Category Archives: Greenlash

Greenlash

Air pollution and drought in China

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A recent paper in Science D. Rosenfeld et al suggests that particulate air pollution in the mountains of northern China is creating droughts in water scarce regions of western China. They write:

Particulate air pollution has been suggested as the cause of the recently observed decreasing trends of 10 to 25% in the ratio between hilly and upwind lowland precipitation, downwind of urban and industrial areas. We quantified the dependence of this ratio of the orographic-precipitation enhancement factor on the amounts of aerosols composed mostly of pollution in the free troposphere, based on measurements at Mt. Hua near Xi’an, in central China. The hilly precipitation can be decreased by 30 to 50% during hazy conditions, with visibility of less than 8 kilometers at the mountaintop. This trend shows the role of air pollution in the loss of significant water resources in hilly areas, which is a major problem in China and many other areas of the world.

SciDev.Net reports on their work:

In this kind of high-altitude rainfall, known as orographic precipitation, moist air is deflected upwards by the mountain. This cools the air and causes the moisture in clouds to condense and form droplets, which then merge to create raindrops.

Cloud droplets form around aerosols. According to Rosenfeld, the higher number of aerosols in polluted air divide cloud droplets into smaller ones, which slows the formation and fall of rain.

“This is the first time a direct link between increasing pollution and decreasing precipitation has been observed,” he said. “The finding is important since precipitation is one of the main sources of water in northern China.”

Yao Zhanyu, co-author of the paper, told SciDev.Net that of all the natural disasters in China, droughts are the most serious. “In the western region, the annual average precipitation is about a fourth that of the world’s average,” he said.

Ecosystem services, Greenlash

A surprising decline of pollination services in USA

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nytimes graphicThe Feb 27 the New York Times article Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Crops and Keepers in Peril describes the recent poorly understood decline in US honeybee populations. While the causes of this decline are not understood, such a decline has been expected by scientists. For example, last year’s US National Research Council report on the Status of Pollinators in North America warned about the many threats facing pollinators and bees in particular.

The introduced European honeybees are the major source of pollination for many crops (See graph). These bees have displaced populations of native bees, reducing the diversity of pollinators.

The honeybee decline seems to match Holling’s pathology of natural resource management. Pollination services are increasingly provided by a single highly managed population. In the US many beekeepers make more money by providing pollination services than making honey. This population has become increasingly vulnerable to disturbance, while the intensive monocultures of industrial agriculture has become dependent on artificial pollination. The NYTimes article describes the situation:

Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.

Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.

“There are less beekeepers, less bees, yet more crops to pollinate,” Mr. Browning said. “While this sounds sweet for the bee business, with so much added loss and expense due to disease, pests and higher equipment costs, profitability is actually falling.”

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A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts. “Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food,” said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.

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Beekeepers now earn many times more renting their bees out to pollinate crops than in producing honey. Two years ago a lack of bees for the California almond crop caused bee rental prices to jump, drawing beekeepers from the East Coast.

This year the price for a bee colony is about $135, up from $55 in 2004, said Joe Traynor, a bee broker in Bakersfield, Calif.

A typical bee colony ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 bees. But beekeepers’ costs are also on the rise. In the past decade, fuel, equipment and even bee boxes have doubled and tripled in price.

The cost to control mites has also risen, along with the price of queen bees, which cost about $15 each, up from $10 three years ago.

To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.

Greenlash, Vulnerability

Decreasing vulnerability to desertification

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SciDev.net reports that Forced migration from desertification and land degradation is an emerging environmental issue. Researchers are trying to identify to identify policies that increase the resilience of agro-ecosystems to climate change and decrease social vulnerability to desertification:

Desertification could create more than 135 million refugees, as droughts become more frequent and climate change makes water increasingly scarce in dryland regions, warn UN experts. …”Migration is a top-of-mind political issue in many countries. We are at the beginning of an unavoidably long process,” said Janos Bogardi, director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security.

Drylands are home to one third of the world’s population, but they contain only eight per cent of global freshwater resources.

The Toronto Star writes:

The main current problem is the spread of deserts, both because Earth’s climate is warming and because impoverished people in dry areas are denuding the land for cooking fuel.

