Pumping groundwater raises sea level

Sarah Simpson lays it out for us in Discover News: Groundwater mining — pumping aquifers faster than they can be replenished — can have nasty consequences. Mining the Ogallala Aquifer (also called the High Plains aquifer), for example, has infamously run the White River dry where it once gushed over Texas' Silver Falls...

Most of the groundwater sprayed on thirsty croplands across America makes its way into streams and rivers. Even though much of the water seeps into the soil first, the vast majority never makes its way back into the aquifer. Instead, it heads toward the sea, where it eventually contributes a surprising share of global sea level rise, reports Leonard Konikow, a hydrogeologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

In a rigorous new analysis of global groundwater depletion published earlier this month, Konikow estimated that global aquifers lost 4,500 cubic kilometers between 1900 and 2008 — enough to raise global sea level by about 12.6 millimeters. That’s a little more than 6 percent of the total sea level rise that took place over that time.

The actual impact on global sea level would have been much greater had it not been for dams, which stall groundwater’s trip to the sea. In a second paper out last week, Konikow and a group of colleagues showed that between 1972 and 2008, dams retained more water in their reservoirs than people pumped out of aquifers. Specifically, groundwater depletion contributed an average of 0.3 millimeters per year to sea level rise, whereas surface water retention decreased sea level rise by 0.4 millimeters per year.

Dams and pumps may be locked in a zero sum game for now, but the balance of power is shifting. Konikow points out a startling acceleration in groundwater depletion since 1950: one quarter of the depletion from 1900 to 2008 occurred in the final eight years. Indeed, the volume of groundwater lost between 2000 and 2008 was equal to 13 percent of global sea level rise. That means groundwater loss is accelerating right at a time when dams may be unable to keep pace; the reservoirs of old dams continue to fill with sediment, and new dam construction is expected to slow....

The White River flowing across Silver Falls in 1891. Now dried up...

If insurance companies pay out too often farmers will be threatened with ruin

Tilo Arnold in Seed Daily: Insurance can help farmers to survive dry periods. However, it can also result in the long term in overgrazing and therefore threaten their existence if insurance companies pay out in periods of moderate drought and farmers change their management strategies as a result.

This is the conclusion of the world's first study on the ecological effects of rain-index insurance. As the international community decided at the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun to set up a fund with which industrial nations intend to support developing countries with 100 billion dollars per year from 2020 for climate adaptation, rain-index insurance might experience a boom in the next few years.

Politicians should therefore be particularly cautious if they support such insurance with subsidies for example. Negative effects on the ecosystem can only be prevented if ecology and economics are taken into account, therefore securing the existence of farmers for the long term, according to the scientists in the journal Ecological Economics.

Rain-index insurance protects farmers against weather catastrophes. They do not have to provide specific proof of their losses as is otherwise the case, but the payout is linked to a predefined rain index. If less rain falls than the agreed threshold level, the farmers receive the contractually agreed compensation which should secure their survival.

The insurance is therefore viewed by development aid organisations as a concept to prevent famines brought on by drought like the current famine in eastern Africa for example. According to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), in 2009 around a million people were insured in this way with a total of around one billion US dollars. Around one billion people worldwide, in particular in dry regions, are dependent on livestock farming; a lack of rainfall therefore threatens their existence....

Livestock at San Esteban de los Patos. Shot by Eugenio Vega, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Swiss Re suggests how India can cut disaster burden

Mayur Shetty in the Economic Times (India): Reinsurance giant Swiss Re has approached the Indian government suggesting ways in which the government could reduce the economic burden of natural disasters which are increasing in frequency. The move comes in the wake of a series of disasters, with the Sikkim earthquake being the most recent. For the world, 2011 is already the second most expensive year in terms of natural disaster losses, second only to 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck US.

Swiss Re has proposed a host of risk transfer measures that could be taken in advance to deal with the economic consequences of natural disasters. These include the issue of catastrophe bonds, similar to the ones issued by Mexico, or through the purchase of insurance cover by the state itself. Swiss Re, which provides cover to insurance companies from large losses, is also a strategic partner of the World Economic Forum, participating in its Global Risk Network.

These risk transfers mechanisms are seen as crucial for emerging markets like India, primarily because the government has a high level of debt, and secondly, the level of insurance penetration is very low. Because of the low level of insurance penetration, there is a huge gap between the economic loss and the insured loss in the aftermath of natural disaster. As a result, the government ends up picking the tab and the economy suffers.

Speaking to TOI, Ivo Menzinger, MD, global partnerships, Swiss Re, said, "India is very much exposed to all sorts of perils -earthquakes and cyclones-which result in losses of billions of dollars. However there are significant gaps between the economic losses and the insured losses and the government, at the end of the day, is paying for the difference."

A Swiss Re study shows that the economic cost of natural catastrophes has risen from an average of $25 billion a year in the '80s to $ $95 billion in the 1990s and to an average of $130 billion in the last ten years. On average, over the last twenty years, only 20-40% were covered by insurance. Insurance coverage is not widespread particularly in the developing and emerging markets....

Ominous skies

Driving around yesterday with a camera, I saw this sky over a field in Canaan, Connecticut. It reminded me of one of John Ruskin's nutty but prophetic essays, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. Ruskin noted, "In many of the reports given by the daily press, my assertion of radical change, during recent years, in weather aspect was scouted as imaginary, or insane. I am indeed, every day of my yet spared life, more and more grateful that my mind is capable of imaginative vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct of brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use or refuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy command of it as a physicist's of his telescope: the times of morbid are just as easily distinguished by me from those of healthy vision, as by men of ordinary faculty, dream from waking; nor is there a single fact stated in the following pages which I have not verified with a chemist's analysis, and a geometer's precision."


