Legally binding ban proposed on ocean fertilisation

Dyna Rochmyaningsih in SciDev.net: Australia has joined with Nigeria and South Korea to propose a legally binding ban on commercial ocean fertilisation. But the move would not prevent legitimate scientific research, according to Tony Burke, Australian Minister of the Environment.

The proposal was sent to the London Convention and Protocol, which governs marine pollution and dumping at sea, on 16 May, and it will be considered when signatory nations meet in October.

Ocean fertilisation is a controversial geoengineering technique in which nutrient particles like iron, phosphorous and nitrogen are poured into the sea to induce growth of photosynthetic microorganisms — known as phytoplankton — that can fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

When phytoplankton die and sink they transfer carbon into the deep ocean, but their growth is usually limited in nutrient-poor water. The technique has attracted scientific and commercial interest as a way to generate carbon credits, and as a potential climate change mitigation mechanism. Some also proposed it as a way to boost fish populations.

Last year, American businessman Russ George, then a director of the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, dumped 100 tonnes of iron near the Haida Gwaii Islands, off the coast of Western Canada. The aim was to increase phytoplankton populations, thereby boosting marine productivity — and eventually the salmon population. The act enraged scientists and environmentalists, many of whom say iron fertilisation is unscientific and unproven, especially on a large-scale....

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba (Feb. 10, 2012) Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Shane Tuck films diving operations off the coast of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Expeditionary Combat Camera's Underwater Photo Team conducts semi-annual training to hone its divers' specialized skill set and ensure valuable support of Department of Defense activities worldwide. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jayme Pastoric/Released) 120210-N-XD935-048 

Papaya-clay combo could cut cost of water purification in developing countries

American Chemical Society: An inexpensive new material made of clay and papaya seeds removes harmful metals from water and could lower the cost of providing clean water to millions of people in the developing world, scientists are reporting. Their study on this “hybrid clay” appears in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Emmanuel Unuabonah and colleagues explain that almost 1 billion people in developing countries lack access to reliable supplies of clean water for drinking, cooking and other key uses. One health problem resulting from that shortage involves exposure to heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury, released from industrial sources into the water. Technology exists for removing those metals from drinking water, but often is too costly in developing countries. So these scientists looked for a more affordable and sustainable water treatment adsorbent.

They turned to two materials readily available in some developing countries. One was kaolinite clay, used to make ceramics, paint, paper and other products. The other: seeds of the Carica papaya fruit. Both had been used separately in water purification in the past, but until now, they had not been combined in what the scientists term “hybrid clay.” Their documentation of the clay’s effectiveness established that the material “has a strong potential for replacing commercial activated carbon in treatment of wastewater in the developing world.”...

New report identifies "regret-free" approaches for adapting African agriculture to climate change

AllAfrica.com via CGIAR: Whether it's swapping coffee for cocoa in Central America or bracing for drought in Sri Lanka with a return to ancient water storage systems, findings from a new report from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) chart a path for farmers to adapt to climate shifts despite uncertainties about what growing conditions will look like decades from now.

As this week's UN climate talks in Bonn continue to sideline a formal deal on agriculture, the study, Addressing uncertainty in adaptation planning for agriculture, which was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS), finds that the cloudy aspects of climate forecasts are no excuse for a paralysis in agriculture adaptation policies.

"Climate projections will always have a degree of uncertainty, but we need to stop using uncertainty as a rationale for inaction," said Sonja Vermeulen, head of research at CCAFS and the lead author of the study.

"Even when our knowledge is incomplete, we often have robust grounds for choosing best-bet adaptation actions and pathways, by building pragmatically on current capacities in agriculture and environmental management, and using projections to add detail and to test promising options against a range of scenarios."...

Rain dampens Colorado’s worst-ever wildfire

Environment News Service: A welcome rain [Friday] afternoon is helping to extinguish the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history. The Black Forest Fire within the Colorado Springs city limits killed two people Tuesday while they were trying to flee, and before the rain began it was still raging out of control.

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa told reporters the bodies of two people were found about 2 pm Thursday in their garage with the car doors open. They are believed to have died Tuesday afternoon as their Black Forest neighborhood was being evacuated. Their identities have not yet been released.

Since it started on Tuesday, the wind-driven Black Forest Fire has consumed 24.5 square miles, destroyed 389 homes and forced the evacuation of 41,000 people. Since the rain began, law enforcement officials have lifted all mandatory evacuation notices, warning that they could be re-imposed if the fire spreads again.

An estimated 800 responders are working to contain the the Black Forest fire, which before the rain started was just five percent contained. At least 140 personnel from the Colorado National Guard and National Guard members from as far away as North Carolina are assisting civil authorities with firefighting support.

Until Thursday, last year’s Waldo Canyon fire, 10 miles west of the current blaze, had topped the list of Colorado’s most destructive fires, with 346 homes destroyed. Now the Black Forest fire is considered the state’s most destructive....

A night time image of the Black Forest Fire at 9:30 pm on the night of the first day, 11 June 2013. Photo was taken from the Broadmoor Bluffs neighborhood of Colorado Springs on the lower slope of Cheyenne Mountain, about 20 miles away.  Shot by Ahodges7, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Developing world bucks decline in green energy funding

Siobhan Chan in SciDev.net: Spending on renewable energy is undergoing a geographic shift, with developing countries investing more last year despite an overall 12 per cent drop in global spending since 2011, according to two reports published this week (12 June).  The reports found that developing countries invested a total of US$112 billion in renewable energy in 2012, up 19 per cent from 2011.

Just under four per cent of the US$244 billion invested globally went on research and development, rising — albeit only slightly — for an eighth consecutive year. At US$9.6 billion in 2012, global R&D funding has almost doubled since 2004.

'Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2013', by the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance and information service Bloomberg New Energy Finance, was published alongside 'Renewables 2013: Global Status Report' by REN21, a global renewable energy policy network.

Two-thirds of the 138 countries with renewable energy policies and targets were in the developing world, the Global Trends report found.  Of the developing countries, China continued to dominate the sector, increasing its investment by 22 per cent to US$67 billion. Latin American countries such as Chile and Mexico also increased their investment in the sector.

However, countries in the Middle East and Africa had the greatest growth, increasing spending by 228 per cent to US$12 billion....

