All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
General, Networks, Visualization

Hunza landslide lake

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In early January of 2010 a huge landscape destroyed the village of Attabad and dammed the Hunza river in Northwest Pakistan.  The landslide dam resulted in the rapid growth of a new lake that has flooded a key road and many villages.   NASA’s Earth Observatory website has images (and an early image) showing the flooding.

From NASA EOS acquired June 1, 2010. False colour - Red shows vegetation.

The lake as now overtopped the landslide dam, its the overflows erosion of this dam is threatening thousands of peope who live downriver.  The Boston Globe has collected an fantastic set of photos of this disaster on its The Big Picture.

Women, who lived near a lake created after a landslide in Hunza district, cut barley in a field in Seeshghat village in Hunza district of northern Pakistan May 24, 2010. (REUTERS/Abrar Tanoli)

David Petley a Geography professor at Durham university in the UK runs a weblog monitoring the conditions at the dam.

Ecological Management, Greenlash

GMO crops and shifting agricultural food webs

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A recent paper by Yanhui Lu and others in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1187881) shows how ecological impacts of Bt cotton at the landscape level have lead to a surge in pests. In northern China, the cotton crop is 95% Bt cotton.  The paper shows that Mirid bugs have increased both within cotton fields, but also in other crops grown in regions with large amounts of Bt cotton.

While the farmers who planted GMO cotton have benefited from it, the increase regional pest load has imposed a burden on other farmers who do not grow Bt cotton – a negative externality. This regional impact on other crops is shown in Figure 4 from their paper.

Association between mirid bug infestation levels in either cotton or key fruit crops, and Bt cotton planting proportion. The measure of mirid bug infestation was assigned a score ranging from 1 (no infestation) to 5 (extreme infestation).

While this is the first paper, which I’m aware of, to demonstrate such landscape level impacts of GMOs on insect pests, this type of consequence of Bt GMO crops has been predicted for a long time.  For example, ten years ago I argued in Conservation Ecology that risk assessment of GMO crops should include not only direct impacts, but indirect ecological impacts, as part of an adaptive risk assessment processes for GMO crops. Below is Figure 1 from that paper.

The direct and indirect effects of genetically modified crops interact with the scale at which they are grown to determine the difficulty of predicting, testing, and monitoring their potential impacts.

The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog comments on the paper, and SciDev.net reports Bt cotton linked with surge in crop pest:

Their fifteen-year study surveyed a region of northern China where ten million small-scale farmers grow nearly three million hectares of Bt cotton, and 26 million hectares of other crops. It revealed widespread infestation with mirid bug (Heteroptera Miridae), which is destroying fruit, vegetable, cotton and cereal crops. And the rise of this pest correlated directly with Bt cotton planting.

Bt cotton is a genetically engineered strain, produced by the biotechnology company Monsanto. It makes its own insecticide which kills bollworm (Helicoverpa armigera), a common cotton pest that eats the crop’s product — the bolls. …

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They watched the farms gradually become a source of mirid bug infestations, in parallel with the rise of Bt cotton. The bugs, initially regarded as occasional or minor pests, spread out to surrounding areas, “acquiring pest status” and infesting Chinese date, grape, apple peach and pear crops.

Before Bt cotton, the pesticides used to kill bollworm also controlled mirid bugs. Now, farmers are using more sprays to fight mirid bugs, said the scientists.

“Our work shows that a drop in insecticide use in Bt cotton fields leads to a reversal of the ecological role of cotton; from being a sink for mirid bugs in conventional systems to an actual source for these pests in Bt cotton growing systems,” …

Nature news reports:

The rise of mirids has driven Chinese farmers back to pesticides — they are currently using about two-thirds as much as they did before Bt cotton was introduced. As mirids develop resistance to the pesticides, Wu expects that farmers will soon spray as much as they ever did.

Two years ago, a study led by David Just, an economist at Cornell University at Ithaca, New York, concluded that the economic benefits of Bt cotton in China have eroded. The team attributed this to increased pesticide use to deal with secondary pests.

The conclusion was controversial, with critics of the study focusing on the relatively small sample size and use of economic modelling. Wu’s findings back up the earlier study, says David Andow, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota in St Paul.

“The finding reminds us yet again that genetic modified crops are not a magic bullet for pest control,” says Andow. “They have to be part of an integrated pest-management system to retain long-term benefits.”

Whenever a primary pest is targeted, other species are likely to rise in its place. For example, the boll weevil was once the main worldwide threat to cotton. As farmers sprayed pesticides against the weevils, bollworms developed resistance and rose to become the primary pest. Similarly, stink bugs have replaced bollworms as the primary pest in southeastern United States since Bt cotton was introduced.

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Wu stresses, however, that pest control must keep sight of the whole ecosystem. “The impact of genetically modified crops must be assessed on the landscape level, taking into account the ecological input of different organisms,” he says. “This is the only way to ensure the sustainability of their application.”

