Climate change contributed towards the collapse of the Maya

Adam Steedman Thake in New Historican: Climate change is one of the major problems facing the world today. It is not simply a modern-day occurrence, however. Ancient populations also struggled to deal with changes in their environment.

New research has explored the devastating consequences of climate change on an ancient Maya civilisation.

Researchers have found that historic droughts in Central America matched the patterns of disruption to Maya society. Importantly, these findings provide clues regarding the longstanding questions about what role climate change had in the Maya collapse between 800 and 950 CE.

Paleoclimate records indicate a series of severe droughts occurred during this period of Maya decline. Evidence for drought, however, largely derives from the drier, less populated northern Maya Lowlands. As such, this does not explain the much more drastic societal disruption in the humid conditions of the southern Maya Lowlands.

“Our work demonstrates that the southern Maya lowlands experienced a more severe drought compared to the north,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale University professor of geology and geophysics and co-author of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

Mayan compass, "Chimera of the Crystal Skull," shot by Rikfriday : Xneotek.com, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Central America drought turning into humanitarian crisis

UN News Centre: A prolonged drought in Central America is turning into a humanitarian crisis for nearly two and a half million people affected by food insecurity in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned today. Briefing the press in Geneva today, OCHA’s Jens Laerke said most of those affected are subsistence farmers, farm labourers and low-income families.

In Honduras and Guatemala, up to 75 per cent of maize and bean crop has been lost and thousands of cattle had died. In the coming months, food insecurity is expected to get worse as families deplete their food stocks.

In Guatemala, the Government declared a state of public calamity in 16 departments in August and by October, 30,000 families had finished their food stocks. Those families were today in deep distress, said Mr. Laerke.

In the so-called “dry corridor” in eastern Guatemala, a joint Government/UN/NGO (non-governmental organization) assessment found that one in four households suffered from moderate or severe malnutrition. Children under five, pregnant women and female-headed households are most vulnerable, said Mr. Laerke.

In Honduras the Government had declared a state of emergency in the drought affected western areas, as crop loss had reached up to 75 per cent. Assessments also found high levels of malnutrition in children under five. An emergency assessment in September found that nearly 20,000 children were malnourished as a consequence of the long drought, said Mr. Laerke.

In El Salvador, the Ministry of Environment and Natural resources had reported that the country was experiencing its worst drought since 1977. The authorities said that in hotspot areas in the eastern part of the country, more than 80 per cent of farmers reported that they have lost all of their crops....

The Guatemalan highlands, shot by Pati Gaitan Pati Gaitan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Drought hits Central America's crops, cattle

Seed Daily via AFP: ...Nicaragua and the rest of Central America has been hit by a major drought that has killed thousands of cattle, dried up crops and forced cities to ration electricity. Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala have declared emergencies in the worst affected areas to speed up aid delivery. El Salvador and Nicaragua have opened special funds to help farmers.

In northern Nicaragua, vultures are eating the carcasses of cows that are dropping dead in dried out pastures. ... Central American agriculture ministers held a videoconference on Wednesday to seek coordinated actions to cope with the drought.

The lack of rain has been blamed on the probable arrival of the El Nino weather phenomen
on, which is characterized by unusually warm Pacific ocean temperatures that can trigger droughts. It is the latest trouble to hammer a region already beset by gang violence and poverty, which have driven families and unaccompanied children to migrate illegally to the United States.

The drought has swept across a region known as "the dry corridor," which covers nearly a third of Central America, where 10 million people live, according to a 2013 study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Nicaragua's government says the country is enduring its worst drought since 1976...

Neil Palmer (CIAT) took this photo of a farmer irrigating crops during the dry season in drought-affected Nicaragua, made possible by the use of special reservoirs to capture and store excess rainwater during the country's rainy season. Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Drought hits Central America's crops, cattle

Terra Daily via AFP: ... Nicaragua and the rest of Central America has been hit by a major drought that has killed thousands of cattle, dried up crops and forced cities to ration electricity. Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala have declared emergencies in the worst affected areas to speed up aid delivery. El Salvador and Nicaragua have opened special funds to help farmers. In northern Nicaragua, vultures are eating the carcasses of cows that are dropping dead in dried out pastures.

Central American agriculture ministers held a videoconference on Wednesday to seek coordinated actions to cope with the drought. The lack of rain has been blamed on the probable arrival of the El Nino weather phenomenon, which is characterized by unusually warm Pacific ocean temperatures that can trigger droughts.

It is the latest trouble to hammer a region already beset by gang violence and poverty, which have driven families and unaccompanied children to migrate illegally to the United States. The drought has swept across a region known as "the dry corridor," which covers nearly a third of Central America, where 10 million people live, according to a 2013 study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Nicaragua's government says the country is enduring its worst drought since 1976.

