All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Regime Shifts, Reorganization

Fire, climate change, and the reorganization of Arctic ecosystems

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Alaskan nature writer Bill Sherwonit reports on Yale Environment 360 about the complex response of Arctic ecosystems to climate change in how Arctic Tundra is Being Lost As Far North Quickly Warms:

Researchers have known for years that the Arctic landscape is being transformed by rising temperatures. Now, scientists are amassing growing evidence that major events precipitated by warming — such as fires and the collapse of slopes caused by melting permafrost — are leading to the loss of tundra in the Arctic. The cold, dry, and treeless ecosystem — characterized by an extremely short growing season; underlying layers of frozen soil, or permafrost; and grasses, sedges, mosses, lichens, and berry plants — will eventually be replaced by shrub lands and even boreal forest, scientists forecast.

Much of the Arctic has experienced temperature increases of 3 to 5 degrees F in the past half-century and could see temperatures soar 10 degrees F above pre-industrial levels by 2100. University of Vermont professor Breck Bowden, a watershed specialist participating in a long-term study of the Alaskan tundra, said that such rapidly rising temperatures will mean that the “tundra as we imagine it today will largely be gone throughout the Arctic. It may take longer than 50 or even 100 years, but the inevitable direction is toward boreal forest or something like it.”

… In the course of studying caribou, Joly has also learned a great deal about the role of fire in “low,” or sub-Arctic, tundra, where for several decades at least it has been a much more significant factor than on the North Slope’s “high Arctic” landscape. About 9 percent of Alaska’s lower latitude tundra burned between 1950 and 2007, whereas only 7 percent of the North Slope caught fire during that period. That could change as the region warms and fires become more frequent farther north.

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Ecological Management

Roving bandits, piracy, and fishing

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Piracy has been in the news a lot over the past few years.  Less noticed is the impact of’ roving bandit fishing fleets from the rich world that outfish local fisherman.  The associated press reports on a perverse consquence of Somalian piracy Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish

A report on pirates this year by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore said the value of illegal catches from Somalia’s maritime jurisdiction is estimated at between $90 million and $300 million a year, and that foreign fishing vessels hail from all around the world.

The report’s author, Clive Schofield, a research fellow with the Australian Centre for Ocean Resources and Security at the University of Wollongong, called it ironic that nations contributing warships to anti-piracy efforts are in some cases directly linked to the foreign fishing vessels “stealing Somalia’s offshore resources.”

“This situation has led some pirates to justify their actions on basis of illegal foreign fishing activities — styling themselves ‘coastguards’ and characterizing ransom demands as ‘fines,'” the report said. “Without condoning acts of violence at sea, it is clear that the Somalis who hijack shipping off their coast are in fact not the only ‘pirates’ operating in these waters,” it said.

Piracy has not had a huge effect on Kenya’s overall fishing industry, which is not very well developed on the coast, according to the permanent secretary for Kenya’s Ministry of Fisheries Development, Micheni Japhet Ntiba. Kenya has brought in between 5,000 and 7,000 metric tons of fish off its Indian Ocean coast each of the last several years, he said, less than a tenth of Kenya’s yearly catch from Lake Victoria, on Kenya’s western edge.

Piracy “is a negative thing for Kenya fisherman. It’s a negative thing for the Kenyan economy. It’s a negative thing for the western Indian Ocean economy,” Ntiba said. “What I think is important for us is to invest in security so the government and the private sector can invest in the deep sea ocean resources.”

Still, Kenya’s sports fisherman say the pirates appear to have had a hugely positive effect on their industry. Angus Paul, whose family owns the Kingfisher sports fishing company, said that over the past season clients on his catch-and-release sports fishing outings averaged 12 or 13 sail fish a day. That compares with two or three in previous years.

Somali pirates, Paul said, are a group of terrorists, “but as long as they can keep the big commercial boats out, not fishing the waters, then it benefits a lot of other smaller people.”

Cities

Deep Walkability for Sustainable Cities

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On WorldChanging Alex Steffen writes about Deep Walkability

Walkability is clearly critical to bright green cities. You can’t advocate for car-free or car-sharing lives if people need cars to get around, and the enticement to walk is key to making density wonderful, to providing realistic transit options, to making smaller greener homes compelling and to growing the kind of digitally-suffused walksheds that post-ownership ideas seem to demand. So knowing how to define “walkable” is important.

