Ecosystem services, General

Can Payments to Farmers Expand Agricultural Production and the Supply of other Ecosystem Services

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greenhouse gas emissionsAgriculture are argueably is the human activity that has the largest impact on the world, impacting many ecosystem services. However, most farmers have minimal financial incentive to enhance ecosystem services other than crop yield. WRI Earthtrends reviews the evidence that Expanding Agriculture and Protecting Ecosystems: Can Payments to Farmers Accomplish Both?

How can farmers be encouraged to reduce these negative side-effects, while also meeting the growing demand for food and fiber?

Paying Farmers for Ecosystem Services

Farmers constitute the largest group of natural resources managers in the world–agriculture accounts for over 40% of global employment. The concept of paying farmers for the ecosystem services they provide, thereby creating a financial incentive for environmental protection, is an approach generating increasing support worldwide. In fact, the FAO’s State of Food and Agriculture Report 2007 provides an in-depth analysis of this concept, highlighting its great potential as well as existing challenges.

Farmers can generate enhanced environmental services in three main ways:

* Changing methods of production
* Diverting current agricultural land to other uses
* Avoiding future conversion of new land to agriculture

Examples of Payment Systems around the World

The demand for environmental services has been increasing over recent decades, both due to greater awareness of their value and to their increasing scarcity. Consequently, many industrialized countries have already implemented programs providing farmers with payments for environmental services. In the United States, for example, farmers can elect to receive annual rental payments for retiring farmland from crop production for 10 to 15 years, thereby enhancing soil conservation. Similarly, farmers in the United Kingdom can receive compensation payments for adopting less intensive farming practices.

One of the most notable programs in the developing world was established in Costa Rica in 1996. To enhance forest environmental services (i.e. carbon sequestration, watershed protection and biodiversity protection), land and forest owners receive compensation payments for reforestation, sustainable forest management and forest protection. The program is financed via a fossil fuel sales tax and revenues from hydroelectric companies, among other sources. Similarly, China’s “Grain for Green” program pays farmers to plant forests on sloping and degraded lands.

Policy Design Issues and Challenges

Environmental payment schemes have great potential but must overcome several implementation challenges. A successful approach must create a mechanism for measuring and valuing a service, identify how and where to enhance services most cost-effectively, and decide which farmers to compensate and how much to pay them. In some situations, it may make sense to use alternative policy approaches, such as reforms to reduce agricultural market distortions or command-and-control regulations. No matter what strategy is adopted, the FAO emphasizes that poverty implications must be kept in mind. Most of the world’s poor people live in rural areas and are dependent upon agriculture and their natural resource base for survival–any plan to implement payments for environmental services will have both positive and negative impacts for the poor that must be considered.

General

Melissa Leach reports from Resilience 2008

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Melissa Leach, co-author of the well known book Misreading the African Landscape and director of the STEPS centre, provides her perspective on the Resilience 2008 conference, on STEP’s Centre’s Crossings blog.  She writes:

Despite the avowed interdisciplinarity of resilience studies, one such tension is still beteween those who come primarily from an ecological science or a social science perspective. Brian Walker’s introductory talk, and Steve Carpenter’s plenary today, both argued that the tendency for ecologists to ‘black-box’ social processes and social scientists to black-box ecological ones, badly needs to be overcome.But many talks here expose how far this is not happening – yet. Meanwhile, panels that Adrian has been contributing to indicate that technology-focused perspectives and work on socio-technical transitions provide a further view, and integrating this with studies of socio-ecological systems is not straightforward. …

Yesterday afternoon, a panel on development and adaptation involving Emily Boyd and Polly Eriksen from Oxford, along with Emma Tompkins, Henny Osbahr and Hallie Eakin, debated vulnerability-resilience ‘trade-offs’ head-on. The ways in which ‘resilience’ (like ‘development’) can be co-opted as a disempowering discourse were raised. But these more politicised discussions are fairly rare in a conference that for the most part sees systems as ‘out there’ and the problems facing society as shared, even if often difficult to deal with.

In addition to the chance to reflect on these dilemmas and meet up with those sharing them in the coffee breaks around the Aula Magna’s gallery (and last night, over drinks in the designer boutique hotel owened by Abba’s Benny Anderson) high points of these days for me have included a brilliant talk on urban system challenges and social movements; and an excellent panel on globalisation, tipping points and the new social contracts that may be required for governance in this context.

