

2012-01-21T07:53:00.001-08:00

Now available! Another annual book drawn from this very blog! I've incorporated the lessons I've learned from last year's annual and made this one much more focused.

Climate change adaptation teems with large events and subtle forces. Every day, the news brings more stories of climate-related floods, droughts, forest fires, sea level rise, extreme weather, disasters, ecological stress, and infectious diseases. The field also spans new developments in computer modeling, agriculture, water and land use, paleoclimate, scientific research, insurance, and finance. Climate instability takes a dramatic toll on indigenous peoples and developing countries, but it also warps the psychological and social quality of our lives, and in my blogging I don't neglect these subjects, either.

For this year's annual review, I've focused on stories about climate risks, since I view risk as the one way of unifying the thronging variety of climate change adaptation. It's a central topic because one effect of global warming is worsening probabilities, something that is notoriously difficult to detect. It's a natural filter for me because risk has been the subject of many of the articles I've written during 2011. Maybe it's my bias showing, but I think risk as a topic is only going to grow in importance as the risks shift and take new forms.

Better scientific understanding of link between climate change, food security needed

2012-01-21T06:53:00.001-08:00

Mariaan Webb in Creamer's Engineering News (South Africa): Scientists should increasingly make critical contributions to ensure food security and environmental sustainability, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) systems ecologist Dr Bob Scholes said on Friday, adding that there was a need to better understand the link between climate change and food production.

More attention should be given to developing agricultural practices that can deliver multiple benefits, such as feeding nine-billion people by 2050, while reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, he said. Writing in the January 20 issue of the journal Science, Scholes and coauthors, many also members of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, urged scientists to lay the groundwork for more decisive action on global food security in the context of international environmental negotiations in 2012.

“There are clearly significant opportunities during this year for scientists to provide the evidence required to quickly generate new investments and policies that would ensure that agriculture can adapt to the impact of climate change – and in ways that mitigate production of greenhouse gas emissions,” Scholes said.

...Meanwhile, the world is already outside a safe operating space with respect to agriculture, climate change, and food security. “To mobilise increased investment, scientists must document ways that farmers, industry, consumers and government can move toward, expand or shift the safe space and achieve multiple benefits from sustainable farming practices,” the paper stated....

A 1943 poster created by the U.S. government Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information, Domestic Operations Branch. Bureau of Special Services

Ecologists gain insight into the likely consequences of global warming

2012-01-21T06:41:00.000-08:00

Science Daily: A new insight into the impact that warmer temperatures could have across the world has been uncovered by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London. The research, published in the journal Global Change Biology on January 20, found that the impact of global warming could be similar across ecosystems, regardless of local environmental conditions and species.

The team, based at Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, went to Iceland to study a set of geothermally-heated streams. The streams provided scientists with a unique environment to conduct their research; they were able to isolate the effects of temperature from other confounding variables found in nature.

Lead author, Queen Mary's Dr Daniel Perkins, explains: "The streams in Iceland are all very similar, in terms of their physical and chemical environment, but maintain very different temperatures to each other all year round. "This enabled us to explore how temperature, both past and present, affects the rate at which respiration responds to temperature in ecosystems."

Dr Perkins said that when the team exposed the organisms found in streams to a range of temperatures "the rate at which carbon was respired increased with temperature as expected, but surprisingly, rate of increase was consistent across streams which differed in average temperature by as much as 20°C."...

A stream wends its way to the coast in Iceland, shot by Bromr, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

France developing 'culture of risk prevention'

2012-01-20T08:57:00.000-08:00

Dizery Salim on the website for the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction: Speaking at France’s first-ever conference on hazards, the UN disaster risk reduction chief, Margareta Wahlström, yesterday commended the French government for its efforts to implement disaster risk reduction nationally, saying that the country could be a model for others in Europe.

Speaking in Bordeaux, at the National Conference on Natural Hazards – Assises Nationales des Risques Naturels – Ms. Wahlström highlighted France’s active role in the European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction, at a time when Europe accounts for 14.3% of global economic losses due to disasters.

Two years ago, France was badly hit by tropical cyclone Xynthia, incurring $4.2 billion in damage as the storm whipped through western Europe in late February and early March 2010. About 50 people were killed and nearly 900,000 people were left without electricity. “Afterwards, the country did a remarkable job of mainstreaming the lessons learnt from Xynthia into national plans for disaster management and plans for infrastructure and for flood protection,” said Ms. Wahlström...

...Already, 7,700 municipalities in hazard prone areas have developed local plans for disaster prevention, with 4,000 more municipalities about to do the same. France has also strengthened its urban planning codes, which incorporate disaster prevention and risk reduction as key elements.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, France’s Minister for Environment, Sustainable Development, Transport and Housing, told delegates that “France is rather good” at managing natural hazards, and a new attitude towards planning along the coast after Xynthia had led to “a number of constructions bans, changes in planning rules. But state policy would only be effective if the country adopts a culture of risk prevention,” warned the minister.

She cautioned against added risks posed by new technology, which she said could cause a “domino effect” when combined with commonly occurring natural hazards, such as floods, earthquakes, avalanches and landslides....

An extratropical cyclone named Xynthia brought hurricane-force winds and high waves to Western Europe at the end of February 2010, CNN reported. Winds as fast as 200 kilometers (125 miles) per hour reached as far inland as Paris, and at the storm’s peak, hurricane-force winds extended from Portugal to the Netherlands. Hundreds of people had to take refuge from rising waters on their rooftops. By March 1, at least 58 people had died, some of them struck by falling trees. Most of the deaths occurred in France, but the storm also caused casualties in England, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal.

Book guides forest management in face of climate change

2012-01-20T08:21:00.000-08:00

Teton Valley News: Resource managers at the nation's 155 national forests now have a set of science-based guidelines to help them manage their landscapes for resilience to climate change. Developed by the Forest Service's western research stations, the four-part framework details a practical and credible management approach, grounded in strong partnerships between local resource managers and scientists, that will help national forests meet their management mandate, said Yasmeen Sands, a spokesman for the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service.

