Cities, Greenlash, Vulnerability

How slow change increased California’s fire risk

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California firesThe Christian Science Monitor article California’s age of megafires describes how California’s fire risk has been increased by slow changes in fire suppression (but probably not in California), climate change, longer fire season, and house construction in the wildland-urban interface:

Megafires, also called “siege fires,” are the increasingly frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more – 10 times the size of the average forest fire of 20 years ago. One of the current wildfires is the sixth biggest in California ever, in terms of acreage burned, according to state figures and news reports.The trend to more superhot fires, experts say, has been driven by a century-long policy of the US Forest Service to stop wildfires as quickly as possible. The unintentional consequence was to halt the natural eradication of underbrush, now the primary fuel for megafires.

Three other factors contribute to the trend, they add. First is climate change marked by a 1-degree F. rise in average yearly temperature across the West. Second is a fire season that on average is 78 days longer than in the late 1980s. Third is increased building of homes and other structures in wooded areas.

“We are increasingly building our homes … in fire-prone ecosystems,” says Dominik Kulakowski, adjunct professor of biology at Clark University Graduate School of Geography in Worcester, Mass. Doing that “in many of the forests of the Western US … is like building homes on the side of an active volcano.”

In California, where population growth has averaged more than 600,000 a year for at least a decade, housing has pushed into such areas.

“What once was open space is now residential homes providing fuel to make fires burn with greater intensity,” says Terry McHale of the California Department of Forestry firefighters union. “With so much dryness, so many communities to catch fire, so many fronts to fight, it becomes an almost incredible job.”

Reorganization

Water in the American West: Learning from Crisis

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Jon Gertner writes in The Future Is Drying Up a New York Times Magazine about Water in the American West. The articles is discusses how increases in population and decreases in precipitation are reorganizing the US inland west. It includes some insightful comments from Roger Pulwarty, a climatologist at NOAA who looks at adaptive solutions to drought. He sounds a bit like Emory University ecological management scientist Lance Gunderson:

You don’t need to know all the numbers of the future exactly,” Pulwarty told me over lunch in a local Vietnamese restaurant. “You just need to know that we’re drying. And so the argument over whether it’s 15 percent drier or 20 percent drier? It’s irrelevant. Because in the long run, that decrease, accumulated over time, is going to dry out the system.” Pulwarty asked if I knew the projections for what it would take to refill Lake Powell, which is at about 50 percent of capacity. Twenty years of average flow on the Colorado River, he told me. “Good luck,” he said. “Even in normal conditions we don’t get 20 years of average flow. People are calling for more storage on the system, but if you can’t fill the reservoirs you have, I don’t know how more storage, or more dams, is going to help you. One has to ask if the normal strategies that we have are actually viable anymore.”

Pulwarty is convinced that the economic impacts could be profound. The worst outcome, he suggested, would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado’s largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime. Already, warmer temperatures have brought on an outbreak of pine beetles that are destroying pine forests; Pulwarty wonders how many tourists will want to visit a state full of dead trees. “A crisis is an interesting thing,” he said. In his view, a crisis is a point in a story, a moment in a narrative, that presents an opportunity for characters to think their way through a problem. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something different: it is one of several possible outcomes that follow from a crisis. “We’re at the point of crisis on the Colorado,” Pulwarty concluded. “And it’s at this point that we decide, O.K., which way are we going to go?”

For some photos see NASA, and a graph of the water levels in Lake Mead showing the longterm decline in water storage.

Ecosystem services, General

Coral Reef Futures and Resilience Economics

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At Crooked Timber, Australian economist John Quiggin reflects on the recent Coral Reef Futures Forum, which was recently organized by Resilience Alliance member Terry Hughes group at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reefs Studies in Australia. The forum aimed to discus how global changes such as fishing, climate change, and ocean acidification are threatening coral reefs. John Quiggin writes:

I spent the last couple of days in Canberra at the Coral Reef Futures Forum, as part of my new Federation Fellowship is to look at economic approaches to management of the Great Barrier Reef. As one of the speakers said, a lot of the talks had people staring at their shoes in gloom, though the tone got a little more positive towards the end. …

The most hopeful view is that, if we can fix the local threats like overfishing and poor water quality, the resulting increase in resilience (part of my project is to develop a more rigorous understanding of this popular buzzword) will offset moderate global warming, so that if we can stabilise the climate (an increase of no more than 2 degrees) we might save at least some reef systems.