A wind farm in Mongolia, shot by Steven Buss, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Tillage and reduced-input rotations affect runoff from agricultural fields

Seed Daily via SPX: No-till management practices can reduce soil erosion, but evidence suggests they can also lead to increased runoff of dissolved phosphorus from soil surfaces. Meanwhile, farmers looking to avoid herbicides often have to combat weeds with tillage, which causes erosion. With all of the tradeoffs of different management systems, which one should growers use? To answer that question, researchers from the USDA Agricultural Research Service compared nutrient and sediment loss from no-till, conventional tillage, and reduced-input rotation watersheds in a study published online in Soil Science Society of America Journal.

By keeping a protective layer of plant matter on the soil surface, no-till practices reduce the loss of soil and phosphorus (P) attached to soil particles. But no-till requires herbicides to control weeds, and even after adoption of the practice by many farmers, harmful algal blooms were still occurring in surface waters. It looked as if no-till, while decreasing particulate P loss, was leading to increased runoff of dissolved P.

"Normally when you apply P-containing fertilizers, you would incorporate them into the soil," says Martin Shipitalo, lead author of the study. "With no-till, you're just broadcasting it on the soil surface, leading to high P concentrations at the surface. Even if you get less particulate loss, runoff will pick up that dissolved P that's highly concentrated at the soil surface."

Shipitalo and his team decided to look at data from a 16-year experiment to compare soil and nutrient runoff in watersheds managed in three different ways - no-till, conventional tillage (chisel-till), and reduced-input rotations. "The idea with the reduced-input rotation was to have a conservation practice that worked for farmers who do not want to use herbicides or large amounts of mineral fertilizers," explains Shipitalo.

In the current study, researchers provided most of the nutrients to crops in the reduced-input watersheds by planting red clover and spreading manure instead of fertilizers. They minimized the amount of bare soils and used just a shallow disking instead of total inversion tillage to leave some crop residue on the soil surface. While herbicides were used in the experiment, they aren't necessary because the light tilling and in-row cultivation that was done kept weeds under control.

"Reduced-input rotations strike a medium between conventional tillage and no-till," says Shipitalo. "And they could easily be adapted to be organic rotations."...

Ferdynand Rusczcyc's 1898 painting, "The Soil"

An ESA satellite measure's Europe's soil moisture before flood

European Space Agency: As parts of central Europe are battling with the most extensive floods in centuries, forecasters are hoping that ESA’s SMOS satellite will help to improve the accuracy of flood prediction in the future.

As its name suggests, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission monitors the amount of water held in the surface layers of the soil and the concentration of salt in the top layer of seawater. This information is helping scientists understand more about how water is cycled between the oceans, atmosphere and land – Earth’s water cycle. It is also helping to improve weather forecasts.

The massive flooding that central Europe is currently suffering was brought about by a wet spring and sudden heavy rains.

 SMOS carries a novel microwave sensor to capture images of ‘brightness temperature’ to derive information on soil moisture. Prior to the torrential rains, SMOS showed that soils in Germany were showing record levels of moisture – in fact, the highest ever observed.

The animation above shows the wet soils in blues and the dryer soils in yellows. ESA’s SMOS mission scientist, Matthias Drusch, explains, “Data from SMOS can be used to monitor the saturation of the soil.

“At the end of May we see that the soil was almost fully saturated, with record values for moisture. More rain meant that it immediately ran off as the surplus water could not soak into the soil, and this resulted in these terrible floods....

GIF from the ESA website

Study helps managers identify regions with multiple threat potential, including wildfires

Terra Daily via SPX: A recent study in the Journal of Forestry now offers managers a tool to help them identify regions exposed to multiple forest threats. The tool uses a novel 15-mile radius neighborhood analysis to highlight locations where threats are more concentrated relative to other areas, and identifies where multiple threats may intersect. It is a technique that may have never been used before to describe forest threats, according to the researchers.

"Policymakers and managers often rely on maps showing where forest threats are most prevalent; they then assess these threats in relation to the forest resources most valued by the public," explains Jeff Kline, the study's lead author and a research forester at the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station.

"Management priorities are then made based on this information. We have devised a way to combine and display forest threat data at its appropriate spatial scale and in a way that transcends political boundaries, using readily available GIS [geographic information system] analytical tools."

"To our knowledge, this is the first time that data describing different threats have been displayed in this manner," adds co-lead and research ecologist, Becky Kerns, "Our approach recognizes that a single point mapped as potentially highly vulnerable to a threat may not be all that important from a regional or national planning perspective. What is important is the concentration of threats within a defined and appropriate spatial scale of interest."...

The Beaver Creek fire in the Grand Tetons, 2012, National Park Service

Questions rise about seeding for ocean C02 sequestration

DOE Argonne National Laboratory: A new study on the feeding habits of ocean microbes calls into question the potential use of algal blooms to trap carbon dioxide and offset rising global levels. These blooms contain iron-eating microscopic phytoplankton that absorb C02 from the air through the process of photosynthesis and provide nutrients for marine life. But one type of phytoplankton, a diatom, is using more iron that it needs for photosynthesis and storing the extra in its silica skeletons and shells, according to an X-ray analysis of phytoplankton conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. This reduces the amount of iron left over to support the carbon-eating plankton.

“Just like someone walking through a buffet line who takes the last two pieces of cake, even though they know they’ll only eat one, they’re hogging the food,” said Ellery Ingall, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-lead author on this result.  “Everyone else in line gets nothing; the person’s decision affects these other people.”

Because of this iron-hogging behavior, the process of adding iron to surface water – called iron fertilization or iron seeding – may have only a short-lived environmental benefit. And, the process may actually reduce over the long-term how much C02 the ocean can trap.

Rather than feed the growth of extra plankton, triggering algal blooms, the iron fertilization may instead stimulate the gluttonous diatoms to take up even more iron to build larger shells. When the shells get large enough, they sink to the ocean floor, sequestering the iron and starving off the diatom’s plankton peers.

Over time, this reduction in the amount of iron in surface waters could trigger the growth of microbial populations that require less iron for nutrients, reducing the amount of phytoplankton blooms available to take in C02 and to feed marine life....