The guidelines are published in Responding to Climate Change on National Forests: A Guidebook for Developing Adaptation Options, a new report published by the PNRS. "This guide lays out an important foundation and provides useful, real-life examples to help managers and citizens build their climate-smart adaptive capacity," said David Cleaves, the Forest Service's climate change advisor. "It will be an important source for practices and tools for enhancing the future of our Nation's forests."

...Forests use an annual performance "scorecard" to outline specific goals and objectives and to document their success in meeting the framework's direction. The new adaptation guidelines support this process by providing managers with specific information about decision tools, models, and planning instruments and by offering guidance on setting priorities, assessing resource vulnerabilities, and developing goals.

Central to the guidelines are four steps - reviewing, ranking, resolving, and observing - that managers can follow to localize climate change science, evaluate sensitivity of specific natural resources, develop adaptation options, and monitor their effectiveness, Sands said. This approach makes the guidebook flexible enough to apply to all national forests, regardless of which ecosystems they contain or what their management priorities are....

The Columbia River Gorge, at the southern edge of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington, shot by Roger Peterson, US Forest Service

2011 the ninth-warmest year on record

2012-01-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

NASA: The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

"We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting," said GISS Director James E. Hansen. "So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record."

The difference between 2011 and the warmest year in the GISS record (2010) is 0.22 degrees F (0.12 C). This underscores the emphasis scientists put on the long-term trend of global temperature rise. Because of the large natural variability of climate, scientists do not expect temperatures to rise consistently year after year. However, they do expect a continuing temperature rise over decades.

The first 11 years of the 21st century experienced notably higher temperatures compared to the middle and late 20th century, Hansen said. The only year from the 20th century in the top 10 warmest years on record is 1998....

While average global temperature will still fluctuate from year to year, scientists focus on the decadal trend. Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since the year 2000, as the Earth has experienced sustained higher temperatures than in any decade during the 20th century. As greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, scientists expect the long-term temperature increase to continue as well. (Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory, Robert Simmon)

The cost of climate change in Pakistan

2012-01-20T07:52:00.000-08:00

Anish Alavi in Dawn (Pakistan): Pakistan, Guatemala and Russia have been the countries worst hit by climate change in the recent past, with thousands of lives lost to extreme weather events. In addition to being the worst-affected, the poor developing countries hit by climate change have had the least amount of responsibility towards causing these catastrophes. While earth’s climate has been evolving continuously over the last millennium, the last two centuries have seen unprecedented threats to climate change.

Located in the sub-tropics and partially in temperate regions, Pakistan’s southern tip hits the Arabian Sea and at its northern end are the Great Himalayas. Climatologically, most parts of Pakistan are arid to semi-arid with significant spatial and temporal variability in climatic parameters. Fifty nine per cent of the annual rainfall which occurs in the country is due to the monsoon rains.

The northern region is dominated by the mountains where climate is ranging from humid to arid. Below the north, tropical continental climate prevails. The Greater Himalayan region receives winter precipitation mostly in the form of snow and ice, and the melting snow keeps the rivers flowing through out the year.

The coastal climate of Pakistan is restrained to a narrow strip along the coast in the south and south east. However, as large numbers of residents dwell in low coastal areas or near the river delta where sea level rise and flooding are frequent, Pakistan has to suffer a great loss every year.

...Meanwhile, Professor Imran Ahmed highlighted water-related issues being faced worldwide. “In Bangladesh,” he said “the harvesting season is usually hit by droughts and by the time the season is over, monsoon rains begin, which affects the agriculture sector.”...

Kund Malir beach in Balochistan, Pakistan, shot by Bilal Mirza, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Uganda lacks active crop insurance

2012-01-20T07:47:00.000-08:00

Joseph Miti in AllAfrica.com via the Monitor (Uganda): Farmers will have to incur more losses caused by climate related conditions since there is no active insurance scheme for the agricultural sector, a new study has revealed.

The feasibility of agricultural insurance report, released on Monday, also indicates that there is no active private sector player offering crop insurance in the country. "This is partly due to a lack of technical expertise and distribution capacity of insurers to develop and service agricultural insurance," Mr John Ariko, a consultant with Friends Consult limited - a firm that conducted the study said.

The study was commissioned by the Uganda Co-operative Alliance (UCA) to explore the feasibility of agricultural insurance with specific emphasis on weather index insurance (WII) as an alternative risk management approach for farmers.

According to the report, carried out in Eastern and Northern Uganda -areas more vulnerable to hydro-meteorological risks, 53 per cent of what farmers may have obtained is lost in fields due to climatic related conditions....

Inadequate flood protection from suspect US levees

2012-01-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

Evan Lehman in Scientific American via ClimateWire: Levees are as varied in the United States as the people they guard. They're shaped like snakes, rings and spurs that can be tough, flimsy or a century old. No one knows for sure where all of these earthen walls are, who built them or what type of rocky mixture lies shrouded inside their bulk. Some help protect homes from flooding, while others ring industrial zones containing chemical plants and refineries. Many stop rivers from turning into lakes on farms that abut the riverfront.

They shadow the diverse landscapes they protect. But these widely disparate levees do share at least two common traits -- they are all steadily weakening from water's efforts to go under, over or straight through their earthy embankment. Very few were built to protect against the more powerful storms expected by climate scientists and the flooding that will accompany them.

Now, after years of treating suspect levees with remarkable caution, federal flood officials are recalibrating the way they view the risk to communities lying behind these walls. Government officials say it's driven by better scientific methods used to measure precise flood hazards. But critics believe it could result in still more homes being built in the path of runaway water.

"I do think it's a huge concern," said Shana Udvardy, who directs flood management policy for American Rivers. "The risk is, people are going to believe they're safe when they're not." At last count, there were roughly 30,000 miles of levees across the country. String them together and they would wrap around the world, and then some. Here's another way to harness their ubiquity: For every McDonald's restaurant in America, there are more than 2 miles of levees.

