Indigenous people measure carbon that satellites miss

Bjorn Carey in Futurity via Stanford University: Indigenous people govern about half of all remaining undeveloped land on the planet. New research with indigenous people in the Amazon suggests they may outperform satellites in measuring the true carbon storage potential of the rainforest. That finding could influence how indigenous people in Guyana and elsewhere manage their forests and may lead to greater opportunities for these communities to engage in carbon offset programs.

The project, described in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, grew out of efforts to engage indigenous peoples to gain better understanding of ecosystems that have been relatively undisturbed by modern civilization. ...“The people know the trails really well, and some of them will walk two days to get to their plot and make measurements,” Fragoso says. “They can make really good measurements in really isolated areas, where government workers would never get to. Generally, professional scientists will not travel these distances on foot to verify carbon estimates.”

While satellite observations would most likely identify each of these plots as “forest” and assigned them a standardized value for carbon storage, the field workers identified 11 habitat types with trees, each of which requires a different set of calculations for determining its carbon storage potential. Because they could be more specific about the biomass of each vegetation type making up a plot, they were able to calculate that forests in Guyana contain 20 to 40 percent more carbon than previously estimated.

...These areas probably play a much larger role in the global climate than previously assumed, Fragoso says, and indigenous people need to be better represented at global climate talks. These land-owners have more carbon storage at their disposal to sell as carbon credits to governments and corporations looking to offset their greenhouse gas-producing activities.

...This is the first model for turning indigenous people into field researchers capable of producing scientifically rigorous calculations for carbon, says Fragoso, who is now planning to share the concept with other indigenous nations around the world.

Rainforest in Guyana, shot by Loriski, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Storms, flooding can unleash a toxic soup

Desmond Brown in IPS News: It’s a dirty, smelly business, but wastewater is gaining prominence across the Caribbean as countries from Jamaica in the west to Guyana in the south increasingly recognise its effects on the environment and the importance of improving its management.

Coordinator of the Guyana Wastewater Revolving Fund Marlon Daniels told IPS that with the advent of climate change, protecting the environment has become more of a challenge for countries of the region. He explained that climate change has resulted in unusual weather patterns, including more rainfall and flash flooding, and these have caused an increase in sewerage entering the sea.

“One of the effects of improving access to water, as required under Goal 7 of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, is that more people instead of using a pit latrine now use a flush toilet, so they have an on-site treatment in the form of a septic tank,” Daniels said.

“When you have a huge storm or heavy rain, you have a toxic soup. There is refuse from septic tanks, which is not as dirty as raw sewerage but it’s still rich in nutrients and pathogens. All of that wastewater ends up in the environment as floodwater and you have populations being exposed to that.”

Dr. Donna-May Sakura-Lemessy, deputy director at the Trinidad-based Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA), says while the Caribbean benefits tremendously from the tourism industry – last year visitors spent an estimated 26 billion dollars – tourism-dependent economies of small island Caribbean states suffer the most from untreated wastewater with the destruction of reefs and the pollution of beaches....

Mangroves help Guyana defend against changing climate

Desmond Brown in IPS: Theola Fortune can recall how residents of Victoria would ridicule her and others every time they went into the east coast village to warn residents about the importance of mangroves and the need to protect them.

“They would accuse us of breeding mosquitoes in the community,” Fortune said. Yet scientists say that mangrove trees, which grow mainly in tropical and subtropical regions, can shield cities and towns from rising seas and storm surges by creating a natural barrier where the ocean meets the land.

Approximately 90 percent of Guyana’s population lives on a narrow coastline strip a half to one metre below sea level. That coastal belt is protected by seawall barriers that have existed since the Dutch occupation of the country. In recent times, however, severe storms have toppled these defences, resulting in significant flooding, a danger scientists predict may become more frequent.

After huge waves breached the seawalls on more than one occasion this year alone, Fortune said, “residents are finally beginning to realise that mangroves could help to protect their community” from destruction, in addition to saving lives.

Fortune, Avnel Wood and Kene Moseley are among the women who, as part of the Guyana Mangrove Restoration Project (GMRP), are combining commercial activity with spreading the word on the importance of protecting coastal mangroves.

