Amazon comes under fire

Environmental Research Web: The Amazon rainforest stores around 100 billion tonnes of carbon in its biomass, the equivalent of more than 10 years' worth of emissions from fossil fuels. But the region has undergone major changes recently, experiencing deforestation and climate variability. With that in mind, over the last 20 years the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) has looked at some of the processes involved.

"The Amazon region is under multiple pressures simultaneously – land-use change due to agricultural expansion, global climate change, regional climate change induced by the regional land-use change, and widespread use of fire," Eric Davidson of the Woods Hole Research Centre, US, told environmentalresearchweb. "We show how these pressures interact."

...According to Davidson, areas that have already had some forest clearing tend to have more sources of fire ignition in the cleared pastures, slash-and-burn agriculture, and charcoal production activities. "If the climate is drier and the remaining forest under water stress, the fires may spread into forests that had not previously experienced fire," he said. "We also try to sort out these pressures geographically, showing how the greatest changes can already be detected on the southern and eastern flanks of the Amazon, where most change has occurred and where the climate is already naturally dry and getting drier."

..."Brazil has successfully reduced rates of deforestation but not incidence of fire," said Davidson. "One implication is the need to control fire better and to find technologies for pasture management and small-scale agriculture that do not rely on fire."...

In this NASA satellite image of the Amazon near Rondonia, intact forest is deep green, while cleared areas are tan (bare ground) or light green (crops, pasture, or occasionally, second-growth forest). The fish bone pattern of small clearings along new roads is the beginning of one of the common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon.

Nearly half China farmers suffer land grabs

Terra Daily via AFP: More than 43 percent of Chinese farmers in a wide-ranging study have been victims of land grabs and local governments have made huge profits in the process, state press said Tuesday.

Land grabs have become an explosive issue in China as officials seeking to cash in on a property boom increasingly force farmers off their land to make way for construction -- an issue repeatedly condemned by Premier Wen Jiabao. In one recent protest, villagers in the wealthy southern province of Guangdong faced off with authorities for more than a week in a row over land and graft, eventually winning rare concessions.

According to the study, conducted in 17 provinces and regions by Beijing's Renmin University and published in the 21st Century Business Herald, nearly a quarter of farmers did not receive any compensation for their land.

Almost two thirds of those surveyed who did receive compensation got a lump sum, which averaged 18,739 yuan ($3,000) per mu, a Chinese unit of land equivalent to 0.16 acres or 0.07 hectares, according to the study....

Why is it so hard to make aid climate-smart?

Megan Rowling in AlertNet: Most aid workers know it doesn't make sense to build a house or install a water pump in a spot that's flooded every year, nor to get farmers to switch to crops that will make them more money now but yield less as temperatures rise. Yet there's no guarantee those types of mistakes still aren't being made, despite growing awareness of the extra complications climate change brings.

Experts who have worked on the nexus between climate change, disaster risk reduction and development for years say the three strands still aren't fully joined up when it comes to projects on the ground – and they have produced a new guide that aims to speed up progress in linking the three.

Some progress is being made, but it has been pretty slow. This is frustrating when it's increasingly recognised that extreme weather and rising seas are likely to bring more disasters and displacement as the planet warms, setting development back by decades in the worst-hit places.

"The three tribes know each other exist, and they barter a bit, but they aren't connected enough," says Terry Cannon, director of the Strengthening Climate Resilience (SCR) project, a consortium of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex University and the non-governmental organisations Plan International and Christian Aid.

The consortium has just released a new guide, "Changing climate, changing disasters: pathways to integration", which outlines a step-by-step approach to help disaster risk practitioners in NGOs and governments incorporate climate knowledge into their programmes....

A tree in a flooded field in Bangladesh, shot by Ziaul Hoque, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Yellow-cedar are dying in Alaska

Terra Daily via SPX: Yellow-cedar, a culturally and economically valuable tree in southeastern Alaska and adjacent parts of British Columbia, has been dying off across large expanses of these areas for the past 100 years. But no one could say why-until now.