A phytoplankton bloom in Shark Bay off the West coast of Australia, NASA image

Chinese 'container hospitals' ready to deploy in Africa

Li Jiao in SciDev.net: Africa's first 'container hospital', developed by Chinese scientists, could be ready for use by the end of the month (June), following two years of development. It will be located in either Cameroon or Namibia, depending on government approval.

Its developers say that the hospital's ten component containers can be slotted together in different configurations, like toy blocks, depending on individual countries' needs.

Each hospital consists of ten containers with rooms for general clinics, waiting patients, treatments, a pharmacy and back-up power supply. The hospitals developers say they can be used for decades if properly maintained, and are intended for long-term service. It is hoped that several African countries will eventually benefit.

In 2010, Liu Yandong, the new Chinese vice premier, signed a memorandum to develop a portable hospital suitable for Africa. The concept was subsequently developed at The Low Cost Health Programme Centre (LCHPC) at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has led and funded the project, so far to the tune of 14 million renminbi (US$2.2 million). However, according to Zhou Shumin, director of LCHPC, the funding is not enough, and so the ministry has pledged to invest further.

Zhou says that container hospitals function in the same way as general hospitals — the only key difference is the size....

Stacks of shipping containers, shot by Danny Cornelissen, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Merkel urges greater flood protection as tours region

Space Daily via SPX: Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday that Germany still had much to do in bolstering the country's flood defences as she toured a northern water-logged region battling historic river levels.

Merkel made her fourth trip to flooded zones in around a week, visiting Hitzacker in Lower Saxony whose 4,000 residents have been told to leave their homes despite an anti-flood barrier set up after devastating 2002 floods.

The defence system has prevented the swollen River Elbe gushing into the town and Merkel said it showed the protective measure was worth having but said "there remains a lot to do", pledging further steps. She earlier went to Lauenburg, 40 kilometres (25 miles) southeast of Hamburg, where the town centre is covered by about 30 centimetres (a foot) of water.

The water level stabilised at around 9.5 metres (31 feet) overnight in the picturesque town of half-timbered houses but was still almost twice as high as normal.

Disastrous floods in Germany began to subside Wednesday after leaving at least 19 people dead in central Europe. While the River Elbe has begun to stabilise, thousands of volunteers are still working to shore up sodden dykes and some 10,000 soldiers are still helping in flooded regions....

The Elbe's high water mark in Dresden, shot by Coffins, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Czechs hope wealth-destroying floods can lift growth

Michael Winfrey in Reuters: Floods that have caused billions of euros in damage across central Europe may actually provide an economic boost for the Czech Republic, a country struggling to shrug off its longest recession in more than two decades.

Governments and insurers from Germany to Romania will have to pick up the costs of helping families and business recover from the floods, which have killed at least a dozen people and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes since the start of June.

But central bank Governor Miroslav Singer cautioned against confusing gross domestic product (GDP) growth with wealth. "The repair of flood damage will probably result in an acceleration of the tempo of GDP," he predicted in a presentation last week, adding: "This variable measures economic activity, or the creation of new value each year; GDP does not measure wealth!"

The rising waters have forced factories to halt production and snarled logistics, cutting into output, while sludge dredged up from river bottoms has wiped out crops in low-lying areas in the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

Those factors, however, could be outweighed - if only just - by the funds will governments pump into rebuilding infrastructure and the cash families and firms will spend on replacing lost or damaged items....

Flood in Prague 2013, Štvanice water-power plant. Shot by Jiří Sedláček, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Severe typhoon season expected

Wang Qian in China Daily: At least seven typhoons are expected to hit China this year, the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters said in May. Typhoon season runs from July to September, with the most intense storms occurring between August and October.

Zhang Ling, chief typhoon forecaster at the typhoon and marine forecast center under the China Meteorological Administration, said the number of typhoons likely to land in the country is similar to the average number recorded since 1949.

The first typhoon is expected to hit about mid-June, a little earlier than usual, Li Benxia, a typhoon expert at the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center of the State Oceanic Administration, said.

She said Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, near the East China Sea, may see more than six typhoons, and the local authorities should prepare for a harsh typhoon season. The South China Sea area is likely to be mild compared with the East China Sea, according to Li.

Experts have warned local authorities to pay close attention to the coming typhoon season, because the severe weather can cause damage and casualties on a massive scale. CMA Spokesman Chen Zhenlin said heavy rainfall is also expected....

Graphic from China Daily

China approves imports of GM soybean from Brazil

Seed Daily via AFP: China, the main buyer of Brazilian soybeans, has approved imports of three genetically modified varieties of the crop, to be produced on a large scale in the South American country.

The Agriculture Ministry said Monday that China gave its green light for the Intacta RR2 PRO variety, which can resist pests such as a type of caterpillar, as well as for the herbicide-resistant CV 127 and Liberty Link.

The agreement followed a meeting of Chinese and Brazilian agriculture ministers in Beijing. Many Brazilian soybean producers were awaiting China's approval before embarking on production of these genetically modified varieties, the ministry said.

Of the 7.2 million tons of soybean exported by Brazil in April, more than 5.6 million went to China. "This approval is even more important in view of the spread of the Helicoverpa armigera caterpillar in several Brazilian states," the ministry said in a statement....

Soybean seeds, shot by Scott Bauer of the US Department of Agriculture

Large-scale biodiversity is vital to maintain ecosystem health

Terra Daily via SPX: Over the years ecologists have shown how biological diversity benefits the health of small, natural communities. New analysis by ecologists at UC Santa Cruz demonstrates that even higher levels of biological diversity are necessary to maintain ecosystem health in larger landscapes over long periods of time.

Think of it as patches on a quilt, says Erika Zavaleta, UCSC associate professor of environmental studies. Each patch may be a diverse habitat of plants, animals, and insects but it is equally important that the landscape "quilt" is made up of a diversity of patches that are different from each other.

"A mix of meadows, young forest, old forest and shrub lands, for example, might provide more benefits than a landscape of continuous young forest, even if that young forest itself has high biodiversity," Zavaleta said.

