Straw albedo mitigates extreme heat

Peter Ruegg in a press release from ETH Zurich: Fields that are not tilled after crop harvesting reflect a greater amount of solar radiation than tilled fields. This phenomenon can reduce temperatures in heat waves by as much as 2 °C, as researchers from ETH have demonstrated in a recent study.

Wheat fields are often tilled immediately after the crop is harvested, removing the light-coloured stubble and crop residues from the soil surface and bringing dark bare earth to the top. Post-harvest tilling is a widely practised and common management technique in Europe. However, ploughed fields can have a negative effect on the local climate during a heat wave. This effect was addressed in a recent study conducted by researchers at ETH Zurich led by Edouard Davin, senior lecturer at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, and Sonia Seneviratne, professor of land-climate dynamics, which has now been published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Unploughed stubble is lighter in colour and reflects more solar radiation than tilled surfaces. Measurements taken show that approximately 30% of sunlight is reflected back due to the albedo effect – the albedo is a measure of the reflectance capacity of reflective surfaces. Ploughed fields reflect only 20% of incoming solar radiation. Model simulations have shown that this difference results in a 50% higher level of reflection in unploughed fields and that this in turn has a significant effect in extreme heat. In the event of a heat wave, such as the one in Europe in 2003, unploughed farm fields could reduce the local temperature by as much as 2 °C.

The hotter it becomes, the greater the albedo effect and the resulting temperature reduction. "Cropland albedo management has more effect during heat waves because there is almost no clouds during these events and more radiation can be reflected back into space", says first author Edouard Davin. However, this effect is only short term and local — perhaps at the most regional, but never trans-regional.

...The scientists also report that the cooling effect of an unploughed field cannot be attributed solely to changes in albedo values. Crop residue acts as an insulating layer that holds back moisture from deeper soil strata and releases it only slowly — this long process of evaporation also helps reduce the air temperature during a heat wave. In a ploughed field, on the other hand, moisture evaporates more rapidly and almost completely in extreme heat. Thus, there is an additional cooling effect of no-till farming through slow evaporation....

Harvested wheat field with round straw bales. Shot by Arne Hückelheim, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Climate change 'not a distant threat,' White House warns

Tanya Lewis in LiveScience: From longer and hotter summers to heavier downpours to more coastal flooding, the effects of human-induced climate change are already hitting every region of the United States and the U.S. economy, a government report finds.

These extreme weather events will likely only get worse, experts say. The Northeast will experience more heat waves, extreme precipitation and coastal flooding caused by storm surge. The Midwest can expect hotter weather and increased demand for water and energy. And the Southwest will suffer hotter, drier weather and more wildfires, according to the third National Climate Assessment (NCA) released by the White House today (May 6).

"Climate change is not a distant threat — it's already affecting every region of the country and economy," John Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said today at a news conference. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

The report reveals how regional impacts of climate change will affect health, agriculture, energy, water and transportation, said Jerry Melillo, a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and chair of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee.

"For decades, we've been connecting the dots about climate change," Melillo said at the news conference. "Now, we have connected those dots."....

Sunset at White Pocket in Arizona, shot by John Fowler, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

China and Nepal agree to cooperate on mountain science

Bhrikuti Rai in SciDev.net: China has agreed to share scientific knowledge with Nepal on the effects of climate and environmental changes on the Tibetan plateau in order to spur sustainable development. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) signed memorandums of understanding earlier this month (7 April) with Nepalese research institutions the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and Tribhuvan University.

The agreement is part of the Third Pole Environment (TPE) initiative, a research programme CAS set up in 2009 to study the Tibetan plateau. The area is often referred to as the ‘third pole’ because it contains huge quantities of ice in the form of glaciers that feed major Asian rivers.

Glacial melt in Nepal has previously been a source of flooding: in 2008 a devastating flood hit northern India after a river breached flood defences, leading some to call for better cross-border monitoring of conditions in the mountain regions where the rivers begin.

ICIMOD could now become an important player in environmental research spearheaded by TPE in the Himalayan region, says Dong Qi of the bureau of international cooperation at CAS. The agreement will also open the way for government institutions to cooperate on environmental research, he says.