"The cause of tree death, called yellow-cedar decline, is now known to be a form of root freezing that occurs during cold weather in late winter and early spring, but only when snow is not present on the ground," explains Pacific Northwest Research Station scientist Paul Hennon, co-lead of a synthesis paper recently published in the February issue of the journal BioScience.

"When present, snow protects the fine, shallow roots from extreme soil temperatures. The shallow rooting of yellow-cedar, early spring growth, and its unique vulnerability to freezing injury also contribute to this problem."

Yellow-cedar decline affects about 60 to 70 percent of trees in forests covering 600,000 acres in Alaska and British Columbia. The paper, "Shifting Climate, Altered Niche, and a Dynamic Conservation Strategy for Yellow-Cedar in the North Pacific Coastal Rainforest," summarizes 30 years of research and offers a framework for a conservation strategy for yellow-cedar in Alaska....

Yellow-cedar cones and foliage. Behind are Subalpine Fir trees. Shot by Walter Siegmund (talk), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK) describes what can happen when lots of money with a compromised agenda targets climate policy: A small group of leading climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires including Bill Gates, are lobbying governments and international bodies to back experiments into manipulating the climate on a global scale to avoid catastrophic climate change.

...Geoengineering is opposed by many environmentalists, who say the technology could undermine efforts to reduce emissions, and by developing countries who fear it could be used as a weapon or by rich countries to their advantage. In 2010, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity declared a moratorium on experiments in the sea and space, except for small-scale scientific studies.

Concern is now growing that the small but influential group of scientists, and their backers, may have a disproportionate effect on major decisions about geoengineering research and policy. "We will need to protect ourselves from vested interests [and] be sure that choices are not influenced by parties who might make significant amounts of money through a choice to modify climate, especially using proprietary intellectual property," said Jane Long, director at large for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, in a paper delivered to a recent geoengineering conference on ethics.

"The stakes are very high and scientists are not the best people to deal with the social, ethical or political issues that geoengineering raises," said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace. "The idea that a self-selected group should have so much influence is bizarre."...

Caricature of a mad scientist drawn by J.J., Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Floods threaten Queensland town's levees

Alison Rourke in the Guardian (UK): Thousands of residents of the rural Queensland town of St George are waiting anxiously to see if the town's levees will hold up to a record flood. About 3,000 of the town's residents left on Sunday after a mandatory evacuation order was issued in the biggest operation of its kind in Queensland's history.

On Monday, emergency crews scrambled to complete a 2.5-mile (4km) dirt levee around the town, 300 miles west of Brisbane. It is thought the levee will hold water from the rising Balonne river up to 14.7 metres. The river is predicted to peak at around 14.5 metres on Tuesday, down from original forecasts of 15 metres.

The district's mayor, Donna Stewart, said she was confident the levee would hold. "The picture is not as grim as what it was looking this time yesterday," she told the ABC. "I'm very confident that the levee bank that we've constructed at 14.7 metres will keep the water out of the major part of the town."

Residents stranded on remote properties outside the town centre were assured by Queensland premier, Anna Bligh, they would be looked after. "Can I say to everybody who is out there, many of whom I know are isolated, that we know where you are, we haven't forgotten you, and while you may not have seen anybody yet there is air support and there are food supplies and you haven't been forgotten," she said.

A prominent member of the opposition coalition party, National's senator Barnaby Joyce, lives in St George. "It is so quiet that it's a little disturbing," he told ABC radio. "There is something that sounds a little bit like the sea but it is not actually the sea, it's a river and it is just outside the back door." Extra police have been brought in to patrol the town....

Balonne River floods over a bridge in the St. George district, ca. 1941. When it comes to flooding, the past is the template

Cost of flood damage could increase tenfold due to climate change

Grimsby Telegraph (UK): "Flooding can ruin lives and livelihoods – we should all be concerned." Those were the words of Dr Harry Buckland, of local group Floodwatch, in response to a government announcement that the risk of flooding in North East Lincolnshire is forecast to rise – with the cost of damage expected to increase tenfold as a result of climate change.

Increased flooding for our region is among the risks that has been highlighted in a comprehensive Government assessment of climate change. Dr Buckland founded Floodwatch in 2007 – a resident's group set up to campaign for measures that would prevent a repeat of the devastating floods which hit the area in June of that year.