He also says, in a letter to the editor of the St. James's Gazette: "I have been a very constant though not a scientific observer of the sky for a period of forty years; and I confess to a certain feeling of astonishment at the way in which the "recent celestial phenomena" seem to have taken the whole body of scientific observers by surprise. It would even appear that something like these extraordinary sunsets was necessary to call the attention of such observers to what has long been a source of perplexity to a variety of common folk, like sailors, farmers, and fishermen. But to such people the look of the weather, and what comes of that look, is of far more consequence than the exact amount of ozone or the depth or width of a band of the spectrum.

'Now, to all such observers, including myself, it has been plain that of late neither the look of the sky nor the character of the weather has been, as we should say, what it used to be; and those whose eyes were strong enough to look now and then toward the sun have noticed a very marked increase of what some would call a watery look about him, which might perhaps be better expressed as a white sheen or glare, at times developing into solar halo or mock suns, as noted in your paper of the 2d of October last year.

He goes on to blame industrialization for the spread of the Storm Cloud, or "plague cloud" as he sometimes calls it.

Maybe he was on to something.

Whales seen navigating Northwest Passage

Terra Daily: Bowhead whales, giant denizens of the arctic, are using the Northwest Passage to move across the top of the Americas, researchers in Greenland say. Skeletons and DNA samples have long suggested bowhead populations living on each side of the passage have met and mingled, and now a study using satellite tags has confirmed they do, the BBC reported Wednesday.

A team led by Mads Peter Heide-Jorgensen of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources has tagged more than 100 bowheads with satellite trackers over the last decade. In August as the arctic sea ice neared its annual minimum, satellite data showed one whale from the Greenland side and one from the Alaskan side arrived in the same area north of the Canadian mainland....

Ansgar Walk took this photo of a bowhead whale in the Foxe Basian, Nunavut, Canada, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The CIA keeps its climate change research secret

Stephen Aftergood in the Secrecy News reports on another maddening and destructive episode in the US war on transparency: When the Central Intelligence Agency established a Center on Climate Change and National Security in 2009, it drew fierce opposition from congressional Republicans who disputed the need for an intelligence initiative on this topic. But now there is a different, and possibly better, reason to doubt the value of the Center: It has adopted an extreme view of classification policy which holds that everything the Center does is a national security secret. Last week, the CIA categorically denied a request under the Freedom of Information Act for a copy of any Center studies or reports concerning the impacts of global warming.

“We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety…,” wrote CIA’s Susan Viscuso to requester Jeffrey Richelson, an intelligence historian affiliated with the National Security Archive. With some effort, one can imagine records related to climate change that would be properly classified. Such records might, for example, include information that was derived from classified collection methods or sources that could be compromised by their disclosure. Or perhaps such records might present analysis reflecting imminent threats to national security that would be exacerbated rather than corrected by publicizing them.

But that’s not what CIA said. Rather, it said that all of the Center’s work is classified and there is not even a single study, or a single passage in a single study, that could be released without damage to national security. That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago. But in this case, it is more than an annoyance. The CIA response indicates a fundamental lack of discernment that calls into question the integrity of the Center on Climate Change, if not the Agency as a whole. If the CIA really thinks (or pretends to think) that every document produced by the Center constitutes a potential threat to national security, who can expect the Center to say anything intelligent or useful about climate change? Security robots cannot help us navigate the environmental challenges ahead. Better to allocate the scarce resources to others who can....

The 16-foot diameter CIA seal that is inlaid in granite in the lobby of the Old Headquarters Building of the CIA

Vietnam pilots a system for environmental warning, disaster mitigation

Vietnam Net Bridge: A project to pilot the sensor and monitoring system for environment warning and disaster mitigation will be executed in Can Tho and Danang cities within a year from January. Vietnam National Institute of Software and Digital Content Industry will implement the project together with Panasonic System Networks Co., Ltd., and Danang and Can Tho Departments of Information and Communications.

The institute has coordinated with Panasonic System Networks Co. to set up the pilot project to monitor the environment as well as give early disaster warnings. The joint project is part of an earlier agreement between the two governments of Vietnam and Japan. The sensor system will be installed in Can Tho to give flood warnings and supervise the quality of water along the Hau River, and the collected data will be transmitted to the Committee for Flood Protection and the local government.

Meanwhile, in Danang, information from supervisory cameras at beaches and riverbanks will also be sent to the municipal government. Director of the Vietnam-Japan project Pham Huy Hoang said that all of the equipment in the project costing billions of Vietnam dong worth will be sponsored by Panasonic...

The Hiền Lương river at sunset, shot by Tong Van Tuan Anh, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Caribeean Development Bank official laments region's 'cavalier' approach to public infrastructure maintenance

Donna Hussey-White in the Jamaica Observer: A senior official of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) has lamented what he described as the apparent "cavalier" manner in which regional governments have historically treated the maintenance of public infrastructure. Norman Cameron, division chief of the project services division of the CDB, said such a practice is one of the major shortcomings of governments in the Caribbean.

"Too often in the region, costly infrastructure is constructed and they struck a shortened lifespan because of inadequate maintenance," Cameron said yesterday. "Highways are a good example, our roads are too often left to deteriorate to the extent that they have to be prematurely reconstructed at considerable cost." He said substantial funding from the CDB to Jamaica has gone into highway reconstruction, hurricane rehabilitation, airport project, irrigation, and water supply maintenance, among others.

Cameron was speaking at the opening of the Jamaica Institution of Engineers (JIE) Caribbean Infrastructure Conference at the Pegasus hotel in Kingston. The two-day conference is being held under the theme 'Developing Sustainable Infrastructure' as part of the JIE engineer's week being celebrated from September 18-25. "Vibrant and active engineering activities are crucial to the sustainable development of infrastructure in countries of the region," Cameron told the small gathering...

The Spring Garden Highway in Barbados, shot by BajanZindy, Wikimedia Commons

Mitigating disaster in Pakistan

Mohammad Hussain Khan in Dawn.com (Pakistan): Last year, districts of Sindh located on the right bank of the River Indus were badly hit by the floods. This year’s disaster has struck the lower Sindh region in particular. Standing crops in these areas have been washed away and some districts in upper Sindh have been engulfed by nature’s fury. The lower Sindh region is a significant contributor to Pakistan’s economy, producing high-quality cotton, rice, sugarcane and fresh produce. While the losses are still in the process of being assessed, there can be little doubt that the rural economy has been dealt a severe blow.