Areas for cooperation outlined in the memorandum include: monitoring air quality levels; studying high-altitude wetland and river systems to share information on water discharge and strengthen flood forecasting; and researching climate change impacts, for example the effect of pollutants such as elemental carbon on glacial melt and fresh water availability in the region....

Taboche (6367 m) seen from the same point in 2007. The clean, debris-free glaciers and ice nestled below the Taboche summit have been reduced considerably by recent warming trends. Shot by Alton Byers, Khumbu, Nepal, 2007, The Mountain Institute., Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Caribbean to forge united front on elusive climate finance

Peter Richards in IPS: Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, says the promises of money by the “biggest polluters in the world” for small island developing states (SIDS) like his to adapt to climate change are a mostly a “mirage”.

But as chair of the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) grouping, Gonsalves will be playing a lead role in getting the region to coordinate a united front on climate finance.  “We agreed on the establishment of a task force on climate change and small island developing states to provide guidance to Caribbean climate change negotiators, their ministers and political leaders in order to ensure the strategic positioning of the region in the negotiations,” he told IPS following the CARICOM summit that ended here on Tuesday.

Gonsalves said the region is now preparing for two important meetings in September – the U.N. Climate Change Summit and the Third U.N. SIDS International Meeting in Samoa.

Guyanese President Donald Ramotar, who made a presentation at CARICOM’s closed-door summit, told IPS that it was important for the leaders themselves to get involved in the negotiations “and to make our voices heard on this matter, because as you know we have been the least contributors to climate change, but we are among the first to feel the big effects.”

...The task force must now “find areas where CARICOM can agree on”, he said. “This is a critical decision by heads [of state] at a time when efforts are underway through the U.N. to have a global climate change agreement by the end of 2015,” he said...

Mustique International Airport, shot by Acp, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Conservation cooperation a ‘matter of survival’ for Arabs

Ola Al-Ghazawy in SciDev.net: The Arab region’s best chance of facing the challenges of food insecurity, water scarcity and natural disasters lies in collaborating on environmental preservation, a study says. The study, published in The Lancet (20 January), argues that current academic discussions about health, population and development in the Arab region fail to convey the true level of urgency.

Rather than speaking about security — as is common in much development parlance — the report argues that the Arab world is facing threats great enough to call into question its survival, and calls for “using survival as an analytical concept in studying the dynamics driving the threats”.

Muna Abdel Aziz, a Sudanese consultant in public health medicine based at the Warrington Borough Council, United Kingdom, tells SciDev.Net that “the concept of survival indicates urgency whereas security does not necessarily convey this”.

Ecological sustainability is a key issue because population-environment-development dynamics have an interactive relationship with health, the report says. For example, environmental factors such as droughts can force urbanisation, and the city slums formed as a result can become a breeding ground for disease.

The paper adds that sufficient investment in disaster preparedness is beyond any single nation’s capacity, making collaboration essential. Abbas El-Zein, lead author of the paper and an associate professor at the University of Sydney, Australia, tells SciDev.Net: “We are arguing that collaboration around ecological sustainability offers the best chance of success in dealing with issues such as water scarcity, food insecurity and emergency preparedness”....

High-rises in Shibam, Wadi Hadhramaut (or Hadhramout, Hadramawt) Yemen. Shot by Jialiang Gao www.peace-on-earth.org, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Cusco, Peru receives help from World Bank in adapting to climate change

Via Andina in Peru This Week: The Andean city of Cusco in southern Peru has received assistance from the World Bank to strengthen local climate change adaptation planning. The World Bank’s disaster risk management team in Latin America and the Caribbean recently piloted a regional study and technical assistance initiative in Cusco and other four small and medium sized cities (SMSC) in the region.

The initiative’s main objective was to support SMSC with their adaptation planning for floods and landslides, two of the most recurrent climate-related hazards in the region. SMSC in the LAC region are diverse in location, topography and socio-economic and institutional make-up, yet many are struggling with similar challenges caused by rapid urban growth, weak capacities in urban planning and inadequate provision for public services and infrastructure.