Zavaleta and two ecologists who recently received Ph.D.s from UCSC illustrate the importance of landscape diversity in their article "Several scales of bioversity affect ecosystem multifunctionality" published this week in PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

..."We used the simulation models to create imaginary landscapes with many kinds of habitats," she said. The team was able to test combinations of "patches" in order to determine the overall potential health of the "quilt." The authors write: "In addition to conserving important species, maintaining ecosystem multifunctionality will require diverse landscape mosaics of diverse communities."...

A 1915 American quilt shot by Sean Pathasema, public domain

Cultivation of climate-change adapting crops a must for food security in Bangladesh

Dhaka Tribune (Bangladesh): Agri experts at a function urged farmers to cultivate climate-change adapting crops in disaster prone areas to boost food production of the country. As our country has been experiencing adverse impact of climate change over the last few years, creating a grave concern to agriculture, human health, livelihood, navigation, ecology, soil, environment and biodiversity, they said.

They made the comments while addressing a concluding session of a daylong training workshop for the farmers on the disaster risk in agri sector and its coping strategies at the agriculture training centre at Khamarbari of Gaibandha town on Monday.

Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) organised the function with the support of Food and Agriculture Organisation service project to educate the farmers to cultivate crops in all seasons and keep agro activities movable at any cost all year round facing the negative and adverse impacts caused by climate change.

Deputy Director of DAE Mir Abdur Razzak attended the function and addressed it as the chief guest and crops production specialist Golam Mostafa was present as the special guest while district training officer Zulfiquer Haider presided over the function.

...DD of DAE Mir Abdur Razzak said as the agro production is being hampered seriously and change in seasons is being noticed due to climate change, he suggested the farmers to take different steps for adaptation of the climate change....

A rice paddy in Bangladesh, shot by Balaram Mahalder, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

European coal pollution causes 22,300 premature deaths a year, study shows

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK): Air pollution from Europe's 300 largest coal power stations causes 22,300 premature deaths a year and costs companies and governments billions of pounds in disease treatment and lost working days, says a major study of the health impacts of burning coal to generate electricity.

The research, from Stuttgart University's Institute for energy economics and commissioned by Greenpeace International, suggests that a further 2,700 people can be expected to die prematurely each year if a new generation of 50 planned coal plants are built in Europe. "The coal-fired power plants in Europe cause a considerable amount of health impacts," the researchers concluded.

Analysis of the emissions shows that air pollution from coal plants is now linked to more deaths than road traffic accidents in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. In Germany and the UK, coal-fired power stations are associated with nearly as many deaths as road accidents. Polish coal power plants were estimated to cause more than 5,000 premature deaths in 2010.

The cumulative impact of pollution on health is "shocking", says an accompanying Greenpeace report. A total of 240,000 years of life were said to be lost in Europe in 2010 with 480,000 work days a year and 22,600 "life years" lost in Britain, the fifth most coal-polluted country. Drax, Britain's largest coal-powered station, was said to be responsible for 4,450 life years lost, and Longannet in Scotland 4,210....

The picture is of Queen Elizabeth and King George Dock in the background and the storage area for cheap imported Eastern European coal in the foreground. All but the bottom left hand side of this area is within the specified square (TA1528). The area of the coal heap is huge - about 16 hectares (39 acres). The picture was taken (from memory) at about 1200 feet. Shot by Andy Beecroft, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Water -- conflict or cooperation?

Asia Society-Northern California: “To what extent is water a factor in conflict and to what extent can we reduce water being a factor in conflict?” The question, posed by Peter Gleick, Co-Founder and President of the Pacific Institute, helped set the context for a panel discussion at ASNC on June 5 that looked at the potential security implications of water scarcity.

Gleick was joined by Brahma Chellaney of the Center for Policy Research (New Delhi), whose research has focused on water scarcity as a source of regional tensions, particularly in regions where the resource is shared. His 2012 book, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, deals at length with this topic and also won Asia Society’s 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award. The event was moderated by Peter Schwartz, a well-known futurist who founded the scenario planning organization Global Business Network. Schwartz is now Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning at Salesforce.com.

“Armies don’t have to march to battle to wage a water war,” argued Chellaney. “Water can be fashioned into a weapon depending on whether the state is located upstream or downstream.” He noted that international rivers create power struggles, such as when upstream countries reengineer water flows or downstream countries withhold data of their water endowments. In short, water can provide tremendous leverage among countries and can be used as a part of a larger strategy to elicit compliance among recipients.

Chellaney has spent his career focusing on emerging security issues that affect the world including climate change and energy, but believes that water scarcity will be the big issue in the coming years. This is especially true in Asia where climate change and other factors such as more demand for meat is intensifying and placing even greater strains on the region’s already finite supply of water. He argues that Asia's policy makers are not giving water the attention it deserves in public discourse. Instead “water policy is often left to hydrologists and engineers and not looked at strategically.” Integrating water in policy and planning will help to secure water over the long-term...

Water drop shot by Fir0002, Wikimedia Commons, under the following Creative Commons license:
Attribution NonCommercial Unported 3.0

New York City weather will get much more severe over next 3 decades

CBS News New York: If you thought Hurricane Sandy was bad, the mayor’s office says conditions are ripe for far worse weather around here: like heat waves, droughts and coastal flooding. The study that Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered on the city’s weather future predicts a grim scenario of more heat waves, more rain and wind and more coastal flooding that will affect increasing numbers of people. A panel of climate change experts compiled the study.

“When they’ve looked at what the potential storm surge from a so-called hundred-year flood could be, the height of that hundred-year flood could be five to six feet higher than Sandy in the out years, and maybe over six feet higher,” city Rebuilding and Resiliency director Seth Pinsky told reporters including WCBS 880′s Rich Lamb. “We’re likely to have more frequent heavy downpours and for those heavy downpours to be heavier.”

The city estimates that by the year 2050 there will be a 101 percent increase in the number of people affect by coastal flooding — from 398,000 in 2013 to 801,000 in 2050. Lost jobs will go up 59 percent from 271,000 this year to 434,000 in 2050.

“Our focus should not be on preparing for the next Sandy — in other words, preparing for a storm that is going to do precisely the same thing in precisely the same places, in precisely the same way as Sandy,” NYC Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway told CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer on Monday.

The city report predicts a significant increase in heat waves — three or more days with temperatures in the 90s, saying it could go from two a year to seven a year. “At the high end of their estimates, by the 2050s, New York could have as many 90-degree days as Birmingham, Alabama,” Pinsky said.