The losses to the country in general are also likely to run into billions of rupees given that this year the province was set to reap bumper cotton and sugarcane crops. As far as disaster mitigation is concerned, the government apparatus has learnt nothing from last year’s floods. All structural issues remain unresolved, particularly at the district level, even though the comprehensive National Disaster Management Act 2010 has been enacted.

The government has managed to put in place Provincial Disaster Management Authorities (PDMAs) but the next tier of disaster management, the District Disaster Management Authorities (DDMAs), has not yet been established in all of Sindh’s districts. Even in urban centres such as Karachi and Hyderabad, DDMAs can be held as existing in name alone. In districts that have been badly affected by the rains, including Tando Mohammad Khan, Mirpurkhas, Badin, Sanghar, Benazirabad, Umerkot and Tharparkar, they have not even been formed. A November 2008 district risk management plan for every province can be found on the website of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), which details the various aspects of disaster management such as preparedness, coordination and even simulation drills. But these guidelines, which could have helped mitigate the scale of the disaster, were not followed.

Last year, the Sindh PDMA was conspicuous by its absence and this year matters were no different. The parent organisation, the NDMA, exonerates the PDMA on account of its being a new organisation trying to learn from its mistakes. But when it does so at the cost of the poor, is that defensible? The Sindh PDMA, which works under the provincial rehabilitation ministry, claimed early this year that a disaster risk management plan had been prepared after consultation with stakeholders. Yet when the rain started, no plan came into effect and no effective service delivery system on the part of the PDMA was in evidence....

Brazilian farmers 'have reason to worry'

Fabiana Frayssinet in IPS: Bananas are harvested where apples used to grow; cassava, a traditional crop, is disappearing from the Northeast; and the southeast is losing the fragrance of good coffee. This is the science fiction of a new distribution of crops in Brazil, South America's agricultural powerhouse. The government is starting to get ready for this open-ended story of science fiction. Only one thing is for sure: the bad guys are neither extraterrestrials nor robots, but the most fearsome human invention: climate change.

In the midst of unusual temperature swings and increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters, weather patterns are modifying landscapes and will also start changing harvests. "It's still early to categorically state that there are effects on agriculture," said the Environment Ministry's secretary of climate change, Eduardo Assad.

But it is not a far-off possibility, and Brazil, as the world's third-largest exporter of agricultural products, has good reason to be worried, he told IPS. "There is an increase in extreme weather phenomena, such as high temperatures, which can cause the flower buds on the coffee plants to abort, or low temperatures as well within a very short time period, which cause more severe frost in the south and more intense Indian summers, which are hurting productivity in grain crops and sugar cane," he said.

In 2008, Professor Hilton Silveira Pinto at the University of Campinas, and Assad, with the Brazilian government's agricultural research agency Embrapa, led a study on global warming and the new map of agricultural production in Brazil.

The study already warned back then that the rise in temperatures – along with more frequent drought and flooding, among other consequences – could cause grain harvest losses of up to 7.4 billion reals (4.6 billion dollars at today's exchange rate) by 2020 and up to 8.7 billion dollars by 2070....

A field planted with soy in Brazil, shot by Coloradogoias, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Arctic sea ice reaches minimum 2011 extent, the second lowest in the satellite record

University of Colorado at Boulder: The blanket of sea ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean appears to have reached its lowest extent for 2011, the second lowest recorded since satellites began measuring it in 1979, according to the University of Colorado Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Arctic sea ice extent fell to 1.67 million square miles, or 4.33 million square kilometers on Sept. 9, 2011. This year's minimum of 1.67 million square miles is more than 1 million square miles below the 1979-2000 monthly average extent for September -- an area larger than Texas and California combined.

While this year's September minimum extent was greater than the all-time low in 2007, it remains significantly below the long-term average and well outside the range of natural climate variability, according to scientists involved in the analysis. Most scientists believe the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases pumped into Earth's atmosphere.

"Every summer that we see a very low ice extent in September sets us up for a similar situation the following year," said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, also a professor in CU-Boulder's geography department. "The Arctic sea ice cover is so thin now compared to 30 years ago that it just can't take a hit anymore. This overall pattern of thinning ice in the Arctic in recent decades is really starting to catch up with us."

Serreze said that in 2007, the year of record low Arctic sea ice, there was a "nearly perfect" set-up of specific weather conditions. Winds pushed in more warm air over the Arctic than usual, helping to melt sea ice, and winds also pushed the floating ice chunks together into a smaller area. "It is interesting that this year, the second lowest sea ice extent ever recorded, that we didn't see that kind of weather pattern at all," he said...

Map of September 20, 2011 sea ice extent from the National Snow and Ice Data Center

Most Joplin, Missouri residents ignored twister warning

MSNBC: "The vast majority of Joplin residents" did not respond to the first siren warning of the May 22 twister that killed 162 people because of a widespread disregard for tornado sirens, federal officials concluded in a report issued Tuesday. "This was a warned event," Kathryn Sullivan, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told reporters, noting that several days before forecasters were warning of a strong possibility of twisters.

Officials didn't blame residents, many of whom complained that sirens often go off in Joplin for tests or even just when dark clouds form, and suggested that a "non-routine warning mechanism" be developed to make it clear when a siren should be taken seriously.

Keith Stammer, who heads the local county's emergency management agency, said the department issued two sets of sirens ahead of the tornado and that many people ignored the first siren. Some people thought a second siren was an all-clear signal, which it wasn't, he said. Stammer said he has never issued an "all-clear" during his 18 years in the department. "Honestly it was a bit of a disappointment that there were so many people who didn't move to shelter after the first warning," Stammer said. "The human side is the part that's most frustrating."...