As reported, our area was inundated as 120mm of rain fell in just one month, causing river waters to rise and devastating homes across the area. The flooding caused almost £5 million of damage to property across North East Lincolnshire.

Dr Buckland's daughter Patricia fell victim, when two to three feet of rainwater gushed into her family's Anderby Drive home. Almost five years on, and he is still pushing for a reduction in the flood risk to our area, saying that it still poses "a very real threat".

According to the latest study, the risk of flooding is projected to increase significantly across the UK, particularly in the Humber and Yorkshire, the East Midlands and the South West. The new analysis for England and Wales shows that if no further plans were made to adapt to changing flood risks, annual damage to buildings and property could reach into the multi-billions by 2080, compared to the current cost of £1.2 billion a year...

Flood defenses under construction in 2005 in Lincolnshire, shot by David Wright, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Bulk of REDD Payments to benefit communities in Tanzania

Finnigan Wa Simbeye in AllAfrica.com via the Tanzania Daily News: Government has agreed to let 80 per cent of payments done under Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) to go to communities which protect forests.

An official from Africa Wildlife Foundation, Godlisten Matilya, told a Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation Programme meeting held in Dar es Salaam over the weekend that after a lot of lobbying by environmental activists, the government has agreed that communities have the responsibility to protect forests hence should pocket the bulk of payments to be made under REDD.

"It's communities that guard these forests because the government has inadequate forest officers to patrol these forests hence it's logical that REDD payments should benefit them," said Mr Matilya. According to Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, Tanzania has over 33.5 million hectares of forests of which 13.5 million are state owned while 18 million belong to communities and the rest are owned by private companies, institutions and individuals.

Experts estimate that when a REDD regime becomes effective next year after the expiry of Kyoto Protocol, the country may earn up to 300 million US dollars from carbon credits bought by polluting industrialized countries. "These payments will greatly encourage communities to conserve forests as they have done for several years," Matilya pointed out....

Lake Manyara in Northern Tanzania. The lake is seen from the Great Rift's rim, that is also clearly visible on the right of the picture. On the lower part of the picture, the small patch of tropical forest is part of Lake Manyara National Park. Shot by Clem23, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Silence shrouds Antarctic dig

The Telegraph (Australia): A team of Russian scientists has gone quiet as they race against winter to uncover an ancient Antarctic lake.

The group from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) have been drilling for weeks in an effort to reach isolated Lake Vostok, a vast, dark body of water hidden 4000m below the surface of the continent. Lake Vostok has not been exposed to air in more than 20 million years.

The team's last contact with colleagues in the outside world was six days ago, and scientists from around the globe are unsure of the fate of the mission - and the scientists themselves - as Antarctica's deadly winter draws near.

"When you're outside, it's extremely cold - minus 30, minus 40," microbiologist Dr David A Pearce said. "If you left your eyes open the fluid in them would start to freeze. Your nostrils would start to freeze. The moisture in your mouth would start to freeze."

Dr Pearce heads a team from the British Antarctic Survey on a competing mission, set to plumb the depths of Lake Ellsworth, one of a string of more than 370 lakes beneath Antarctica that may soon see light for the first time for eons. But time is running out for the Russian scientists....

A scene at Bellingshausen, a Russian Antarctic base on King George Island (far from the site for the Lake Vostok dig, I believe), shot by Loranchet, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Poor, minority residents in California face most health risks with climate change

Bernice Yeung in California Watch: Poor, urban and minority residents are most at risk for health problems linked to climate change, according to a new California Department of Public Health analysis of Los Angeles and Fresno counties.

The department examined social and environmental factors ranging from the rising sea level to public transportation access and found that African Americans and Latinos living in these counties are more likely to be exposed to health and safety risks related to poor air quality, heat waves, flooding and wildfires stemming from climate change.

“Clearly, climate change risks are not equal across the state or within individual counties,” according to the report .... “Identifying communities at greatest risk is a necessary step in efficiently employing limited resources to protect public health.”

