Category Archives: Ideas

Ecosystem services, Regime Shifts

Intensive agriculture’s ecological surprises

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regime shift cartoon from TREE paperRhitu Chatterjee has written a news article Intensive agriculture’s ecological surprises in Environ. Sci. Technol. (July 2, 2008) about a paper Agricultural modifications of hydrological flows create ecological surprises (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2007.11.011) that Line Gordon, Elena Bennett and I published in TREE earlier this year.  From the article:

Previous reports have outlined ways that agriculture alters ecosystems by changing hydrology. The new study, led by Line Gordon of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, classifies these changes, or “regime shifts”, from one ecological state to another into three categories: through agriculture’s interaction with aquatic systems, as in the case of nutrient runoff; in the interactions of plants and soil, as in Australia’s salinity issues; or by influencing atmospheric processes such as evaporation and loss of water by plants (transpiration), as in the rapid drying of the Sahel in sub-Saharan Africa.

The authors “make it clear that agricultural practices result in these regime changes by altering water quality and available quantity,” says Deborah Bossio, a water expert at Sri Lanka’s International Water Management Institute.

“The increasing demand for food, feed, and fuel is placing enormous pressure on the world’s arable lands,” says ecologist Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia (Canada). Awareness of agriculture-related environmental problems has been growing in the past few years, says Bossio. But some of that awareness has been lost in the “current frenzy of global food crisis shifting the balance back toward increasing yield.”

Be it the desertification of the Sahel, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, or the increasing salinity in Australia, countries all over the world are already trying to solve some of these problems. But the fixes are not quick, and the results of their efforts are often hard to predict.

Given the difficult-to-repair, or even irreparable, nature of the problems, agricultural systems must be made resilient to change, the authors argue. The new study adds to “the increasing chorus of voices” that emphasizes the need to avoid irreversible ecological damage, says Donner.

However, the science of understanding ecological regime shifts is still young, which makes it difficult to predict when the changes will manifest. “The tipping points aren’t very well understood at all,” says Bossio. Researchers first need to understand the various biophysical factors involved and how those factors interact with one another, the authors say.

For now, ecologists, agronomists, and regulators can acknowledge the problem and encourage certain practices to minimize the likelihood of some of these water-related changes. People should begin by viewing agriculture not simply as a source of food but also as a source of ecosystem services like water and biodiversity, says coauthor Garry Peterson of McGill University (Canada). For example, Australian farmers are adopting mosaic farming, which involves combining annual crops, pastures, and perennial trees into the same landscape. This restores biodiversity and hydrology and prevents the rise of salinity.

“If we don’t heed the management lessons from the past, many of which are listed in the paper, we are bound to face many more ecological surprises in the coming decades,” says Donner.

Ideas

A view of the RA’s research from Cultural Ecology

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Lesley Head in her article Cultural ecology: the problematic human and the terms of engagement (Prog Hum Geogr 2007 31:837 DOI: 10.1177/0309132507080625) discusses the current ‘terms of engagement’ between the cultural and the ecological. She writes:

Although ecology would in theory claim a holistic remit that includes humans as part of earth’s biota, its usual practice has reinforced humans as different (Haila, 1999; 2000), with anthropologists more likely to consider humans within an explicitly biogeographical perspective (Terrell, 2006). A recent contents analysis of mainstream conservation biology journals shows a continued focus on relatively ‘intact’ habitats, with few studies ‘conducted entirely in areas under intense human pressure (agricultural landscapes, coastal and urban areas)’ (Fazey et al., 2005: 70).

Changes can be seen as part of the so-called ‘new ecology’, or ‘non-equilibrium’ ecology, in which change and contingency rather than stability is the norm, and ‘disturbances’ such as fire and human actions are understood as internal to the system rather than external.

She describes the Resilience Alliance as follows:

An integrative brand of ecology is practised by the Resilience Alliance, published mostly in their journal Ecology and Society. The Alliance works through interdisciplinary collaborations to explore the dynamics of social-ecological systems, using key concepts such as resilience, adaptability and transformability. The approach is avowedly integrative of ‘ecology’ and ‘society’ (eg, Gunderson et al., 2005) and acknowledges the pervasiveness of humans in ecosystems (Elmqvist et al., 2003; Folke et al., 2004; Trosper, 2005). Yet the assumption of separate systems remains curiously unexamined in this work. Further there is conceptual slippage between treating humans as different, and ultimately absorbing all human activities as part of ecosystems.