And most of them, almost 70 percent, are not trusted by government flood officials to do their job. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said in 2010 that 20,350 miles of levee walls are "not accredited" -- meaning that those who live behind the barriers are assumed to be threatened by a "high risk" of flooding....

Boys climbing on a levee in New Orleans, shot by Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Quakes make 2011 a costly year

2012-01-19T13:27:00.000-08:00

Prevention Web: For two consecutive years the long-term disasters trend has been bucked by major earthquakes which claimed thousands of lives and affected millions in both 2010 and 2011, according to new statistics published today by CRED and the UN office for disaster risk reduction, UNISDR.

UNISDR Chief, Margareta Wahlström, said today: “The Great East Japan Earthquake and the accompanying tsunami is a reminder to us all that we cannot afford to ignore the lessons of history no matter how forgotten. The many major cities located in seismic zones need to take seriously the probability of return events even if many years have passed since the last seismic event of major magnitude.

“In 2010 we saw this phenomenon as well when over 220,000 people died in Haiti which had not been hit by an earthquake of such strength for almost 200 years. Unless we prepare for the worst then many earthquake-prone urban areas around the world are destined to see even greater loss of life in the future as more and more people move to cities.”

Figures released today by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at a UNISDR-hosted press conference in Geneva showed that 20,943 people lost their lives in earthquakes last year out of a total of 29,782 people directly killed by 302 disasters. The earthquake fatalities included 19,846 who died in Japan while the remainder were largely accounted for by the October earthquake in Turkey.

The year was marked by the fact that major disasters in terms of human impact and economic losses occurred in high and middle-income countries. These included the Brazil floods (January); the New Zealand earthquake (February); the Japan earthquake/tsunami (March); two waves of severe storms and tornadoes in the USA (April and May); Hurricane Irene in the USA, (August/September); floods in Thailand (August to December); the October earthquake in Turkey and the December storm Sendong (Washi) in the Philippines....

Photo of damage to the Sydenham Heritage Church sustained during the 2011 New Zealand earthquake, shot by Peter Walker, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Tanzanian farmers look to science - and tradition - to resist drought

2012-01-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

Felix Mwakyembe in AlertNet: Recent years have not been kind to Veremund Mfuse and his maize crops. As Tanzania struggles with increasingly extreme weather, the farmer, from Mbarali in Tanzania’s Mbeya region, has seen his maize production decline, a problem he says is affecting farmers across the region.

“Our major challenge here is drought. We face a critical shortage of water, rains are not reliable (and) we harvest very little,” Mfuse said. In response to the problem, which experts in the region say is linked to climate change, some farmers are now planting new, drought-resistant maize hybrids, while others are experimenting with a return to traditional varieties.

Arnold Mushongi, a researcher at Uyole Agricultural Research Institute in Mbeya, about 860 km (540 miles) from Dar es Salaam, has developed several new varieties of maize that require little water, can grow in less fertile soil and are pest-resistant.

They can also produce significantly bigger yields: 8 to 10 tonnes per hectare compared with less than 2 tonnes per hectare from commonly used local varieties, particularly in drought conditions, according to Mushongi. The new hybrids mature in 125 to 130 days, up to three weeks less than is required for normal maize varieties.

Mfuse says that is exactly the kind of maize he now needs to be planting. “Maize seeds that take so long to mature are a loss (in current conditions). We need seeds that take a shorter period to mature, (so that) when rains stop the maize is ready for harvest,” he said....

A lone maize plant, shot by ben britten, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Amazon basin becoming carbon emitter

2012-01-19T13:17:00.000-08:00

Kate Taylor in TG Daily: Deforestation and climate change are having a profound effect on the Amazon basin, shifting it from a carbon sink to a carbon emitter. The Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in the Amazon (LBA) evaluates the connections between climate change, agricultural expansion, logging, and fire risk.

And, concludes the team, there are clear signs of transition to a disturbance-dominated regime in the southern and eastern portions of the Amazon basin. "Deforestation has moved the net basin-wide budget away from a possible late 20th-century net carbon sink and towards a net source," they say.

The Amazon forest currently holds about 100 billion tones of carbon - 10 years’ worth of global fossil fuel emissions. The project showed that it can cope with considerable climatic variation from year to year, but that this resilience can be overwhelmed by severe or prolonged drought.

Successful efforts in Brazil to curb deforestation have cut the clearing of forests in the Amazon basin, from nearly 28,000 km2 per year in 2004 to less than 7,000 km2 in 2010. However, the incidence of fire has not decreased.

"One strong sign of a new disturbance regime is the high number of recent large-scale wildfires, which are a by-product of intentional fires in Brazil’s ‘arc of deforestation.’," says Jennifer Balch, co-author of a paper appearing in Nature...

Rainforest outside Manaus, shot by Phil P Harris, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

A campaign in Pakistan to promote disaster risk reduction

2012-01-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

One Pakistan News: UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency for Human Settlements, as part of their disaster risk management activities has initiated a mass information campaign.

Under the Pakistan Settlements Flood Recovery Project funded by the Government of Japan, UN-HABITAT has produced a calendar for the year 2012 and an interactive board game The Indus River Game by successfully applying disaster risk reduction approach. These include the messages of safe construction and preparedness for anticipated floods in the future. These messages have been developed with an aim to empower communities and increase their resilience towards disasters throughout Pakistan. The game and calendar have been produced, keeping in mind the different kinds of disasters that have happened in Pakistan. Graphic illustrations have been used for easy understanding by the masses and at the same time for appeal to a wider audience.

UN-HABITAT has, with a team of legal experts also prepared a simple guide to introduce the principle elements of land administration systems in this country. The guide has been published as part of the response to the initiative on housing and land so that people can understand the complex land administration system in Pakistan in a very simple and elaborative manner. The “Guide on Land and Property Rights” can be of use to donor agencies, international affairs organizations, national civil society organizations, lawyers and community leaders engaged in relief, rehabilitation, development or other similar works that necessitate some basic information about the general features of the rural land administration system in Pakistan...