In Joplin, Missouri on June 2, 2011, Chief Yeoman Mike Shea, assigned to the Virginia-class attack submarine USS Missouri (SSN 780), helps a crane operator move a wrecked vehicle during tornado clean-up efforts (U.S. Navy photo by Lt. j.g. Ryan Sullivan/Released)

Plants create a water reserve in the soil

Terra Daily: Experiments performed at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) reveal that a zone of higher water concentration exists around the roots of a plant. It has long been known that roots alter the soil in their immediate vicinity, where other microorganisms live and the chemical composition is altered compared to that further away from the roots.

An international research team has now demonstrated in experiments at the Paul Scherrer Institute that the soil in the vicinity of roots also contains more water - contrary to the earlier belief that there must be less water in this region, as the plant takes up water from the soil. Apparently, however, plants create a small water reserve that helps to tide them over through short periods of drought. These findings could help, in the long term, in the breeding of plants to cope better during periods of drought or in support of the development of efficient irrigation systems.

These results were obtained from experiments carried out with the benefit of neutron tomography at the Paul Scherrer Institute, using a method that makes it possible to exactly show the distribution of water to a fraction of a millimetre, without having to remove a plant from the soil. The researchers have published their results in the prestigious journal New Phytologist.

"The question of how plants take up water is not only relevant to the development of new, water-efficient strains of plants, but also for improving climate models", explains Sascha Oswald, from the Institute of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Potsdam, "because typically more than half of all the water that falls onto the earth's surface as rain in a humid climate is taken up by plants and then passes back to the atmosphere through the plants."...

Photo of plant roots with striga plant connected, from the USDA Forest Service

Disasters continue to happen in Kenya

IRIN: To illustrate the lack of disaster preparedness across East Africa, a cartoon in a weekly newspaper lists, tongue in cheek, the six chapters of the region's disaster preparedness and management blueprint. These range from visits by political dignitaries to the scene of disaster, declaration of days of mourning, calls for foreign aid, rhetoric, promises to take action, the blame game and finally, business as usual.

The situation in Kenya, especially concerning man-made disasters, seems to follow this script. IRIN looks at some potential "disasters waiting to happen", as well as recent incidents, focusing on the impact, immediate action taken and whether or not lessons learnt have resulted in better preparedness:

• Railway line destruction across Kibera slum in Nairobi: In the event of a train crash, the impact would be deadly given the numbers of people living in the slum (said to be Africa's largest, with up to 200,000 people, according to the latest census) and the fact that structures have been built so close to the railway line.
• Construction under electric power lines or close to petroleum pipelines: Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu are some of Kenya's main cities with such buildings, mostly in densely populated, low-income areas. In Kisumu city, the village of Usoma is located a few metres from the Kisumu Pipeline Depot.
• Construction of residential buildings and other structures close to airports, such as Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, as well as airports and airstrips in towns such as Eldoret, Kitale (in the Rift Valley) and Kakamega (in Western Province). On 13 September, Internal Security Minister Orwa Ojode, speaking about the situation around JKIA, said: "This is a disaster in waiting. The government cannot take any more of such laxity and resistance to relocation. We must move with speed and save Kenyans from avoidable death traps."
• ... Floods: So far, incidents of flooding reported in 2011 have not caused serious damage but weather experts and disaster preparedness officials have warned that parts of the country, especially the drought-affected northwest as well as Upper Eastern, could experience floods during the coming rainy season (October-November). In mid-2010, more than 60 people died and thousands more were displaced following floods and mudslides across the country, according to the Kenya Red Cross Society.

US Army Corps of Engineers pegs 2011 flood damage to levees at $2 billion

Heather Hollingsworth in the Insurance Journal: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates it will cost more than $2 billion to repair the damage to the nation’s levees, dams and riverbanks caused by this year’s excessive flooding, a sum that dwarfs $150 million it currently has to make such repairs and that doesn’t account for damage from Hurricane Irene or Tropical Storm Lee.

Floodwaters that raged down the nation’s rivers this year have strained dams, eroded riverbanks, filled harbors with silt and ripped football field-sized holes in some earthen levees protecting farmland and small towns. The damage estimate, confirmed to The Associated Press by corps officials, promises to be more significant than with a typical flood in which high water recedes quickly. The estimate does not factor in flood damage caused by Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, and the corps does not have an estimate of the damage from those storms yet.

Along some stretches of the Missouri River, levees have been holding back floodwaters since June 1 as the corps lowered water levels from upstream dams that had filled to overflowing with record runoff from rain and winter snows. That water ultimately proved too much for many levees downstream in states such as Iowa and Missouri. Record high water levels also created havoc along the lower Mississippi from Missouri to Louisiana.

“I’m really nervous about it,” Tom Waters, chairman of the Missouri Levee and Drainage District Association, said of the limited resources. “I think the corps is real nervous about it, too.”

The Senate is considering a $7 billion emergency disaster relief bill, but only $1.3 billion of that would go to the corps. A competing House bill would allocate $3.7 billion to overall disaster aid, $226 million of it to the corps, although Congress could provide more money in future legislation.

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin said he is working with senators in neighboring states to urge support for the emergency relief. “I have seen firsthand some of the devastation along these rivers and local communities need financial assistance to recover,” Harkin said...

Flooding and levee breach at the confluence of the Nishnabottna and Missouri Rivers on June 16, 2011 during the 2011 Missouri River floods, from the US Army Corps of Engineers

Typhoon nears Japan, 1.3 million told to evacuate

Reuters: More than 1.3 million people were advised to evacuate on Tuesday as typhoon Roke approached Japan, threatening the industrial city of Nagoya with heavy rain and landslides. In Nagoya in central Japan's Aichi prefecture about 1.1 million people were urged to evacuate, while other cities in western Japan also issued evacuation advisories on a smaller scale, public broadcaster NHK said.

No major disruptions to plant operations were reported. The eye of the typhoon was 210 km (130 miles) east-southeast of the southern island of Tanegashima, moving east-northeast at 20 km (13 miles) per hour as of 5 p.m. (0800 GMT), the Meteorological Agency said....

