Archive for March, 2006

Wetland Mitigation Banking Shortchanges Urban Areas

Published by Elena Bennett on March 31, 2006 in Ecological Economics and Ecological Management. 0 Comments

In a study highlighted in the National Wetlands Newsletter, J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman show that wetland mitigation banking redistributes wetlands from urban areas to rural ones, leaving urban residents with less access to important ecological services provided by wetlands, such as water filtration, erosion protection, and flood control.

Ruhl, J.B. and Salzman, James E., “The Effects of Wetland Mitigation Banking on People” (January 2006). FSU College of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 179 Available at SSRN).

Wetland mitigation banking is used to ensure no net loss of wetland area under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Basically, mitigation banking allows developers who damage or destroy wetlands to buy off-site wetlands as compensation. Many studies have examined whether the new wetlands adequately replace wetland values and functions, but few have examined the social impacts of wetland mitigation banking.

Ruhl and Salzman studied 24 wetland mitigation banks in Florida (accounting for 95% of bank activity, and representing over 900 development projects). They show that in 19 of 24 banks, wetlands “migrated” from urban to rural areas.

“The whole point of wetland mitigation banking - what makes its economic incentives work - is that developers get to wipe out wetland patches in the higher priced land markets and bankers get to establish wetlands banks in the less pricey land markets,” Ruhl said. “It’s not surprising then that development projects using wetland mitigation banking often are located in urban areas and the banks they use are located in rural areas.”

The populations of winners and losers in wetland mitigation banking are quite different, as you might expect. The banks (where wetlands are restored) are, on average 10 miles from the projects (where wetlands are damanged). The average income was nearly $12,000 lower in projects compared to banks, and the average minority population was 13% higher projects.

The researchers suggest that further examination of wetlands mitigation banking is needed. ” … wetland mitigation banking has been touted as a “win-win” program, but unless someone keeps score we really can’t know whether it truly fits that billing.” For now, it seems that not actively including the value of ecosystem services means inadequately assessing the true costs and benefits of the program.

Ruhl is the Matthew and Hawkins Professor of Property at the FSU College of Law, and Salzman is a professor at the Duke University School of Law and the Nicholas School of the Environment.

Using weblogs in science

Published by Garry Peterson on March 30, 2006 in General. 0 Comments

Nature (March 30, 2006) has an profile of the father and son scientists Roger Pielke Jr and Roger Pielke Sr. Each of them run a climate weblog. Pielke Sr focuses on climate science, while Pielke Jr focuses on science policy. Below are their explanations to Nature on how their weblogs help their research.

Roger Pielke Jr runs Prometheus: The Science Policy Weblog

“It started as an experiment for our centre, and now it serves a number of different purposes. It is kind of like an extra hard drive for my brain. I can search for things that I’ve written, something I might want later, sort of like my professional notes in a public format. “I’m surprised at the reach the blog has, which is rewarding for this centre with only eight of us here. We can put an argument on it and it shows up out there in the real world. I get contacted by professionals in the United States or elsewhere that I would have never met otherwise. “Blogs are also out there for the public, and it gives you an entirely different perspective on how well the public is getting your message.”

Roger Pielke Sr runs the weblog Climate Science

“My weblog was completely motivated by my son’s. I was sending all these e-mails out to people about committee reports and he said, ‘Why don’t you just do a weblog?’ “With so many journals out there now, it is hard to keep track. When a peer reviewed paper comes out, I can put up the abstract and a summary of key points on the blog. “Now I’m making my arguments to a broader community to see how well they stand up. I also use it as a professional diary and it has increased my network. “The feedback has been wonderful.”

I have been using this weblog in a similar way to Roger Pielke Jr. I have been posting articles of things that I have been reading in my research or teaching that I think will be interesting to the larger resilience community. I frequently use the weblog to show colleagues and students articles, figures, or ideas that I think are relevant to our work. From the posts on the site you are probably able to guess that I am working on the impacts of inequality in social-ecological systems and connections between agriculture and water.

Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems - E&S special feature

Published by Garry Peterson on March 29, 2006 in Ideas, Regime Shifts, Reorganization and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

Ecology & Society has just published a special feature Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: Comparative Studies and Theory Development based upon the comparisons of 15 Resilience Alliance case studies.

The current table of contents of the issue is:

Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Through Comparative Studies and Theory Development: Introduction to the Special Issue
by Brian H. Walker, John M. Anderies, Ann P. Kinzig, and Paul Ryan

A Handful of Heuristics and Some Propositions for Understanding Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
by Brian Walker, Lance Gunderson, Ann Kinzig, Carl Folke, Steve Carpenter, and Lisen Schultz

Scale Mismatches in Social-Ecological Systems: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions
by Graeme S. Cumming, David H. M. Cumming, and Charles L. Redman

Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects
by Ann P. Kinzig, Paul Ryan, Michel Etienne, Helen Allyson, Thomas Elmqvist, and Brian H. Walker

Fifteen Weddings and a Funeral: Case Studies and Resilience-based Management
by John M. Anderies, Brian H. Walker, and Ann P. Kinzig

Toward a Network Perspective of the Study of Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
by Marco A. Janssen, Örjan Bodin, John M. Anderies, Thomas Elmqvist, Henrik Ernstson, Ryan R. J. McAllister, Per Olsson, and Paul Ryan

Collapse and Reorganization in Social-Ecological Systems: Questions, Some Ideas, and Policy Implications
by Nick Abel, David H. M. Cumming, and John M. Anderies

Governance and the Capacity to Manage Resilience in Regional Social-Ecological Systems
by Louis Lebel, John M. Anderies, Bruce Campbell, Carl Folke, Steve Hatfield-Dodds, Terry P. Hughes, and James Wilson

Water RATs (Resilience, Adaptability, and Transformability) in Lake and Wetland Social-Ecological Systems
by Lance H. Gunderson, Steve R. Carpenter, Carl Folke, Per Olsson, and Garry Peterson

Shooting the Rapids: Navigating Transitions to Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems
by Per Olsson, Lance H. Gunderson, Steve R. Carpenter, Paul Ryan, Louis Lebel, Carl Folke, and C. S. Holling

Survey of Initial Impacts of Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Published by Garry Peterson on March 28, 2006 in General and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 0 Comments

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s general synthesis report was released about a year ago. On March 21 2006, the MA released an assessment of the initial impact of the MA. The report is written by Walt Reid, the director of the MA, based upon a survey of (report pdf). The survey found that some organizations and countries have been significantly influenced by the MA while others have not been minimally if at all. In the report’s executive summary Walt Reid assess the impact of the MA on its multiple target audiences:

Continue reading ‘Survey of Initial Impacts of Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’

More cartograms: Population, GDP, & more

Published by Garry Peterson on March 26, 2006 in Tools and Visualization. 0 Comments

Mark Newman (see previous post Another world population map) has used his cartogram technique to make a series of sharp cartograms of the world (smoother than these rougher cartograms), some of which are shown below (land area, population, GDP, and GHG emissions):
Map of world

Population Cartogram

GDP Continue reading ‘More cartograms: Population, GDP, & more’

Mapping Sea Level Rise

Published by Garry Peterson on March 24, 2006 in Greenlash, Ideas, New Orleans, Tools, Visualization and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

Sea Level Rise Jonathan Overpeck and others have a paper Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise in Science (24 March 2006) that suggests that sea level rise due to anthropogenic climate change could occur much faster than people have previously expected. Possibly an increase of 5 to 10 m of several centuries. (For news articles see BBC, NYTimes, & Toronto G&M).

To visualize the consquences of sea level rise:

WorldChanging points to Flood Maps. A site that mashes up NASA elevation data with Google Maps, and offers a visualization of the effects of a single meter increase all the way to a 14 meter rise. Some examples are: Vancouver with 6m sea rise, New Orleans, and the Netherlands.