Climate adaptation difficult for Europe's birds

2012-01-18T06:40:00.000-08:00

PhysOrg: Åke Lindström is Professor of Animal Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. Together with other European researchers he has looked at 20 years' worth of data on birds, butterflies and summer temperatures. During this period, Europe has become warmer and set temperatures have shifted northwards by 250 km. Bird and butterfly communities have not moved at the same rate.

"Both butterflies and birds respond to climate change, but not fast enough to keep up with an increasingly warm climate. We don't know what the long-term ecological effects of this will be", says Åke Lindström.

Butterflies have adapted more quickly to the changing temperatures and have moved on average 114 km north, whereas birds have only moved 37 km. A likely reason is that butterflies have much shorter lifespans and therefore adapt more quickly to climate change. Because birds like to return to the same breeding ground as in previous years, there is also greater inertia in the bird system.

"A worrying aspect of this is if birds fall out of step with butterflies, because caterpillars and insects in general represent an important source of food for many birds", says Åke Lindström....

A young European greenfinch, shot by Mexxx, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Flood control blueprint a sea change in California's Central Valley

2012-01-18T06:19:00.000-08:00

An editorial in the Sacramento Bee: If California is to help protect the Central Valley from floods over the next half century, it can't just place Band-Aids on the Valley's current system of levees, dams, weirs and bypasses.

Fortunately, the state Department of Water Resources, under Director Mark W. Cowin, seems to recognize this reality. In releasing a draft of the Central Valley Flood Protection plan a few weeks ago, DWR has acknowledged the state must make strategic changes to the system to protect lives and property, prepare for climate change and marry flood control with habitat and recreational concerns.

Best of all, the DWR report makes clear that flood control is not just a Central Valley responsibility. The state's transportation system, its seat of government, its agricultural industries and its water delivery system could be dangerously disrupted by a devastating flood.

"The state is also responsible for responding to emergencies and public threats," says the report. "Thus, it is in the state's interest to invest funds proactively to avoid and mitigate for known risks."

More of a framework for action than a detailed list of recommendations, the DWR report floats a number of ideas that have long been discussed by engineers but not pushed in a real way. These include expanding the Yolo Bypass to handle stronger flows expected in the future. It also mentions creating two new bypasses, in the south Delta and beside the Feather River, to relieve pressure points in the system....

A retouched image of the confluence of the Feather and Yuba rivers, near Yuba City, California, from Yuba_City_CA_From_Air.jpg, work by Shannon1, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

A water summit lauched by United Arab Emirates and Abu Dhabi

2012-01-18T06:13:00.000-08:00

WAM (the United Arab Emirates): His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces has launched the International Water Summit to be held alongside the World Future Energy Summit in January 2013.

UAE Minister of Environment and Water, Dr. Rashid Ahmad Bin Fahad, Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, and Dr. Glen Daigger, President of the International Water Association (IWA) held a press conference at the World Future Energy Summit today to make the announcement.

Dr. Rashid said: "As a result of the increased pressure on this valuable resource due to various factors including over population, agricultural and economic growth and the unsustainable consumption patterns, various countries around the world are currently facing real problems with water resources. Moreover, climate change has increased the pressure on this resource as well. Therefore, this launch - as a result of our visionary leadership's drive towards achieving water security - helmed by President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan - will shed a real light on the subject.

Dr. Sultan Ahmed al Jaber said: "based on the directives of His Highness General Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, the launch of the International Water Summit and its bid to face the most pressing challenges facing the world today - is a testament to the UAE's role in shedding light on today's relevant subjects and a clear testimony to thought leadership." Emphasizing the clear directives laid by His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed when he recently stated "water is more important than oil in the United Arab Emirates," Dr Al Jaber, called the statement a bold and clear signal - that an economy based on oil - is placing water at the topmost of its agenda; adding that His Highness also made a clear call to action: that we need to enhance and increase the studies and research necessary, create strategic action plans, and find solutions to preserving this invaluable resource for future generations....

Abu Dhabi as seen by the SPOT satellite, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

More valuable than gold

2012-01-18T06:08:00.000-08:00

Dominic Feain in the Coffs Coast Advocate (Australia): A new warning calling for greater research into Australia's groundwater has been welcomed by locals concerned about the burgeoning coal seam gas industry on the Northern Rivers.

The statement, released yesterday by the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training, describes Australia's underground water reserves as a "buried treasure" potentially more valuable to our future gross national product than gold, oil, wheat or coal. It states groundwater will become increasingly critical as the population grows and temperatures rise.

Environmental scientist Boudicca Cerese, from community group Kyogle Against Gas, said her primary concern had always been the lack of information and she believed the warning vindicated the call for a moratorium on the industry until "adequate regional hydro-geological studies" have been undertaken. "The critical thing it says is that the key to ground water management is knowledge - and I believe we have insufficient knowledge to be going ahead with any coal seam gas exploration," she said.

The centre's director, Professor Craig Simmons, says that ground-water makes up 97% of the world's fresh water, but he expected dependence upon it to grow as the pressure from population growth, climate change, mining, coal seam gas and agriculture intensified.

"In a future where rainfall cannot be relied on, groundwater represents Australia's national water security for the future," Prof Simmons said. "Where our national security is concerned, we should spare no effort to assure it....

Water bore and dam on a property in the Townsville district of Queensland, Australia, ca. 1902

China report spells out "grim" climate change risks

2012-01-18T06:04:00.000-08:00

Chris Buckley in Reuters: Global warming threatens China's march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, says the government's latest assessment of climate change, projecting big shifts in how the nation feeds itself.

The warnings are carried in the government's "Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change," which sums up advancing scientific knowledge about the consequences and costs of global warming for China -- the world's second biggest economy and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gas pollution.

Global warming fed by greenhouse gases from industry, transport and shifting land-use poses a long-term threat to China's prosperity, health and food output, says the report. With China's economy likely to rival the United States' in size in coming decades, that will trigger wider consequences.

"China faces extremely grim ecological and environmental conditions under the impact of continued global warming and changes to China's regional environment," says the 710-page report, officially published late last year but released for public sale only recently.

