Archive for December, 2008

Mapping global fires

Published by Garry Peterson on December 31, 2008 in Visualization. 3 Comments

Global Fires : Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory:

Like plants, fire activity grows and wanes in seasonal patterns. Globally, fires peak in July, August, and September, when summer’s drying heat makes vegetation flammable and lightning ignites the landscape. In addition, summer is the time when many crops are harvested and fields are burned in the Northern Hemisphere, where most of Earth’s continents are. On any given day in July, August, or September an estimated 6,000 fires burn across the world. February is the slowest month of the year, with an estimated 3,000 fires per day. To watch fires move across the globe throughout the year, see Fire in the Global Maps section of the Earth Observatory.

The contrast between the two months is shown in this pair of images made from data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The top image shows all of the fires detected during August 2008, while the lower image shows February 2008. Dense fire concentrations are yellow, while more scattered fires are red. February is clearly the burning season in the tropics. A solid band of red stretches across the Sahel of Africa, and hundreds fires were burning in northern South America, Central America, and southeast Asia. In August, the fire regions shifted into more temperate regions north and south of the Equator. Intense agricultural fires burn in south-central Europe and in southern Africa.

An animation of global fires is available on the Global Maps section of the NASA Earth Observatory

Ten most popular posts on Resilience Science from 2008

Published by Garry Peterson on December 25, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Ten most popular post on Resilience Science from 2008

1. The long history of human-environment interactions in China

2. Financial resilience: Taleb and Mandelbrot reflect on crisis

3. Sichuan postcard: after the earthquake

4. Herman Daly on the financial crisis

5. World Press Photos: Evacuation of dead Mountain Gorillas

6. Shipping containers and world trade

7. Mapping global wind energy potential

8. Financial crisis news and analysis

9. Ecological economics of the global food trade

10. Political and economic implications of Arctic melting

Pedestrians and Urban Life: lessons from Copenhagen

Published by Garry Peterson on December 21, 2008 in Design and Ecological Management. 0 Comments

kennymaticChris Turner, author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need, writes on WorldChanging Canada about Danish architect Jan Gehl who focuses on the role of pedestrians in urban life in Copenhagen, Melbourne & The Reconquest of the City:

Mr. Gehl’s core message remains so simple it sounds almost like a proverb. It goes like this: “Cultures and climates differ all over the world, but people are the same. They will gather in public if you give them a good place to do it.”

Urban sustainability rarely seems so straightforward, ensnarled as it is in thorny issues of land use and energy consumption, housing prices and unemployment rates, roads and transit lines, density and sprawl. In many of the world’s cities, however – North American cities in particular – there might be no single problem that encompasses them all as fully as the decision made after World War II to give top priority to the automobile in every urban quarter and under essentially every circumstance. And as Mr. Gehl’s clients are learning, there is no more economical or efficient way to begin sorting out this knot of problems than to simply restore people to their rightful place above cars in the urban hierarchy.

If the pedestrianization movement has a birthplace, it is Mr. Gehl’s hometown, the cozy Danish capital of Copenhagen. Regarded as recently as the 1950s as a dull provincial burgh, utterly overshadowed by dynamic metropolises like Paris and Rome, Copenhagen now routinely tops international quality of life rankings. …

Continue reading ‘Pedestrians and Urban Life: lessons from Copenhagen’

Mapping US Oil Imports over Time

Published by Garry Peterson on December 20, 2008 in Visualization. 0 Comments

Rocky Mountain Institute has created an animated map of US oil imports from 1973 to the present using google maps.  The map uses data from the Energy Information Agency’s to show oil flows from exporting countries in terms of volume and dollars.

Click on the image to see the interactive map on RMI’s website.