SMSC are also less likely to have had access to climate change adaptation (CCA) training, financing or knowledge networks. The ultimate goal of the initiative was to strengthen local adaptive capacity and to increase urban resilience through mainstreaming climate change adaptation into current planning systems. The other medium sized cities selected were Castries, Saint Lucia; El Progreso, Honduras; Estelí, Nicaragua; and Santos, Brazil.

Over the course of one and a half years, the task team worked with these cities to conduct three assessments to evaluate their i) climate related risks, ii) institutional adaptive capacities, and iii) socio-economic capacities to adapt to climate change.

These assessments, in conjunction with a series of consultative workshops with city planners and decision-makers, resulted in the development of Strategic Climate Adaptation Investment and Institutional Strengthening Plans for each city. These plans identify priority investments and activities to strengthen institutional capacities for climate change adaptation....

Roofs in Cusco, shot by Colegota, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Spain license

Savanna vegetation predictions best done by continent

North Carolina State University Newsroom: A “one-size-fits-all” model to predict the effects of climate change on savanna vegetation isn’t as effective as examining individual savannas by continent, according to research published in Science this week.

Savannas – grasslands dotted with trees – cover about 20 percent of the earth’s land and play a critical role in storing atmospheric carbon, says Dr. William Hoffmann, associate professor of plant and microbial biology at North Carolina State University and co-author of the study.

A single global model can't predict savanna tree density as well as continent-specific models, according to research published in Science this week.

A single global model can’t predict savanna tree density as well as continent-specific models, according to research published in Science this week. Photo of a South African savanna courtesy of Dr. William Hoffmann, a co-author of the study.

“We wanted to find out what controls savanna vegetation – essentially the density of trees within the savanna – and whether we can use a single global model to predict what will happen to savannas if global temperatures rise,” Hoffmann said. “We found that the rules determining tree density are fundamentally different among the three continents studied – Africa, Australia and South America. That means a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach won’t work.”

…“For example, greater moisture availability – a combination of rainfall, rainfall seasonality and drought indices – meant greater tree density in Africa and Australia, but it had almost no relationship with tree density in South America,” Hoffmann said.

Not surprisingly, he added, the study showed that fire reduces tree density. But the researchers found some strong counter-intuitive relationships between rainfall and fire frequency, namely that more moisture meant more fires. Hoffmann explained that more rainfall in a savanna meant faster-growing grasses, which meant any fires in that savanna would have ample fuel to spread quickly and easily…

A grassland in Slovenia, shot by Eleassar, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

UN develops innovative early warning tool for drought prone Asia-Pacific regions

UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific: Senior officials from governments across the Asia-Pacific region today agreed on a set of collective priorities and ground-breaking initiatives that will build resilience to natural disasters and further enhance regional cooperation, at a meeting convened by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in Bangkok.

Faced with the continued, severe impact of natural disasters across the region, representatives at the Third Session of the Committee on Disaster Risk Reduction called on ESCAP to facilitate regional cooperation aimed at harnessing technological advances for resilient, inclusive and sustainable development.

In line with this, ESCAP's long-standing Regional Space Applications Programme for Sustainable Development (RESAP) announced the development and operationalization of a new regional mechanism on drought. With this mechanism, the monitoring and early warning capabilities of drought-prone countries will be significantly strengthened through the effective use of space-based information provided by service nodes in the region.

Every year in the Asia-Pacific region, droughts push millions of farmers into debt and deepen poverty and hunger but this new regional mechanism is capable of issuing early warnings before the drought is visible to the human eye. Its satellite sensors will detect warning soil and water conditions before the worst of the droughts take hold, so that early action can be taken.

Initially supported by Chinese and Indian space agencies, the regional drought mechanism will provide monitoring and early warning services and capacity building for drought-prone countries in the region. Mongolia is already piloting the mechanism, and Cambodia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka are expected to join soon as pilot counties....

Europe needs local and regional strategies for climate change

Neil Swannick in the Guardian (UK): ...The European commission launched a strategy in April about adaptation to climate change, which was reviewed by the committee of the regions last week in Brussels. This European Union consultative body comprises 353 elected local and regional authority representatives from the 28 member states. Local and regional authorities are well aware that they are in the front line as first responders to extreme weather events in their communities, such as the deadly floods in central Europe when the Elbe and Danube burst their banks.