...Wood does not doubt what is causing the unusually high waves and frequent topping of the seawalls. “This is a product of climate change,” she told IPS. “There is nothing in that [coastal] area to break the energy of the waves because there are no mangroves at that part of the seawall.” Scientists say that mangroves also play an important role in combating climate change because they store ten times more carbon than any other tree in Guyana’s forests....

Food management critical in Guyana's climate change fight

The Guyana Times: The importance of managing food in the fight against global warming was reinforced by national and international diplomats during the Environmental Community Health Organisation’s (ECHO) first National Environmental Youth Convention on Wednesday, which was held to mark World Environment Day.

Schoolchildren marvel at “trees” and a “house“ made of recycled bottles at the World Environment Day observance, organised by the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry

In keeping with the theme “Think. Eat. Save.”, U.S. Ambassador D Brent Hardt, while addressing primary and secondary school students at the Guyana International Convention Centre (GICC), said the close link between food security and climate change cannot go unnoticed.

The evidence of global warming is glaring, the U.S. ambassador said, pointing to an increase in floods, forest fires, hurricanes and other natural disasters. This global phenomena, he said, can be attributed to the increase in land, water and air pollutions.

He said due to lack of effective food management, approximately 1.3 billion tons of food are disposed of annually. “Every year, 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted… and one third of everything that is grown in the world is lost or wasted. This is just a huge drain on natural resources.”

Ambassador Hardt explained that during the production and distribution of food across the world, significant amounts of financial and natural resources are utilised to generate food. In the process, 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water is used while deforestation occurs to facilitate food production, although it contributes to global warming....

Stabroek Market in Georgetown, Guyana, shot by Loriski, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

When mangroves no longer protect the coastline in Guyana

Institut de recherche pour le developpement media centre: The mangroves of Guyana, in South America, are gradually disappearing. Contrary to the coastline of its near neighbour, French Guiana, which is still relatively protected, that of Guyana has been largely developed. In order to develop agriculture and aquaculture, earth dikes were built, destroying the greater part of the mangrove forest.

A study conducted by IRD researchers and the University of Aix-Marseille shows that the reduced protection provided by mangroves against the swell will lead to the large-scale erosion of 370 km of the country's coastline. Only one ecosystem restoration programme will help contain this phenomenon.

...The mangrove forests in the Guyanas (French Guiana, Surinam and Guyana), which spread across the Orinoco and Amazon deltas, are among the most extensive in the world. This particular ecosystem, between the earth and the sea, plays a major role in protecting the particularly unstable muddy coastline against erosion. However, most of the Guyana mangroves have been destroyed to develop the coastal plain. The retreating mangrove wall will result in large-scale coastal erosion, threatening populations and their economic activities, as demonstrated in a study conducted by researchers from IRD and the University of Aix-Marseille.

Although the French Guiana coastline remains protected by human developments for the time being, that of Guyana is already highly disrupted. The entire coastal strip is now inhabited*. In order to conquer this space and subsequently develop the aquaculture and agriculture - mainly rice cultivation - the coastal swamp areas have been transformed into polders. To this end, dikes have been built, reducing the 1km mangrove strip to just a few dozen metres wide. More than three quarters of Guyana's 450 km of coastline along the Atlantic are currently diked up. Coastal stability now depends on these earthen dikes.

...However, these dikes do not provide the same level of protection as mangroves against the swell, which is the main cause of erosion. Moreover, they would not withstand the strength of the waves if the mangroves were to disappear completely. Yet, they prevent the sedimentation of mud coming from the Amazon, which enables forest regeneration...

Jobs, social welfare are crucial to food security, top ag scientist says

Johann Earle in Alertnet: Making life better for family farmers is a key way to ensure food security in Guyana without compromising the environment, according to a top Indian agricultural expert who helped lead that country’s agricultural “Green Revolution.”

M.S. Swaminathan, who promotes sustainable agriculture that preserves biodiversity and who worked in Guyana in the early 1990s on a forest conservation project, says agricultural and conservation need not be in conflict.