Oil flows into USA in 1973 and 2008

USDA establishes office of ecosystem services

Published by Garry Peterson on December 19, 2008 in Ecosystem services. 1 Comment

The USA’s Department of Agriculture is establishing an Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets.  The Ecological Society of America’s blog EcoTone writes:

According to their press release, the office will help develop new guidelines and methods to assess ecosystem service benefits and create markets for ecosystem services.  The authorization for this office was approved in this summer’s Farm Bill, which Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer spoke out against.

Ecosystem services are one way that ecologists can place a currency on the valuable services our environment provides, such as water filtration and air purification, carbon sequestration, pollination and recreation. The new office’s first priority will be carbon sequestration. Says the press release:

“Agriculture producers provide many ecosystem services which have historically been viewed as free benefits to society - clean water and air, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and scenic landscapes. Lacking a formal structure to market these services, farmers, ranchers and forest landowners are not generally compensated for providing these critical public benefits. Market-based approaches to conservation are proven to be a cost-effective method to achieve environmental goals and sustain working and natural landscapes. Without financial incentives, these ecosystem services may be lost as privately-owned lands are sold or converted to development.”

Evaluating Ruddiman’s long anthropocene hypothesis

Published by Garry Peterson on December 19, 2008 in Ideas. 0 Comments

From In The Field a report on a symposium on Bill Ruddiman’s long anthropocene hypothesis -  that the development of agriculture caused significant global warming:

Ruddiman’s basic argument goes like this: Although the climate has cycled through a series of ice ages and warm interglacial periods for more than a million years, none of those warm spells looks like the one we’re in. In all previous cases, carbon dioxide and methane concentrations peaked just after the preceding ice age ended and then levels of those greenhouse gases dropped until the planet slipped again into a new glacial epoch. The planet seemed to be following the same routine since the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago. But then something funny happened. After falling for a few thousand years, carbon dioxide levels started to rise about 8,000 years ago and methane values swung upward 5,000 years ago.

As an explanation, Ruddiman suggests that carbon dioxide concentrations started to grow when early farmers cleared vast stretches of forest to plant crops, thus reducing the planet’s ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Later, when people learned how to irrigate rice 5,000 years ago, the paddies created for that purpose led to a jump in methane emissions. Those changes prevented the planet from slipping into an ice age, he suggested.

At Wednesday’s session, Ruddiman took the provocative stance of saying that the case is closed.

“I think we are at the point where it is a dead end to claim that natural [processes] explain the Holocene trends,” said Ruddiman, an emeritus professor at the University of Virgiinia. If you look at the previous interglacial periods, none show the rising pattern of carbon dioxide and methane. Q.E.D.

…

Jean Jouzel, director of the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute in Paris, said “the change in methane is huge. It’s difficult to think it’s not natural.” There were so few people alive 5,000 years ago that it would be hard for humans to account for the methane changes, he said. Jouzel was part of a group that examined the interglacials and made the point that they are each unique in some way. So arguments about the uniqueness of the current interglacial leave some researchers cool.

Scenario-planning for robust development in small-scale farming

Published by Garry Peterson on December 17, 2008 in Scenarios. 0 Comments

Making Investments in Dryland Development Work: Participatory Scenario Planning in the Makanya Catchment, Tanzania is a new paper my colleagues Elin Enfors and Line Gordon from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Debbie Bossio from the International Water Management Institute, and I have just had published in Ecology and Society.  Below is part of the press release Scenario-planning help small-scale farming from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Predicting living conditions in 2030
People farming in the world´s drylands are some of the world´s poorest people, their populations are growing, but they have to cope with a variable climate that causes frequent crop failures. Consequently, many governments, NGOs, and scientists are making large efforts to improve productivity in small-scale farming particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The recent development of cheap, farm-scale water management technologies offer the potential for farmers to improve their farm productivity and reduce their vulnerability to drought. However, often many development investments have failed.

To develop better approaches to investments in water management, Enfors, Gordon, Peterson and Bossio worked with famers, local officials, and scientists in Tanzania to identify alternative ways livelihoods, farming practices, and ecosystems could change over the next 25 years.