Local government, as well as having to cope with the "new norm" of more frequent extreme weather events and the slow-onset effects of climate change such as increase in temperatures and rising sea level, will need to put in place the adaptation work necessary to avoid their regions becoming unattractive to investors or uninsurable because of climate risk.

Many areas of local government responsibility such as spatial planning, buildings, waste and transport, will need to be changed and emergency planning and adaptation brought together. But while local and regional authorities will have to be key players in developing climate resilience, the EU adaptation strategy focuses its attention on national adaptation strategies, which few member states appear to be addressing as a priority.

The Committee of the Regions argues that a multi-level governance approach, which recognises a role for member state governments and local and regional authorities, will be necessary to make our world ready for the changing climate environment. It points out that encouraging societies and economies to become more resilient to climate change, while at the same time lessening their contribution to the problem through reducing greenhouse gas emissions, is a crucial aspect of strengthening Europe's competitiveness and quality of life over the coming decades....

Climate experts call for local models to aid prediction

Jan Piotrowski in SciDev.net: Better observational data and geographically precise climate models are needed to allow scientists to predict the effects of rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at a local level, says a major climate change report.

Deficiencies in these areas prevent reliable temperature and rainfall predictions being made on a regional scale, according to the report published this week (30 September) by Working Group I of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The document, while underlining how much climate change science has advanced since the panel's last major report in 2007, also stresses the urgent need for more location-specific assessment, says Michel Jarraud, the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization. "We need further projections, in particular to downscale this information to a regional and local level," he told a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden, on Friday.

The report compiles the scientific evidence for the physical aspects of climate change and, when joined by two upcoming investigations, one on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, and the other on mitigation options, will comprise the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).

While models predicting temperature changes at a continent-wide scale consistently agree with observations, moving to a regional level adds much more uncertainty, meaning they match less well,  says report....

Photo by Christoph Michels, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Developing countries to share community-based adaptation experience

T.V. Padma in SciDev.net: Countries in Asia and Africa have formed an open and informal 'government group network' to help mainstream community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change and share knowledge and evidence gathered from projects.

The formation of the network was announced at the seventh international conference on CBA, which was opened in Dhaka last week (22 April) by Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.  "The focus is on sharing knowledge and evidence from government experience in mainstreaming CBA activities into national and local planning," said Saleemul Haq, senior fellow at the International Institute of Environment and Development, London, and director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Dhaka.

CBA focuses on innovative ways in which local communities deal with climate change impacts and integrate scientific and local knowledge in planning local adaptation strategies. This has evoked interest in climate scientists and development practitioners at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"The science of adaptation has made promising advances with the number of chapters on adaptation increasing steadily in successive IPCC reports," Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, said. "But the science of community-based adaptation is just emerging."...

A 2008 flood in Bihar, India, shot by Kumarrakajee, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Regional insights set latest study of climate history apart

Space Daily via SPX: As climate studies saturate scientific journals and mainstream media, with opposing viewpoints quickly squaring off in reaction and debate, new findings can easily be lost in the noise. But in the case of Northern Arizona University Regents' professor Darrell Kaufman and a study appearing in Nature Geoscience, obscurity is an unlikely fate.

What Kaufman-the lead co-author of "Continental-scale temperature variability during the last two millennia"-and 78 experts from 24 countries have done is to assemble the most comprehensive study to date of temperature change of Earth's continents over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years. By looking regionally, the researchers found considerable complexity hidden within a global average.

"We wanted a new and ambitious effort to reconstruct past climate," Kaufman said of the PAGES 2k network of researchers. "One of the strongest aspects of the consortium study is that it relies on regional expertise."

Members of the consortium represent eight continental-scale regions. They lent their insights about the best proxy records-such as tree-ring measurements-to use for a particular region, and how to interpret the data based on regional climatology.

While the study does not attempt to attribute temperature changes to natural or human-caused factors, Kaufman said the finding of a long-term global cooling trend that ended late in the 19th century is further evidence that increased greenhouse gasses have had an influence in later years. "The pre-industrial trend was likely caused by natural factors that continued to operate through the 20th century, making 20th century warming more difficult to explain if not for the likely impact of increased greenhouse gasses," Kaufman said.