...Assuming no measures to counter global warming, grain output in the world's most populous nation could fall from 5 to 20 percent by 2050, depending on whether a "fertilization effect" from more carbon dioxide in the air offsets losses, says the report. But that possible fall can be held in check by improved crop choice and farming practices, as well as increased irrigation and fertilizer use....

New model finds climate change could expose North America, East Asia and the Caribbean to costly hurricane damage

2012-01-17T11:29:00.000-08:00

PhysOrg: Researchers from MIT and Yale University have found that coastal regions of North America and the Caribbean, as well as East Asia, are most at risk for hurricane damage — a finding that may not surprise residents of such hurricane-prone communities. However, the researchers say by the year 2100, two factors could more than quadruple the economic damages caused by tropical storms in such regions and around the world: growing income and global warming.

In a paper published this week in Nature Climate Change, researchers developed a model to predict hurricanes around the world, looking at how hurricane activity might change in the next 100 years both with and without climate change.

Even in a world without climate change, where rates of greenhouse gas emissions remain stable, the researchers found that annual economic damages from hurricanes could double in the next century: Global population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2100, likely leading to more development along hurricane-prone coastlines. Given such growth, the researchers projected that worldwide annual damage from hurricanes — currently $26 billion — could increase to $56 billion in the next century.

Under a similar economic scenario, but with the added factor of climate change, the team found that annual hurricane damage could quadruple to $109 billion by 2100. According to the researchers’ model, proliferating greenhouse gases would likely increase the incidence of severe tropical cyclones and hurricanes, which would increase storm-related damage....

Hurricane Isabel in 2003, 400 miles north of Puerto Rico

Protecting France's Mediterranean salt marshes, a haven for migratory species

2012-01-17T11:23:00.000-08:00

Anne Devailly in the Guardian (UK): Near the Mediterranean resort of Sète, on a 140-hectare expanse of wetland that used to be the Villeroy salt marsh and now belongs to France's Conservatoire du Littoral (CDL), a little island of seashells mixed with sand and salt has just been laid out for the birds. About 100 metres from the shore, it should accommodate a colony of migrating terns in the spring. The island cost the Thau conurbation, made up of eight localities around the southern side of the Etang de Thau, some €30,000 ($38,000).

Four similar amenities are planned but others might appear on other salt marshes in the Camargue, on the Etang de l'Or (near Montpellier), and on lagoons farther along the coast near Port la Nouvelle, Aude. Since 2007 the Compagnie des Salins du Midi (CSME), which used to work almost all the salt marshes along the south coast of France, has concentrated output at Aigues Mortes and sold all the other sites to the Conservatoire.

In exchange for about €12.4m the coastal conservation organisation is now responsible for some 1,240 hectares of wetland. Its acquisitions are set to continue, with more than 1,000 hectares round the Etang de Lairan, Gard, soon to follow. Each time the challenge is to find ways of turning former production facilities into top-grade centres for nature conservation.

"In 10 to 20 years," says Jean-Paul Salasse, the head of the Ecologistes de l'Euzière (EDE) organisation, "we can lure vibrant bird colonies back to these places, or see the return of the same plant life as everywhere else. But this won't happen on its own: we must continue to control the water level."...

Flamingos in the Camargue, shot by Barbarossa, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Shelter from the storm?

2012-01-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

David Hodgkinson in AlertNet: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN, the International Organization for Migration and many other groups warn that the effects of climate change - including rising sea levels, heavier floods, more frequent and severe storms, drought and desertification - may cause large-scale population movements.

The scale of climate change displacement is often established by reference to the possible numbers of those displaced; estimates range from tens to hundreds of millions of people. Although it’s not clear what climate change will mean for human population distribution, there is consensus that climate change will lead to significant displacement over time.

And while it’s important to take account of the different contexts and forms that climate change displacement may take, there is a need, as one expert has said, “for international recognition of the problem, a better understanding of its dimensions and a willingness to tackle it.”

One way of tackling the problem is through a treaty for climate change displaced persons (CCDPs). At the moment, neither existing climate change law nor refugee law adequately provides for CCDPs. There has been no coordinated response by governments to address human displacement due to climate change. And given the nature and magnitude of the problem which displacement presents, ad hoc measures may lead to inconsistency, confusion and conflict...

A Flood on Java (c.1865-1876) by Raden Saleh, lithograph, 32 x 44 cm, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and the Caribbean Studies

Eyeing resources, India, China, Brazil, Japan, other countries want a voice on Arctic Council

2012-01-17T11:12:00.000-08:00

Terra Daily via SPX: With an eye on rapid changes in the resource-rich Arctic, countries like China, India and Brazil, which have no Arctic territories, are nonetheless knocking on the door of the increasingly influential Arctic Council looking for admission as permanent observers.

The issue has divided existing members, with Russia and Canada most strongly opposed. It is among the major questions with which Canada will have to grapple as it prepares to chair the Council next year.

It will also feature prominently on the agenda of a two-day meeting on the future of the Arctic Council, January 17-18 in Toronto: The 2nd annual Munk-Gordon Arctic Security Conference, which has attracted the participation of several experts, national ambassadors and indigenous leaders - more than 100 participants from 15 nations in all.

Full members of the Arctic Council are Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Denmark (Greenland) - the eight countries with Arctic territory. Six northern indigenous groups - the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Arctic Athabaska Council, Gwich'in Council International, Sami Council, Russian Association of the Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON) and Aleut International Association - wield strong influence as permanent participants....

"I don't care if you are a Los Angeles class fast attack submarine -- get off my lawn." U. S. Navy photo by Chief Yeoman Alphonso Braggs. (RELEASED)

Water security in Africa

2012-01-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

Timothy Walker in AllAfrica.com via the Institute for Security Studies (South Africa): Africa is home to some of the largest lakes in the world, both in size and volume. These lakes play a significant role in the political, social, economic and environmental life of many of the continent's people and their importance is set to increase. However, the strain placed upon these water resources is also forecast to pose significant challenges for their future sustainable development....