“It makes our infrastructure extremely vulnerable,” Holloway said. “It is clear that we’re going to need to make investments as a city, significant investments if we’re going to be protected over the long term.”...

Easter Sunday on Fifth Avenue in 1900

The Amazon rainforest's silent killer, understory fires, outburns deforestation

Keerthi Chandrashekar in Latinos Post: Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest may capture most of the headlines, but NASA scientists have found a previously-undiscovered killer lurking under the tree tops: understory fires. The extent of damage caused by these fires is so great that it has destroyed more of the Amazon in recent years than deforestation.

These understory fires have escaped NASA's satellites throughout the years because they are hidden from view and all that escapes through the thick tree canopies are wisps of smoke. The team of researchers had to utilize new techniques when analyzing satellite data.

...According to the study, understory fires between 1999 and 2010 ravaged 2.8 percent of the Amazon, or 33,000 square miles of forest. While grasses and shrubs in the Amazon savannah can handle fires that can spread up to 330 feet per minute, the trees and plants underneath the thick forest canopy cannot. Understory fires burn at a slow rate of only a few feet per minute, but destroy 10-50 percent of the burn area's trees. A slow but efficient killer of the forest.

The study also found no correlation between deforestation for farmland done through burning and understory fires. The highest rates of destruction done by the understory fires were in 2005, 2007, and 2010, while the most prolific years for manmade deforestation were 2003 and 2004.

...The scientists are hoping the study will help drive further research into the way climate change is contributing to understory fires. The existence of these understory fires changes the way carbon emissions from rainforests should be looked at....

Amazon fire smoke seen from space, via NASA

NASA to study how pollution, storms and climate mix

Space Daily via SPX: NASA aircraft will take to the skies over the southern United States this summer to investigate how air pollution and natural emissions, which are pushed high into the atmosphere by large storms, affect atmospheric composition and climate.

NASA will conduct its most complex airborne science campaign of the year from Houston's Ellington Field, which is operated by the agency's Johnson Space Center, beginning Aug. 7 and continuing through September. The field campaign draws together coordinated observations from NASA satellites, aircraft and an array of ground sites.

More than 250 scientists, engineers and flight personnel, including several from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are participating in the Studies of Emissions, Atmospheric Composition, Clouds and Climate Coupling by Regional Surveys (SEAC4RS) campaign. The project is sponsored by the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Brian Toon of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is the lead scientist.

Aircraft and sensors will probe the atmosphere from top to bottom at the critical time of year when weather systems are strong enough and regional air pollution and natural emissions are prolific enough to pump gases and particles high into the atmosphere. The result is potentially global consequences for Earth's atmosphere and climate.

"In summertime across the United States, emissions from large seasonal fires, metropolitan areas and vegetation are moved upward by thunderstorms and the North American Monsoon," Toon said. "When these chemicals get into the stratosphere they can affect the whole Earth. They also may influence how thunderstorms behave. With SEAC4RS we hope to better understand how all these things interact."

The campaign will provide new insights into the effects of the gases and tiny aerosol particles in the atmosphere. The mission is targeting two major regional sources of summertime emissions: intense smoke from forest fires in the U.S. West and natural emissions of isoprene, a carbon compound, from forests in the Southeast....

Aftermath of the Bastrop, Texas, fires in October 2011, shot by Ed Schipul, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Study reveals significant leakage of carbon stored on land to rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal regions

University of Exeter: When carbon is emitted by human activities into the atmosphere it is generally thought that about half remains in the atmosphere and the remainder is stored in the oceans and on land. New research suggests that human activity could be increasing the movement of carbon from land to rivers, estuaries and the coastal zone indicating that large quantities of anthropogenic carbon may be hidden in regions not previously considered.

The research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience and led by researchers from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Exeter, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement, the University of Hawai’i and ETH Zürich, has for the first time shown that increased leaching of carbon from soil, mainly due to deforestation, sewage inputs and increased weathering, has resulted in less carbon being stored on land and more stored in rivers, streams, lakes, reservoirs, estuaries and coastal zones – environments that are together known as the ‘land-ocean aquatic continuum’.

The study reviewed previously published data and showed that a significant fraction of the carbon emitted through human activity that is taken up by the land is not actually stored there, but in the aquatic continuum.

Pierre Regnier from Université Libre de Bruxelles said: “The budget of anthropogenic CO2 reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently does not take into account the carbon leaking from terrestrial ecosystems to rivers, estuaries and coastal regions. As a result of this leakage, the actual storage by terrestrial ecosystems is about 40% lower than the current estimates by the IPCC.”

The ‘land-ocean aquatic continuum’, has not previously been considered an important carbon sink. Future assessments of carbon storage must now take into account the surface areas of the land-ocean aquatic continuum to ensure accurate estimation of carbon storage. This will also require an improved knowledge of the mechanisms controlling the degradation, preservation and emissions of carbon along the aquatic continuum to fully understand the impact of human activity on carbon transfer....

Dzhantshey Lagoon, Ukraine, shot by Yuriy Kvach, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

How do you feed 9 billion people?

Michigan State University Today: An international team of scientists has developed crop models to better forecast food production to feed a growing population – projected to reach 9 billion by mid-century – in the face of climate change.

In a paper appearing in Nature Climate Change, members of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project unveiled an all-encompassing modeling system that integrates multiple crop simulations with improved climate change models. AgMIP’s effort has produced new knowledge that better predicts global wheat yields while reducing political and socio-economic influences that can skew data and planning efforts, said Bruno Basso, Michigan State University ecosystem scientist and AgMIP member.

“Quantifying uncertainties is an important step to build confidence in future yield forecasts produced by crop models,” said Basso, with MSU’s geological sciences department and Kellogg Biological Station. “By using an ensemble of crop and climate models, we can understand how increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, along with temperature increases and precipitation changes, will affect wheat yield globally.”

The improved crop models can help guide the world’s developed and developing countries as they adapt to changing climate and create policies to improve food security and feed more people, he added.