Ecological Management, Ecosystem services, Inequality, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Four short links to new papers

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Four interesting new papers – Parks & Poverty, Pleistocene extinctions, Evosystem services, and making better assessments

1) Parks can help local people.  Protected areas reduced poverty in surrounding areas in Costa Rica and Thailand by K.S. Andam and other in PNAS (doi:/10.1073/pnas.0914177107)

2) Evidence for a long Anthropocene.   Pleistocene extinctions of mega-herbivores may have lead to global cooling due to reduction on methane.  Methane emissions from extinct megafauna by Felisa A. Smith and others in Nature Geoscience(doi:/10.1038/ngeo877)

3) Evosystem services, the services of evolution.  By Daniel Faith and others.  Evosystem services: an evolutionary perspective on the links between biodiversity and human well-being (doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2010.04.002).  Evosystem services seem fall into the category of regulating and supporting services to me.  However, an interesting idea.  It would be nice to see it further developed.

4)  A bit older, Reflections on how to make global scientific assessments better. From new journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability How to make global assessments more effective: lessons from the assessment community by Dale Rothman and others. (doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.09.002)

Inequality

Conservation Social Science

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Conservation Biology has published three ‘virtual issues’ of Conservation Biology for the International Year of Biodiversity.  The issues each include 10-15 previously published articles from Conservation Biology, but access to these articles is now free of charge.  The virtual issues are:

Two of my articles are in the “Conservation Social Science” issue.  The first article was a collaboration with my Smith Fellows cohort, and the second was written by Tim Holland, who did his Masters with Andrew Gonzalez and I.

Resilience colleagues also have two papers reprinted, the first in the climate change special issue, and the second also in the social science issue

Ecological Management, Ecosystem services

Malaria, public health, and climate

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Peter Gething, from the malaria atlas project at Oxford, and others have a paper in Nature, Climate change and the global malaria recession (doi:10.1038/nature09098) that examines at changes in global malaria distribution.  While the world warmed in the 20th century, the distribution of malaria shrank.  From their examination of this change they argue that development and public health measures have much stronger impacts on malaria distribution than expected climate change.

Change in P. falciparum malaria endemicity between 1900 and 2007. Negative values denote a reduction in endemicity, positive values an increase.

From looking at these changes and their causes they find that:

1) widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent.

2) the proposed future effects of rising temperatures on endemicity are at least one order of magnitude smaller than changes observed since about 1900 and up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures.

Predictions of an intensification of malaria in a warmer world, based on extrapolated empirical relationships or biological mechanisms, must be set against a context of a century of warming that has seen marked global declines in the disease and a substantial weakening of the global correlation between malaria endemicity and climate.

SciDev.net has a news article that includes some responses from critics of the study.

General

Vulnerability Modelling Post-docs in Netherlands

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Marcel Kok lets me know that there are:

Two post-doc positions at Wageningen University and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) for the analysis of patterns of vulnerability.

Within the framework of a collaborative project with the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL = Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving) and CERES Research School in the domain of global environmental change we are looking for two postdoc s Vulnerability analysis (M/F).

The post-docs will work in a team on analysis of vulnerability patterns on building bridges between system dynamic models and qualitative case-studies by attempting to upscale lessons learned from local case-studies through Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and by down-scaling Integrated Assessment Models (IAMS) through cluster analysis of model outcomes. Both strands of the project come together in analyzing patterns of vulnerability. The project will focus on drylands and coastal zones.

http://www.academictransfer.com/employer/WUR/vacancy/4624/lang/en/
http://www.academictransfer.com/employer/WUR/vacancy/4625/lang/en/

Ecological Economics

History of The Limits to Growth

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In the new general sustainability science journal Solutions, sustainability researchers Jørgen Nørgård, John Peet, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir provide their take on the history of the response to the controversial and influential environmental study Limits to Growth in The History of The Limits to Growth:

… In re-examining the analysis and central arguments of [Limits to Growth] LtG, we have found that its approach remains useful and that its conclusions are still surprisingly valid. …

Matthew R. Simmons, president of the world’s largest investment company specializing in energy, Simmons and Company International, read the book a few years ago, after hearing about the controversy. To his surprise he discovered that the criticisms had little to do with the content of the book. “After reading Limits to Growth, I was amazed,” he wrote in 2000. “There was not one sentence or even a single word written about an oil shortage or limits to any specific resource, by the year 2000.” He concluded that LtG broadly gives a correct picture of world development, and he became upset that so many of his colleagues had wasted three decades criticizing it instead of taking action.

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The recent renewed interest in the environment and economic development gives hope for a solution. Although it has not yet led to new action, this shift in thinking has triggered a few analyses that recognize possible limits to growth and hence point toward solutions along the lines suggested in LtG. The following examples illustrate this hope.

A recent UK government committee indicates an emerging political willingness to at least challenge the growth paradigm as reflected in the title of the committee’s report: Prosperity without Growth? The report “questions whether ever-rising incomes for the already-rich are an appropriate goal for policy in a world constrained by ecological limits.”

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who had at first rejected LtG‘s ideas about resource shortages, now recognizes that present trends in the world economy are unsustainable. Stiglitz, along with another Nobel laureate in economics, Amartya Sen, headed a commission convened by French president Nicolas Sarkozy to investigate alternative measures of social progress to GDP. One of their key messages is that “the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.” In their critique of societies’ overreliance on GDP, Stiglitz and Sen are implicitly agreeing with LtG‘s analysis.