General, Greenlash

China’s blue-green Olympics

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Coastal eutrophication is an increasing problem in China, due to their massive use of fertilizers.

china algae

Large blooms of blooms of blue-green algae are clogging parts of the sailing course at one of China’s Olympic sites in Quindoa. Algae are being manually removed by a thousand boats and thousands of people at (AFP, AP, Guardian, NYT, and photos from Xinmin). Bloomberg news writes:

Warmer waters, increased rainfall and high levels of nutrients in the ocean brought about the algae explosion along vast stretches of the 800-kilometer (500-mile) coastline, according to the Qingdao Weather Bureau.

Qingdao, located 830 kilometers from Beijing, is mobilizing more than 1,000 fishing boats to scoop up the algae and contain the outbreak, Wang said.

“We can only haul the blue-green algae manually and we’re doing all we can with our arms full and by the boat-load,” said Wang, a sailing spokesman for the Beijing Games organizing committee. “All you can see is fishing boats along the coast.”

via Great Beyond

update: BBC video of army algae removal

Regime Shifts

Regime shifts in the Gulf of Mexico

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Regime shifts in the Gulf of MexicoEugene Turner, Nancy Rabalais, and Dubravko Justic‘s recent article Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia: Alternate States and a Legacy (Env. Sci. Tech., 2008 42(7) 2323–2327) suggests that benthic carbon in the coastal benthic may be a critical slow variable regulating coastal hypoxia. As organic matter accumulates in sediments it demands increasing amounts of oxygen, making the area more vulnerable to nutrient driven hypoxia.

The Gulf of Mexico is one of the most studied coastal hypoxic zones in the world, but it is not the only one. The number of these zones has greatly increased, primarily due to agricultural expansion and intensification (one of the many ways that agriculture has been driving ecological regime shifts). The authors compare changes in coastal hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico to that found in the Baltic Sea, which has also been suggested to have undergone a regime shift. The authors conclude:

… there has been a system-wide response to the combination of organic buildup in the sediments and higher nitrogen loading, which has increased the area of hypoxia generated for a given nitrogen load and has increased the opportunity for hypoxia to develop. The results discussed above demonstrate that the average [nitrogen] loading of the 1980s would result in a hypoxic zone that is twice as large in the past decade.

…Hypoxia has well-documented catastrophic consequences to the benthos, including animals with multiyear life spans, and creates large areas without commercial quantities of shrimp and fish. The changes in the Mississippi River-influenced continental shelf over the last 30–40 years should be considered to a shift to an alternate state in the sense that (A) the threshold for hypoxia development has been exceeded on a continuing basis and the size of the hypoxic zone has increased and may be approaching its maximum size, given physical constraints on shelf geometry (e.g., width, depth, and length); and (B) the return to a previous system state is more difficult the longer that the current level of nutrient loading is stable or increasing.

… respiratory demand in the sediments remains a legacy influencing water quality of the eutrophied continental shelf in the northern Gulf of Mexico. …The goal of reducing the size of the hypoxic zone to 5000 km2 thus becomes more difficult to achieve for every year without a significant reduction in nutrient loading. Each year without reducing the nutrient loading rates means that it will take longer to realize the Action Plan goal, because the legacy of accumulated organic matter and its respiratory demand increases with time.

Ecological Economics

Joseph Stiglitz on reforming devlopment

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Economist Joesph Stiglitz writes about how he thinks societies should shift their incentive structures to encourage investment in the sources of economic growth.  On Comment is free he writes How to combat scarcity in an age of plenty:

At the core of America’s success is technology, symbolised by Silicon Valley. The irony is that the scientists making the advances that enable technology-based growth, and the venture capital firms that finance it were not the ones reaping the biggest rewards in the heyday of the real estate bubble. These real investments are overshadowed by the games that have been absorbing most participants in financial markets.The world needs to rethink the sources of growth. If the foundations of economic growth lie in advances in science and technology, not in speculation in real estate or financial markets, then tax systems must be realigned. Why should those who make their income by gambling in Wall Street’s casinos or even through online gambling in California, be taxed at a lower rate than those who earn their money in other ways? Capital gains should be taxed at least at as high a rate as ordinary income. (Such returns will, in any case, get a substantial benefit because the tax is not imposed until the gain is realised.) In addition, there should be a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies.

Given the huge increase in inequality in most countries, higher taxes for those who have done well – to help those who have lost ground from globalisation and technological change – are in order, and could also ameliorate the strains imposed by soaring food and energy prices. Countries, like the US, with food stamp programmes, clearly need to increase the value of these subsidies in order to ensure that nutrition standards do not deteriorate. Those countries without such programmes might think about instituting them.