...The study also found that there was a notable economic disparity between families living in the areas most vulnerable to climate change and those who didn't – the more at-risk families earned between 40 and 55 percent less each year than the least vulnerable families. Residents living downtown or in urban areas were also more vulnerable, the study said.

A western portion of Fresno County near Mendota also was found to be especially susceptible to climate change-related safety and health problems. Public health experts say these disparities in climate-related health risks can partially be explained by living conditions and a poor baseline status of health....

Los Angeles in heavy smog, 1973, US Environmental Protection Agency

Dark cloud over severe weather cover in the UK

Harvey Jones in the Express (UK): The UK may be in the middle of a big freeze but the biggest long-term weather threat facing millions of homeowners is flooding. As more extreme weather is on the horizon, 5.2 million homes face a serious flood risk. Watching helplessly as your house fills with water is a harrowing experience and the clean-up operation can be costly.

Household insurance should foot the bill but many people in flood-prone areas could soon find their homes become uninsurable, following a dispute between the Government and insurance companies. Currently insurers are committed to cover flood-risk homes under a “statement of principles” agreement between the Association of British Insurers and the Government.

Under the deal, insurers will continue to cover properties where the risk of a flood is less than one year in 75. They will also cover properties facing an even greater flood risk, provided the Environment Agency publicly commits to bolstering local flood defences within five years. But insurers claim the Government has failed to boost flood defences and they may refuse to renew the agreement when it expires in June next year.

This week, an influential group of MPs published a damning report into the state of the nation’s flood defences. The Public Accounts Committee accused the Government of failing to “accept ultimate responsibility for managing the risk of floods”. ‘Homeowners might not be able to renew their policy this year’

Many homes could become uninsurable before that 2013 deadline expires, says Simon Douglas, director of AA Insurance....

Brayford, telephone kiosk and signpost during the 2007 floods, shot by Nicholas Mutton, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Island nations want climate change in world court

Dawn.com (Pakistan) via AP: Small island nations, whose very existence is threatened by the rising sea levels brought about by global warming, are seeking to take the issue of climate change before the International Court of Justice. Johnson Toribiong, president of Palau, said Friday his country and other island nations had formed an expert advisory committee to bring the issue before the U.N. General Assembly. That would allow the world court in the Hague to determine the legal ramifications of climate change under international law.

”If 20 years of climate change negotiations have taught us anything, it’s that every state sees climate change differently. For some, it is mainly an economic issue … for others it’s about geopolitics and their past or future place in the global economy, but for us it’s about survival,” Toribiong said.

”Pacific countries are in the red zone, a swell of ocean where waters have risen two or three times higher than anywhere else in the world. That differential might explain why we speak about climate change so urgently and we look to everyone in every corner of the United Nations to find a solution,” he added.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Colombia University and a member the advisory committee, said the idea is to have a court determination compelling developed nations to control emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to cause global warming in the absence of an international treaty.

Gerrad said that the big emitter nations could then be found liable under the international law principles of transboundary harm, when physical activities in one country impact adversely upon another, and the preservation of statehood _ something that becomes exceedingly difficult if a country is submerged between the rising oceans....

Aerial view of uplifted limestone islands, so called "Rock Islands" in Palau, shot by NOAA

China water project to begin operating in 2013

Terra Daily via AFP: A massive project to divert water from China's south to its drought-prone north -- which has seen hundreds of thousands of people relocated -- will become partly operational next year, state media reported. The South-North Water Diversion Project is one of the country's largest infrastructure projects since the building of the Three Gorges Dam, which involved the relocation of more than one million people.

Sun Yifu, deputy water resources chief in the eastern province of Shandong -- who is also involved in the programme -- said his province's part of the project would be completed at the end of the year, the Xinhua news agency said. He added that "the entire project" would become operational in the first half of 2013, and start supplying water to arid parts of the north, the report said late Saturday.

China's South-North Water Diversion project consists of three routes -- the eastern, middle and western routes -- and Sun was referring to the eastern portion of the project, or a 1,890-kilometre (1,170-mile) canal....