The first harvest, which takes place between May and August, has yielded nothing, according to Nicaragua's national farmers and ranchers union. Some 2,500 cattle have died and 700,000 more are in critical health as they roam dry pastures.

...El Nino, which occurs every two to seven years, has clobbered Central America 10 times in the past 60 years . "What we are seeing is the consequence of El Nino," Luis Fernando Alvarado, researcher at Costa Rica's Meteorological Institute, told AFP...

Picture by Neil Palmer CIAT. Irrigation of food crops during the dry season in drought-affected Nicaragua, made possible by the use of special reservoirs to capture and store excess rainwater during the country's rainy season. Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Disaster-prone Central America shows it means business on climate legislation

Nelson Renteria at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: In El Salvador’s Chalatenango hills, hit hard by civil war in the 1980s between the army and Marxist insurgents, many trees were damaged or destroyed in the hail of bombs and bullets.

After the conflict ended in 1992, the inhabitants of Montañona, a small town 98 km north of San Salvador, began mobilising to restore the 21 hectares they owned, and to protect the surrounding forest landscape of more than 1,400 hectares.    

These days, however, the local vegetation has a new enemy: ranchers. Some are starting fires on hillsides to clear the land so they can grow grass there to feed cattle. Sometimes the fires burn out of control, affecting wooded parkland.

For that reason, Juan Calderon, a 50-year-old ex-guerilla who is now a forest ranger, walks every day into the pine woods to make sure no one is cutting down trees or lighting fires there. “This (conservation) project is effective - it is the best, because before many people were coming into the woods to fell trees, hunt or do whatever, but now it is not possible,” Calderon told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The Montañona reserve is the biggest in the northern department of Chalatenango. Not only does it help keep the air clean and healthy, but the 70 water sources in its river basin supply at least 70,000 families in nearby urban areas....

Dawn at Cerro El Pital, highest point in El Salvador. Shot by ElmerGuevara, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Deforestation of Central America rises as Mexico's war on drugs moves south

Frederic Saliba in the Guardian (UK): According to Kendra McSweeney: "Drug trafficking is causing an ecological disaster in Central America." McSweeney, a geographer at Ohio State University, is the co-author of a recent report on the little-known phenomenon of "narco-deforestation" that is destroying huge tracts of rainforest that are already under threat from other quarters.

Viewed from the air, the tropical forests of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua are scarred with landing strips and roads built illegally by the narco-traffickers for transporting drugs to the US, the leading world market. "These protected ecological zones have become the hub for South American cocaine," according to McSweeney, who stresses that the annual deforestation rate in Honduras more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2011, a boom-period for drug trafficking. In 2011 alone, 183 sq km of forest was destroyed in the east of the country, including in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, an endangered Unesco world heritage site. This was in addition to the pre-existing problem of forest destruction due to illegal logging.

The wave of devastation has been moving south down the American continent, as drug crackdowns have taken force in Mexico. This is known as the efecto cucaracha, or cockroach effect, with reference to the survival instinct this creature has of seeking refuge next door as soon as it has been of chased out of one house. In the Laguna del Tigre national park in north-east Guatemala, deforestation has increased by between 5% and 10% in the past seven years. That coincides with the war against drug trafficking launched at the end of 2006 by the former Mexican president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), with backing from the US.

Take the powerful Sinaloa cartel. When it was headed by Joaquin Guzmán, alias El Chapo, before his arrest on 22 February, the Mexican mafia extended its influence in Central America via local gangs. For McSweeney: "Narco-deforestation enables cartels to occupy territory to the detriment of their competitors. If that continues, the entire Mesoamerican [Central American] biological corridor, which stretches from Panama to Mexico, will be affected by tree felling."...

Burned jungle in Mexico, shot by Jami Dwyer, public domain

Protecting 17% of earth's land could save two-thirds of plant species

Duke University News: Protecting key regions that comprise just 17 percent of Earth’s land may help preserve more than two-thirds of its plant species, according to a new Duke University-led study by an international team of scientists.

The researchers from Duke, North Carolina State University and Microsoft Research used computer algorithms to identify the smallest set of regions worldwide that could contain the largest numbers of plant species. They published their findings today in the journal Science.

“Our analysis shows that two of the most ambitious goals set forth by the 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity -- to protect 60 percent of Earth’s plant species and 17 percent of its land surface -- can be achieved, with one major caveat,” said Stuart L. Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

“To achieve these goals, we need to protect more land, on average, than we currently do, and much more in key places such as Madagascar, New Guinea and Ecuador,” Pimm said. “Our study identifies regions of importance. The logical -- and very challenging -- next step will be to make tactical local decisions within those regions to secure the most critical land for conservation.”

