Archive for February, 2006

Evaluation of ecosystem services provided by multifunctional agriculture in the USA

Published by Elena Bennett on February 17, 2006 in Ecological Economics and Scenarios. 0 Comments

George Boody and colleagues used a scenario-development exercise to discover that some types of changes in agricultural management can lead to economic benefits as well as improvements in the delivery of multiple ecosystem services.(Boody et al. 2005. Multifunctional agrcitulture in the United States. BioScience 55: 27 - 38.)

The team of 17 members (including farmers, government agency workers, and acadmics from several disciplines) worked with stakeholders in 2 southern Minnesota (USA) watersheds to develop 4 scenarios evaluating the future of agricultural management in the area.

These two watersheds face many of the same issues found in other agricultural regions of the United States: there are fewer farms now than in past decades; farms are growing in size as farmers buy out their neighbors; more land is leased; the diversity of crops is declining; and more land is managed by large companies working on non-contiguous areas, necessitating transport of manure and other items around the region.

The 4 scenarios they developed were (click for maps of landcover in one of the watersheds):

A) continuation of current trends
B) Implementation of BMPs (best management practices)
C) Maximizing diversity and profitability
D) Increased vegetative cover

The team estimated changes in fish populations in each watershed’s streams, greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, and carbon sequestration in each watershed under the conditions of each scenario. In one watershed, Scenarios B, C, and D all reduced N loading to the Mississippi River by at least 30% (a goal set by the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Nutrient Task Force). In the other watershed, simply implementing BMPs (Scenario B)was not enough to reach this reduction goal.

In addition, the team estimated the short-term economic effects of each of the 4 scenarios, including net farm income, farm production costs, and commodity and CRP payments. Net farm income was greatest in Scenario C or D, depending on the watershed, despite declines in CRP and commodity payments in those scenarios. The authors also estimated externality cost savings due to reduced sedimentation and flooding.

In their conclusions, the authors state (p. 35):

Our analysis indicates that diversifying agriculture on actively
farmed land could provide environmental, social, and
economic benefits.Citizens would be willing to pay for these
benefits.

They also point out the importance of social capital and changes in agricultural policy to the ability to achieve the transitions required to enter Scenario B, C, or D.

More detail about this project can be found in the report here, and more information on other projects related to stewardship of farmland, sustainable agriculture and sustainable communities can be found at the web site of the Land Stewardship Project.

Anthropogenic Modification of Vapours Flows and Tipping Points in the Earth System

Published by Garry Peterson on February 17, 2006 in Greenlash, Ideas, Regime Shifts, Visualization and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

Compare the map of soil moisture - atmosphere couplings against Gordon et al’s 2005 map of changes in vapour flows in the Human modification of global water vapor flows from the land surface.

PNAS Vapour Flows

Figure shows spatial distribution of net changes in vapor flows between potential vegetation and actual deforested and irrigated vegetation in mm/yr. The aggregated global change as compared with the potential vegetation is small (400 km3/yr), but the map illustrates the large spatial redistribution of water vapor flows from the land surface at the global scale.

Note that the location of increases in vapor flows in irrigation matches up with several of the hotspots identified in the map of soil moisture - atmosphere couplings - central Great Plains of North America, and India. Change occurs also in less intense hot spots appear in South America and China. Consquently, the combination of these two papers predicts that irrigation should have altered the local climate in these regions more than in other regions.

Another world population map

Published by Garry Peterson on February 16, 2006 in Visualization. 3 Comments

Following up on the population world map post - an more detailed version of the population adjusted world map is below. It would be great to have some other distorted world maps (of wealth, health, etc) to compare this one against.
Population adjusted world map

From Cartography: A popular perspective in Nature 439(800) Continue reading ‘Another world population map’

Leverage Points in the Earth System: Soil Moisture

Published by Garry Peterson on February 16, 2006 in General, Regime Shifts, Visualization and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

The 2004 Science paper - Regions of Strong Coupling Between Soil Moisture and Precipitation - by Koster et al. used a dozen independent climate models to estimate ‘hot spots’ on Earth’s surface where precipitation is affected by soil moisture anomalies during Northern Hemisphere summer. They propose that these hot spots are, in a sense, land-surface analogs to the ocean’s “El Niño hot spot” in the eastern tropical Pacific.

Soil moisture is a slowly vary aspect of the Earth system (relative to weather). Soil moisture can persist for months. Soil moisture, influences evaporation and other surface energy fluxes can influence weather.

Soil moisture atmospheric coupling

Figure: Hot spots of soil moisture - local precipitation coupling appear in the central Great Plains of North America, the Sahel, equatorial Africa, and India. Less intense hot spots appear in South America, central Asia, and China.