Girding for the 100-year storm in New York City

Katherine Jose in Capital New York: ..."I would say three or four years ago there was—and this a general statement, not specific to New York—the emphasis was on mitigation; in other words, reducing our contribution to climate change," David Bragdon, head of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, told Capital in an interview. "It's only more recently that policy makers are acknowledging what scientists have known, which is that even if we magically stop emissions tomorrow—if we were successful in all these mitigation efforts, there's still effects that are happening already."

Acknowledgement of the science meant that a great deal of the chapter on climate change in the 2011 revised PlaNYC is devoted to sea-level rise, partly coming from recommendations of the New York Panel on Climate Change, convened for expressly this sort of thing. The panel believes that the sea level will rise as much as two to five inches in the 2020s, and reach the double digits as early as the 2050s.

"I think it's not understood how serious the situation will be in coastal areas and what the costs will be to society at large," Professor Klaus Jacob of Columbia's Earth Institute, a member of the panel, said in an interview. "This will go into any urban area that's on the coast into tens of billions of dollars."

It is, somewhat obviously, more exciting and uplifting to green the city and spare future generations the depredations of environmental change than it is to contemplate the inevitability of a serious flooding disaster in our lifetime. But despite the great deal of research and information that has emerged in the last several years, Jacob said, "greening" projects are still proceeding largely without heed of potential disaster. Government bureaucracies, even those that operate in the generally forward-thinking Bloomberg administration, aren't always quick to act on new research that outlines new risks.

Another key initiative of the Bloomberg administration has been the transformation of the city's waterfronts. It's been a boom on the waterfront and the plans are only just beginning to be realized. None of them, Jacob said, take sea-level rise into account....

The High Line in New York City, shot by Beyond My Ken, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Deforestation threatens Brazil's wetland sanctuary

Terra Daily via AFP: The Pantanal, a stunning biodiversity sanctuary in central-western Brazil, is threatened by intensive farming and deforestation, a leading environmental group warned as the world marked World Wetlands Day on Thursday. Often referred to as the worlds largest freshwater wetland system, the Pantanal extends through millions of hectares of Brazil, eastern Bolivia and eastern Paraguay.

It includes sanctuaries for migratory birds, nursery grounds for aquatic life, and refuges for such creatures as the yacare caiman, deer, and jaguar. Some 4,500 different species live in the Pantanal. A leading environmental group, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), is sounding the alarm about the growing threat to the region posed by intensive farming, deforestation, urban growth and the proliferation of hydro-electric dams.

As evidence the group cites a three-year study by 30 experts from Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, the counties that share the Paraguay river, which flows from its headwaters in Mato Grosso about 2,600 kilometers (1,620 miles) to its confluence with the Parana River in Argentina.

"The Pantanal is under threat," said biologist Glauco Kimura, who coordinates the Water for Life program at WWF. "This may seem surprising but it is the sad reality. Our study shows that 14 percent of the Paraguay River basin must be urgently protected," Kimura said....

An aerial view of the Pantanal by Alicia Yo, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Can afforestation mitigate climate change?

Borbala Galos in Environmental Research Web: Afforestation in larger forest blocks could affect climate on a regional scale and may reduce the projected climate change in a drought-threatened study region. So say researchers from Germany and Hungary, who report their climate simulation work in Environmental Research Letters.

Increased forest cover affects the climate to a very different extent, depending on the region. In some areas, half of the projected precipitation decrease can be offset and the total number of drought events may be reduced, assuming complete afforestation of the areas in question. Modelling studies can help to identify regions where forest-cover increase should most effectively alleviate climate-change effects.

We selected Hungary as our study area because of the significant increase in the probability and severity of summer droughts predicted for the end of the 21st century, the large-scale land-use changes envisaged, and the high climate sensitivity of the zonal forest belts of the lowlands. Using REMO (regional climate model at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg) we prepared a case study to analyse whether the climate-change signal for summer precipitation and the probability of droughts could be reduced, assuming afforestation for the entire country.

We conclude that, although even practically unrealistic increases in forest cover did not offset the projected climate change, the ecological significance of the indicated effects of land-cover changes – as well as certain services and local-scale benefits of forests – should not be underestimated...