In a packed plenary, Steve Carpenter has just given us a system’s ecologist’s perspective on scenarios and imaginations for global futures. And Eric Lambin is about to fill another hall, I suspect, in a session on land use transitions. Rich stuff indeed. And lots of fuel for our thinking in the STEPS centre, both in our projects and in our own ‘Reframing Resilience’ symposium planned for September this year which will follow up on a number of the debates aired here.

Adaptation, Ecological Economics, Greenlash

The sustainability of improving living standards

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Australian economist John Quiggin writes on The sustainability of improving living standards in a world of climate change. He discusses responses to the Stern Review on the economics of climate change. In particular, its conclusion that stabilizing at the atmosphere at 500 ppm CO2 equivalent in 2050 would result have same size economy as would otherwise have been reached in 2048.

Stern’s optimistic view that CO2 emissions could be greatly reduced without a corresponding reduction in living standards is rejected by critics beginning from two diametrically opposed positions. Although deeply hostile to each other, the two groups find some surprising common ground.

The first group are ‘Deep Green’ pessimists who see the end of consumer capitalism as both inevitable and desirable. At least since the reports of the Club of Rome in the 1970s, members of this group have argued that continued economic growth is inherently unsustainable. …

The mirror image of Deep Green pessimism is that of the ‘Dark Brown’ pessimists who say that we should do nothing to stabilise the climate because to do so will wreck our standards of living. Dark Brown commentators from thinktanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute warn of ruinous economic consequences even from modest first steps such as the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. …

Both groups engage in a fair bit of wishful thinking about their position, the Greens arguing that we’ll all be happier in the long run and the Browns claiming that the environmental problems will solve themselves if we ignore them. But these opposing claims are secondary to the shared presumption that economic growth depends on increasing exploitation of the natural environment and, in particular, on the burning of fossil fuels.

Underlying both Deep Green and Dark Brown positions is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of economic progress and of economic activity in a modern society. The concept of economic growth is so firmly embedded in our thinking that we forget it is just a metaphor. The idea of growth implies physical expansion, and any process of physical expansion has limits. …

The public-good nature of information explains how economic progress can continue without additional resources. Most obviously, improvements in information technology allow more and faster communication which in turn allows for yet more technological improvements. There is no apparent indication of diminishing marginal returns in this field; if anything the opposite. …

Despite the claims of Dark Browns and Deep Greens, we can, if we choose, have both a stable climate and steadily improving standards of living throughout the world. But the fact that we can achieve these things does not mean we will. At this stage, failure seems all too possible, as does a half-hearted response that will imply the need for much more costly action in the future.

While I am relatively optimistic about the ability of human society to successfully adapt and mitigate climate change I am worried that:

  1. Economic growth is not being decoupled from its use of global ecosystems, and
  2. Estimates of the costs of climate change fails to consider that we are substantially reducing the ability of the biosphere to adapt to climate change, which will have unknown but likely substantial negative impacts on human wellbeing.
General

Student-led resilience workshop after Resilience 2008

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Realise, Reorganise, Adapt – Reorganising knowledge for sustainability is a student led resilience workshop that follows the Resilience conference on Friday April 18, 10.00-14.00 at Stockholm Resilience Centre.

It will address the questions:

  • How should we organise knowledge for sustainability?
  • Is the adaptive cycle a useful tool for organising interdisciplinary research and building knowledge for sustainability?
  • What lessons can we learn from different programs, their organisation and their various phases – conservation, collapses, and reorganisations?
  • Building on experience from students and their programs, we hope to identify what lessons emerge from these cases.

They hope to build an international student network of resilience researchers.

General

Resilience 2008 conference schedule and web broadcast information

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Hosted by Stockholm Resilience Centre, Resilience 2008 will take place in Stockholm between April 14-17 2008 and will involve some of the world´s most distinguished scientists and politicians who will discuss ecology, economy and society from a Resilience perspective.

Live web TV
 Using advanced web television interface, more than 40 events over a four-day period will be covered live via the Stockholm Resilience Centre website. An additional 20 events will be filmed and later made available via the same website. Below is a complete list of all events that will be filmed and broadcast live.

