Category Archives: Tools

Green water efficiency in farming

March 24, 2006 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

A recent SciDev.net article Improve water efficiency in farming, urges report describes an International Water Management Insitute (IMWI) report – Beyond More Crop per Drop prepared for the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico (March 2006).

The article quotes IWMI director general, Frank Rijsberman, who justifies the need to increase water use efficiency by the statement that it takes “70 times more water to grow the food we eat every day than we need for drinking, cooking, bathing and other domestic needs.”

The report describes how water management usually focuses on runoff, blue water, which is only 40% of rainfall. The other 60% is green water that replenishes soil moisture and evaporates from the soil or is transpired by plants. The report states that three quarters of the world’s poor depend upon rainfed agriculture (90% in sub-Saharan Africa), meaning that improving green water productivity has the potential to improve the well-being of the world’s poor.

The report writes:

Increasing the productivity of green water used in rainfed agriculture has great potential to reduce the area needed for agriculture. Agricultural production of staple crops in Africa, has, over the last 40 years, increased almost exclusively by area expansion, at the cost of large areas of natural ecosystems. To enable sustainable increases in food production in Africa, agricultural intensification is absolutely necessary. Increasing the productivity of green water used in rainfed agriculture – particularly by adding a limited amount of blue water (from rivers or aquifers) through supplemental irrigation has great potential.

Rainwater harvesting in Sri Lanka The report recommends using rainwater harvesting, supplemental and micro irrigation, and using land and water conservation to increasee infiltration and reduce runoff, to increase green water efficiency. It suggests that using these known techniques could double crop yields.

The IMWI report provides examples of water management in stories from two areas the Awash Basin – Ethiopia and the Krishna Basin – India.

See also, my previous post on agricultural modification of green water flows.

Greenlash, Ideas, Regime Shifts, Visualization

Mapping anoxic zones – pt 2

March 23, 2006 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

Global International Waters Assessment is a systematic assessment of the environmental conditions and problems in large transboundary waters, comprising marine, coastal and freshwater areas, and surface waters as well as ground waters. Involving over 1,500 expert it has assessed 66 of the world’s major river basins and recently published a synthesis report. These publications are freely available online. The synthesis report‘s section on pollution provides a map of eutrophication impact.

Fig 14 GIWA

As mentioned in a earlier post on mapping dead zones, eutrophication can produce large coastal hypoxic zones. The GIWA regional assessments reported that dead zones:

… have become increasingly common in the world’s lakes, estuaries and coastal zones, with serious impacts on local fisheries, biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Extensive dead zones have been observed for many years in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The GIWA assessment has compiled information on dead zones in the Southern Hemisphere, including several lagoons in the Brazil Current region, coastal locations in the Humboldt Current region, and in the Yangtze River estuary located in the East China Sea region.

Visualization

Visualization of place in everyday life

March 21, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Seyed Alavi, a Californian artist, created a wonderful visualization in a public art/carpet for a bridge at Sacremento airport. He writes:

This project consists of an aerial view of the Sacramento River that is woven into a carpet for the floor of a pedestrian bridge connecting the terminal to the parking garage. This image represents approximately 50 miles of the Sacramento River starting just outside of Colusa, California and ending about 6 miles south of Chico.

In addition to recalling the experience of flight and flying, this piece, by depicting the larger geographical area, also helps to reinforce a sense of belonging and/or connection for the traveler. In this way, the carpet can also be read and experienced as a “welcome mat” for visitors arriving in Sacramento.

via WorldChanging: Aerial Mapping in Carpet.

See also commentary about the carpet and landscape visualization on Pruned.

Big Back Loop, Ideas, Scenarios, Vulnerability

Planet of Slums

March 16, 2006 Garry Peterson 6 Comments

The prolific and controversial urban critic, Mike Davis, has a new book Planet of Slums. It is based upon his article Planet of Slums in New Left Review (March-April 2004). In Planet of Slums he writes:

There may be more than quarter of a million slums on earth. The five great metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities with a total population of more than 20 million. An even larger slum population crowds the urbanizing littoral of West Africa, while other huge conurbations of poverty sprawl across Anatolia and the Ethiopian highlands; hug the base of the Andes and the Himalayas; explode outward from the skyscraper cores of Mexico, Jo-burg, Manila and São Paulo; and, of course, line the banks of the rivers Amazon, Niger, Congo, Nile, Tigris, Ganges, Irrawaddy and Mekong. The building blocks of this slum planet, paradoxically, are both utterly interchangeable and spontaneously unique: including the bustees of Kolkata, the chawls and zopadpattis of Mumbai, the katchi abadis of Karachi, the kampungs of Jakarta, the iskwaters of Manila, the shammasas of Khartoum, the umjondolos of Durban, the intra-murios of Rabat, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo, the gecekondus of Ankara, the conventillos of Quito, the favelas of Brazil, the villas miseria of Buenos Aires and the colonias populares of Mexico City. They are the gritty antipodes to the generic fantasy-scapes and residential themeparks—Philip K. Dick’s bourgeois ‘Offworlds’—in which the global middle classes increasingly prefer to cloister themselves.

Continue reading →

Design, Ideas, Reorganization

Teddy Cruz – What adaptive architecture can learn from Shantytowns

March 15, 2006 Garry Peterson 10 Comments

Teddy Cruz a California architecture, who has focussed on what architecture can be learnt from informal settlements is profiled in an article Border-town muse: An architect finds a model in Tijuana from the March 13 International Herald Tribune.