Tisza river, floodplain forests, Szeged, Hungary, shot by Takkk, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels

Jean Francois Mouhot further elaborates on a brilliant point he made in 2010, this time in the Guardian (UK): ...The history of slavery and its abolition shows how blurred the frontier between what is considered good and evil can be, and how quickly it can shift. We have a mental image of slave-owners as cruel, sadistic, inhuman brutes, and forget too easily the ordinariness of slave ownership throughout the world. To many, slavery seemed normal and indispensable. In the US, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Lifestyles and healthy incomes were predicated upon it, just as we today depend on oil. Similarly, many slave-owners lived with the impression that they were decent people.

... Why is all of this relevant for climate change policy? Our contemporary economies have become extremely dependent on fossil fuels, just as slave societies were dependent on their slaves – indeed far more than the latter ever were. As one scholar remarked: "That US Congressmen tend to rationalise fossil fuel use despite climate risks to future generations just as southern congressmen rationalised slavery despite ideals of equality is perhaps unsurprising."

It should thus come as no surprise that there is so much resistance to climate science. Our societies, like slave-owning societies, have a vested interest in ignoring the scientific consensus. Pointing out the similarities between slavery and the use of fossil fuels can help us engage with the issue in a new way, and convince us to act, as no one envisages comfortably being compared with a slave-owner.

Furthermore, because of the striking similarities between the use of slaves and of fossil fuels, policymakers can find inspiration from the campaigns to abolish slavery and use them to tackle global warming. For example, the history of the abolition of slavery, in the UK at least, suggests that an incremental approach and the development of compromises worked better at moving the cause forward than hardline stances.

The evidence also implies that slavery came to be challenged and finally abolished when people became aware of an alternative. This alternative – steam power – was of course a great moral improvement until we came to know the consequences of fossil fuel consumption. This, in turn, suggests that we will restrain our use of fossil fuels if we can favour a new energy transition and find clean sources of energy – and that we should concentrate our efforts on developing "green" technologies at the same time as reducing our consumption of fossil fuels....

If we do not change, the human family will pay heavily for the consequences of our reckless activity. Moreover, future generations will look back at us and wonder how our civilisation could have been so backward and have lived in such appalling moral blindness. Will the next generation have any awareness that industrialised societies had mitigating circumstances? Probably not. They are more likely to curse us for the irreparable damage we have done to the planet. Surely, they will say, we were a barbarian people....

An image of the Congress of the Confederacy in the US, 1861

UN declares Somali famine over for now

Katy Migiro in AlertNet: An exceptional harvest after good rains and food deliveries by aid agencies have ended famine in Somalia for now but food stocks could run out again in May, the United Nations said on Friday. The famine, which was declared in July, killed tens of thousands in south and central Somalia, much of which is controlled by Islamist militants. More than 2.3 million Somalis, almost a third of the population, are still in need of aid.

"....famine conditions are no longer present," said a statement from the office of Mark Bowden, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia. Millions of people still need food, clean water, shelter and other assistance to survive and the situation is expected to deteriorate in May," the statement cited Bowden as saying.

Al Shabaab said there was no hunger crisis in parts of the anarchic country it governed and accused aid agencies of misleading the population. While aid deliveries to some 180,000 people in camps in the capital Mogadishu have improved the situation there, fighting in southern and central Somalia is still hampering aid deliveries to the worst-hit areas.

Government forces have been fighting Islamist rebels for the past five years, while Kenyan and Ethiopian forces both moved into the country last year to help fight the al Qaeda-linked militants al Shabaab. The fighting, combined with attacks on aid workers and a history of aid being manipulated for political gain, means Somalia is one of the toughest countries for relief agencies to operate in....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature can help lessen flood impacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

New report reviews nitrogen pollution impacts and sollutions

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

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

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

The report cites the following impacts from nitrogen pollution:

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

A toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie, shot by NASA

Cold snap tests Greece's depleted welfare services

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

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

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

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

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

Tropical cyclones to cause greater damage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drought-hit Middle East ripe for conflict

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

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

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

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

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

Flood defences are being overwhelmed by a whirlpool of spin

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

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

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

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

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

Drought forces Texas town to truck in water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argentina tries to combat a drier future

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

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

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

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

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

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