Two factors set off today’s crisis: the Iraq war contributed to the run-up in oil prices, including through increased instability in the Middle East, the low-cost provider of oil, while biofuels have meant that food and energy markets are increasingly integrated. Although the focus on renewable energy sources is welcome, policies that distort food supply are not. America’s subsidies for corn-based ethanol contribute more to the coffers of ethanol producers than they do to curtailing global warming. Huge agriculture subsidies in the US and the European Union have weakened agriculture in the developing world, where too little international assistance was directed at improving agriculture productivity. Development aid for agriculture has fallen from a high of 17% of total aid to just 3% today, with some international donors demanding that fertiliser subsidies be eliminated, making it even more difficult for cash-strapped farmers to compete.

Rich countries must reduce, if not eliminate, distortional agriculture and energy policies, and help those in the poorest countries improve their capacity to produce food. But this is just a start: we have treated our most precious resources – clean water and air – as if they were free. Only new patterns of consumption and production – a new economic model – can address that most fundamental resource problem.

Regime Shifts

The Mississippi dead zone will grow due to this year’s floods

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Low oxygen anoxic zones due to excess nutrient runoff from agriculture and are increasingly common worldwide. On Maribo Simon Donner writes about how the ongoing floods in the upper Mississippi are likely to produce the largest ever ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. Simon writes:

Nitrogen applied to crops like corn in the Midwest is the major driver of the now famous Dead Zone, as I’ve described in a number of previous posts and this Google News commentary. The blame for the high nitrogen levels in the Mississippi and this year’s record Dead Zone forecast is being placed on the production of more corn for ethanol. A more complete explanation would be that the surge in corn production, and, hence, fertilizer use, the past few years has made nitrogen pollution more sensitive to the climate than ever.

Nitrogen and hydrology are tightly linked in the Mississippi River Basin, and other agriculturally intensive river basins, thanks to nature and to humans. Several nitrogen ‘species’ like nitrate are highly soluble. What has exacerbates things in the Mississippi is activities like wetlands, installing artificial drainage under fields and channelizing rivers that reduce chances for nitrogen to be consumed before moving downstream. The result is the amount of nitrogen that the Mississippi sends to the Gulf can actually be predicted from the rainfall in the Corn Belt.

In coverage of our recent paper on corn and the Dead Zone, the prediction that the US Energy Policy would increase average nitrogen loading by 10-34% drew most of the attention. What might be missed is that the nitrogen loading could be much higher if the conditions are wetter.

The reason this matters is the the continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico has a memory. The usual tale is that the Dead Zone grows each spring and summer when the big flood of Mississippi nitrogen arrives weather and water conditions are ripe for algae growth (it breaks up in the fall when the waters cool and mix, reintroducing oxygen to the bottom waters). However, nitrogen from previous years that is deposited in the sediments can also be recycled and feed algae growth. In other words, the system remembers a big flood of nitrogen. For example, during the 1993 Mississippi floods, the Dead Zone grew to a then-record 17,600 km2; the next year, it grew to an almost equal 16,600 km2, despite 31% less nitrate flowing down the Mississippi. That’s just one reason why it is critical to consider climate and climate variability in ecological management and policy.

This year, the Dead Zone is projected to reach over 25,000 km2 in size, 20% greater than the previous maximum. What will that mean for 2009? For 2010? The longer you wait, the harder problem like the Dead Zone are to solve.

Ecological Economics, Ecosystem services, Vulnerability

Agricultural trade and poverty

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A recent Economist article poses the question Does freer farm trade help poor people? Given the ideological slant of the Economist, it is unsurprising that the article concludes yes. The interesting aspect of the article discusses two World Bank research papers that indicate that the way in which agricultural trade is regulated has major consequences.

The links between trade, food prices and poverty reduction are more subtle. Different types of reform have diverse effects on prices. When countries cut their tariffs on farm goods, their consumers pay lower prices. In contrast, when farm subsidies are slashed, world food prices rise. The lavishness of farm subsidies means that the net effect of fully freeing trade would be to raise prices, by an average of 5.5% for primary farm products and 1.3% for processed goods, according to the World Bank.

These effects are still much smaller than recent food-price spikes, but would they, on balance, help or hurt the poor? In crude terms, food-exporting countries gain in the short term whereas net importers lose. Farmers are better off; those who buy their food fare worse. Although most of the world’s poor live in rural areas, they are not, by and large, net food sellers. A forthcoming study* of nine poor countries by M. Ataman Aksoy and Aylin Isik-Dikmelik, two economists at the World Bank, shows that even in very rural countries, such as Bangladesh and Zambia, only one-fifth of households sell more food than they buy. That suggests the losers may outnumber winners.