Tropical Storm Roke on September 15, 2011

Uncertain climate models impair long-term climate strategies

Terra Daily: A new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, explains weaknesses in our understanding of climate change and how we can fix them. These issues mean predictions vary wildly about how quickly temperatures will rise. This has serious implications for long term political and economic planning. The papers lead author is Dr Nigel Fox of The National Physical Laboratory, The UK's National Measurement Institution.

The Earth's climate is undoubtedly changing, but how fast and what the implications will be are unclear. Our most reliable models rely on data acquired through a range of complex measurements. Most of the important measurements - such as ice cover, cloud cover, sea levels and temperature, chlorophyll (oceans and land) and the radiation balance (incoming to outgoing energy) - must be taken from space, and for constraining and testing the forecast models, made over long timescales. This presents two major problems.

Firstly, we have to detect small changes in the levels of radiation or reflection from a background fluctuating as a result of natural variability. This requires measurements to be made on decadal timescales - beyond the life of any one mission, and thus demands not only high accuracy but also high confidence that measurements will be made in a consistent manner.

Secondly, although the space industry adheres to high levels of quality assurance during manufacture, satellites, particularly optical usually lose their calibration during the launch, and this drifts further over time. Similar ground based instruments would be regularly calibrated traceable to a primary standard to ensure confidence in the measurements. This is much harder in space.

The result is varying model forecasts. Estimates of global temperature increases by 2100, range from ~2-10 [degrees]C.

From NASA: Satellite data and images such as those presented in this image of Earth give scientists a more comprehensive view of the Earth's interrelated systems and climate. Four different satellites contributed to the making of this image. Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) provided the land image layer and is a true color composite of land vegetation for cloud-free conditions from September 18 to October 3, 1997. Each red dot over South America and Africa represents a fire detected by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer. The oceanic aerosol layer is based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data and is caused by biomass burning and windblown dust over Africa. The cloud layer is a composite of infrared images from four geostationary weather satellites?NOAA's GOES 8 and 9, the European Space Agency's METEOSAT, and Japan's GMS 5.

Scaling up innovative climate change adaptation and insurance solutions in Senegal

AlertNet: The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and Oxfam America, supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Swiss Re respectively, today committed at the Clinton Global Initiative to expand their ground-breaking "R4 Rural Resilience Initiative" to help the rural poor to protect their crops and livelihoods from the impacts of climate variability and change, including drought.

This innovative public-private partnership will be expanded from Ethiopia to Senegal over the next five years. It empowers farmers and food-insecure rural households with integrated risk management tools to develop long-term resilience.

"For the 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, natural disasters are a constant threat to their food security. The most vulnerable people in the world are being hit by more frequent and intense climate-related disasters. The world knows how to do this: Proven tools have broken the cycle of emergency hunger for millions, building resilience in the face of repeat disasters," said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran.

R4 will enable poor farmers in Senegal to strengthen their food and income security by managing risks through a four-part approach - improving natural resource management (community risk reduction), accessing microcredit ("prudent" risk taking), gaining insurance coverage (risk transfer), and increasing savings (risk reserves)...

Deforestation reduces rainfall in Africa

PhysOrg: Deforestation in the rainforests of West Africa reduces rainfall over the rest of the forest, according to new University of Leeds research published in Geophysical Research Letters. The study shows that changing land use from forest to crop land reduces rainfall over neighbouring trees by around 50% due to changes in the surface temperature which affects the formation of rain clouds.

The authors say the findings have important implications for future decisions about land management in this region and other global rainforests such as the Amazon. Lead author of the study Dr Luis Garcia-Carreras, from the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, said: "We already know from satellite observations that changes in land use can have a big impact on local weather patterns. Here we have been able to show why this happens.

"Our findings suggest that it's not just the number of trees removed that threatens the stability of the world's rainforests, the pattern of deforestation is also important."

The forests of West Africa and the Congo Basin are the second largest in the world after the Amazon rainforest. They are important not only as a habitat for a vast and diverse ecosystem but also as a carbon sink, removing a large proportion of the CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere and slowing down climate change....

Hilly landscape near Kpalimé, Togo, shot by Francois Jake Green (Fanfan), Wikimedia Commons via Picasa, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Minimizing extinctions in a changing climate

Science Daily: More species could be saved from extinction under climate change thanks to a new model scientists have developed to guide allocation of conservation funding. The international team, led by Dr Brendan Wintle of the University of Melbourne and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, is the first to develop a pioneering decision-support model that incorporates both ecological and economic information to guide conservation investment in the face of climate change.

..."The best part about this model is that it can be applied to a range of environments, including many of Australia's native ecosystems, to suggest how to allocate funding," Dr Wintle said. Although scientists knew that high extinction rates were predicted to increase under climate change, there was little advice to guide how money could be best spent to minimise extinctions.

"Our analysis supports the existing evidence that climate change will substantially accelerate extinction rates. So the first step is that we urgently need to limit global warming to avoid a mass extinction. Given that we are probably committed to a two degree warming by 2050, we need to develop effective strategies for minimizing the number of species that go extinct as a result.

"We only have a limited amount of money to spend on managing biodiversity, so the question becomes, how do we most effectively allocate these funds? We needed a systematic approach to guide conservation investment to minimize extinctions and avoid wasting money. An advantage of our approach is that it makes the costs of a plan explicit, reducing the opportunity for politicization of decisions."...

Just off Route 7, south of Canaan, Connecticut, shot by Brian Thomas, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Cities to grab lands equaling size of Mongolia In next 20 years

Web Newswire: In the next 20 years, more than 590,000 square miles of land globally — more than twice the size of Texas — will be gobbled up by cities, a trend that shows no signs of stopping and one that could pose threats on several levels, says a Texas A&M University geographer who is part of a national team studying the problem.