Basso, part of MSU’s Global Water Initiative, and his team of researchers developed the System Approach for Land-Use Sustainability model. SALUS is a new generation crop tool to forecast crop, soil, water, nutrient conditions in current and future climates. It also can evaluate crop rotations, planting dates, irrigation and fertilizer use and project crop yields and their impact on the land....

A wheat field in Poland, shot by Ondrej.konicek, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Ganges, Nile and Amazon seen suffering more floods from warming

Reuters: Climate change is likely to worsen floods on rivers such as the Ganges, the Nile and the Amazon this century while a few, including the now-inundated Danube, may become less prone, a Japanese-led scientific study said on Sunday.

The findings will go some way to help countries prepare for deluges that have killed thousands of people worldwide and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage every year in the past decade, experts wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Given enough warning, governments can bring in flood barriers, building bans on flood plains, more flood-resistant crops and other measures to limit damage. Overall, a "large increase" in flood frequency is expected in south-east Asia, central Africa and much of South America this century, the experts in Japan and Britain wrote.

Severe floods would happen more often on most of the 29 rivers reviewed in detail, including the Yangtze, Mekong and Ganges in Asia, the Niger, the Congo and the Nile in Africa, the Amazon and the Parana in Latin America and the Rhine in Europe.

Flooding would become less frequent in a handful of river basins including the Mississippi in the United States, the Euphrates in the Middle East and the Danube in Europe. The experts predicted that northwestern Europe, where the Rhine flows, would be damper while a band from the Mediterranean Sea through eastern Europe - including the Danube region - into Russia would be drier....

The scientists said there were wide bands of uncertainty.

The edge of the Nile's flood plain, shot by Andrew®, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Academies urge action on drug resistance and development policy

T.V. Padma in SciDev.net: Science academies from eight developed and five emerging economies have urged developing countries to take a lead in tackling increasing drug resistance and pledged to support policymaking for sustainable development.

In two joint statements released last week (29 May) they noted the need for new drug discovery and development to tackle growing drug resistance worldwide, and they pledged to support policymaking for sustainable development through inter-academy and research collaboration.

In the statement on drug resistance, the academies say there is a need for enhancing research and development capacity in developing countries; regular monitoring of drug sensitivity; tracking resistance in real-time; carrying out regular surveys on the impacts of antibiotics released into the environment; and promoting drug regulation policies.

On sustainable development policy after 2015, the deadline for meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they pledge to proactively engage with international, national and regional policymakers with an eye on "providing objective expertise" and ensuring "scientific rigour to gathering evidence"....

Potentially 'catastrophic' changes underway in Canada's northern Mackenzie River Basin: report

EurekAlert via the Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy: Canada's Mackenzie River basin -- among the world's most important major ecosystems -- is poorly studied, inadequately monitored, and at serious risk due to climate change and resource exploitation, a panel of international scientists warn today.

In a report, nine Canadian, US and UK scientists convened by the US-based Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy, say effective governance of the massive Basin, comprising an area three times larger than France -- holds enormous national and global importance due to the watershed's biodiversity and its role in hemispheric bird migrations, stabilizing climate and the health of the Arctic Ocean.

The panel agreed the largest single threat to the Basin is a potential breach in the tailings ponds at one of the large oil sands sites mining surface bitumen. A breach in winter sending tailings liquid under the ice of the tributary Athabasca River, "would be virtually impossible to remediate or clean-up," says the report, available in full at http://bit.ly/13gc01K

"Extractive industries should be required to post a substantial performance bond which would be used to cover the costs of site clean-up should the enterprise fail financially or otherwise fail to fully remediate damage and destruction at the site in question," the report says. "The performance bond should be secured prior to site development and the commencement of operations."

Researchers have compared the Mackenzie Basin to Africa's Serengeti Plain, an area of comparable size. Both ecosystems harbour high biodiversity and biological productivity compared to others in their respective regions. There are some 45,000 biologically productive lakes in the Mackenzie Basin....

Researchers have compared the Mackenzie Basin to Africa's Serengeti Plain, an area of comparable size. Both ecosystems harbor high biodiversity and biological productivity compared to others in their respective regions. There are some 45,000 biologically productive lakes in the Mackenzie Basin. Meanwhile, the ice and snow cover in the Mackenzie Basin provides a vital refrigerator-like cooling role, in weather and climate patterns throughout the northern hemisphere. Credit: Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy

El Salvador mining ban could establish a vital water security precedent

Meera Karunananthan in the Povertymatters blog in the Guardian (UK): Five hundred scientists meeting in Bonn last month warned that 9 billion people would face the consequences of severe water shortages within a generation or two, but did not point the finger at industries devastating fresh water supplies.

Meanwhile, a battle against a metal mining industry that has ravaged freshwater supplies in El Salvador shows just how difficult it is for a developing country to build economic alternatives for a water-secure future. Two mining companies are dragging El Salvador through a costly legal challenge at an international trade tribunal for attempting to protect limited water supplies by refusing permits for their operations.

With 90% of its surface water heavily contaminated and a quarter of its rural population lacking access to safe drinking water, El Salvador is embroiled in a clean water crisis. More than two-thirds of the population rely on the Lempa river basin for drinking water – the same number that would be threatened by water-intensive and water-contaminating metal mining projects were El Salvador to reopen its doors to the industry.

In 2008, after strong public pressure to protect water from mining, Antonio Saca, El Salvador's president at the time, declared he would not issue any new mining permits. There are no active metal-mining operations in the mineral-rich country, which a majority of Salvadorans would like to become the first in the world to prohibit metal mining permanently. A bill to ban the industry has the support of more than 62% of the population and was initially backed by the ruling FMLN party....

Europe floods: Hungary Danube set for record high

BBC News: Hungarians have been warned to prepare for their country's worst floods ever as the Danube is set to reach record levels this weekend. "We are facing the worst floods of all time," said PM Viktor Orban.

Europe's second-longest river is set to hit unprecedented levels in the capital Budapest in the next few days. A state of emergency has been declared, and thousands of volunteers have been working to reinforce the banks of the swelling river.

Water levels are set to reach 8.85m (29ft), some 25cm (10in) higher than the Danube's previous record high in 2006. Emergency workers have set up camps along the river as residents packed sandbags around their homes amid an atmosphere of concerned expectation, says the BBC's Nick Thorpe in Budapest.