“The foundations of agriculture are land, water, biodiversity and climate. A family farmer will look after the land very well. It is the agri-business people who have short term interest in land,” the scientist told AlertNet at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in South Korea.

“A family farmer has to take care of the children so it is a way of life for them so they ensure that there is soil fertility…whether it is cow dung, compost, or crop rotation,” he said. What Guyana needs, he said, is “a new deal for the family farmers, otherwise family farming will disappear and all will become agri-business,” he said.

For the small South American nation to be a truly food secure, it must pay attention to three factors: availability of food on the market, which is a function of production; accessibility to food, a function of jobs and income, and absorption of food in the body, which is a function of clean drinking water, sanitation and primary health care like immunization, he said.

“You have food security in a country when all these three things are there,” he said...

A tractor in a Guyanese rice field, shot by Tracey Dos Santos, public domain

Merging science, traditional knowledge could benefit climate adaptation

Johann Earle in AlertNet: A conservation and research organisation in Guyana is teaming up with indigenous people to benefit the country’s forest communities and provide insights into weather and climate change.

A team of water experts this year has begun research to determine the effects of climate change on two ecosystems – tropical forests and savannah wetlands – straddled by the Iwokrama reserve, an area of 371,000 hectares (917,000 acres) in the centre of Guyana. People living on reserve are using their traditional knowledge of the land to help the researchers, and at the same time learning new ways to strengthen their food and economic security.

Isabella Bovolo, resident scientist at the Iwokrama International Centre for Rainforest Conservation and Development (IIC), an international organisation established in 1996 by the government of Guyana and the Commonwealth Secretariat, said that the goal of the research is to examine the changes likely to take place where the two ecosystems border each other as temperatures warm.

 “We are expecting that any effects of climate change will be more prominent at the boundary because we have the forest and the savannah meeting. Whether the forest is advancing or the savannah is advancing, we would see that at the boundary first,” Bovolo said.

...Sydney Allicock, an Amerindian community leader from North Rupununi, believes it is important for science and traditional indigenous knowledge to work together on solutions to problems, including those caused by growing population pressure on forests and savannahs lands. Allicock emphasised that local communities have traditionally used their environmental knowledge to live in a sustainable way....

Kaietur Falls in Guyana, shot by Sorenriise, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Flood-tolerant rice leads Guyana farm adaptation push

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

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

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

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

Strengthening Guyana’s sea defenses

National Communications Network (Guyana): The Public Works Ministry says is taking the necessary steps to ensure that the sea defence structures across the country are resilient to the effects of the rising global sea levels. The Ministry says with the changes and several weather related occurrences an analysis is necessary to ensure the right strategies are implemented to deal with these sea level rises.

The Transport Minister Robson Benn says with climate change, global sea level rise is imminent; hence engineers are observing trends in Guyana’s weather pattern to arrive at an analysis. “We have a sense based on the predicted versus actual events that we have a bit higher water and more predication in the system and we know in any event we have to prepare….

The Minister also says freak events occurring within a short space of time along the West Bank of Demerara and other areas are of major concern. He notes that free boards on the west coast along the river embankment had to be raised to accommodate the sea level rise. Some embankments were also raised while others were restored.

“If two of them happen in a fairly short space of time as it happened then it tells us something, it means the probability stand will tell us something but we have to go through that and come up with a proper analysis.”….

Muslims pray for rain in drought-hit Guyana

Reuters: Muslims across Guyana prayed for rain on Saturday to end a drought that has battered the tiny South American nation's rice and sugar exports and caused food shortages in indigenous communities. The government of the former British colony of about 750,000 people is struggling to irrigate farmland, with water at storage points reaching dangerously low levels.

The Central Islamic Organization of Guyana (CIOG), which represents Muslims in 145 mosques across the multiethnic nation, organized a day of prayers for rain. … Muslims make up about 7 percent of Guyana's population, with Hindus at 28 percent and Christians making up most of the rest across various denominations.