Poverty and climate change impacts feed on each other, Adeel said. For example, once land is cleared of vegetation, it reflects more of the sun’s heat into the atmosphere, warming the climate. That, in turn, increases the spread of areas too dry to support vegetation.”We have a poor sense of how fast it’s happening, but current estimates are that 200 million people now live in desertified areas,” Adeel said. Some 2 billion live in dry areas threatened with becoming desert.With every rise of 1 degree Celsius in average temperature, the boundary of such parched areas expands by another 200 kilometres, he said.

A Reuters article continues:

“Bad policies are as much to blame for aggravating desertification as climate change,” said Zafar Adeel, head of the U.N. University’s Canada-based International Network on Water, Environment and Health.

…”If millions of people with skills as farmers suddenly find themselves living in desertified areas … they have no time to adapt and have to flee,” Janos Bogardi, head of the U.N. University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn, told Reuters.

New policies could include helping people whose lands are at risk from erosion to plant more drought-resistant crops or turn to new activities such as eco-tourism, fish farming or production of solar energy.

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Too often farmers tried to offset degradation of drylands by ever more costly irrigation rather than switching to less water-demanding activities.

“Crops transpire water. It’s a very water-intensive process,” Adeel said.

Greenlash

Increase in Number of Coastal Dead Zones

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Contemporary agriculture uses huge amounts of fertilizer (largely responsible for the doubling of global Nitrogen flows and the tripling of global Phosphorus flows).  The over application and lack of finesse with which fertilizer is used produces a tradeoff between increased agricultural production and coastal ecosystem production.

Agricultural runoff is the main driver of low oxygen coastal ‘dead zones,’ which greatly reduce fish, shellfish, and most other living things, consequently reducing coastal fisheries, recreation opportunities, and sometimes, when there are toxic algae blooms, endangering human health.

A Science magazine news article (Oct 26, 2006) reports on an update to a UNEP assessment of the world’s dead zones.

The number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in global marine waters has jumped by more than a third in the last 2 years, according to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report released last week. The latest figures reveal some 200 dead zones worldwide, up from 149 since 2004. The affected waters are robbed of fish, oysters, sea grasses, and other marine life, damaging food supplies for millions of people worldwide, the report warns.
Dead zones form when microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton explode in number. When the phytoplankton die, bacteria feast on them and consume vast amounts of dissolved oxygen. The resulting oxygen depletion–or hypoxia–kills fish, oysters, sea grasses, and other marine life. Although phytoplankton are the backbone of marine food chains and their populations naturally wax and wane, abnormally large “blooms” have been on the rise since the 1970s. According to the UNEP report, this has been due to skyrocketing marine levels of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizers, sewage, animal wastes, and other sources.

Marine biologist Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences in Williamsburg compiled much of the findings on dead zones from exhaustive reviews of scientific journals around the world. Better scientific reporting in recent years likely accounts for some of the apparent increase in the phenomenon, he says; “however, there’s no mistaking the consistent upward trend over the last 50 years.” It is difficult to estimate the total area affected worldwide, but he believes the total is “on the order of” 300,000 square kilometers. About 80% of the zones occur every summer and autumn, he says. Some, such as the Baltic Sea’s 80,000-square-kilometer zone, even persist year-round.

The situation may well worsen. The UNEP report projects that the volume of nitrogen alone dumped by rivers into the oceans will climb 14% by 2030, compared to mid-1990s levels. However, not all dead zones are linked to human activities, says paleoceanographer Kjell Nordberg of Göteborg University in Sweden. His historical and geological studies indicate that natural changes in climate and ocean conditions have caused oxygen depletion in some North Sea estuaries and fjords. Not all hope is lost, however. In some areas where sewage discharge and agricultural practices are implicated, regulations to curb the impacts have helped improve oxygen levels over the last few years, Nordberg says.

Ecological Management, General, Greenlash

Gilbert White: Floods are acts of God, but flood losses are largely acts of man

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Gilbert White a pioneer in understanding the social-ecological nature of natural disasters died recently in Colorado. He died, in early October 2006, age 94 after a long and diverse career that centered on the impact of flooding.