Continue reading →

Visualization

Visualizing US CO2 emissions

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A neat visualization of CO2 emissions from the Vulcan project. They CO2 levels, which aren’t measured, from fine scale air pollution data and atmospheric models to produce high resolution hourly map of US CO2 emissions. Kevin Gurney posted a visualization of their data on YouTube, in which you can see the daily and seasonal variation in emissions.

via Great Beyond and Andrew Revkin’s DotEarth

Greenlash

Climate change amplifies eutrophication

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Hans Paerl and Jef Huisman have a perspective article in Science that reviews how climate change may promote blooms of cyanobacteria Blooms Like It Hot (320 (5872): 57 ):

Nutrient overenrichment of waters by urban, agricultural, and industrial development has promoted the growth of cyanobacteria as harmful algal blooms (1, 2). These blooms increase the turbidity of aquatic ecosystems, smothering aquatic plants and thereby suppressing important invertebrate and fish habitats. Die-off of blooms may deplete oxygen, killing fish. Some cyanobacteria produce toxins, which can cause serious and occasionally fatal human liver, digestive, neurological, and skin diseases (1-4). Cyanobacterial blooms thus threaten many aquatic ecosystems, including Lake Victoria in Africa, Lake Erie in North America, Lake Taihu in China, and the Baltic Sea in Europe (3-6). Climate change is a potent catalyst for the further expansion of these blooms.

Rising temperatures favor cyanobacteria in several ways. Cyanobacteria generally grow better at higher temperatures (often above 25°C) than do other phytoplankton species such as diatoms and green algae (7, 8). This gives cyanobacteria a competitive advantage at elevated temperatures (8, 9). Warming of surface waters also strengthens the vertical stratification of lakes, reducing vertical mixing. Furthermore, global warming causes lakes to stratify earlier in spring and destratify later in autumn, which lengthens optimal growth periods. Many cyanobacteria exploit these stratified conditions by forming intracellular gas vesicles, which make the cells buoyant. Buoyant cyanobacteria float upward when mixing is weak and accumulate in dense surface blooms (1, 2, 7) (see the figure). These surface blooms shade underlying nonbuoyant phytoplankton, thus suppressing their opponents through competition for light (8). Cyanobacterial blooms may even locally increase water temperatures through the intense absorption of light. The temperatures of surface blooms in the Baltic Sea and in Lake IJsselmeer, Netherlands, can be at least 1.5°C above those of ambient waters (10, 11). This positive feedback provides additional competitive dominance of buoyant cyanobacteria over nonbuoyant phytoplankton.

Global warming also affects patterns of precipitation and drought. These changes in the hydrological cycle could further enhance cyanobacterial dominance. For example, more intense precipitation will increase surface and groundwater nutrient discharge into water bodies. In the short term, freshwater discharge may prevent blooms by flushing. However, as the discharge subsides and water residence time increases as a result of drought, nutrient loads will be captured, eventually promoting blooms. This scenario takes place when elevated winter-spring rainfall and flushing events are followed by protracted periods of summer drought. This sequence of events has triggered massive algal blooms in aquatic ecosystems serving critical drinking water, fishery, and recreational needs. Attempts to control fluctuations in the discharge of rivers and lakes by means of dams and sluices may increase residence time, further aggravating cyanobacteria-related ecological and human health problems.

Visualization

Changing Matters – the Resilience Art Exhibition

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In a few weeks the conference Resilience 2008 will begin in Stockholm. Along the the scientific talks is an art exhibit on resilience. Its called Changing Matters – the Resilience Art Exhibition and will be opening at the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet just before the conference (it runs 12 April -7 September 2008).

On the conference website the art exhibit and its rationale are described.

A central message of the Resilience 2008 Conference is that resilience is not just an ecological issue, or a social, economic or cultural issue. These issues are interlinked. Resilience involves ecological, economic, cultural, ethical and other social dimensions and values. Sustaining and developing social capacity will be a prerequisite for adaptability and transformability.

To explore this fundamentally important feature, and to complement and enhance the scientific symposium, we invited artists to submit proposals for a Resilience Art Exhibition to be held in connection with the science and policy conference. The full Resilience Art Exhibition, where invited artists interpret the notion of resilience, will take place between April 12 and September 7, 2008, at The Swedish Museum of Natural History (Naturhistoriska riksmuseet).

During the conference there will also be highlights and excerpts shown in the grand lecture hall Aula Magna at Stockholm University.

Falling Boxes by Paul Matosic, one of the artists in the exhibition

The artists participating in the show are:

Visualization

Colours of Salt Pond Ecosystems

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The South San Francisco Bay salt evaporation ponds, which are often visible from planes flying in and out of San Francisco Airport. Salt ponds with different salinity levels are inhabited by different organisms that give them different colours. Algae colour low salinity ponds green, while different algae color high salinity ponds red. Bacteria and shrimp also shift the colours.

Hidden Ecologies is blog describes work from the San Francisco Exploratorium that explores and visualizes the transitional landscapes surounding San Francisco Bay at different scales. Architect Cris Benton has made a collage of his photos from high and low elevations of Salt Pond Colors:

Salt pond collage