While that sounds like a familiar theme, the study's findings of regional variations are less well known. Because of extensive participation by scientists working in the Southern Hemisphere, Kaufman said, data from those regions broadened what had been a view previously centered on Europe....

A NASA image of Europe processed by http://www.terraprints.com, Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license

Chinese dams on Brahmaputra worry India

Hindustan Times: Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Nabam Tuki said on Saturday he would ask the central government to look into China constructing three hydropower projects on the Brahmaputra river in Tibet. "China building the three dams will affect the interest of people in the downstream areas. We will soon move New Delhi to take up this issue with China in the interest of the people," Tuki said. He added: "It is a cause of concern for us but we are not certain how big these dams are..."

The 2,906-km-long Brahmaputra - called Tsangpo in Tibet - is one of Asia's longest rivers that traverses 1,625 km through Tibet, 918 km in India and 363 km in Bangladesh before flowing into the Bay of Bengal. China's plan to build the dams over the Brahmaputra river and diverting water into its arid provinces has been opposed by state governments in India's northeast.

Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi had written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh requesting him to take up the matter regarding the construction of the three dams on the Brahmaputra with Beijing. "We can't do anything if China is building dams. Our concern is that the lives of the people in the downstream should not be affected by the dams," Tuki said.

China announced plans to build three dams - Dagu, Jiacha and Jiexu - on the river last month as part of its aggressive plan to provide energy and water needs for its 1.3 billion people. The Chinese government said that the hydropower dams would not impact flood control efforts or the ecological environment in downstream regions.

Experts said that if the projects were carried out, they would have devastating consequences on the lives of millions of people in India and Bangladesh....

Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet. In India it becomes very wide and is called Brahmaputra. A beautiful shot by Luca Galuzzi (Lucag), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Maybe climate change is closer than we think

Tracee Hutchison in ABC (Australia): Australia's recent re-acquaintance with devastating flooding in Queensland and northern NSW this summer has been another sobering reminder of the climatic shape-shifting wreaking havoc with lives and livelihoods across the country.

...Watching on, from the fire-prone drier states, the unspoken narrative is screaming; where will these people go? What will they do for a living? And who will grow the food they were growing for both domestic and export markets? There's even been talk from Queensland Premier Campbell Newman that some flood-prone residential areas in Queensland might have to be relocated to avoid what looks increasingly like the recurring reality of extreme flooding.

So what about when the city in question has numbers nudging the entire population of Australia? That's the reality in Jakarta right now, where record flooding has swamped the CBD for the first time in history. There is increasing talk that relocating the Indonesian capital is the only feasible solution to an escalating problem.

Jakarta is sinking. Literally. Years and years of unregulated private water-bores has drained the city's below-sea-level water table dry. The record rain, coupled with an underdeveloped drainage system and the penchant of Jakartans to use the city's waterways as rubbish dumps, brought this city of 20-odd million to a standstill of a different kind.

For the first time in years there were no cars on Jakarta's streets (other than floating ones); instead, the city more used to lumbering in a grinding traffic gridlock was incapacitated by metre-high water that turned the city's roads into Venice-style canals. It put a whole new - and rather ironic - spin on Jakarta's car-free day campaign to reduce pollution in the city.

...The implications of a non-functioning Jakarta are immense and wide-ranging both for Indonesia and the region. But this is the reality facing the new Jakartan governor Joko Widodo and outgoing Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his government, who are canvassing alternate-capital locations in higher and drier locations....

January 19, 2013, in Jakarta, shot by Thedonz at Indonesian Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

California's Central Valley irrigation intensifies rainfall, storms across the Southwest

UC Irvine News: Agricultural irrigation in California’s Central Valley doubles the amount of water vapor pumped into the atmosphere, ratcheting up rainfall and powerful monsoons across the interior Southwest, according to a new study by UC Irvine scientists.

Moisture on the vast farm fields evaporates, is blown over the Sierra Nevada and dumps 15 percent more than average summer rain in numerous other states. Runoff to the Colorado River increases by 28 percent, and the Four Corners region experiences a 56 percent boost in runoff. While the additional water supply can be a good thing, the transport pattern also accelerates the severity of monsoons and other potentially destructive seasonal weather events.