White argued that ‘hard’ engineering solutions to flooding, such as dams and levees, frequently produced pathological results. His PhD research at the University of Chicago “Human adjustment to floods,” showed river engineering had increased, rather than decreased, the costs of floods, because river engineering resulted in more settlement in the floodplain, increasing vulnerability to large flood.

The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder maintains a Gilbert White archive.

The University of Colorado has an obituary. The Washington Post also has an obituary that quotes Gilbert White:

While watching the German occupation of France, I became convinced that man can no more conquer or preserve a civilization by war than he can conquer nature solely by engineering force,” Dr. White told broadcaster Edward R. Murrow for the radio program “This I Believe” in 1951.

“I found that an occupying army or a concentration camp can repress men’s basic beliefs but cannot change them. The good life, like the balance of all the complex elements of a river valley, is founded upon friendly adjustment. . . . It embraces confidence in fellowship, tolerance in outlook, humility in service and a constant search for the truth.”

Ecological Management, Greenlash, Ideas, Vulnerability

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

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Michael Pollan article The Vegetable-Industrial Complex in the October 15th New York Times describes an example of Holling’s pathology of natural resource management in agriculture.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.

But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has spread it far and wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened in the case of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink.

Continue reading →

Greenlash, Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Vulnerability

Biodiversity Loss Threatens Human Well-Being

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Sandra Díaz, Joseph Fargione, Terry Chapin and David Tilman have nice a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment based review essay Biodiversity Loss Threatens Human Well-Being in PLOS Biology. The article summarizes current understanding of how biodiversity influences human wellbeing.

fig 1 plos biolHuman societies have been built on biodiversity. Many activities indispensable for human subsistence lead to biodiversity loss, and this trend is likely to continue in the future. We clearly benefit from the diversity of organisms that we have learned to use for medicines, food, fibers, and other renewable resources. In addition, biodiversity has always been an integral part of the human experience, and there are many moral reasons to preserve it for its own sake. What has been less recognized is that biodiversity also influences human well-being, including the access to water and basic materials for a satisfactory life, and security in the face of environmental change, through its effects on the ecosystem processes that lie at the core of the Earth’s most vital life support systems.

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By affecting the magnitude, pace, and temporal continuity by which energy and materials are circulated through ecosystems, biodiversity in the broad sense influences the provision of ecosystem services. The most dramatic changes in ecosystem services are likely to come from altered functional compositions of communities and from the loss, within the same trophic level, of locally abundant species rather than from the loss of already rare species. Based on the available evidence, we cannot define a level of biodiversity loss that is safe, and we still do not have satisfactory models to account for ecological surprises. Direct effects of drivers of biodiversity loss (eutrophication, burning, soil erosion and flooding, etc.) on ecosystem processes and services are often more dramatic than those mediated by biodiversity change. Nevertheless, there is compelling evidence that the tapestry of life, rather than responding passively to global environmental change, actively mediates changes in the Earth’s life-support systems. Its degradation is threatening the fulfillment of basic needs and aspiration of humanity as a whole, but especially, and most immediately, those of the most disadvantaged segments of society.

Greenlash, Ideas

Estimating Greenlash from Agriculture via Climatic Regulation

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Ecological greenlash occurs when human action aimed at increasing the supply of a desired ecosystem service (e.g. food production) inadvertenly degrade other ecosystem services (e.g. climatic regulation or pollination) that are essential for the provision of the desired ecosystem service, consquently reducing the supply of the desired ecosystem service.

While ecologists have documented many examples of greenlash at small spatial scales, a gap has existed between ecological research and the questions and spatial scales of ecological policy. Research is starting to close bridge this gap.

Roger Pielke Sr. points to several New Papers on the Importance of Land Use/Land Cover Change on Climate on his Climate Science blog. These include one by my new McGill Geography colleague, Navin Ramankutty and several of his colleagues from SAGE at U Wisconsin. In the paper:

Ramankutty, Navin, Christine Delire, and Peter Snyder, 2006. Feedbacks between agriculture and climate: An illustration of the potential unintended consequences of human land use activities. Global and Planetary Change, in press, corrected proof available online.