Also, Jonathan Overpeck’s lab also has a visualization of the consquences of sea level rise for the US and the world.

Richard Kerr writes in a news article in Science, A Worrying Trend of Less Ice, Higher Seas:

The ice sheet problem today very much resembles the ozone problem of the early 1980s, before researchers recognized the Antarctic ozone hole, Oppenheimer and Alley have written. The stakes are high in both cases, and the uncertainties are large. Chemists had shown that chlorine gas would, in theory, destroy ozone, but no ozone destruction had yet been seen in the atmosphere. While the magnitude of the problem remained uncertain, only a few countries restricted the use of chlorofluorocarbons, mainly by banning their use in aerosol sprays.

But then the ozone hole showed up, and scientists soon realized a second, far more powerful loss mechanism was operating in the stratosphere; the solid surfaces of ice cloud particles were accelerating the destruction of ozone by chlorine. Far more drastic measures than banning aerosols would be required to handle the problem.

Now glaciologists have a second mechanism for the loss of ice: accelerated flow of the ice itself, not just its meltwater, to the sea. “In the end, ice dynamics is going to win out” over simple, slower melting, says Bindschadler. Is glacier acceleration the ozone hole of sea level rise? No one knows. No one knows whether the exceptionally strong warmings around the ice will continue apace, whether the ice accelerations of recent years will slow as the ice sheets adjust to the new warmth, or whether more glaciers will fall prey to the warmth. No one knows, yet.

Green water efficiency in farming

Published by Garry Peterson on March 24, 2006 in Ecological Management and Tools. 1 Comment

Green & Blue water A recent SciDev.net article Improve water efficiency in farming, urges report describes an International Water Management Insitute (IMWI) report - Beyond More Crop per Drop prepared for the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico (March 2006).

The article quotes IWMI director general, Frank Rijsberman, who justifies the need to increase water use efficiency by the statement that it takes “70 times more water to grow the food we eat every day than we need for drinking, cooking, bathing and other domestic needs.”

The report describes how water management usually focuses on runoff, blue water, which is only 40% of rainfall. The other 60% is green water that replenishes soil moisture and evaporates from the soil or is transpired by plants. The report states that three quarters of the world’s poor depend upon rainfed agriculture (90% in sub-Saharan Africa), meaning that improving green water productivity has the potential to improve the well-being of the world’s poor.

The report writes:

Increasing the productivity of green water used in rainfed agriculture has great potential to reduce the area needed for agriculture. Agricultural production of staple crops in Africa, has, over the last 40 years, increased almost exclusively by area expansion, at the cost of large areas of natural ecosystems. To enable sustainable increases in food production in Africa, agricultural intensification is absolutely necessary. Increasing the productivity of green water used in rainfed agriculture - particularly by adding a limited amount of blue water (from rivers or aquifers) through supplemental irrigation has great potential.

Rainwater harvesting in Sri LankaThe report recommends using rainwater harvesting, supplemental and micro irrigation, and using land and water conservation to increasee infiltration and reduce runoff, to increase green water efficiency. It suggests that using these known techniques could double crop yields.

The IMWI report provides examples of water management in stories from two areas the Awash Basin - Ethiopia and the Krishna Basin - India.

See also, my previous post on agricultural modification of green water flows.

Mapping anoxic zones - pt 2

Published by Garry Peterson on March 23, 2006 in Greenlash, Ideas, Regime Shifts and Visualization. 1 Comment

Global International Waters Assessment is a systematic assessment of the environmental conditions and problems in large transboundary waters, comprising marine, coastal and freshwater areas, and surface waters as well as ground waters. Involving over 1,500 expert it has assessed 66 of the world’s major river basins and recently published a synthesis report. These publications are freely available online. The synthesis report’s section on pollution provides a map of eutrophication impact.