Guyana is one of several countries in the region, including neighboring Venezuela, that have been parched by drought since the end of last year. "The Amerindian communities are really badly hit," President Bharrat Jagdeo said on Friday of the indigenous people who make up nearly a 10th of Guyana's population. "We have been supplying food to some communities but I need to increase that significantly."…

This is what's missing -- a rain cloud in Guyana, from 2007, shot by J Evans Jodybwiki, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Guyana is a model of forest protection that could solve the climate crisis

Bharrat Jagdeo, President of Guyana, in the Guardian (UK): …This week [at the UN meeting in New York], among the talk of recession and growth, defence and terrorism, economic stimuli and trade sanctions, world leaders will discuss one of the key solutions that we need to focus on to tackle climate change — the world's forests.

…The particular solution the UN will discuss centres around a set of ideas called Redd (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) that looks set to be a key pillar of the forthcoming Copenhagen climate agreement. Redd should help to lay to rest one of the greatest mistakes of modern times — the failure to include a mechanism for protecting forests in the Kyoto protocol.

Redd should be good news for Guyana, because we have a lot of trees, and a bold plan to make these trees the economic generator of our nation by offering their services in removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it for the nations who have been generating the emissions.

In fact, more than three-quarters of our nation is covered with trees, and we have been able to keep it that way while many similar nations have suffered from rampant deforestation. But Redd will only work if the governments of the world provide the money to make conserving forests a viable alternative to cutting them down, and it is essential that the UN delegates realise this.

A recent report estimated that Guyana could generate approximately $500m a year by cutting its forests – money that is desperately needed for healthcare, education and infrastructure in a poor nation such as ours. But the world needs our forests to prevent climate change – what should we do?...

Adaptation to climate change will cost Guyana billions

Stabroek News (Guyana): Guyana would have to spend billions of US dollars on adaptation to climate change as rising sea levels and adverse weather patterns could lay waste to fertile lands agricultural lands, particularly on the coastland, President Bharrat Jagdeo said.

Speaking on a number of issues including climate change, food prices, fuel prices and the global trading environment and their impact on the local scene at the opening of the PPP 29th Congress at the Diamond Secondary School yesterday, Jagdeo shied away from referring to developments under the PPP/C which he felt had been covered by the PPP General Secretary Donald Ramotar and former President Janet Jagan in their addresses. He nevertheless engaged in his usual bashing of sections of the media over their coverage of the government, more particularly the Stabroek News and the Kaieteur News.

Jagdeo said that in protecting the coast from the Atlantic Ocean the government had had to spend recently US$6.4 million to build one kilometre of concrete sea defences and US$4.4 million to build with the riff-raff design. The country, he said, needed to fortify 360 kilometres of sea defences an the sums already spent on one kilometer would give an idea of how much money was needed for the country’s infrastructure….

Flag of Guyana, Wikimedia Commons

Raising sea walls in Guyana -- a proposal

Starbroek News (Guyana): Executive Director of Conservation International Dr. David Singh is of the view that effective upgrade of sea defences is one of many measures that Guyana could undertake to help combat the effects that climate change brings.

In particular, he said that the heightening of the sea wall to cater for the rising seas as a result of climate change is one that should be looked at. But he acknowledges that such an undertaking might be beyond the coffers of the state and dependent on donors. He said that the nature of donor funding disbursement makes successfully implementing such projects difficult.

Further, Dr Singh said that it is for the engineers to calculate the height that the existing sea defences need to be raised in order to withstand higher sea levels. He said that when the sea defences were built in the 1950s they catered for a certain degree of overtopping, and now that there has been a general increase in the level of the sea since then, the structures are inadequate. He said that because of the rise, existing sea defence structures are put at additional pressure.

This inadequacy of the sea defence has led to salt water intrusion, he said. "Yes, we can build higher sea defences but we must also look at other options as well," he said, adding that with the population concentrated on the coast, it would be difficult for the country to move its capital inland for fear of being overtaken by the sea. "A suite of different approaches is needed - one of them is to invest more in sea defence," Dr Singh said….

View of the ocean, Georgetown, Guyana, by "JukoFF," Wikimedia Commons