“We had two parallel objectives with the scenario planning exercise in Makanya”, says author Elin Enfors.

“The first was to analyze how, investments in water system technologies would play out over a range of alternative, but plausible futures, and the second was to initiate a discussion locally about the catchment’s future development”.

From our paper’s discussion and conclusions

Developing participatory scenarios also proved to be a useful tool to rapidly assess some of the major hopes, fears, and thoughts about the future among people in the local community. Such an overview is useful in any project, especially in a start-up phase. In this particular case, where the objective was to assess the relevance of investments in agricultural technologies that are intended for small-scale farmers, this perspective was essential because the farmers’ risk calculations and expectations of the future will influence whether or not, and under what conditions, they will adopt small-scale water system technologies.

Furthermore, there seems to be a risk that development and applied research projects become trapped in a vision that describes how their proposed interventions will ideally unfold over time. Scenario planning may help overcome such biases as it facilitates an understanding of how the project could develop in different kind of futures and because it improves the understanding of events and processes that either may challenge the project or provide opportunities for it.

We conclude that increasing the robustness of water investments should build

A way to increase the robustness of this type of investments is to build capacity among farmers for innovation and learning through experimentation, as this will generate benefits across a range of possible futures. The analysis shows that there is not one ideal type of collaborative partner for research and development projects working with small-scale agricultural technology, highlighting the importance of identifying a diverse set of potential collaborators.

Follow the links for more of Elin’s research in Makanya, and more photos of Makanya catchment.

Mapping the world’s ‘intact’ forests

Published by Garry Peterson on December 16, 2008 in Visualization. 2 Comments

In the latest issue of Ecology and Society, Peter Potapov et al’s article Mapping the world’s intact forest landscapes by remote sensing. (Ecology and Society 13(2): 51). Shows a new map of global forests - showing the “intact forest” areas that are not directly transformed by human action.

World's intact forest

The world’s intact forest landscapes (IFLs): IFL (green), Forest zone outside IFL (yellow).

The authors define an intact forest area as:

as an unbroken expanse of natural ecosystems within the zone of current forest extent, showing no signs of significant human activity, and large enough that all native biodiversity, including viable populations of wide-ranging species, could be maintained. Although all IFLs are within the forest zone, some may contain extensive naturally treeless areas, including grasslands, wetlands, lakes, alpine areas, and ice.

The data can be downloaded from the projects website as tiff, google earth, or shapefiles.

Compared to other global forest areas assessments the authors found:

  • significantly less intact area in boreal forests than the World’s Wilderness Areas analysis (McCloskey and Spalding 1989) and the Frontier Forests analysis (Bryant et al. 1997) because of our more recent data allowing us to capture the effect of the expansion of oil and gas extraction infrastructure in Canada and Siberia, as well as the role of extensive human-caused fires accompanying industrial development of northern forests.
  • more intact areas in dense tropical forests (the Amazon and Congo basins) and in boreal mountains (southern and eastern Siberia, Kamchatka, Alaska, and the Canadian Rocky Mountains) than was found in previous studies based on coarse-scale map and expert data analysis.
  • the Human Footprint data set (Sanderson et al. 2002), which finds a significantly larger area to be intact within boreal regions and the southern part of the Amazon Basin in Brazil. Both areas were developed (by industrial logging and oil and gas extraction in Canada and Russia, and by agricultural clearing in Brazil) in recent decades, and these changes were not captured in the Human Footprint assessment.
  • in some regions (i.e., Central Africa, boreal forests in Siberia and Canada) we found a smaller area to be intact than the Human Footprint map because we classified burned areas in the vicinity of infrastructure as not intact.
  • The Landscape Domestication Analysis by The Nature Conservancy, which relied on existing transportation network maps, also overestimated the intact area (Kareiva et al. 2007).