Fig 14 GIWA

As mentioned in a earlier post on mapping dead zones, eutrophication can produce large coastal hypoxic zones. The GIWA regional assessments reported that dead zones:

… have become increasingly common in the world’s lakes, estuaries and coastal zones, with serious impacts on local fisheries, biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Extensive dead zones have been observed for many years in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The GIWA assessment has compiled information on dead zones in the Southern Hemisphere, including several lagoons in the Brazil Current region, coastal locations in the Humboldt Current region, and in the Yangtze River estuary located in the East China Sea region.

Computing & Future of Science

Published by Garry Peterson on March 23, 2006 in General. 0 Comments

Nature (440:7083) has a Microsoft sponsored freely available special feature on the future of scientific computing - the articles focus on sensor networks, database management, and automated learning.

Declan Butler 2020 computing: Everything, everywhere

Data networks will have gone from being the repositories of science to its starting point. When researchers look back on the days when computers were thought of only as desktops and portables, our world may look as strange to them as their envisaged one does to us. Although we might imagine a science based so much on computing as being distanced from life’s nitty gritty, future researchers may look back on today’s world as the one that is more abstracted. To them the science practised now may, ironically, look like a sort of virtual reality, constrained by the artificialities of data selection and lab analysis: a science not yet ready to capture the essence of the real world.

Computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernon Vinge writes on the internet as The Creativity Machine

All this points to ways that science might exploit the Internet in the near future. Beyond that, we know that hardware will continue to improve. In 15 years, we are likely to have processing power that is 1,000 times greater than today, and an even larger increase in the number of network-connected devices (such as tiny sensors and effectors). Among other things, these improvements will add a layer of networking beneath what we have today, to create a world come alive with trillions of tiny devices that know what they are, where they are and how to communicate with their near neighbours, and thus, with anything in the world. Much of the planetary sensing that is part of the scientific enterprise will be implicit in this new digital Gaia. The Internet will have leaked out, to become coincident with Earth.

How can we prepare for such a future? Perhaps that is the most important research project for our creativity machine. We need to exploit the growing sensor/effector layer to make the world itself a real-time database. In the social, human layers of the Internet, we need to devise and experiment with large-scale architectures for collaboration. We need linguists and artificial-intelligence researchers to extend the capabilities of search engines and social networks to produce services that can bridge barriers created by technical jargon and forge links between unrelated specialties, bringing research groups with complementary problems and solutions together — even when those groups have not noticed the possibility of collaboration. In the end, computers plus networks plus people add up to something significantly greater than the parts. The ensemble eventually grows beyond human creativity. To become what? We can’t know until we get there.

Continue reading ‘Computing & Future of Science’

African ReOrientation II

Published by Garry Peterson on March 22, 2006 in Ideas and Reorganization. 0 Comments

Following the earlier post on Africa’s reOrientation, Nature has a news article, Tide of censure for African dams (Nature 440, 393-394 2006), Jim Giles writes that Chinese-built dams in Africa are expected to have devastating consequences for local communities.

…The billion-dollar Merowe project will more than double the amount of electricity that Sudan can produce, and is just one of a dozen new dam projects being built across Africa using Chinese money and expertise.

But scientists and environmentalists who have studied the dam say that poor local people will suffer because necessary precautions are not being taken. According to the first independent review of the dam plans, a copy of which has been seen by Nature, inadequate thought has been given to the environmental and social consequences of flooding hundreds of square kilometres of land. That is far from unusual when it comes to Chinese investment in Africa, environmental groups allege. They say that China, which has a dire domestic environmental record, is repeating the mistakes of previous big dam projects, and that rural African communities will pay the price.

“Chinese companies will ignore social and environmental impacts to the extent that local governments are willing to ignore them,” says Thayer Scudder, an anthropologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who has spent decades studying hydropower projects. “If governments don’t care, or are corrupt, why will the Chinese engineers worry?”

Continue reading ‘African ReOrientation II’