The IHT article writes:

As Tijuana has expanded into the hilly terrain to the east, squatters have fashioned an elaborate system of retaining walls out of used tires packed with earth. The houses jostling on the incline are constructed out of concrete blocks, sheets of corrugated metal, used garage doors and discarded packing crates – much of it brought down by local contractors and wholesalers from across the border (slideshow in NY Times).

Once such a settlement is completed, it is protected from demolition under Mexican law – and the government is eventually obliged to provide plumbing, electricity and roads to serve it. In Cruz’s view, the process is in some ways a far more flexible and democratic form of urban development than is the norm elsewhere.
Continue reading →

Reorganization, Visualization

Recovery Happens – Asian Tsunami impacts after one year

March 13, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Jamais Cascio posts on WorldChanging

In the immediate aftermath of the December 26, 2004, tsunami, we pointed to satellite photos showing the before-and-after of coastal regions of Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and other affected locations. These images were among the most powerful representations of the disaster, as viewers could easily trace the path of destruction. New before-and-after images are now available, but these tell a very different story.

Photojournalist Zoriah covered both Sri Lanka and Thailand in the days following the tsunami; earlier this year, Zoriah returned to Thailand, and took pictures at the exact same sets of locations. WarShooter.com, a web portal for photojournalists covering conflict and disaster, posted the resulting side-by-side comparison this weekend. Some of the changes are subtle, but it’s clear that much of Thailand is well on the road to recovery.

John Stanmeyer also posted before-and-after shots, this time of Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Aceh still has much further to go than Thailand, but these images stand as record that human beings can, and will, choose to survive and flourish even in the wake of unthinkable disaster. (Warning: the first image of Stanmeyer’s collection includes a fully-visible corpse; the subsequent images aren’t nearly as disturbing.)

Gaming

Interactive agroecological story

March 12, 2006 Marco Janssen 1 Comment

A nice interactive game on solving dilemmas between different stakeholders can be found at http://www.alwayssunny.com/lab/lindissima/. The game is a simple-minded and optimistic story which is used as an excercise for people to learn the basics about scenario simulation, dynamical adaptive systems, sustainability attributes, multicriteria analysis, among others. In the first act, slash and burn maize farmers are compelled by the government to leave a biodiversity reserve zone and to intensify maize production in a smaller area using urea. The user plays the role of the farmer, explores scenarios and decides if he can sustain his family economy under the government´s proposal.

In act 2, rural families that depend on ecotourism in a clear lake downhill feel their income threatened by water murkiness caused by nitrogen coming into the lake from the maize farmer´s fields. As part of negotiation with uphill farmers, the user (now in the role of the lake-side dweller) needs to know how much N they can accept to run into the lake before it becomes murky. A number of simulations helps the user find out the limits (which of course depend on initial conditions in the bi-stable regime). Time series coupled with parameter-sensitive cup and marble models that run as real time animations allow the user to better understand the cusp catastrophe involved

In act 3 farmers try to comply with such restriction imposed by the interests of the lake side people. The farmer, together with the lakesier and the government, first consider if its possible to do so under a maize moncrop system and later under a maize-leguminous shrub system. A simple agroforestry model is behind the curtains and the user currently has access only to a small set of its parameters.

Each act provides: the story with illustrations, a scenario simulator based on minimalist dynamical models, a number of excercises that must be solved before going further and a graphical tutorial.

Tools, Visualization

Visualizing Ecological Footprint of Nations

March 12, 2006 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

Following up on other global mapping posts (population cartogram (distorted) & pop vs. economy cartograms), here is a cartogram from Jerrad Pierce showing countries sized by their ecological footprint and coloured according the their status as a net surplus or debtor nation.

One the website, the map is explained:

This thematic map shows two variables; 1) coloration indicates reserve(green) – deficit(red) of national biocapacity and 2) area indicates absolute consumption of biocapacity.

Consumption = Appropriated National Biocapacity + Imports - Exports

The area of each country has been distorted to represent its consumption i.e.; its ecological footprint. Countries which appear larger than normal are consuming more than their fair share and smaller countries are consuming less.

Notes:
1) Features with missing data are shown in blue, and are scaled as if they were in ecological balance.
2) Fair share of a country is considered to be equal to the global biocapacity per capita, currently 2.1 global ha/person. Note that this does not take into account land dedicated for reserves for biodiversity.
There is also a dynamic web GIS on the site that, although buggy, allows you to play around with a few types of cartograms.

via WWF Living Planet Report

General, Tools, Visualization

Mapping Inequality

March 11, 2006 Garry Peterson 2 Comments

Tim Holland, a graduate student in Geography at McGill, working with Andy Gonzalez and Greg Mikkelson, and I has recently mapped out US household inequality (using the Gini coefficent to measure inequality) at a county level for 1970, 1980, and 1990. The inequality data is from François Nielsen at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

The striking increase in USA inequality between 1970 and 1990 primarily occured in the 1980s. The spatial pattern of inequality is interesting, but perhaps unsurprising. Why inequality decreased in some counties in the central USA is perhaps more interesting.

For comparison, below is a map of international inequality from Wikipedia (note the color scheme is slightly different).
global inequality index