Ramankutty and colleagues examine agricultural greenlash by estimating the impact land conversion from agriculture has had via feedbacks on climate on the ability of people to practice agriculture. They find that globally the change is minimal, but in specific regions the change is substantial (a result similar to what Line Gordon and colleagues found in their estimates of how agriculture has altered global green water flows).

Ramankutty climate suitability

Figure 4 in the paper shows areas where the suitability for agriculture (where 1 is max suitability and cross hatching indicates areas where changes appears to be statistically significant) has increased or decreased due to the impact of agricultural land use change on global climate.

Ecological Management, Greenlash

Complicated ecological tradeoffs from water & agriculture

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A recent paper in Water Resources Research (2006: 42) by Eloise Kendy and John Bredehoeft Transient effects of groundwater pumping and surface-water-irrigation returns on streamflow shows how a long history of excess irrigation in the US west has prodcued streamflow that ecosystems and people have come to rely upon. Now improvements in irrigation effectiveness (i.e. more crop per drop) could reduce this streamflow. These connections show how complicated tradeoffs between different water uses can become. Fortunately, in this case, as in many others, it appears that more sophisticated water management can reduce the intensity of this tradeoff.

Abstract: In surface-water-irrigated western valleys, groundwater discharge from excess irrigation sustains winter streamflow at levels that exceed natural flows. This unnatural condition has persisted for so long that hydrologists, water managers, and water users consider it to be normal. Changing land uses and irrigation practices complicate efforts to manage groundwater discharge and, in turn, to protect instream flows. We examined the impacts on streamflow of (1) seasonal groundwater pumping at various distances from the Gallatin River and (2) improving irrigation efficiency in the Gallatin Valley, Montana. We show that the greater the distance from a seasonally pumping well to a stream, the less the stream depletion fluctuates seasonally and the greater the proportion of annual depletion occurs during the nonirrigation season. Furthermore, we show that increasing irrigation efficiency has implications beyond simply reducing diversions. Improving irrigation efficiency reduces fall and winter flows to a lower, but more natural condition than the artificially high conditions to which we have become accustomed. However, existing water users and aquatic ecosystems may rely upon return flows from inefficient irrigation systems. By strategically timing and locating artificial recharge within a basin, groundwater and surface water may be managed conjunctively to help maintain desirable streamflow conditions as land uses and irrigation practices change.

Eloise Kendy has a short related article in Geotimes (June 2005) Water woes: predictable but not inevitable, where she writes how land-use change produces inadvertent ecological engineering that should become more intentional and less haphazard.

The change from irrigated agriculture to residential development entails more than simply pumping groundwater. Most irrigation systems in the West — especially the oldest systems on the most productive ground — use diverted surface water. Irrigation water that crops do not use seeps into the soil and eventually reaches the water table, where it recharges groundwater in the underlying aquifer. So-called irrigation return flow is a major source of groundwater recharge in irrigated western valleys.

The irrigation-charged groundwater slowly makes its way underground to rivers, streams and springs, where it eventually discharges. Groundwater discharge from irrigation return flow keeps rivers flowing well into late summer and fall, even after all the snow has long since melted, even after the rains have stopped. Although not a natural phenomenon, we consider this annual flow pattern “normal,” for it has recurred for more than 30 years.

The most important hydrologic change brought on by urban and suburban development is a drastic reduction in groundwater recharge. Urban land surfaces such as roofs, roads and parking lots are impermeable. Rain and snowmelt run off these surfaces, instead of seeping into the ground and recharging aquifers. In a typical engineering design, runoff is quickly shunted into the nearest stream or river to rid the area of potential flood waters. Consequently, localized recharge greatly decreases, streamflow becomes “flashier” (larger fluctuations over shorter periods of time), and late-season, groundwater-fed streamflow decreases. When irrigation stops, seepage from excess irrigation water also stops, or continues to recharge the aquifer only from leaky ditches.

Almost without exception, rural residential development in the West relies on well water for domestic use. So, on top of reducing aquifer recharge, the change from surface-water-irrigated cropland to groundwater-irrigated yards increases aquifer discharge. Less water goes into the aquifer than before, and more water goes out.