It will be interesting to see what type of resilience economics John Quiggin develops. Several other economists have been working on the economics of resilience, such as Wisconsin econmist Buz Brock, Charles Perrings at Arizona State U, as well as Anne Sophie Crepin and others at the Beijer Institute, but the there is a lot that needs to be done to create a broadly useful resilience economics.

Cities

Cell-phone banking

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The Christian Science Monitor has an Oct 12 article, Unserved by banks, poor Kenyans now just use a cellphone, about how Keynas are using cell phones to conduct banking. Cell phones allow Kenyans to transfer cash and conduct business across long distances. This trend is significant because mobile phone ownership is rapidly growing in Africa and today about 1/5 of Africa’s population has access to a mobile phone.

With a click of a cellphone key, Bernard Otieno makes the transfer – sending funds instantly from his residence in a sprawling Nairobi slum to his wife, who holds down their rural family farm some 250 miles away.

Mr. Otieno, a security guard who works the night shift, used to risk carrying cash on infrequent, slow trips to his hometown or pay high rates to send money through the post office.

Now, he’s one of a growing number of Kenyans tapping into a service called M-PESA – M for “mobile” and pesa for “cash” in Swahili. Launched this year, it’s one of the world’s first cellphone-to-cellphone cash-transfer services for people who lack access to conventional banks.

…

Indeed, the initial success of M-PESA has surprised even those who helped set it up. “We have now [the number of customers that] we thought we’d have in January,” says Gerald Rasugu, the manager for all M-PESA agents nationwide. M-PESA serves more than 450,000 customers, well over the target of 100,000 set at launch, says Michael Joseph, CEO of Safaricom, Kenya’s largest cellphone provider, which started M-PESA. He expects to have 1 million customers by January. “I wonder sometimes if people understand how big this can be,” he says.

The potential goes beyond M-PESA and Kenya. Once poor people have more access to financial products offered through trusted banking systems, investors soon follow, creating jobs, say economists.

“There’s a very clear correlation between a more developed financial sector and GDP growth,” says Thorsten Beck, a senior economist at the World Bank in Washington.

via My Heart’s in Accra

Ecosystem services, Inequality

Inequality and an ecosystem service transition

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Privately owned forests in the US are being increasingly converted to housing for the wealthy as the demand for cultural ecosystem service, such as recreation and beauty, is out-competing demands for provisioning services such as timber and pulp. These changes are having extensive effects on conservation and forest management practices. They are also resulting in a loss of public access to private forests.

These changes are described in a Oct 13th NY Times article As Logging Fades, Rich Carve Up Open Land in West:

With the timber industry in steep decline, recreation is pushing aside logging as the biggest undertaking in the national forests and grasslands, making nearby private tracts more desirable — and valuable, in a sort of ratchet effect — to people who enjoy outdoor activities and ample elbow room and who have the means to take title to what they want.  Some old-line logging companies, including Plum Creek Timber, the country’s largest private landowner, are cashing in, putting tens of thousands of wooded acres on the market from Montana to Oregon. Plum Creek, which owns about 1.2 million acres here in Montana alone, is getting up to $29,000 an acre for land that was worth perhaps $500 an acre for timber cutting.

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Visualization

Ice minima

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Arctic sea ice has reached record low coverage in 2007.

Ice minima

From NASA EOS:

This image shows the Arctic as observed by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on September 16, 2007. In this image, blue indicates open water, white indicates high sea ice concentration, and turquoise indicates loosely packed sea ice. The black circle at the North Pole results from an absence of data as the satellite does not make observations that far north.

Three contour lines appear on this image. The red line is the 2007 minimum, as of September 15, and it almost exactly fits the sea ice observed by AMSR-E. Depending on the calculations, the minimum occurred on September 14 (one-day running average) or September 16 (five-day running average). The green line indicates the 2005 minimum, the previous record low. The yellow line indicates the median minimum from 1979 to 2000.