...Firstly the issue of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing must remain firmly fixed in the spotlight. Indeed, the World Wildlife Fund South Africa (WWF-SA) recently highlighted the perilous future facing inshore fishing sources for Africa's littoral states. For instance according to the WWF-SA a great number of South Africa's inshore marine resources are considered overexploited or collapsed.

This also applies in other parts of Africa, yet attention must be paid to internal sources of fish such as rivers and lakes, thereby placing emphasis on the importance of cooperative monitoring and regulation of fishing. The dependency on fish as a source of protein and livelihood is also likely to increase and the example of Lake Victoria further shows how the management of these areas must be efficient and coordinated....

....In August 2011 the tiny Kenyan island of Migingo in Lake Victoria became the focal point for a dispute between Uganda and Kenya resulting from past uncertainties of borders and contemporary pressures for securing food and livelihoods. The value of the island lies in its location within rich fishing grounds; it is however a mere 500m from Ugandan waters, and accusations of poaching and unequal access to ostensibly shared resources heightened tensions.

It also illustrates how the past management of lakes continues to impact upon the situation today, and advocating prudent and cooperative strategies now is vital to avoid a repetition of tension and possible conflict...

Lake Victoria from space, from a NASA photograph

Saskatoon curious about effects of climate change on water system

2012-01-16T11:57:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Warren in the Star Phoenix (Saskatoon): The City of Saskatoon wants to work with the University of Saskatchewan on a research project that will study how the city's storm water and sewer systems are affected by climate change trends.

The two-year project could start this month and will study the city's "intensity-duration-frequency curves" - the main tool used in storm water management system designs - in the wake of unprecedented rainfall during the past decade. Saskatoon has had four of its wettest years on record since 2005, according to the city.

A city report, which is a response to an inquiry made by Coun. Mairin Loewen, recommends approval for the $106,000 U of S study and goes before city council tonight. The study will complement the city's greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan, Loewen said in an interview. Other cities have developed climate change plans and Loewen suggested the city look to Toronto's Ahead of the Storm: Preparing Toronto for Climate Change report as a guide for its own plans.

"What we're seeing is the rainfall events happening more frequently, and what I want to see come out of this is an assessment of how appropriate our systems are for those changing patterns in our climate," Loewen said. "What we've seen in the last decade is that these rain events may not be that rare anymore. Perhaps the change is just a blip, and perhaps not. It's a good step forward to work with the university to identify possible risks."

..."A Climate Adaptation Plan ensures the hard and soft infrastructure of the community can respond to climate change effects," the report said. Assessments of infrastructure and climate modelling can help cities better prepare for adverse weather, the report added...

A brush fire in Saskatoon, shot by SriMesh, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Climate change could quadruple deaths

2012-01-16T11:36:00.000-08:00

Clare Pain in Cosmos: Climate change may quadruple the loss of life due to extreme heat in Brisbane, an Australian study has predicted. Cunrui Huang and colleagues at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane investigated how temperature changes affect the death rate in Brisbane. The study adopted a ground-breaking way of measuring climate change deaths, which could become standard for similar studies carried out for other cities.

"This is something every individual city has to look at," said co-author Adrian Barnett, explaining that cities around the world have unique climate and housing conditions. The results appear in Nature Climate Science today.

Looking at non-accidental deaths in Brisbane between 1996 and 2004, the researchers evaluated them in terms of 'years of life lost'. This way of measuring a death recognises that the death of a younger person (say in their 50s) is more of a loss to society than the death of an 80 year old. "This is the big difference in our study," said Barnett. "We suspected that a lot of temperature-related deaths were occurring in very old people." But when they used their new measure, it became clear that there must also be younger people, between 40 and 60 years old, dying from high and low temperatures.

Commenting on the study, Colin Butler of the Australian National University in Canberra said, "The 'years of life lost' approach is the real breakthrough in this paper," adding that he wishes he had thought of the idea himself. "They show that heat waves have a bigger effect on mortality in younger and middle-aged people than we would expect."

Although one might think that Brisbane's balmy climate would lead to more deaths from heat than cold, the opposite is currently true. When the researchers correlated their mortality data with temperature, they found that there are many more deaths from the cold than from heat...

Brisbane from the air, shot by Cyron Ray Macey, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Rising sea levels threat to Oman real estate plans

2012-01-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

Claire Ferris-Lay in Arabian Business: Rising sea levels in Oman could be a threat to future construction projects in the Gulf sultanate, new research has said. Land in Oman is moving a few millimeters every year, impacting areas in the capital city of Muscat and Seefah while data has also suggested the country could be at risk of a tsunami in the future, a study from the German University of Technology in Oman has found.

“Here in Oman, the land is moving by a few millimeters each year - in both directions up and downwards. It is necessary to quantify these processes as large infrastructure projects are under development in the coastal regions,” Professor Goesta Hoffmann, associate professor of applied geosciences at the university, said in a statement. “As a consequence, parts of Oman especially between Seefah and Muscat are threatened.”

Construction projects in Oman, like many Gulf countries, have ramped up in recent years as the country looks to diversify its economy and address its growing national population. Spending on construction projects is expected to reach more than $27bn by 2014, according to research from Venture....

Distant click of Muscat Port - the yacht of the Sultan of Oman can be seen anchored at port. Shot by Pranav21391, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Include trees in climate modeling, say scientists

2012-01-16T09:57:00.000-08:00

Dina Rochmyaningsih in the Guardian (UK): Current climate models and projections may be inaccurate because measurements are based on guidelines that do not include the effects of trees on the local climate, according to agroforestry experts. This in turn may be hindering effective adaptation by local farming communities, as the true effect of climate change on their crops is not accurately captured.

Trees can influence many of the climate factors predicted by modelling, and their effects should be added to climate maps, scientists from the the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) said in a book, "How people and trees can co-adapt to climate change," launched last month (1 December). According to the book, enhancing tree cover for agricultural purposes is a good adaptation mechanism.People have fought long and hard for access to our woodlands.