…The big thing I think falls out of most walkability formulas is a quality critical to the actual experience of walkability, and that’s the extent to which the place in which you live is connected (by walking routes and easy transit) to other places worth walking to.

…The true test of walkability I think is this: Can you spend a pleasant half hour walking or on transit and end up at a variety of great places? The quality of having a feast of options available when you walk out your front door is what I starting to think of as “deep walkability.”

It’s this deep walkability that ought to be the top priority driving urban design and development in our communities. We ought to be looking at how to knit our walkable communities together and how to make friendlier the unwalkable streets between them.

In most cities, serious walkers (and bikers) share stories about the routes they’ve taken, hidden paths through the fractured landscape that let you walk safely and happily from one people-centered place to another. A killer urban ap would be one that revealed these urban songlines. A smart urban policy would be one that aimed to weave new walking routes through the whole urban fabric, until places walkers feared to tread were the exception rather than the expectation.

Alex also points to a New York Times article Street Corners vs. Cul de Sacs that the property values of walkable neighbourhoods have been more resilience to the bursting of the US property bubble.

A study published in August by C.E.O.’s for Cities, a group of urban redevelopment advocates, found that in many ways, the street corner beats the cul de sac. It looked at the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 markets to estimate how much value was associated with something called the Walk Score. Using a 100-point scale, this score rates the number of destinations, including libraries, parks and coffee shops, within walking distance of a home.

…The study found that houses with above-average Walk Scores commanded a premium. It was as much as $30,000 in cities like Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Sacramento and San Francisco, wrote Joe Cortright, the study’s author and an economist at Impresa, a consulting firm in Portland, Ore.

Visualization

Visualizing the Arctic Oscillation

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Impact of the negative Arctic Oscillation on land surface temperatures throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Acquired December 1 - 31, 2009 from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite

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The Arctic Oscillation is unusually strong right now.  The consequences, a warm arctic and cold N Europe and E North America, are illustrated in the image Winter Temperatures and the Arctic Oscillation from NASA’s Earth Observatory’s Image of the Day:

If you live nearly anywhere in North America, Europe, or Asia, it’s no news that December 2009 and early January 2010 were cold. This image illustrates how cold December was compared to the average of temperatures recorded in December between 2000 and 2008. Blue points to colder than average land surface temperatures, while red indicates warmer temperatures. Much of the Northern Hemisphere experienced cold land surface temperatures, but the Arctic was exceptionally warm. This weather pattern is a tale-tell sign of the Arctic Oscillation.

The Arctic Oscillation is a climate pattern that influences winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere. It is defined by the pressure difference between air at mid-latitudes (around 45 degrees North, about the latitude of Montreal, Canada or Bordeaux, France) and air over the Arctic. A low-pressure air mass dominates the Arctic, while high pressure systems sit over the mid-latitudes. The strength of the high- and low-pressure systems oscillates. When the systems are weaker than normal, the pressure difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes decreases, allowing chilly Arctic air to slide south while warmer air creeps north. A weaker-than-normal Arctic Oscillation is said to be negative. When high and low pressure systems are strong, the Arctic Oscillation is positive.

Ecosystem services

Colony Collapse Disorder: a loss of resilience?

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In Science, Francis Ratnieks and Norman Carreck write about what has been learned about the collapse of bee populations in Clarity on Honey Bee Collapse? (2010 327 (5962): 152)

Over the past few years, the media have frequently reported deaths of honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Most reports express opinions but little hard science. A recent historical survey pointed out that extensive colony losses are not unusual and have occurred repeatedly over many centuries and locations. Concern for honey bees in the United States has been magnified by their vital role in agriculture. The California almond industry alone is worth $2 billion annually and relies on over 1 million honey bee hives for cross-pollination. So what is killing honey bee colonies worldwide, and what are the implications for agriculture?

In fall 2006 and spring 2007, many U.S. beekeepers encountered hives without adult bees but with abandoned food and brood. It was widely believed that these were symptoms of a new and highly virulent pathogen. In the absence of a known cause, the term “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD) was coined. What have we learned about this condition since then? Are the symptoms really novel?