The hot spots are located in regions that in areas that are at intermediate moisture levels. The authors argue that this is because in wet climates, soil water is plentiful and evaporation is controlled not by soil moisture but by net radiative energy. In dry climates evaporation rates are sensitive to soil moisture but they are small. Consquently the biggest impact of soil moisture on evaporation is in the transition areas between dry and wet climates.

What this analysis suggests is that these hotspots are areas in which changes in land use - especially those that alter soil moisture - such as irrigation or land clearing, will have a larger impact of regional climate.

Anoxic zones - mapping ecosystem tradeoffs (a start)

Published by Garry Peterson on February 15, 2006 in Greenlash, Regime Shifts and Visualization. 1 Comment

Current industrial agricultural practices, particularly the overuse of fertilizer and its sloppy management, frequently create a tradeoff between agricultural production and coastal eutrophication. That is increases in agricultural yields have produced low oxygen zones around the world. The UNEP Global Environmental Outlook 2003 maps the location of coastal anoxic zones world wide (somewhat confusingly the worst cases - the persistent ones are coloured yellow, next worst red and orange, and least worst blue).
Global distribution of oxygen-depleted coastal zones.

Global distribution of oxygen-depleted coastal zones. The 146 zones shown are associated with either majorpopulation concentrations or with watersheds that deliver large quantities of nutrients to coastal waters.

Legend:

  • Annual – yearly events related to summer or autumnal stratification
  • Episodic – events occurring at irregularintervals greater than one year
  • Periodic – events occurring at regular intervals shorter than one year
  • Persistent –all-year-round hypoxia

Continue reading ‘Anoxic zones - mapping ecosystem tradeoffs (a start)’

Normalized global maps - population vs. economy

Published by Garry Peterson on February 14, 2006 in Visualization. 3 Comments

By population

Global map normalized by population

via Beyond the Beyond

By economy

Mapping Size of Global Economy

From Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

Poverty traps at multiple scales

Published by Line Gordon on February 13, 2006 in Ideas, Regime Shifts and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

Welfare dynamics under the poverty trap hypothesis. From Barrett and Swallow 2006

Christopher Barrett and Brent Swallow recently published an interesting paper in World Development on what the authors term ‘Fractal poverty traps’. These are the sort of poverty traps that develops where multiple dynamic equilibria exist simultaneously at multiple scales of analysis. The figure to right shows welfare dynamics under the poverty traps hypothesis.

The authors argue that the strategies that people choose depends on their assets as well as on the risks that they have to deal with, and they give the following example (from Lybbert et al. 1004):

Lybbert, Barrett, Desta, and Coppock (2004) demonstrate that southern Ethiopian pastoralists face two strategies— migratory or sedentarized pastoralism—reflecting two different dynamic wealth equilibria. The dynamic wealth equilibrium associated with migration is relatively high, while that associated with sedentarization is low. Pastoralists prefer not to sedentarize, but if they start off with too small a herd or lose too many animals to drought, disease or (human or wildlife) predators, the superior strategy of transhumant grazing is not accessible to them, for reasons Lybbert et al. (2004) explain. Poorer pastoralists therefore adopt a sedentarization strategy and predictably settle into a low-level wealth equilibrium. The key to understanding the genesis of poverty traps therefore lies in understanding the nature of transitions—or, more importantly, the absence of transitions—between strategies. Why do some pastoralists remain mobile while others do not? Why do some farmers adopt improved production technologies or enter high value-added marketing channels while others do not? What are the barriers that effectively preclude adoption of superior strategies?

According to the authors this is a reason why the UN Millennium Project final report emphasises the need for large initial investments – to push poor individuals, communities, and nations over thresholds so that different strategies become available and feasible. This is particularly important in situations of ‘fractal’ poverty traps:

Small adjustments at any one of these levels are unlikely to move the system away from its dominant, stable dynamic equilibrium. Governments, markets and communities are simultaneously weak in places characterized by fractal poverty traps. No unit operates at a high-level equilibrium in such a system. All seem simultaneously trapped in low-level equilibria.

They suggest four interrelated poverty reduction strategies:

First, it is possible that significant but shortlived transfers to individuals, households, communities, and nations caught in low-level equilibria can enable them to cross crucial thresholds presently inaccessible to them and thereby make it feasible for them to switch to positive growth trajectories that can carry them out of persistent poverty. …

Second, public agencies need to assess the possibilities for eliminating or moving thresholds through interventions at aggregate scales that make previously inaccessible strategies feasible at more disaggregated scales. …
Third, there is a critical need for effective safety nets set above critical thresholds so as to prevent people from falling unexpectedly into chronic poverty. Safety nets that can prevent the non-poor from falling into poverty in response to uninsured shocks should be included in poverty reduction strategies. …

Finally, fractal poverty traps carry important implications for decentralization. … Prioritization exercises must take place at multiple scales and there must be serious attempts to integrate these, not just cursory exercises as has too often been the case.