Burak Güneralp, a research assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M, says urban areas are growing faster than urban populations and by 2030, urbanized land worldwide will grow by 590,000 square miles — more than twice the size of Texas, or about the size of Mongolia. He is part of a team that includes three other researchers from Yale, Stanford and Arizona State and their work is published in the journal PloS ONE.

This massive urbanization of land is happening worldwide, but India, China and Africa have experienced the highest rates of urban land expansion, Güneralp explains. Our study covered the 30 years from 1970 to 2000, and we found that urban growth is occurring at the highest rates in developing countries. However, it is the North America that experienced the largest increase in total urban land.

The United Nations predicts that by 2030 there will be an additional 1.47 billion people living in urban areas. Güneralp says, urban population growth is a significant driver of urban land change, especially in developing regions such in India and Africa. However, economic growth is also important, particularly in China. He notes that coastal areas are especially vulnerable to urban expansion.

Where cities grow the most seem to be near coastal areas, and this is a very noticeable trend, Güneralp says. This makes coastal areas a special area of concern because people and infrastructures are at risk to rising sea levels, flooding, hurricanes, tsunamis and other disasters. All over the world, people like to live by the water, so its a trend that will likely not change....

The new city of Shenzhen, China in 2004, shot by Rüdiger Meier, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

More than 30 million climate migrants in Asia in 2010

Fiona Harvey in the Guardian (UK): More than 30 million people were displaced last year by environmental and weather-related disasters across Asia, experts have warned, and the problem is only likely to grow worse as climate change exacerbates such problems.

Tens of millions more people are likely to be similarly displaced in the future by the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and reduced agricultural productivity. Such people are likely to migrate in regions across Asia, and governments must start to prepare for the problems this will create, the Asian Development Bank warned.

The costs will be high – about $40bn is the likely price for adapting and putting in place protective measures, from sea walls to re-growing mangrove swamps that have been cut down, and that can help to protect against the impacts of storm surges.

But the problem is already taking effect, though at a much lower scale than is likely in the future. "While large-scale climate-induced migration is a gradual phenomenon, communities in Asia and the Pacific are already experiencing the consequences of changing environmental conditions including eroding shorelines, desertification and more frequent severe storms and flooding," the bank said at a workshop last week. This could lead to a widespread crisis across the region in coming years, if preparations are not made to deal with the current and probable future consequences...

In Congo Basin rainforests, the success of REDD+ leaves adaptation efforts trailing

Frank Swain in CIFOR's Forest Blog: The dominance of REDD+ schemes (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) as a way to tackle climate change has encouraged government offices, international agencies and private groups in the Congo Basin to focus on mitigation efforts, often at the expense of protective adaptation to climate change, according to a recent study by the Center for International Forestry Research.

“When it comes to adaptation, people say ‘show me the impact of climate change’,” says Olufunso Somorin, lead author of The Congo Basin forests in a changing climate: Policy discourses on adaptation and mitigation (REDD+). “But the reality is that climate change is never debated when it comes to mitigation through REDD+. You begin to wonder if we actually have two different climate changes to deal with.”

...To gauge attitudes toward climate change efforts, researchers drew on interviews with over a hundred different actors from Cameroon, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, including government officials, international agencies such the World Bank, non-governmental organisations including Greenpeace and the WWF, research groups, and representatives from the private sector such as logging and mining companies. They found that the opportunities provided by REDD+ meant efforts to mitigate climate change often took precedence over adaptation in environmental policy discourse.

“Despite the importance of adaptation for a region with high level of poverty and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, the focus of the majority of the actors is on REDD+, purely due to the financial incentives it offers,” said Somorin....

Two types of forest are shown in this image. At bottom left is a tropical evergreen forest with an extremely dense canopy, a forest type known locally as limbali forest. Most of the rest of the scene is occupied by a more open forest in which stands of trees (dark green patches) are separated from each other by a sea of lower-growing plants (light green). The appearance of openness, however, is something of an illusion. A dense under story of plants, such as wild ginger that can grow to be 2 meters tall, makes a thicket so impenetrable that you could not walk through it without a machete. From NASA

Pakistan seeks to track flood risk from melting glaciers

Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio in AlertNet: Pakistan is expanding its network of glacier monitoring stations in the Himalayas, in an effort to improve understanding of glacier melt and provide better warning of floods. But some experts say it’s not happening fast enough, as the country continues to be hit by disasters.

Massive flooding in mid-2010 affected some 20 million people and destroyed 1.6 million homes in the South Asian nation. The floods - which inundated up to one-fifth of the country over several weeks as water swept down the Indus River from north to south - were caused by a combination of glacier melt and heavy monsoon rains.

So far this monsoon season, some 5.4 million people have been affected by flooding in the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan. Nearly 1 million homes have been destroyed and close to three quarters of crops lost in the worst-affected areas.

These emergencies have increased pressure on the government to do more to protect people from floods and adapt to climate shifts. One way it’s responding is by closer tracking of glacier melt, which experts says is speeding up and could worsen flooding in the coming years.

Over the past seven years, Pakistan has installed five glacier monitoring stations in its northern mountainous areas, each costing around $20,000. In July, the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) set up the highest of these at the Baltoro glacier in northern Gilgit-Baltistan province, some 4,750 metres above sea level, in collaboration with Italian research organisation EV-K2-CNR.

Ghazanfar Ali, a prominent glaciologist at the Global Change Impact Study Centre in Islamabad, said the stations are providing information that can be used to protect people from flash floods and make management of water resources more efficient....

The Baltoro Glacier (in the background) is the source of the Braldu River. Trango Cathedral on the far left (among others). Shot by Stuart Orford, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Mideast and North Africa at risk of natural disasters

Yosra Shohayeb in the Daily News (Egypt): By 2050, the number of people exposed to storms and earthquakes, particularly in coastal areas, could more than double to 1.5 billion, a report said. This is also true for the Middle East and North Africa region, with its rapidly growing cities exposed to many hazards, particularly in coastal areas.

The report titled “Natural Hazards, and Unnatural Hazards Disasters: the Economics of Effective Prevention,” said that in the coming years the region will become more vulnerable to floods, earthquakes, droughts, landslides and other natural disasters that can impede development, unless effective risk management is applied...