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The first annual report of the U.S. Colony Collapse Disorder Steering Committee, published in July 2009 (15), suggests that CCD is unlikely to be caused by a previously unknown pathogen. Rather, it may be caused by many agents in combination—the interaction between known pests and pathogens, poor weather conditions that diminish foraging, lack of forage (16), and management factors such as the use of pesticides and stress caused by long-distance transport of hives to nectar sources or pollination locations. The increasingly technical process of beekeeping itself merits further research as far as its impact on colony health. For example, although pollen substitutes are now widely used, little is known about the interactions between nutrition and disease susceptibility. Further research is also needed to develop effective ways of keeping colonies healthy through good hive management based on appropriate chemical, and other treatments such as “hygienic” bees that remove diseased brood and can be bred using conventional methods. In Europe, the COLOSS (COlony LOSS) network, consisting of 161 members from 40 countries worldwide, is coordinating research efforts and activities by scientists and the beekeeping industry to address these and other issues related to honey bee losses, including CCD (2).

In February 2009, the high pollination fee, combined with a temporary reduction in pollination demand due to drought and reduced almond prices, resulted in a surplus of hives in California available to pollinate almonds. But this leaves no room for complacency. Almond pollinating beekeepers had a poor summer in 2009 in the Dakotas and neighboring states, where hives spend the summer making honey, with heavy rains delaying and reducing the honey crop. This delayed chemical treatments for Varroa mites, and many colonies were probably in worse than usual condition going into winter back in California. It will be interesting to see what happens in February 2010 when the almonds bloom. On a longer time scale, there is a worrying downward trend in U.S. hives, from six million after World War II to 2.4 million today. Is the future of U.S. commercial beekeeping going to be based on pollinating a few high-value crops? If so, what will be the wider economic cost arising from crops that have modest yield increases from honey bee pollination? These crops cannot pay large pollination fees but have hitherto benefited from an abundance of honey bees providing free pollination.

Cities

Dubai’s new tower

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The world’s tallest building has just been opened in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

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burj_dubaiThe Toronto Globe and Mail writes:

Soaring 200 storeys and 828 metres into the sky, the world’s tallest structure has opened in Dubai, a monument to the excesses of the emirate’s bygone boom. But while the $1.5-billion (U.S.) tower’s striking opulence recalls the unrestrained era of a massive property bubble, its surprise name is very much grounded in Dubai’s new reality.

Originally called Burj Dubai, it was renamed Burj Khalifa Monday in a tribute to Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, head of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi, which came to debt-laden Dubai’s financial rescue last month.

Abu Dhabi has provided about $25-billion in bailout funds for Dubai in the past year, including a $10-billion lifeline in December that was funnelled to state-owned conglomerate Dubai World to avoid an embarrassing default on its crushing debt load.

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Cities, Greenlash

Climate change refugees and urbanization

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bangladeshJoanna Kakissis writes about Banglasdeshi environmental refugees in Environmental Refugees Unable to Return Home:

Natural calamities have plagued humanity for generations. But with the prospect of worsening climate conditions over the next few decades, experts on migration say tens of millions more people in the developing world could be on the move because of disasters.

Rather than seeking a new life elsewhere in a mass international “climate migration,” as some analysts had once predicted, many of these migrants are now expected to move to nearby megacities in their own countries.

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General

Economics as a complex systems science

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An interesting interview of Paul Krugman by Edward Hugh is on A Fistful of Euros:

E.H. : The late Sir Karl Popper used to contrast what he regarded as science with ideologies like Marxism and Psychoanalysis, because there seemed to be no way whatever of consenually agreeing with their practitioners a series of simple tests which would enable their theories to be falsified. Some critics of neoclassical economics – including Popper’s heir Imre Lakatos – have expressed similar frustrations. Do you think we economists are, as a profession, up to the challenge of formulating testable hypotheses in such a way that the public at large might come to have more confidence in what we are up to, or are we a lost cause?

P.K.: I really don’t think that’s a helpful way to pose this question. Economics is about modeling complex systems, and as such the models are always less than fully accurate. What economists do need, however, is some demonstrated ability to get big things right. They had that after the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics clearly made sense of both the depression and the wartime recovery. But now the profession needs to get back on track.