“If we stop irrigating in the Valley, we’ll see a decrease in stream flow in the Colorado River basin,” said climate hydrologist Jay Famiglietti, senior author on the paper, which will be published online Tuesday, Jan. 29, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The basin provides water for about 35 million people, including those in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix. But the extra water vapor also accelerates normal atmospheric circulation, he said, “firing up” the annual storm cycle and drawing in more water vapor from the Gulf of Mexico as well as the Central Valley. When the additional waves of moisture bump into developing monsoons, Famiglietti said, “it’s like throwing fuel on a fire.”

Famiglietti, an Earth system science professor in the School of Physical Sciences, and colleague Min-Hui Lo, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling who is now at National Taiwan University, painstakingly entered regional irrigation levels into global rainfall and weather models and traced the patterns.

“All percent differences in the paper are the differences between applying irrigation to the Central Valley and not applying it,” Famiglietti said. “That’s the point of the study – and the beauty of using computer models. You can isolate the phenomenon that you wish to explore, in this case, irrigation versus no irrigation.”...

An irrigation canal in the Central Valley, shot in 1972

Amazon regional alliance to confront the climate emergency

Milagros Salazar in IPS: "When someone in Peru sneezes, someone in Brazil catches a cold. When a barrel of oil is produced in Ecuador, a neighbouring country ends up buying it," says prominent environmentalist Yolanda Kakabadse.

Everything that happens in Latin American countries is closely connected, as if they were vital organs shared by the same body, maintains Kakabadse, former environment minister of Ecuador and current regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN).

This is why the CDKN is promoting an initiative that will allow Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia to exchange and assess evidence-based information on the risks, impacts and threats of climate change shared by the countries of the Amazon region.

The aim is not only to measure impacts that are already evident, but also to foresee damages in the medium to long term. What will be the implications for the lives of the most vulnerable people if global temperatures increase two degrees by 2025? This is the kind of questions that need to be asked, explained Carolina Navarrete of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), which is also supporting the initiative.

For example, Navarrete told Tierramérica*, "a two-degree increase in temperature could make it necessary to move coffee crops up 300 meters higher, and the same thing would happen with other crops. How can we prepare for this situation without causing pressure on sensitive areas, such as protected natural areas, for example?"

The goal of the project is help the region's authorities respond to these crucial questions for the population's survival with concrete actions, Kakabadse and Navarrete told journalists from the five countries gathered in Puerto Maldonado, the capital of the Peruvian Amazonian region of Madre de Dios....

The photo was taken 1986 in the Peruvian region of Ayacucho, shot by Torox, public domain

The limitations of climate models

Fabio Bergamin in Phys.org: How accurate is the latest generation of climate models? Climate physicist Reto Knutti from ETH Zurich has compared them with old models and draws a differentiated conclusion: while climate modelling has made substantial progress in recent years, we also need to be aware of its limitations.

We know that scientists simulate the climate on the computer. A large proportion of their work, however, is devoted to improving and refining the simulations: they include recent research results into their computer models and test them with increasingly extensive sets of measurement data. Consequently, the climate models used today are not the same as those that were used five years ago when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its last report.

But is the evidence from the new, more complex and more detailed models still the same? Or have five years of climate research turned the old projections upside down? It is questions like these that hundreds of climate researchers have been pursuing in recent years, joining forces to calculate the climate of the future with all thirty-five existing models.

Together with his team, Reto Knutti, a professor of climate physics, analysed the data and compared it with that of the old models. In doing so, the ETH-Zurich researchers reached the conclusion: hardly anything has changed in the projections. From today's perspective, predictions five years ago were already remarkably good. "That's great news from scientist's point of view," says Knutti. Apparently, however, it is not all good: the uncertainties in the old projections still exist. "We're still convinced that the climate is changing because of the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. However, the information on how much warmer or drier it's getting is still uncertain in many places," says Knutti...

A wall cloud with lightning, in Miami, Texas, via NOAA

Cambodian DRR managers to study best practices at Filipino Climate Change Academy

Philippine Information Agency: Fifteen members of the Cambodian Joint Climate Change Initiative (JCCI) are visiting Albay this week to study in brief the province’s valuable strategies on climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR).  Albay Gov. Joey Salceda said the visitors will be in the province for five days starting November 5, for a learning exchange with the Climate Change Academy and to share approaches on coping mechanisms through community based organizations.