Kristalina Georgieva, the EU Commissioner for International Co-operation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, tweeted: "Hungary well prepared for highest ever measured water levels on Danube. We are monitoring & ready to assist."...

High water in Linz, Germany, in February 2013, shot by Liberaler Humanist, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Germany struggles to hold back flood "catastrophe"

Channel News Asia: Thousands of emergency workers, troops and volunteers in Germany battled Sunday against central Europe's worst floods in over a decade, while the swelling Danube put Budapest on high alert. Rising flood waters in Germany have forced mass evacuations in what one lawmaker termed a "national catastrophe."

As Hungary braced for a deluge in its capital, bolstering sandbag barriers as the Danube is expected to reach historic levels, German rescuers focused on the eastern city of Magdeburg. Vast areas around the city were covered in a sea of brown water, sparked by recent torrential rains which have washed down the Elbe river system from the Czech Republic.

The water level in Magdeburg reached 7.45 metres (24 feet) in the morning, up from the usual level of around two metres and worse than massive floods that struck the region in 2002, local authorities said.

Despite frantic efforts to secure it, a dam broke on Sunday south of the city at the point where the Elbe meets the Saale tributary, the local crisis command said, urging the remaining 150 residents in the region to quickly seek high ground. Almost 3,000 residents were evacuated from Magdeburg's Rothensee district, where hundreds of army troops struggled to reinforce a dyke protecting a crucial electricity facility.

President Joachim Gauck on Sunday went on a tour of the flood-hit states of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, where in vast areas only roofs and tree tops stick out of the water and the only access is by boat or helicopter. "One cannot imagine how much remains to be dealt with," said Gauck in view of the massive clean-up, after joining a church service in the city of Halle.

So far the floods on the Elbe and Danube river systems have killed at least 18 people, including 10 in the Czech Republic....

A May 30 shot from Wertheim, Germany of the flooding then. By Xocolatl, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

First-ever national ranking shows most coastal states failing to protect oceans

Mission Blue: Today two leading marine science and conservation organizations, the Marine Conservation Institute and Mission Blue, issued the 1st-ever quantitative, scientifically rigorous national ranking of states’ protection of their ocean waters.  SeaStates: How Well Does Your State Protect Your Coastal Waters? shows that most states and territories are failing to safeguard our nation’s marine life, seafood and coasts.

Oceans are crucial to our health and economy.  Coastal counties include only 5.71% of the area in the lower 48 states but generate 35.54% of the Gross Domestic Product.  Indeed, coastal counties generate $7,992 more GDP per person than inland and Great Lakes counties.

“Despite so many threats to their health, states are failing to protect our ocean waters,” said Dr. Lance Morgan, President of the Marine Conservation Institute. “No-take marine protected areas are the gold-standard for healthy oceans, but far too few states and territories are designating them.”

SeaStates measures the percentage of state’s waters they strongly protect.  Being free from fishing, oil drilling and other extractive uses allows marine life in no-take marine reserves to thrive and recover their former abundance.  That’s crucial because marine animals and plants maintain healthy oceans essential to people.  As coastal areas face increasing overfishing and climate change, strong marine protected areas maintain biodiversity, fisheries and coastal economies.  Dozens of studies show that no-take marine reserves provide more effective protection than weaker protected areas, often providing an overflow of marine life into surrounding waters.  Many marine scientists recommend designating at least 20% of state waters as no-take areas as the best way to sustain ocean health.

...SeaStates shows that 15 coastal states (AL, AK, CT, DE, GA, LA, MD, MA, MS, NH, NJ, NY, RI, SC, TX) out of 23 have no (zero) no-take areas.  Six states (FL, OR, WA, NC, VA, and ME) have designated barely 1% or much less of their coastal waters as no-take areas.  Only 2 states strongly protect over 5% of their waters in no-take reserves.  Hawaii ranks 1st for ocean protection with 22.9% fully protected (most inside the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument), while California ranks 2nd with 8.7%....

A Landsat image of trawlers leaving mud trails off the Louisiana coast

OECD-FAO expect slower global agricultural production growth

A press release from the OECD: Global agricultural production is expected to grow 1.5% a year on average over the coming decade, compared with annual growth of 2.1% between 2003 and 2012, according to a new report published by the OECD and FAO today.

Limited expansion of agricultural land, rising production costs, growing resource constraints and increasing environmental pressures are the main factors behind the trend. But the report argues that farm commodity supply should keep pace with global demand.

The OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2013-2022 expects prices to remain above historical averages over the medium term for both crop and livestock products due to a combination of slower production growth and stronger demand, including for biofuels,

The report says agriculture has been turned into an increasingly market-driven sector, as opposed to policy-driven as it was in the past, thus offering developing countries important investment opportunities and economic benefits, given their growing food demand, potential for production expansion and comparative advantages in many global markets.

However, production shortfalls, price volatility and trade disruption remain a threat to global food security. The OECD/FAO Outlook warns: “As long as food stocks in major producing and consuming countries remain low, the risk of price volatility is amplified. A wide-spread drought such as the one experienced in 2012, on top of low food stocks, could raise world prices by 15-40 percent.”

China, with one-fifth of the world’s population, high income growth and a rapidly expanding agri-food sector, will have a major influence on world markets, and is the special focus of the report. China is projected to remain self-sufficient in the main food crops, although output is anticipated to slow in the next decade due to land, water and rural labour constraints....

View from Bukowica hill, Nowotaniec, farmland, parish and main market, Lipiec. Poland, shot by Marek Silarski, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Japan and UNDP highlight need to build on adaptation achievements in Africa

UNDP News Centre: Efforts to protect development from the impacts of climate change must be supported in Africa. This was the rationale behind the creation of UNDP’s Africa Adaptation Programme (AAP), and it was a sentiment voiced by senior officials from Africa, Japan and the UN at a TICAD V side-event on the AAP’s achievements.

In their opening addresses at the event, Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaoré, Japan’s Parliamentary Senior Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Masaji Matsuyama and UNDP Administrator Helen Clark said they would like to see progress made under the AAP expanded and built on.

The Tokyo International Conference on African Development is the world’s largest forum on African development issues. Under the "Japan-UNDP Joint Framework for Building Partnerships to Address Climate Change in Africa," which was established at TICAD IV in 2008, the Government of Japan provided $92.1 million to implement the AAP.