...“The findings of this report are indeed timely and important to the Arab region,” Secretary General of the Arab League Nabil El-Araby, said. “While water scarcity is becoming a major threat, climate change is undoubtedly aggravating the situation,” he added.

He explained that these findings must be put on the region’s development agenda, as they provide guidelines for regional efforts aiming at reducing vulnerabilities and risks induced by natural hazards. “By 2020, more than 66 percent of the Arab population will be living in cities that face several hazards and stressed resources,” Head of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Regional Office for Arab States, Amjad Abbashar, said.

...The report shows that taking preventive measures against natural disasters do not require the government to spend more, but spend better. “Institution building, double-duty infrastructure and sharing data are all key to preventing disasters,” Acting Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa region in the World Bank, Lazlo Lovei, said. “Even modest increases, and greater sharing of data internationally, can have enormous benefits,” the report said.

Sanghi highlighted the importance of infrastructure, by giving an example on Kuala Lumpur's storm water management and road tunnel infrastructure and mobility, saying that it succeeded in March 2008 to build a tunnel diverting 1.2 million cubic meters of water. “When prevention is done right, even poor countries in harm's way manages to protect their population over time,” he said....

Ageba in Matrouh, Egypt, shot by Muhammad khamis

Salty flow into Florida rivers blamed on sea level rise, not overpumping

Craig Pittman in Tampa Bay.com: The folks who live along the Chassahowitzka and Homosassa rivers have noticed a lot of changes lately. Saltwater fish swimming in what used to be mostly freshwater, as freshwater fish disappear. Trees on the riverbanks toppling over, killed by an increase in salt. Barnacles growing where they never did before.

To them, the cause seems obvious: pumping too much freshwater out of the underground aquifer so people can keep their St. Augustine grass green. Overpumping cuts the flow of freshwater from the local springs into the rivers, allowing salty water from the Gulf of Mexico to begin pushing upstream.

So they were outraged when they found out the Southwest Florida Water Management District may let pumping cut back the rivers' flow even more. According to the agency commonly known as Swiftmud, the Homosassa's flow can be cut by another 5 percent and the Chassahowitzka by 11 percent before causing any "significant harm" to the environment.

...The clash turns on an unusual argument. Swiftmud's experts say the increased saltiness of the rivers is not due to overpumping. They contend it's due to climate change. That means it's not a sufficient reason to block more pumping.

"The increased salinity that has occurred is partly the result of sea level rise, and partly due to recent drought conditions that caused the flow to decline," said Marty Kelly, who is in charge of the river flow project for Swiftmud....

Winslow Homer's 1904 watercolor of the Homosassa River

Climate change transforms Namibian landscape

Mark Dunphy in Irish Weather Online: In stark contrasts to many other parts of the African continent the riverbeds of western Namibia, known as the land of arid deserts, are awash in water. Usually, western Namibia is a dusty place where the stream beds are sand and the “lakes” are nothing more than flats of dried mud. This year, however, rivers with names like Swakop and Omaruru and Kuiseb flowed all the way to the sea–something they don’t do often, “maybe once a decade,” says Paul Bierman of the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vt.

Along with his geoscientist colleague, Kyle Nichols of Skidmore College, Bierman has recently completed a study trip to the western mountains and coastal plain of the sparsely populated African country. The rivers didn’t just flow for a day or two, Nichols and Bierman say, they ran from the desert to the ocean for weeks on end.

“There was so much water,” says Bierman, “that people went swimming, they went tubing, and the desert turned green around rivers carrying so much sediment they were chocolate-brown.” The rains were unprecedented in both their intensity and duration. “There’s nothing like this widespread, heavy rain in the historic record,” says Nichols.

There they collected river sediment and rock at many of the sites they had sampled in 1997, 2001 and 2010. Their hope is to discover whether sediment carried by rivers in such “mega-floods” is coming from sources that are the same as those when sediment is transported by more “normal” events.

They work with collaborators at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, counting rare isotopes, or sub-types, of elements formed in the mineral quartz. The results provide valuable information about the samples. “The research focuses on the use of isotopes of the chemical elements beryllium, cesium and lead to measure erosion rates and determine sediment sources,” says Paul Cutler, program director in NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences, which awarded the grant.

...It will be months before the geologists have the first results, but the effects of the torrential rains and floods in Namibia in early 2011 are clearly evident, they say. Grass covers what should be barren stony desert, and there is water in streams, something Nichols and Bierman haven’t seen before....

Dunes in Sossusvlei region, Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namib Desert, Namibia, shot by (Luca Galuzzi) http://www.galuzzi.it, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Thousands trapped in Pakistan's flood-hit south

Terra Daily via AFP: In Pakistan's fertile south, a grim-faced soldier found himself in a standoff with 100 flood-stricken protesters demanding help for their communities marooned by the surging water. "We won't leave until you come with us to save our families," a defiant Ali Mohammad, 27, told the soldier. "Hundreds of our villagers are trapped in the flood waters but we can't find anyone to help us rescue them."

A year after Pakistan's worst ever floods, the lush southern lands of Sindh are inundated once more, and angry villagers were desperate for help for their families who escaped the rising floodwaters by sitting on their roofs.

A heated argument ended with a promise that the army would return to help the thousands of marooned residents in Tando Allahyar district, one of the areas worst affected by the deluge. "We are going to save people in another town -- this delay will risk their lives," the soldier said....

Water evaporated from trees cools global climate

The Carnegie Institution: Scientists have long debated about the impact on global climate of water evaporated from vegetation. New research from Carnegie’s Global Ecology department concludes that evaporated water helps cool the earth as a whole, not just the local area of evaporation, demonstrating that evaporation of water from trees and lakes could have a cooling effect on the entire atmosphere. These findings, published September 14 in Environmental Research Letters, have major implications for land-use decision making.