The group will have a meeting with Salceda at the Climate Change Academy of Albay where they will be provided an opportunity to personally hear the governor discuss Albay’s holistic approach to CCA and DRR, which had elevated the province to a world class category in the campaign on climate adaptation.

Albay is UN’s global model in in CCA and DRR and Salceda had been proclaimed its Senior Global Champion and spokesman, and now sits as director of the Green Climate Fund of the United Nations Framework Convention on climate Change representing Asia.

The province had since then become a venue of many seminars and trainings, and visits from CCA and DRR practitioners from other countries, and specially most recently after the establishment of the the Climate Change Academy at the Bicol University, in this city.

The academy is first of its kind in Asia and was also a brainchild of Salceda, who pioneered CCA and DRR in local governance and made popular the ‘zero casualty’ and ‘preemptive evacuation’ strategies which has since then adopted by the national government and other LGUs ....

Caribbean ministers address regional water security and climate change

Caribbean 360: At the first-ever meeting of water ministers in the Caribbean, nine ministers with responsibility for water resources management committed to making all essential efforts in addressing water security and climate change in the region.

The assurance was given last week at the 8th Annual High Level Session (HLS) Ministerial Forum in The Bahamas. The Forum is a joint initiative of the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C) and its partner the Caribbean Water and Wastewater Association (CWWA).

Critical to the declaration signed by the ministers was their recognition that high level political leadership is key for meeting water security and climate change challenges faced by the Caribbean. This, along with other recommendations, was sanctioned by ministers from The Bahamas, Anguilla, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

It was also deemed imperative that Caribbean governments in collaboration with regional partners should conduct national assessments on the status of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) implementation in the Caribbean and keep the implementation of IWRM under continuous review.

During the two-day HLS, ministers and senior government officials offered their perspectives on national and regional priorities for water security in the Caribbean and discussed regional water resource coordination at the ministerial level.

Included in the main issues brought to the table were the need for greater focus on IWRM; disaster risk reduction; closer integration of the water sector with other sectors; access to water; water tariffs; the need for more water experts in the region; raising water conservation consciousness at the national and regional level; looking into various water technologies to control resources; the use of rainwater harvesting as a mitigation practice;  water's impact on health; and climate being key to addressing water security....

St. Catherine's beach in Bermuda, shot by dbking, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, no user license given, though Flickr usually is Creative Commons 2.0

Climate scientists put predictions to the test

Daniel Stolte at the University of Arizona News: Climate-prediction models show skills in forecasting climate trends over time spans of greater than 30 years and at the geographical scale of continents, but they deteriorate when applied to shorter time frames and smaller geographical regions, a new study has found. 

Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, the study is one of the first to systematically address a longstanding, fundamental question asked not only by climate scientists and weather forecasters, but the public as well: How good are Earth system models at predicting the surface air temperature trend at different geographical and time scales?

Xubin Zeng, a professor in the University of Arizona department of atmospheric sciences who leads a research group evaluating and developing climate models, said the goal of the study was to bridge the communities of climate scientists and weather forecasters, who sometimes disagree with respect to climate change.

According to Zeng, who directs the UA Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Center, the weather forecasting community has demonstrated skill and progress in predicting the weather up to about two weeks into the future, whereas the track record has remained less clear in the climate science community tasked with identifying long-term trends for the global climate.

“Without such a track record, how can the community trust the climate projections we make for the future?” said Zeng, who serves on the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the National Academies and the Executive Committee of the American Meteorological Society. “Our results show that actually both sides' arguments are valid to a certain degree.”

“Climate scientists are correct because we do show that on the continental scale, and for time scales of three decades or more, climate models indeed show predictive skills. But when it comes to predicting the climate for a certain area over the next 10 or 20 years, our models can’t do it.”...

These maps show the observed (left) and model-predicted (right) air temperature trend from 1970 to 1999. The climate model developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is used here as an example. More than 50 such simulations were analyzed in the published study. (Illustration: Koichi Sakaguchi)