Finally, as a sign of renewed recognition of the limits to growth, 28 scientists have identified nine planetary boundaries within which human activities can operate safely. The scientists estimate that humanity has already transgressed three of these boundaries, namely those for climate change, biodiversity loss, and changes to the global nitrogen cycle.

Networks

The invisible hand of our robot traders is a bit shaky

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Recently I a mentioned a modelling paper (doi:10.1038/nature08932) on cascading failure in connected networks, that shows that feedbacks between connected networks can destabilize two stable networks.

This type of dynamic appears to be the cause of last weeks stock market plunge.  At least according to the article  Haphazard Trading Network Draws Focus of Wall St. Inquiry the New York Times writes:

Investigators seeking an explanation for the brief stock market panic last week said Sunday that they were focusing increasingly on how a controlled slowdown in trading on the New York Stock Exchange, meant to bring about stability, instead set off uncontrolled selling on electronic exchanges.

It was an unintended consequence of a system built to place a circuit breaker on stocks in sharp decline. In theory, trades slow down so that sellers can find buyers the old-fashioned way, by hand, one by one. The electronic exchanges did not slow down in tandem, causing problems, according to two officials familiar with the investigation.

According to Newsweek’s Wealth of Nations blog  The Computer Glitch Felt Round the World:

… computer-driven trading algorithms that now account for more than 60 percent of all stock-market volume in the U.S. While high-frequency trading certainly brings efficiencies to equities market, it can also exaggerate things enormously. When you’re dealing with such volume and speed, movements can be bigger and faster than predicted. Today’s volatility is an interesting blip in the yearlong debate over whether high-frequency trading is a dark, sinister practice that needs to be reigned in, or a benign technological evolution.

Science fiction author and design critic, Bruce Sterling has a more colourful description of the current situation as the Invisible Crazy Robot Hand

*Nobody is less surprised than me to see that interacting pieces of software can do weird emergent stuff, and act all buggy. This is not, like, some surprising discovery. It’s more like a law of computational physics.

*For the stock market to go into a “tornado” of dark pool trading is not all that great, though. Especially when days tick by, and nobody knows what the hell actually happened. This is not a chaos-theory lab experiment: this is supposed to be the bedrock of global capitalism.

General

Excercise in nature improves well-being

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Robin Mejia reports on a review paper Green exercise may be good for your head in Environmental Science and Technology by Jules Pretty and Jo Barton (DOI 10.1021/es903183r).  They did a a meta-analysis of 10 studies and found that outside activity for as little as five minutes included mood and self-esteem.

Outdoor activities have been shown to have a positive impact on mental health and can be a valuable component of rehabilitation programs. For individuals struggling with addiction, participating in outdoor activities can provide a healthy outlet for stress and anxiety, as well as improve overall mood and self-esteem. Residential rehab programs, such as those offered at residential rehab in LA, often incorporate outdoor activities into their treatment plans. These programs recognize the importance of connecting with nature as a means of promoting overall well-being and encourage patients to engage in outdoor activities such as hiking, gardening, and yoga. By providing patients with the opportunity to engage in green exercise, residential rehab programs can help individuals on the path to recovery achieve a more balanced and healthy lifestyle.

… the group has studied the effects of different types of green exercise on a variety of populations, from gardening by visitors to university farms to walking and sailing activities for young offender groups, as well as walking by members of urban flower shows. This new analysis reviewed 10 of these studies, which involved a total of 1252 participants. In each study, mood and self-esteem were measured using two widely accepted scales. All types of green exercise led to improvements in the mental health indicators. Most surprising to the researchers was that the strongest response was seen almost immediately.“You get a very substantial benefit from the first five minutes. We should be encouraging people in busy and stressed environments to get outside regularly, even for short bits of time,” says Pretty. After that, increased green exercise continues to add benefit, but with decreasing returns. However, a full day of activity causes another spike in the level of benefit. Both healthy individuals and those managing mental health disorders have reported experiencing benefits from physical activity, with individuals dealing with mental health challenges often showing the most significant improvement in self-esteem. While some people explore various approaches, including CBD products like cbd vape juice, for potential pain and stress relief, it’s worth noting that the effectiveness of CBD in enhancing the benefits of physical activity or addressing mental health needs is an ongoing topic of research. Consulting with healthcare professionals remains important for making well-informed decisions about incorporating CBD products into holistic wellness strategies.

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Frances Kuo, the director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, notes that the new analysis looked at 10 studies with over 1000 participants, which raises the confidence that they’re seeing a valid pattern. Yet the studies were not randomized trials. “None of the studies involved taking people and assigning them to different ‘doses’ of nature; rather, they looked at how people who sought out nature on their own responded to nature.”

Still, the analysis may help those arguing that the built world should be designed to facilitate things such as walking near trees, not driving from garage to parking lot. “Planners and consultants can put this in front of policy makers and say this is serious research that’s been published in the scientific literature,” says Sullivan.