coping with ecological suprise in a human dominated world
| The World Resources Institute has just published its 2005 report The Wealth of the Poor: Managing ecosystems to fight poverty its available online as a pdf file.
WRI describes the report in their press release:
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Continue reading ‘WRI 2005: Environment key to helping poor’
Fernando et al. writing in Eos (86, 301, 304; 2005) demonstrate that in Sri Lanka tsunami damage was mitigated by the presence of intact coral reefs, demonstrating the regulating ecosystem service that coral reefs can provide.
New Scientist has an interview with Paul van Vlissingen who is the largest private parks operator in Africa. Interesting is his focus on the importance of integrating the people and the park:
No park will survive in the long run unless it is supported by the people living in and around it. They need to know there is something better to do with a zebra than eat it, that they can benefit from protecting it.
Our management philosophy is completely different from anything that has been there before. We say that the villagers in and around our parks should see the park rangers as people who will help them, not as policemen who go round beating up anybody they think is poaching. Our rangers visit the villages and ask if there is anything they can do. There is a lot of physical suffering there: hunger, malaria, AIDS, people being mauled by lions. Our rangers have radio equipment, so they can get doctors or medicine. We offer security, too. In Liuwa, our park in Zambia, there were 60 or 80 murders a year before we went there. In the first year that we were there, that number went down to 26, the next year to two.
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The National History Museum of Los Angeles County has an exposition Collapse? running until January 17, 2006, inspired by the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond. See also the post Partha Dasgupta vs. Jared Diamond |
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The 2003 paper Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience in Frontiers in Ecology by Thomas Elmqvist, Carl Folke, Magnus Nyström, Garry Peterson, Jan Bengtsson, Brian Walker and Jon Norberg has been identified by ISI as a Fast breaking paper for August 2005.
The paper introduces the concept of response diversity - the diversity of responses to environmental change among species contributing to the same ecosystem function. Response diversity is particularly important for ecosystem renewal and reorganization following change.
Thomas Elmqvist answers some questions from ISI about the paper on ISI’s site.
Continue reading ‘Response Diversity: Concept is being used’
Last week Science had a special issue on Dealing with Disasters with focus on the role of building or conserving resilience. The Tsunami disaster on 26 December 2005 clearly highlighted the vulnerability of coastal communities, and has triggered a global discussion on how to deal with increasingly severe natural and human induced catastrophes. Today humanity increase the risk for extreme events by simultaneously e.g. accelerating climate change, simplifying ecosystems, and concentrating human populations in coastal areas and cities.
In the special issue, Neil Adger and co-authors focus on coastal communities and explore their social-ecological resilience by looking at the diverse mechanisms they have developed for living with, and learning from, change and unexpected shocks. The authors also discuss the complexity of how resilience can be both increased and decreased through the same development. For example, global tourism increases the risk of infectious and vector borne diseases, but enhance resilience through the development of interlinked local communities, improved communications and the growth of national and international NGO network that link societies.
Continue reading ‘Building resilience to deal with disasters’