Lovelock and the Global Climate

Published by Garry Peterson on February 13, 2006 in Big Back Loop, Greenlash and Ideas. 0 Comments

Real Climate, a commentary website on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public, has commented on James Lovelock’s new book Revenge of Gaia: Why the earth is fighting back - and how we can still save humanity.
Continue reading ‘Lovelock and the Global Climate’

Bruce Mau @ McGill

Published by Garry Peterson on February 7, 2006 in Design, Ideas, Scenarios and Visualization. 1 Comment

Bruce Mau, a Canadian designer, recently gave the McGill School of the Environment’s annual Environment Public Lecture at McGill University, on the ‘Future of Environmental Design,’ based upon the Massive Change exhibit developed for the Vancouver Art Gallery. The show was at the Art Gallery on Ontario in 2005, and will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in the fall of 2006.

The Massive Change project takes an optimistic, design oriented look at global social and environmental problems and suggests there are many existing resources and abilities that can be mobilized to improve the global human well-being, in areas such as transportation, cities, and manufacturing. My favourite part of the Massive Change exhibit was the visualization room - which filled the walls and floor of a room:

Visual Room VAG

The room is set up like a three-dimensional electromagnetic spectrum. The images made from low frequency waves (radio waves) are near the entrance, images made with visible light (red, orange, yellow…) are in the middle of the room, and images made using high frequency waves (gamma waves) are near the exit of the room.

Massive Change is oriented towards market based technological solutions to environmental problems and therefore in the language of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, it fits withthe TechnoGarden scenario, and indeed addresses many of the same issues, such as bus-rapid transit systems.

The exhbit/book/radio show/website were developed by Bruce Mau and a group of design students.

After hearing from Bruce Mau about the what the students did in these project I was inspired to try and build on our project courses in the McGill School of the Environment.
I think it would be great if we could run a similar type of workshop course here at McGill. That is a course that would encourage a team of students (somewhere between 7-25) to imagine what a sustainable McGill or Montreal could look like, and how we could get there over the next (5 – 25 years) and make there visions/proposal/syntheses into a series of public products such as an exhibit (ideally on the streets of Montreal), lecture series, a book, and website. I think they could build upon lots of work in synthesis and communication done by Massive Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, WorldChanging, and many others, to develop practical proposals for McGill and Montreal.

It is also interesting to think about what type of resilience oriented course with a larger international vision could be developed as a Resilience Alliance project. In either case, there are many details of time, money, and credit to work. But I think, there is a lot of potential for learning and innovation in real world, positive, synthetic courses.
—–

Some other articles on Bruce Mau and Massive Change:
From architecture/design magazine MetropolisMag.com - At the Parsons Table with Bruce Mau, and from the business magazine Fast Company, Making a Map to a New World.

Ecosystem Tradeoffs and Synergisms in Agriculture

Published by Elena Bennett on February 5, 2006 in Ecological Economics and Ideas. 1 Comment

How can we feed ourselves without degrading other ecosystem services? This critical question has often been couched as a debate between maximizing production through high input/high efficiency agricultural systems versus minimizing impact by practicing less intensive but more extensive farming. (See Balmford et al. 2005 “Sparing land for nature: exploring the potential impact of changes in agricultural yield on the area needed for crop production” in Global Change Biology 11:1594-1605. or RE Green et al. “Farming and the fate of wild nature” in Science 28:550-555.)

However, a new paper by Pretty and colleagues in Environmental Science and Technology indicates that this debate may miss important opportunities for achieving win-win solution in developing countries. (J.N. Pretty, A.D. Noble, D. Bossio, J. Dixon, R.E. Hine, F.W.T. Penning De Vries, and J.I.L. Morrison. 2006. Resource-conserving agriculture increases yields in developing countries.)

Focusing on the use of seven different resource-conserving technologies (integrated pest management, integrated nutrient management, conservation tillage, agroforestry, aquaculture, water harvesting, and livestock integration) in developing countries, Pretty et al found that farmers could both improve their sustainability and increase production. The mean relative increase in crop yield was 79% across a wide variety of crop types and farming systems. In only 3 cases did yields decrease as a result of implementing sustainable farming practices, all in rice farming systems.

Approaches that allow increases in multiple ecosystem services provided by farmland – increased food production as well as improved environmental services, for example – solves a critical problem for farmers as well as the world at large.

Poor farmers need low-cost and readily available technologies and practices to increase local food production and raise their income. At the same time, land and water degradation is increasingly posing a threat to food security and the livelihoods of rural people who often live on degradation-prone lands.

The authors think that 3 types of technical improvement were key players in the increased food production:

more efficient water use …; improvements in organic matter accumulation in soils and carbon sequestration; and pest, weed, and disease control emphasizing in-field biodiversity and reduced pesticide … use.

It would be interesting to find out if “green” farming practices would have similar impacts on production in developed countries, too.