Plant species aren’t haphazardly distributed across the planet. Certain areas, including Central America, the Caribbean, the Northern Andes and regions in Africa and Asia have much higher concentrations of endemic species, that is, those which are found nowhere else.

“Species endemic to small geographical ranges are at a much higher risk of being threatened or endangered than those with large ranges," said Lucas N. Joppa, a conservation scientist at Microsoft Research’s Computational Science Laboratory in Cambridge, U.K. "We combined regions to maximize the numbers of species in the minimal area. With that information, we can more accurately evaluate each region’s relative importance for conservation, and assess international priorities accordingly.”...

A rainbow eucalyptus in New Guinea, shot by Jeff Kubina, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Climate change causes $1.1 billion in losses in Costa Rica

The Tico Times (Costa Rica): A recent study released by Costa Rican officials shows that the country has accumulated approximately $1.13 billion in losses due to climate change from 2005 to 2011, primarily along coastal areas. The investigation was based on a report by climate change expert Roberto Flores about how to adapt to climate change. The study was released Sunday in the weekly business newspaper El Financiero.

Rural areas were hit the hardest, and 50 percent of damages affected highway infrastructure. The other damages were distributed between agriculture (16.7 percent), flood control and similar construction projects (13 percent) and homes (12.2 percent). Puntarenas, on Costa Rica’s central Pacific, is the province most affected by climate change, with damages in the six-year period reaching $164.5 million.

Flores, the head of climate change at the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry’s Planning Department, said that the study used data primarily from the National Emergency Commission. William Alpízar, director of climate change at the Environment Ministry, told the weekly newspaper that the phenomenon’s primary effects are increased precipitation, more sickness and higher ocean levels.

These effects are reflected in the nearly $710 million lost due to hydrometeorological changes. For Walter Vergara, an expert in the field at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDP), Costa Rica needs to prioritize prevention, as estimates show that by the middle of the century damages from temperature increases in Latin America could increase to $100 million annually....

Coffee shadow trees in Costa Rica, shot by Dirk van der Made (DirkvdM), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Generic license 

Dengue fever epidemic sparks public health emergency in Central America

Thomas Diego Badia in the Guardian (UK): A dengue epidemic is raging in Central America, from Honduras to Costa Rica. The virus has already claimed 60 lives, with a total of 120,000 cases. The Pan American Health Organisation fears the figures may "explode", with this year looking "unusually bad".

Several factors are likely to exacerbate the situation. The rainy season, which starts in June in that part of the world, is set to continue until November. With heavy rainfall and torrid heat, conditions are particularly favourable for proliferation of the main vector of dengue fever, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, whose eggs hatch on the surface of ponds.

With the rising number of new cases, Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica announced a health emergency in July and launched campaigns to prevent the disease from spreading. Lacking adequate resources, Honduras, which has been hardest hit with at least 17 fatalities and 20,000 cases reported, appealed to the International Red Cross for help.

"The $169,000 in aid provided by the disaster relief emergency fund enables us to distribute mosquito nets in high-risk areas, promote hygiene and combat vectors, in order to halt mosquito reproduction," says Amanda McClelland, a Red Cross co-ordinator.

The poor suburbs of Central American capitals are the main targets for campaigns to raise public awareness. Poor housing, the lack of a mains water supply and the accumulation of household waste make such neighbourhoods an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. The authorities have dispatched paramedics, police and the military to remote villages in order to stamp out the epidemic in the areas most at risk....

A TEM micrograph showing Dengue virus virions (the cluster of dark dots near the center).

Central American farmers seek buffers against climate change

Danielle Marie Mackey in National Catholic Reporter: In 2009, El Salvador was not only the most vulnerable country in Central America to climate change -- it was No. 1 in the world. In the past several years, natural disasters have hit the country with increasing frequency. Their intensity and duration have risen exponentially, as well as their cost.

The total economic loss from three of the five storms in 2009-2011 is estimated at some $1.3 billion, with much of that coming from lost crops.

"With climate change, we face a challenge much greater than we ever could have imagined a few decades ago," Salvadoran Minister of the Environment Herman Rosa Chávez said at an Oct. 11 conference announcing a new study on the impact climate change will have on countries in the region. "Each year that we do not act is one more year of losses."

Storms are not the only problem. An increased frequency of uncommon weather patterns has had a wide impact. This year, for instance, drought ravaged farmers both in the United States and in Central America -- prompting fears of a worldwide spike in food prices.

This combination of events causes serious consequences for people who do not have access to economic or institutional buffers, like insurance, that enable them to survive this type of shock. In Central America, the livelihoods of a million small-hold farmers of maize and beans, the region's staples, will be at risk. The food security of the region is under threat.

That problem is the subject of the new study "Tortillas on the Roaster," an effort of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center....