But things are not so simple. The authors point out that net food buyers tend to be richer than net sellers, so high food prices, on average, transfer income from richer to poorer households. And prices are not the only route through which poverty is affected. Higher farm income boosts demand for rural labour, increasing wages for landless peasants and others who buy rather than grow their food. Several studies show this income effect can outweigh the initial price effect. Finally, the farm sector itself can grow. Decades of underinvestment in agriculture have left many poor countries reliant on imports: over time that can change.

The World Bank has often argued that the balance of all these factors is likely to be positive. Although freer farm trade—and higher prices—may raise poverty rates in some countries, it will reduce them in more. One much-cited piece of evidence is a study† by Thomas Hertel, Roman Keeney, Maros Ivanic and Alan Winters. This analysis simulated the effect of getting rid of all subsidies and barriers on global prices and trade volumes. It then mapped these results on to detailed household statistics in 15 countries, which between them covered 1 billion people. Fully free trade in farm goods would reduce poverty in 13 countries while raising it in two.

But lately the bank seems to be taking a different line. Robert Zoellick, the bank’s president, claims that the food-price crisis will throw 100m people below the poverty line, undoing seven years of progress. His figure comes from extrapolating the results of a different study** by Mr Ivanic and Will Martin, another World Bank economist. This study analyses the effects of more expensive staple foods on poverty by examining household surveys in nine countries. In seven cases, higher food prices meant more poverty. (Dani Rodrik, a blogging Harvard economist, was one of the first to highlight the tension between these studies.)

In fact, the bank’s results are not as contradictory as they seem. The two studies are based on different sets of countries: only Peru, Zambia and Vietnam appear in both. And the gloomy analysis measures only the effect of pricier staple foods, whereas the other examines freer trade in all farm goods. Such trade brings broader benefits: even if higher prices for staples exacerbate poverty in some countries, at least in the short term, the effect may be outweighed by increased demand for other farm exports, such as processed goods, as rich countries cut tariffs.

These subtleties suggest two conclusions. First, the bank, and others, should beware sweeping generalisations about the impact of food prices on the poor. Second, the nature of trade reform matters. Removing rich-country subsidies on staple goods, the focus of much debate in the Doha round, may be less useful in the fight against poverty than cutting tariffs would be. The food-price crisis has not hurt the case for freer farm trade. But it has shown how important it is to get it right.

These papers only assess trade rather than agricultural practices. I would add that the ecological fit of agriculture to the place in which it is practiced will also have substantial impacts on the potential for a regions ability to escape from poverty. Increases in agricultural production that damages other ecosystem services that are important for local people’s livelihood, such a fisheries, fuelwood, flood regulation, or water quality, can do more damage than good.

Ecological Economics, Ecosystem services, Greenlash, Regime Shifts

A giant pool of money flows into global agriculture

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As part of its interesting Food Chain series, the New York Times writes Food Is Gold, So Billions Invested in Farming about how investment funds are pouring billions of dollars into agriculture. One investment bank has estimated that investments in agricultural commodities has increased over 3X, from $70 billion at the start of 2006 to $235 billion in April of 2008, with roughly half of this growth being due to appreciation and half to new investment (for more details see Financial Times on agricultural funds and why food prices are rising?). However, money is now moving from investments in commodity futures into actual agricultural infrastructure:

Huge investment funds have already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into booming financial markets for commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans. But a few big private investors are starting to make bolder and longer-term bets that the world’s need for food will greatly increase — by buying farmland, fertilizer, grain elevators and shipping equipment.

Part of the article is reminiscent of the TechnoGarden scenario of the MA, in which rich companies invest in the underdeveloped African agriculture infrastructure. The article states:

Emergent is raising $450 million to $750 million to invest in farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, where it plans to consolidate small plots into more productive holdings and introduce better equipment. Emergent also plans to provide clinics and schools for local labor.

One crop and a source of fuel for farming operations will be jatropha, an oil-seed plant useful for biofuels that is grown in sandy soil unsuitable for food production, Ms. Payne said.

“We are getting strong response from institutional investors — pensions, insurance companies, endowments, some sovereign wealth funds,” she said.

The fund chose Africa because “land values are very, very inexpensive, compared to other agriculture-based economies,” she said. “Its microclimates are enticing, allowing a range of different crops. There’s accessible labor. And there’s good logistics — wide open roads, good truck transport, sea transport.”

However, unlike the TechnoGarden scenario, this investment seems focussed on increasing yields of food and fuel, rather than producing multiple ecosystem services. Consequently, such investments attempts to increase yields by practicing intensive agriculture are likely to lead to negative impacts on other people and ecosystems using water, and potentially leading to local or regional ecological regime shifts (see our paper Gordon et al 2008).