"Modifying tree cover in agricultural landscapes to adjust micro-climates for crops has a long history," the book says, citing examples of Sahel parklands, where trees protect grain crops from excessive heat and maintain soil moisture; South-East Asian coastal zones, where intercropping with coconut has a long tradition; and mountain slopes, where 'shade trees' are used to help with cocoa, coffee or tea farming. But it adds that "none of this has yet made it into national climate-adaptation planning".

Following the guidelines of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), global weather stations collect climate data on open ground — away from trees, said Meine Van Noordwijk, an editor of the book. The collected data are then used for climate modelling and projections. But trees can affect the local climate in a region, for example by reducing the maximum temperature and increasing humidity, said Van Noordwijk. Depending on where the weather station is placed, with respect to the tree canopy, the data may be different and this might produce different results, he said....

"Norns and the tree," a drawing by Anker Eli Petersen (original work of art); MarieStockholm, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Pakistan's cities wake up to climate threats

2012-01-16T09:48:00.000-08:00

Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio in AlertNet: Alerts last June from the Pakistan Meteorological Department about a fast-approaching tropical cyclone, urging the evacuation of communities along the coastline of the southern city of Karachi, are still fresh in Haleema Memon’s memory.

“The warnings created a hue and cry in settlements along the shoreline and in other parts of the city… as it caught us unprepared,” recalled the 45-year-old mother of five, who lives in Ibrahim Hyderi, a fishing settlement on Karachi’s outskirts with her husband, a fisherman. “The people fled to take refuge in central and northern parts of the city as the storm brewed.”

...But not everyone received adequate notice of the storm. Many fishermen’s relatives, with good reason, were desperately worried about the safety of their loved ones out at sea. “My husband never came back,” said 35-year-old Ayesha Mallah. “It was too late for (him) and others on the fishing vessel. … The warnings were sounded some 18 hours after they had embarked on the journey.” Mallah says dozens of fishermen who went missing in the storm may well have postponed their trip if they had received more timely information about the cyclone.

That is one reason environmentalists are pressing city authorities to draw up an effective strategy to protect its fast-growing population from disasters. “Such plans will help mitigate risks and mortalities if any natural disaster strikes,” said Karachi-based Tahir Qureshi, a coastal ecosystem adviser at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Pakistan.

With a population of nearly 20 million, the sprawling port city of Karachi – which covers 3,527 square km (1,362 square miles) and is nearly four times larger than Hong Kong - is vulnerable to a range of natural disasters, from storms to earthquakes. It is also grappling with the threat of rising sea levels. Addressing the threats will take a range of interventions, experts say...

A Karachi beach at sunset, shot by Wahidain, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Aerosol particle increase linked to more rainfall

2012-01-15T10:42:00.000-08:00

Nina Chestney in Reuters: A rise in the atmosphere of aerosols - miniscule particles which include soot, dust and sulphates - has led to more rainfall in certain parts of the world and could provide vital clues for future climate predictions, a scientific study shows. A deeper understanding of rainfall patterns would aid scientists' ability to predict changing trends in the climate.

Aerosols can be produced from burning coal or gas, industrial and agricultural processes or by the burning of forests. As well as being harmful for human health, they are blamed for causing air pollution such as smog and smoke.

"For a range of conditions, increases in aerosol abundance are associated with the local intensification of rain rates," said the study published in Nature Geoscience by scientists from Israel's Weizmann Institute, NASA, and other institutions.

"The relationship is apparent over both the ocean and land, and in the tropics, sub-tropics and mid-latitudes," it added, which would include large parts of continents such as Africa, South America and Asia....

A late May shower in 2006 heads in towards Dockray along Matterdale, shot by Bob Danylec, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Scientists to study effects of climate warming on Truckee River

2012-01-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

Jeff DeLong in the Reno Gazette-Journal (Nevada): Scientists are beginning new research into how a warming climate could affect water supplies and flooding along the Truckee River, the waterway that serves as one of the region's central natural features and the source of most of its water. The $1.7 million study by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is part of a larger effort examining eight rivers across the West, with California's Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers among them.

The goal is to get an early idea of what costly changes might be associated with climate change when it comes to the vital issue of water supplies and flooding along major river basins in the western United States, officials said. "The goal is to look into the future so we can be prepared for it," said Mary Johannis, deputy planning officer for the Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento.

Authorized by Congress in 2009 under the Secure Water Act, the study would build on information collected through a risk assessment released last year that examined potential impacts from climate change. Experts have projected that in California's Sierra Nevada range, the climate could warm between 1 and 5 degrees between now and 2050, said Arlan Nickel, project manager for the Bureau of Reclamation.

One expected result could be "fairly significant" reductions in the amount of precipitation falling in upper-level watersheds as well as a change in how that precipitation falls, Nickel said. "Not only will there potentially be less overall precipitation, but the type of precipitation will be different. There will be less snowfall and more rainfall," Nickel said....

View of the Truckee River from the UPRR grade just East of Truckee, California. Shot by Bruce C. Cooper (DigitalImageServices.com) aka Centpacrr, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

New Hampshire experts express concern for rising sea levels, lack of planning

2012-01-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

Christa Marshall in Fosters.com: Driving past an undulating sea wall on New Hampshire's coast, Steve Miller pointed at the blue ocean and said the placid waters were deceptively calm. During winter storms now, the ocean gets busier than it has gotten in the past. Sometimes it flings baseball-sized rocks over the barrier onto the road, he said. Just across the road are miles of mansions with their manicured lawns and gazebos. Because of its high property values and the tourism dollars it attracts, the stretch is known as the Gold Coast.

As the climate warms and the sea level rises, though, the Gold Coast could quickly become an expensive problem. Farther north, Miller turned onto a causeway connecting the city of Portsmouth with the island community of New Castle. The bridge artery is a few feet above the water line on a sunny day, but looks like a floating strip of highway during heavy rains and recent high "king tides."

"Imagine if you add climate change and storm surges to the situation," said Miller, a coastal training program coordinator at the Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve who spoke as a private citizen for this article.

"I worry about a day when this entire bridge will be underwater," said Miller, passing floating buoys. "It's the only way in and out. If someone had a heart attack on the island, how would we get them out of here, and who would pay for it?"...