The side-event attracted a standing-room-only audience, with international viewers following the webcast and tweeting questions and comments. It received coverage in mainstream Japanese media, including a story on the nightly news of Japan’s national TV station NHK.

...In his opening address, President Compaoré called for adaptation-related achievements of the AAP to be built on. "African countries at this moment are confronting serious development challenges. And for each country, the measures that they take to address climate change risks will become increasingly important for their future. But we need to have the tools available and strategic plans in place to effectively adapt to climate change," said President Compaoré....

Climate change may be making children sick in Pakistan

M. Wagar Bhatti in the News (Pakistan): Cases of vector-borne diseases have increased rapidly in the country this year, particularly in Sindh, and experts have linked this phenomenon to the irregular rain patterns “This year, the rise in vector-borne diseases including diarrhoea, cholera, gastroenteritis, typhoid, and hepatitis is due to environmental factors and the effects of climate change,” says Dr Iqbal Memon, renowned paediatrician and president of the Pakistan Paediatric Association.

Monsoon season in Pakistan normally starts in the middle of July and continues till mid-September and in the monsoon season, the consumption of contaminated water from freshwater sources caused outbreaks of water-borne diseases, especially in the rural areas of Sindh.

“But we are seeing a rise in the cases if diarrhoea, cholera, gastroenteritis and typhoid cases, which shows that safe drinking water is unavailable in our freshwater sources, which was not the case in the past,” explains Dr Memon. He adds that thousands of children have been diagnosed with vector-borne diseases in Sindh during the last couple of months.

A few decades back, Dr Memon recalls, the Indus River used to flow at full strength prior to the monsoon season in the country and freshwater was abundantly available to local communities during all seasons.

“Now there is no water in the Indus River. Ponds and riverines in Sindh have become contaminated, but people have no other option but to use that water for drinking and cooking. This lack of freshwater is purely due to environmental reasons.”...

The Indus River in Hyderabad, shot by Farhan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Pollution in Northern Hemisphere helped cause 1980s African drought

Hannah Hickey in the University of Washington News: Decades of drought in central Africa reached their worst point in the 1980s, causing Lake Chad, a shallow lake used to water crops in neighboring countries, to almost dry out completely. The shrinking lake and prolonged drought were initially blamed on overgrazing and bad agricultural practices. More recently, Lake Chad became an example of global warming.

New University of Washington research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the drought was caused at least in part by Northern Hemisphere air pollution.

Aerosols emanating from coal-burning factories in the United States and Europe during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere, shifting tropical rain bands south. Rains no longer reached the Sahel region, a band that spans the African continent just below the Sahara desert. When clean-air legislation passed in the U.S. and Europe, the rain band shifted back, and the drought lessened.

Related research by the UW researchers and their collaborators shows that global warming is now causing the land-covered Northern Hemisphere to warm faster than the Southern Hemisphere, further reversing the pre-1980s trend.

Previous research has suggested a connection between coal-burning and the Sahel drought, but this was the first study that used decades of historical observations to find that this drought was part of a global shift in tropical rainfall, and then used multiple climate models to determine why.

...“We think people should know that these particles not only pollute air locally, but they also have these remote climate effects,” Hwang said. Light-colored sulfate aerosols are emitted mainly by dirty burning of coal. They create hazy air that reflects sunlight, and also lead to more reflective, longer-lasting clouds. People living in the Northern Hemisphere did not notice the cooling, the authors said, because it balanced the heating associated with the greenhouse effect from increased carbon dioxide, so temperatures were steady....

Smokestacks in Champaign, Illinois, shot by Dori, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license

Amazon forest fire risk to increase in 2013

NASA: University and NASA researchers predict that the severity of the 2013 fire season will be considerably higher than in 2011 and 2012 for many Amazon forests in the Southern Hemisphere. The outlook is based on a fire severity model that produced a successful first forecast in 2012.

The model, produced by a group led by Jim Randerson of the University of California, Irvine, considers historical fire data from NASA's Terra satellite, along with sea surface temperature data from NOAA. Previous research has shown that sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans can be used to forecast the pending Amazon fire season severity three to six months prior to the onset of the dry season.

As of March 2013, surface waters of the tropical north Atlantic Ocean remained warmer than average, while Pacific Ocean temperatures declined from a peak in late fall. These conditions are consistent with increased fire risk across the southern portion of the Amazon later this summer and early fall.

Brazil's key fire states, Mato Grosso and Pará, account for the majority of all burning activity in the Amazon region. For the 2013 season, the model shows that fire activity in these two states is projected to be above average compared to 2001-2012. Other important burning regions in the southern Amazon, such as the Brazilian states of Rondônia and Acre, and the Bolivian departments of Santa Cruz and Pando, are also projected to have average or above-average fire activity in 2013.

"The confluence of climate and people in these areas increases the risk of widespread fire activity when the fire season severity is elevated," said Doug Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who works with Randerson and colleagues on the forecast....

Dials indicate regions in the southern Amazon forest predicted to have below-average fire activity (green) and above-average activity (orange and red) during the 2013 dry season, relative to the 2001-2012 mean. Credit: UC Irvine

Indigenous people 'excluded from development efforts'

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Laura Owings in SciDev.net: Representatives of some of the world's indigenous people have raised concerns that the global development agenda — including the UN's Millennium Development Goals and their planned successors — is being implemented without their full consent and participation.

The 12th session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in New York, which ended last week (31 May), gathered to address the global response to political, economic and cultural problems affecting the world's most vulnerable communities.

Issues of health, education and sustainable development were top of the two-week agenda for the 2,000 delegates from nearly 100 countries who attended, as were efforts by the global community to uphold agreements outlined in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

But some indigenous representatives highlighted the disconnect between global development policy and how it is implemented in their communities. "We are concerned that, while the Millennium Development Goals have been established for some time now, we see government agencies instituting and implementing projects, and indigenous people [still] not involved in deciding, planning or monitoring these interventions," says Pablo Mis, a member of the Q'eqchi Maya people from southern Belize and coordinator for the Maya Leaders Alliance...

Aztec drums, from the Florentine Codex, 16th century