Also, many of these investments are not aimed at increasing agricultural yield on the ground, but hedging against inflation risk, and providing market power for large funds to leverage investments in other financial instruments, such as options, derivatives and other more complicated packages. This coupling of financial markets, to the already coupled food, fuel, and climate systems means that the systemic consequences of these investments are likely to be unexpected and novel.

Adaptation, Vulnerability

Resilience to Earthquakes

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In response to the high number of school children killed in school collapses in the recent Sichuan earthquake, Andrew Revkin writes in the New York Times about the challenges of enhancing resilience – even when the problem and solution are well understood – in his article A Move to Turn Schools From Earthquake Death Traps Into Havens:

… The main challenge in bolstering resilience to such geophysical shocks, Ms. Wang, Mr. Tucker and many other experts said, is not the structural engineering. There is no mystery to adding and securing iron rods in concrete, securing floors to beams, boosting the resilience of columns, monitoring the size of gravel mixed with cement.

It is not cost, either. In California, Dr. Tucker notes, the premium for building earthquake resistance into new schools is less than 4 percent. The payoff, beyond saved lives, is significantly lower repair costs after a temblor — 10 to 100 times less than in unimproved buildings. (In poorer countries, the differential in cost could be substantially higher, other experts note, but the payoff, they say, is priceless.)

Rich or poor, the big challenge lies in overcoming social and political hurdles that still give priority to pressing daily problems over foreseeable disasters that may not occur for decades, scores of years, or longer. In some developing countries there is a tendency to ascribe earthquakes and their consequences to fate, but Dr. Tucker and other experts say that lets the authorities off the hook.

“I can’t hold a government responsible for protecting its citizens against a meteorite falling out of the sky,” Dr. Tucker said. “But I can and do hold a government in a country with known seismic risk responsible for protecting its children, who are compelled to attend school, from the school collapsing during an earthquake.”

Dr. Tucker has written or co-written a lengthening string of reports pointing to the building risks worldwide as more populations shift to urban areas, often into shoddy, hastily built structures, with children sent to schools in similar, and often worse, condition.

Arthur Lerner-Lam, who maps disaster risks at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, agrees that urbanization in earthquake zones is setting the world up for its first true megadisaster — a million-casualty earthquake that many seismologists say is only a matter of time. The greatest risk, he said, lies in a belt from Italy and Turkey through central Asia and the Himalayas into central China.

In such regions, Dr. Tucker said, the best blueprints and materials are no guarantee of safety without adequate building codes, laws, training, inspections and enforcement. In regions prone to disasters, Dr. Tucker emphasizes that safety goes beyond blueprints and materials. It hinges on the presence of stringent building codes, legal frameworks, well-trained inspectors, and their enforcement. Inspection experts from Inspexion.com say that these factors are equally vital in the context of disaster inspection and response, ensuring that structures can withstand extreme forces, experts are equipped to assess damage accurately, and safety measures are rigorously upheld to protect communities in the aftermath of catastrophic events.

The biggest challenge of all may simply be redefining security, and building societies that demand that government investments match risks, said Fouad Bendimerad, an engineering and risk-management consultant in California and chairman of the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative.

“The typical government spends around 15 percent of its G.D.P. to defend against exterior military threats that may never occur during the lifetime of generation,” Dr. Bendimerad said. “Why do we want to exonerate governments from dedicating a small portion of that 15 percent to protect against the threats of natural hazards that we know will happen?”

Ideas

Mammals better invaders than birds

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Journal Watch Online reports an interesting finding:

According to the “tens rule”, roughly ten percent of introduced species become established and ten percent of those become invasive. Only it doesn’t hold for mammals or birds, according to Jonathan Jeschke’s study, the findings of which are published in Diversity and Distributions.

The Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, researcher found that fifty percent of introduced bird species become established, of which 34 percent become invasive. Mammals are even more successful colonists, with an amazing 79 percent finding a permanent home and 63 percent of those going on to become a pain in the proverbial for conservationists. That makes mammals almost fifty times more effective invaders than the tens rule predicts. How wrong can one be?

Source: Jeschke JM (2008) Across islands and continents, mammals are more successful invaders than birds. Diversity and Distributions DOI: 10.1111/j.1472-4642.2008.00488.x

I wonder what explains this difference between mammals and birds.  Is it something to do with biology or what species people move around?  It would be interesting to see how the patterns vary with body mass.

Another paper by Jeschke is also interesting.  Invasion success of vertebrates in Europe and North America – which showed that there does not seem to be ecological imperialism between vertabrates, and that invasion success is higher than expect.