Previously, irrigation diversions depleted streamflow in the spring and early summer, and irrigation return flow maintained streamflow well into the late summer and fall. Now, with fewer surface-water diversions, early flows increase, as does the risk of flooding. Conversely, late-season flows decrease, potentially leaving fish and downstream irrigators high and dry.

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When sewers were put in place in Long Island, N.Y., in the 1950s, wastewater that previously recharged the aquifer now discharges straight into the ocean. The loss of aquifer recharge caused the water table to drop about 20 feet. To save the aquifer, more than 3,000 small recharge basins were constructed. Their average combined infiltration rate of 150 millions gallons per day has successfully reversed the trend of declining water levels in the aquifer.

Out West, many creative options exist for water management. Most of the basins within the Basin and Range province, which, loosely defined, extends from Canada to Mexico, provide ideal geologic settings for storing artificially recharged water underground. Using existing irrigation infrastructure, we could spread spring runoff onto benchlands, allowing it to flow underground toward rivers, where it would replace irrigation return flow as a resource for late-season use. Another simple option is to discourage landscaping that requires irrigation.

via Kevin Vranes’s No Se Nada.

Greenlash, Ideas, Vulnerability

Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour

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The world’s oceans are warming, rising, and acidifing due to human action. The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) on May 31 2006 released a new report on climate change and the world’s oceans, The Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour, that synthesizes current knowledge on climate change and oceans. They state that climate change in combination with over-fishing is threatening already depleted fish stocks. Sea-level rise is exposing coastal regions to mounting flood and hurricane risks. They argue that to keep the impacts on human wellbeing within manageable limits it is necessary to both increase coastal and ocean resilience and reduce the amount of future global warming and ocean acidification. The WBGU recommends that societies act to:

Limit acidification and temperature rise
Adaptation measures can only succeed if sea-level rise, ocean warming and ocean acidification are limited to tolerable levels. The only way to do this is through aggressive climate protection policies. WBGU has already recommended previously that the rise in global mean temperature be limited to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Ocean conservation is a further reason for imposing this limit. Furthermore, in order to restrain acidification it is essential to reduce not only emissions of the overall basket of greenhouse gases, but also to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions in particular are sufficiently abated. It follows in WBGU’s view that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will need to be approximately halved by 2050 from 1990 levels.

Strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems
To strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems to elevated seawater temperatures and acidification, it is essential to manage marine resources sustainably. In particular, over-fishing must be stopped. In addition, WBGU recommends designating at least 20–30 per cent of the global marine area as conservation zones. The international community has already adopted goals in this regard, for instance at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. These must now be implemented, and the regulatory gap for the high seas closed by adopting an appropriate international agreement.

Develop new strategies for coastal protection
About every fifth person lives within 30 kilometres of the sea. Many of these people are put at immediate risk by sea-level rise and hurricanes. Coastal protection is thus becoming a key challenge for society, not least in financial terms. National and international strategies for mitigation and adaptation need to be further developed and harmonized. This includes plans for a managed retreat from endangered areas. In developing countries, financing needs to be secured by means of both existing and innovative financing instruments such as micro-insurance.

Give legal certainty to refugees from sea-level rise
At present, international law neither establishes a commitment to receive people who are forced to leave coastal areas or islands because of climate change, nor is the cost question resolved. Over the long term, a quota system is conceivable, under which states would have to adopt responsibility for refugees in line with their greenhouse gas emissions. This will require formal international agreements and the establishment of dedicated funds for international compensation payments.

Use carbon dioxide storage only as a transitional solution
To mitigate emissions, carbon dioxide can be captured in energy-generating facilities and then stored in geological formations on land or under the sea floor. Direct injection into the deep sea is a further option under debate, but this lacks permanence and harbours a risk of ecological damage in the deep sea. WBGU therefore recommends prohibiting the injection of carbon dioxide into seawater in general. In contrast, storing carbon dioxide in geological formations under the sea floor can present a transitional solution for climate protection, complementing more sustainable approaches such as enhancing energy efficiency and expanding renewable energies. Permits should only be granted, however, if such storage is environmentally sound and is secure for at least 10,000 years.