Evaporative cooling is the process by which a local area is cooled by the energy used in the evaporation process, energy that would have otherwise heated the area’s surface. It is well known that the paving over of urban areas and the clearing of forests can contribute to local warming by decreasing local evaporative cooling, but it was not understood whether this decreased evaporation would also contribute to global warming

The Earth has been getting warmer over at least the past several decades, primarily as a result of the emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil, and gas, as well as the clearing of forests. But because water vapor plays so many roles in the climate system, the global climate effects of changes in evaporation were not well understood.

The researchers even thought it was possible that evaporation could have a warming effect on global climate, because water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Also, the energy taken up in evaporating water is released back into the environment when the water vapor condenses and returns to earth, mostly as rain. Globally, this cycle of evaporation and condensation moves energy around, but cannot create or destroy energy. So, evaporation cannot directly affect the global balance of energy on our planet.

The team led by George Ban-Weiss, formerly of Carnegie and currently at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, included Carnegie’s Long Cao, Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira, as well as Govindasamy Bala of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Using a climate model, they found that increased evaporation actually had an overall cooling effect on the global climate. Increased evaporation tends to cause clouds to form low in the atmosphere, which act to reflect the sun’s warming rays back out into space. This has a cooling influence....

Trees in the mist The low-lying fields near the Kennet and Avon canal and Semington Brook, shot by Doug Lee, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Arctic ice at second lowest level since 1979

IOL (South Africa): The frozen Arctic has shrunk to its second lowest level since satellites began measuring it in 1979, capping a decade of “rapidly decreasing summer sea ice,” US scientists said on Friday. The Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the ice cap appeared to have reached its lowest level for the summer, at 4.33 million square kilometers (1.67 million square miles) on September 9.

That is the second lowest level since the centre began tracking the ice mass by satellite more than 30 years ago, with the lowest level recorded in 2007. The NSIDC cautioned that the measurement was based on preliminary results and that changing winds could push the ice flows closer together, resulting in a smaller figure when final numbers are released in early October.

“The last five years (2007 to 2011) have been the five lowest extents in the continuous satellite record, which extends back to 1979,” the NSIDC said. “While the record low year of 2007 was marked by a combination of weather conditions that favoured ice loss... this year has shown more typical weather patterns but continued warmth over the Arctic,” it said.

Using a different set of data, German researchers said last week that the area covered by Arctic Sea ice had reached its lowest point since the start of satellite observations in 1972, calling it a “new historic minimum.” Arctic ice cover plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool....

Satellite image of cloud streets in the Bering Sea. St. Matthew Island is visible in the upper portion, its mountains casting shadows to the southwest. From NASA

Number of displaced Vermont families may be double

Sally Pollak in the Burlington Free Press (Vermont): Gov. Peter Shumlin said 1,500 to 2,000 Vermont families might have been displaced from their homes by the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Irene. Shumlin said Friday he’s concerned the actual number of families unable to live in their own homes because of the flood is unknown.

“We’re putting together a plan where we’re going to be reaching out once again to community leaders to literally go out and talk and count and find where people are,” Shumlin said. “It’s one of the gaps we have in the system right now.” The governor said he wouldn’t be surprised “in the least” if the number turned out be as many as 2,000 families. Preliminary federal estimates suggested 700 homes were damaged or destroyed by last month’s flooding.

Shumlin said he meets Vermonters every day who are staying with relatives, neighbors and even strangers. These people don’t appear on the government’s lists because “they feel like they have a home,” Shumlin said.

Referring to people in these kinds of temporary living arrangements, who have not classified themselves as displaced or homeless, the governor said: “There are people who may well find, in a couple of months, that their current housing situation is not ideal — for either the host or for them.”...

26 die in Indian floods, 200,000 evacuated

Terra Daily via AFP: At least 26 people have died and nearly 200,000 have been evacuated as a result of massive flooding in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, a minister said on Thursday. The floods were triggered by torrential monsoon rains across Orissa, causing water levels to breach river banks, prompting a huge rescue operation in which helicopters dropped off emergency supplies to help the stranded.

"The floods have killed 26 people and 12 others are missing," Orissa's Disaster Management Minister Surya Narayan Patra told AFP in the state capital Bhubaneswar, painting a picture of widespread devastation.

"We have evacuated 193,000 people to relative safety," he added, warning that the death toll was likely to rise. He added that a total of 2.1 million people in the state of 40 million people had been affected in some way or another with floodwaters entering their homes or their crops submerged....

Locator map of Orissa by Jayanta Nath, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

An index to help private, public sectors prioritize investments in adaptation

MarketWatch: Leaders in the global effort to adapt to the massive forces changing our world unveiled this week an unprecedented tool: the first country ranking intended to guide policy and private sector capital to have the greatest adaptation impact.

The Global Adaptation Index(TM) ("GaIn(TM)") is a response to the various challenges of sustainable development including climate change, population growth and economic development. It was developed as a navigation tool to help prioritize and measure progress in adapting to climate change and other global forces, and is online at gain.globalai.org.

"We believe that by creating the right incentives while expanding our knowledge and understanding of the need for adaptation, we can save lives and improve the livelihoods of people around the world," said Jose Maria Aznar, Former President of Spain and Chairman of the Global Adaptation Institute Council of Advisors. "I believe that GaIn will become a natural navigation chart for both the private and public sectors."

GaIn looks at 15 years of data and finds: The United States has lost ground over the past fifteen years. Corrected for GDP, the United States in 2010 ranks 53rd out of 161 countries. In terms of raw score, the United States ranked third in the world in 1995, but today has fallen to 8th. Its vulnerability has risen slightly; and, while its readiness did increase, it was significantly outpaced by several other countries.

Major emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Mexico) are making significant improvements, both decreasing their vulnerabilities and increasing their readiness. However, India remains vulnerable in its agriculture and food sectors; China must confront strains on its water resources and lacks infrastructure to access internal markets; and South Africa's highly vulnerable health sector drains human resources from innovation. In all these countries, governance and corruption continue to negatively impact readiness....