Kenyan elephants send text messages to warn of crop raiding

Published by Garry Peterson on December 14, 2008 in Ecological Management. 0 Comments

Kenya’s elephants send text messages to rangers

The text message from the elephant flashed across Richard Lesowapir’s screen: Kimani was heading for neighboring farms.

The huge bull elephant had a long history of raiding villagers’ crops during the harvest, sometimes wiping out six months of income at a time. But this time a mobile phone card inserted in his collar sent rangers a text message. Lesowapir, an armed guard and a driver arrived in a jeep bristling with spotlights to frighten Kimani back into the Ol Pejeta conservancy.

Kenya is the first country to try elephant texting as a way to protect both a growing human population and the wild animals that now have less room to roam. …

The race to save Kimani began two years ago. The Kenya Wildlife Service had already reluctantly shot five elephants from the conservancy who refused to stop crop-raiding, and Kimani was the last of the regular raiders. The Save the Elephants group wanted to see if he could break the habit.

So they placed a mobile phone SIM card in Kimani’s collar, then set up a virtual “geofence” using a global positioning system that mirrored the conservatory’s boundaries. Whenever Kimani approaches the virtual fence, his collar texts rangers.

They have intercepted Kimani 15 times since the project began. Once almost a nightly raider, he last went near a farmer’s field four months ago.

It’s a huge relief to the small farmers who rely on their crops for food and cash for school fees. Basila Mwasu, a 31-year-old mother of two, lives a stone’s throw from the conservancy fence. She and her neighbors used to drum through the night on pots and pans in front of flaming bonfires to try to frighten the elephants away.

…the experiment with Kimani has been a success, and last month another geofence was set up in another part of the country for an elephant known as Mountain Bull. Moses Litoroh, the coordinator of Kenya Wildlife Service’s elephant program, hopes the project might help resolve some of the 1,300 complaints the Service receives every year over crop raiding.

More details are on Save the Elephants founded by Elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and this 2005 article from the BBC, and Youtube.

Martti Ahtisaari’s Nobel Peace Prize Lecture

Published by Garry Peterson on December 13, 2008 in Ideas and Inequality. 0 Comments

From Martti Ahtisaari’s Nobel Lecture:

All conflicts can be resolved
Wars and conflicts are not inevitable. They are caused by human beings. There are always interests that are furthered by war. Therefore those who have power and influence can also stop them.

Peace is a question of will. All conflicts can be settled, and there are no excuses for allowing them to become eternal. It is simply intolerable that violent conflicts defy resolution for decades causing immeasurable human suffering, and preventing economic and social development. The passivity and impotence of the international community make it more difficult for us to place our faith in jointly built security structures. Despite the many challenges, even the most intractable conflicts can be resolved if the parties involved and the international community join forces and work together for a common aim. The United Nations provides the right framework for international peace efforts and solutions to global problems. However, we are all aware of the constraints of the United Nations and of the tendency of the member states to give it demanding assignments without providing adequate resources and political support. It is important that the UN member states work resolutely to strengthen the world organization. We cannot afford to lose the UN.

In a conflict, one party can always claim victory, but building peace must involve everybody: the weak and the powerful, the victors and the vanquished, men and women, young and old. However, peace negotiations are often conducted by a small elite. In the future we must be better able to achieve a broader participation in peace processes. Particularly, there is a need to ensure the engagement of women in all stages of a peace process.

Peace processes and the agreements resulting from them end the violence. But the real work only starts after a peace agreement has been concluded. The agreements reached have to be implemented. Social and political change does not happen overnight, and the reconstruction and establishment of democracy demand patience. That requires a comprehensive approach to peacebuilding, and support for civil society.

Inequality breeds conflict

Growing inequality within countries and between regions deepens the existing cleavages. It is our task to create a future and hope for regions and countries in crisis where young people suffer from unemployment and have little prospects of improving their lives. Unless we can meet this challenge, new conflicts will flare up and we will lose another generation to war.

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