Farmers survey a field in Nicaragua, shot by Neil Palmer (CIAT), Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Climate change to hit Central America's food crops

Megan Rowling in AlertNet: Climate change is expected to reduce maize and bean harvests across Central America, leading to economic losses of more than $120 million a year by the 2020s and threatening the incomes of around 1 million small farmers, says a new scientific study.

Researchers from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) examined how the region's two most important food crops would be affected by higher temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

"Even with our most conservative estimates, it's clear that climate change could transform the agricultural landscape across Central America," Anton Eitzinger, a CIAT climate scientist and lead author of the report, said in a statement. "Conditions are already tough there; it's one of the poorest and most vulnerable parts of Latin America."

In some parts of El Salvador and Honduras that have poor soil, where much farming takes place, maize production could drop by around 30 percent by the 2020s, and on poor soils in Guatemala and Nicaragua, it could fall by around 11 percent, the study warns.

For beans, Honduras will be the worst affected by 2020, with a production decline of 15 percent, followed by El Salvador at 8 percent, Nicaragua at 6 percent, and Guatemala at 4 percent, the study says. In all four countries, bean production is expected to fall by up to 25 percent by 2050.

But in financial terms, the estimated annual losses for maize are five times higher than for beans, topping $100 million. The combined figure for both crops - close to $123 million - equals around 30 percent of their current values....

A sorghum field in El Salvador, shot by Ll1324, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Action needed now to prepare for severe drought

Stephen Leahy  in AlertNet via Tierramérica/IPS: Mexico and Central America look like they are covered in dried blood on maps projecting future soil moisture conditions.The results from 19 different state-of-the-art climate models project extreme and persistent drought conditions (colored dark red-brown on the maps) for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America.

If climate change pushes the global average temperature to 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels, as many experts now expect, these regions will be under severe and permanent drought conditions. Future conditions are projected to be worse than Mexico's current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate.

These are some of the conclusions of the study "Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico", which was published in the December 2011 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Hydrometeorology and has gone largely unnoticed.

"Drought conditions will prevail no matter what precipitation rates are in the future," said co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. government research centre in California. "Even in regions where rainfall increases, the soils will get drier. This is a very robust finding," Wehner told Tierramérica.

...The 19 models used in the study show that the increased heat will dry soils more than any additional rain can replenish soil moisture levels. Ever warmer air temperatures will cause greater evaporation, drying out soils...

The Sonoran Desert in Mexico, shot by Tomascastelazo - Tomas Castelazo, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Climate change seen costing Central America billions of dollars

Anastasia Moloney in Relief Web via AlertNet: Climate change could cost Central America at least half its gross domestic product by the end of this century as more extreme weather, lower crop yields and water shortages are forecast in a region already prone to natural disasters, a recent United Nations report warns.

Increasing global average temperatures, rising sea levels, changes in rainfall and more frequent storms and droughts linked to climate change are already taking a heavy toll on government finances and poor rural communities across the seven countries that make up Central America.

Based on economic modelling, the study carried out by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) aims to put a price tag on the impact of global warming in the region, based on development and carbon emissions scenarios for agriculture, water resources, intensity of hurricanes and floods, and biodiversity.

"While uncertainties exist, initial estimates for only four sectors suggest that climate change might cost the region the equivalent 54 percent of its GDP based on 2008 figures - the equivalent of $73 billion - accumulated over 90 years, from now until 2100," Julie Lennox, climate change expert and ECLAC project coordinator, told AlertNet in an interview from Mexico City.

The study estimates the potential cost for Central American governments of doing nothing or little to address the effects of climate change – the "business as usual" approach – as well as costs if governments do implement strategies to tackle the problem. The report concludes it would be more "cost effective" for states to address climate change by focusing on disaster prevention and adaptation sooner rather than later….

Central America espcially vulnerable

Danilo Valladares in IPS: Having suffered the devastation of extreme weather phenomena in recent years, such as hurricanes Mitch, Stan and Agatha, the countries of Central America will head to the next global climate summit with an emphasis on their vulnerability and demand access to better conditions for dealing with climate disasters. They will make their case at the 16th Conference of Parties (COP 16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Nov. 29-Dec. 10 in the southeastern Mexican resort city of Cancún.

"What we are most concerned about is the issue of vulnerability and adaptation, taking into account that the region contributes little to the greenhouse effect but we are very vulnerable to climate change," Carlos Mancilla, coordinator of the climate change unit at Guatemala's Environment Ministry, told IPS. All told, the countries of Central America contribute less than 0.5 percent of the total greenhouse-effect gases at the global level, according to "The Economics of Climate Change in Latin America and the Caribbean 2009," a study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

…In Mancilla's view, Central America must be recognised as one of the world's regions most vulnerable to climate change in order to obtain financing for adaptation, capacity building, and technology transfer….