Cities, Ecosystem services, General, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Society and Environment (ENVR 201) reading list

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This semester I am co-teaching the first year course Society and the Environment in the McGill School of Environment. I teach a diverse set of lectures that are mainly focussed on commons, urban ecosystems, and resilience, but also include cost-benefit analysis and ecological futures. My colleagues cover a whack of other topics. Below are the assinged readings for my sections of the course.

Making environmental decisions: Assessing costs & benefits (1)

  • Leung, B., Lodge, D.M., Finnoff, D., Shogren, J.F., Lewis, M, Lamberti, G. 2002. An ounce of prevention or a pound of cure: bioeconomic risk analysis of invasive species. Proceedings: Biological Sciences 269:2407-2413

Managing the Commons (3)

  • Hardin, G. 1968. Tragedy of the commons.. Science, 162(1968): 1243-1248.
  • Feeny, D, et.al. 1990. The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited: Twenty Years Later. Human Ecology. 18:1-19
  • Dietz, Thomas., Elinor Ostrom, Paul C. Stern. 2003. “The Struggle to Govern the Commons.” Science. 302(5652): 1907-1912.

Urban Ecosystems (3)

  • Davis, M.. 2004. Planet of slums. New Left Review 26, March-April.
  • Lee, K. N. 2006. Urban sustainability and the limits of classical environmentalism. Environment and Urbanization; 18(1) 9-22
  • Jannson et al 1999 Linking Freshwater Flows and Ecosystem Services Appropriated by People: The Case of the Baltic Sea Drainage Basin. Ecosystems 2(4) 351-366.
  • Colding, Johan, Jakob Lundberg, and Carl Folke. 2006 Incorporating Green-area User Groups in Urban Ecosystem Management AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment: 35(5) 237–244.

Resilience and Surprise (4)

Ecological Futures (1)

Adaptation

Adaptive invasions

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From Conservation magazine’s Journal Watch Online

Revved-up evolution allows invasive species to rampage through new habitat, a study published in Molecular Ecology shows. The seeming ease with which chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha colonized New Zealand in the early part of the twentieth century was a complex combination of ecology and evolution, according to University of Maine biologist Michael Kinnison and colleagues.

Studies of biological invasions have often considered ecology — freedom from predators and/or parasites, lack of competition and so on — but evolution on a short timescale has seldom been seen as a major factor. Kinnison’s neat experimental approach, which involved releasing captive-bred salmon to several NZ river systems, showed that substantial and rapid evolutionary change has taken place among populations with differing local ecological conditions. The ever-worsening threat that invasive species pose to global biodiversity suggests the need to take evolvability very seriously, and these findings raise many questions about how we tackle the problem.

Source: Kinnison MT, Unwin MJ & Quinn TP (2007) Eco-evolutionary vs. habitat contributions to invasion in salmon: experimental evaluation in the wild. Molecular Ecology DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03495.x

General

Suggested papers for social-ecological PhD students

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From the Natural Resources Management group at Systems Ecology at Stockholm University, which does a lot of research on social-ecological resilience, suggested papers for doctoral students:

  1. Adger W.N. 2000. Social and ecological resilience: are they related? Progress in Human Geography 24(3): 347-364.
  2. Becker, C. D., and E. Ostrom. 1995. Human-Ecology and Resource Sustainability – the Importance of Institutional Diversity. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 26:113-133.
  3. Bengtsson, J., P. Angelstam, T. Elmqvist, U. Emanuelsson, C. Folke, M. Ihse, F. Moberg, and M. Nyström. 2003. Reserves, Resilience and Dynamic Landscapes. Ambio 32:389-396.
  4. Berkes F, Hughes TP, Steneck RS, Wilson J, Bellwood DR, Crona B, Folke C, Gunderson LH, Leslie HM, Norberg J,. Nyström M, Olsson P, Österblom H, Scheffer, M, Worm B. (2006). Globalization, roving bandits and marine resources. Science 311: 1557-1558.
  5. Bodin Ö., Crona B. and Ernstson H. 2006. Social networks in natural resource management: What is there to learn from a structural perspective? Ecology and Society 11(2): r2. [also available at: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss2/resp2/]
  6. Costanza, R., M. Daly, C. Folke, P. Hawken, C. S. Holling, A. J. McMichael, D. Pimentel, and D. Rapport. 2000. Managing our environmental portfolio. Bioscience 50:149-155
  7. CS Holling, and G. K. Meffe. 1996. Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management. Conservation Biology 10(2): 328-37
  8. CS Holling. 2001. Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological and social systems. Ecosystems 4: 390–405.
  9. Daily, G. C., T. Soderqvist, S. Aniyar, K. Arrow, P. Dasgupta, P. R. Ehrlich, C. Folke, A. Jansson, B. O. Jansson, N. Kautsky, S. Levin, J. Lubchenco, K. G. Maler, D. Simpson, D. Starrett, D. Tilman, and B. Walker. 2000. Ecology – The value of nature and the nature of value. Science 289:395-396.
  10. de la Torre-Castro, M. (2006). Beyond regulations in fisheries management: the dilemmas of the “beach recorders” Bwana Dikos in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Ecology and Society 11(2): 35. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss2/art35/
  11. Díaz S., Fargione J., Chapin III F.S. and Tilman D. 2006. Biodiversity Loss Threatens Human well-being. Vol 4, issue 8, e277. PLOS Biology open access on-line, www.plosbiology.org
  12. Elmqvist, T., C. Folke, M. Nyström, G. Peterson, J. Bengtsson, B. Walker, and J. Norberg. 2003. Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1(9):488-494.
  13. Fischer, J., D. B. Lindenmayer, and A. D. Manning. 2006. Biodiversity, ecosystem function, and resilience: ten guiding principles for commodity production landscapes. Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 4(2):80-86
  14. Folke, C. 2006. Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses Global Environmental Change 16 (2006) 253–267
  15. Folke, C., S. Carpenter, B. Walker, M. Scheffer, T. Elmqvist, L. Gunderson, and C. S. Holling. 2004. Regime shifts, resilience, and biodiversity in ecosystem management. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 35:557-581.
  16. Goodstein, E. S. Economics and the environment. 2nd ed. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. New York. pp. 485-488, 495-510
  17. Holling, C. S., L. H. Gunderson and D. Ludwig. 2002. In Quest of a Theory of Adaptive Change. In: Gunderson, L.H. and Holling C. S. (Eds). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press, Washington DC.
  18. Holloway, M. 1998. Trade rules: a World Trade Organization decision about sea turtles raises doubts about reconciling economics and the environment. Scientific American. Vol. 279, No. 2, pp 33-35.
  19. Kremen, C. and R. S. Ostfeld. 2005. A call to ecologists: measuring, analyzing, and managing ecosystem services. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Vol. 3, No. 10, pp. 540–548.
  20. Olsson, P., and C. Folke. 2001. Local ecological knowledge and institutional dynamics for ecosystem management: A study of Lake Racken Watershed, Sweden. Ecosystems 4:85-104.
  21. Ostrom, E., J. Burger, C. B. Field, R. B. Norgaard, and D. Policansky. 1999. Sustainability – Revisiting the commons: Local lessons, global challenges. Science 284:278-282.
  22. Peterson G., C.R. Allen, and C.S. Holling. 1998. Ecological resilience, biodiversity, and scale. Ecosystems 1:6-18.
  23. Richard J.T. Klein, Nicholls R.J., and Thomalla F. 2003. Resilience to natural hazards: how useful is the concept? Environmental hazards 5: 35-45.
  24. Scheffer, M., S. Carpenter, J. A. Foley, C. Folke, and B. Walker. 2001. Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems. Nature 413:591-596.
  25. Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom, Paul C. Stern. 2003. The Struggle to Govern the Commons. Science. Vol. 302. no. 5652, pp. 1907 – 1912.

via Maricela de la Torre Castro

Update:

Any further suggestions would be great. If you have any additional suggestions of readgins, leave a comment, with the reference and a note explaining why the reading is interesting.