Sailboat crosses under the lift span of Portsmouth's Memorial Bridge, shot by JayDuck, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Spanish ski resorts struggle with lack of snow

2012-01-15T07:53:00.000-08:00

Terra Daily via AFP: Spanish ski resorts are watching business melt away as a lack of snow and unusually warm weather force them to close or operate just some of their pistes. "We have not been able to open at all this year. We are talking about the worst thing that could happen," said Agustin Ramirez, the manager of the Valdesqui resort near Madrid as he stood in front of a closed ticket booth.

The 40-year-old resort located some 60 kilometres (40 miles) from the Spanish capital has 27 pistes of different levels of difficulty that normally draw around 1,500 customers on a weekday -- and up to 3,500 on weekends. But on a recent visit its parking lot with its sweeping views of the peaks of the surrounding Madrid mountains was empty except for three staff vehicles and the pistes were covered in brown grass.

Of Spain's 32 ski resorts, eight including Valdesqui were closed for skiing on Friday due to the lack of snow and mild temperatures, according to the website of the Spanish Tourist Association of Ski and Mountain Resorts. None of the 24 resorts that were operating had all of their trails open -- and those that did operate pistes relied on expensive man-made snow to draw skiers....

Not quite fair, but this is part of the ski resort of Pradollano in Sierra Nevada, in August 2010, Andalusia, Spain. Shot by Jebulon, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

USAID pledges $922 million to Bangladesh by 2016

2012-01-15T07:19:00.001-08:00

Daily Star (Bangladesh): The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will provide $922 million to Bangladesh over the next five years to help the country address food security, health and global climate change.

The health sector will receive the largest assistance of $312 million, while USAID will spend $269 million for food security, $210 million for humanitarian assistance, $66 million for strengthening democracy and governance and $63 million for climate change.

USAID Bangladesh Mission Director Richard Greene unveiled the agency's new five-year strategy from 2011 to 2016 for the nation at an event at Radisson Hotel in Dhaka yesterday.

The US government's development agency organised the event to celebrate its 50 years of global assistance and 40 years with Bangladesh.

“Bangladesh has made tremendous success in promoting child health and family planning and became one of a few countries who have achieved some of the millennium development goals," Greene said. "USAID has successes in marketing family planning products at affordable prices."...

Nymphaea pubescens, the national flower of Bangladesh, shot by Bernard Loison, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Reuse of municipal wastewater has potential to augment future drinking water supplies

2012-01-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

Terra Daily via SPX: With recent advances in technology and design, treating municipal wastewater and reusing it for drinking water, irrigation, industry, and other applications could significantly increase the nation's total available water resources, particularly in coastal areas facing water shortages, says a new report from the National Research Council.

It adds that the reuse of treated wastewater, also known as reclaimed water, to augment drinking water supplies has significant potential for helping meet future needs. Moreover, new analyses suggest that the possible health risks of exposure to chemical contaminants and disease-causing microbes from wastewater reuse do not exceed, and in some cases may be significantly lower than, the risks of existing water supplies.

"Wastewater reuse is poised to become a legitimate part of the nation's water supply portfolio given recent improvements to treatment processes," said R. Rhodes Trussell, chair of the committee that wrote the report and president of Trussell Technologies, Pasadena, Calif. "Although reuse is not a panacea, wastewater discharged to the environment is of such quantity that it could measurably complement water from other sources and management strategies."

The report examines a wide range of reuse applications, including potable water, non-potable urban and industrial uses, irrigation, groundwater recharge, and ecological enhancement. The committee found that many communities have already implemented water reuse projects - such as irrigating golf courses and parks or providing industrial cooling water in locations near wastewater reclamation plants - that are well-established and generally accepted....

A wastewater treatment plant, shot by Fanghong, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

India's Economic Survey to have special chapter on financing of climate change

2012-01-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

Business Line in the Hindu (India): The Finance Ministry will include a special chapter on financing of climate change in the Economic Survey, the Chief Economic Advisor, Mr Kaushik Basu, has said.

“This year we have decided to devote a special chapter on the topic of financing of climate change in the Economic Survey,” Mr Basu said while addressing a UNDP event here today.

Speaking at the event, the Economic Affairs Secretary, Mr R. Gopalan, said that the climate change issue is posing a challenge for the world.

“The challenges are both environmental and developmental. Addressing climate change is a challenge for all humanity and it is in our interest that the world community address the issue effectively,” Mr Gopalan said....

Climate change miscalculation endangers Des Moines Riverwalk

2012-01-14T07:53:00.000-08:00

David Elbert in the Des Moines Register explains a terrible error that throws a costly piece of new infrastructure into jeopardy. Why, yes, the Army Corps of Engineers was involved, why do you ask?: A little more than a year ago, Des Moines City Manager Rick Clark received a piece of shockingly bad news that is likely to take years and nearly $40 million to fix. The gist of the news was that federal officials had recalculated a worst-case flood on the Des Moines River, and the new numbers showed water in downtown Des Moines was likely to rise nearly two feet higher than previously projected.

The new flood estimates from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers arrived in December 2010, just as the city and Principal Financial Group were ramping up to complete the final phases of the downtown Principal Riverwalk.

The new calculations meant that the flood specifications used in the design of the $70 million riverwalk were no longer valid. It meant that the riverwalk, and several million dollars’ worth of flood protection associated with it, was designed and built based on a worst-case flood that was nearly two feet lower than what the new numbers indicated.

...The new information created a virtual train wreck. The city and Principal had to figure out what to do. The riverwalk was more than 90 percent complete, but it was already several years behind schedule. Should they stop everything until new, higher flood walls could be designed and built? Or should they go ahead and finish the riverwalk while they figured out a Plan B?

There really wasn’t much choice, Clark said. The riverwalk project had to move forward, and it will. Paving of most of the walkway is expected to be completed late this year or early in 2013, and once it is, the riverwalk will formally open. But the work will now take place against a backdrop of uncertainty...

The Des Moines skyline, shot by Des Moines Guy, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license