Tag Archives: climate change

restoring tropical peat swamps

Leave a reply

Restoring tropical peat swamps might not seem like such an important thing, until you realize the extent of clearing and burning that occurs in places like Indonesia each year. The amount of carbon emitted is staggering even in comparison to that of the economic activities of a major developed country like Japan.

A common-sense approach to tropical peat swamp forest restoration in Southeast Asia

Tropical peat swamp forests (TPSFs) are found mainly in Southeast Asia and especially Indonesia. A total of 61% were lost between 1990 and 2015 and 6% remained in a pristine condition by 2015. Tropical peat swamps store vast amounts of carbon in their peat, but peat degradation, through drainage and fire, leads to high greenhouse gas emissions. This is gaining much international attention and, with it, policy initiatives and funding for restoration from local to landscape scales are being promoted. Unfortunately, although there is a now strong desire and need for TPSF restoration, methods are lacking. Ecological understanding is still at an early stage, and, even more so, in its applied use. There is an imbalance between the activities of TPSF restoration and sound ecological application. Furthermore, while many activities are underway and knowledge is being gained, these techniques are yet to be published. This article has been written to provide a common-sense, practical guide to tropical peatland forest restoration which summarizes what we know to date, while acknowledging the gaps in our understanding. Topics covered include species selection, land assessment, land selection, and appropriate nursery, transplanting, and monitoring methods. The authors make no apologies that in places this reads like a manual as, given the importance of tropical peatland recovery and the recent attention and funding opportunities available, it is essential we now provide techniques to restoration practitioners working on the ground, and a basic common-sense approach must be the starting point.

I actually did my masters research on subtropical peat wetlands, so I know a little bit about this. Peat is formed by organic matter decomposing slowly under anaerobic conditions under shallow standing water for long periods of time. Bacteria and other biological processes that turn carbon into carbon dioxide operate slowly under anaerobic conditions, and new organic matter is able to build up faster than it can be broken down and liberated into the atmosphere. The same plants that decompose into peat grow in the decomposing remains of their predecessors, so that new layers get added gradually over time. When you drain the water, conditions in the soil become aerobic, and especially under warm conditions the organic matter gets mineralized (turned into carbon dioxide gas) faster than it can form. This happens even outside the tropics and in the absence of fire (the Everglades for example have seen a lot of soil loss), but catch the organic matter on fire and you get a triple threat – a smoky mess that is very bad for human health, habitat loss, and liberation of enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Do this on an enormous scale and it is truly a catastrophe. The world is not making a whole lot of progress in slowing this situation down, let alone stopping it, let alone beginning to restore what is being lost.

100 million dead trees in California

Leave a reply

USDA says more than 100 million trees have died in California as a result of drought.

The majority of the 102 million dead trees are located in ten counties in the southern and central Sierra Nevada region. The Forest Service also identified increasing mortality in the northern part of the state, including Siskiyou, Modoc, Plumas and Lassen counties.  Five consecutive years of severe drought in California, a dramatic rise in bark beetle infestation and warmer temperatures are leading to these historic levels of tree die-off. As a result, in October 2015 California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency on the unprecedented tree die-off and formed a Tree Mortality Task Force to help mobilize additional resources for the safe removal of dead and dying trees.

This year, California had a record setting wildfire season, with the Blue Cut fire alone scorching over 30,000 acres and triggering the evacuation of 80,000 people. In the southeastern United States wildfires have burned more than 120,000 acres this fall. The southeast region of the Forest Service is operating at the highest preparedness level, PL 5, reflecting the high level of physical resources and funding devoted to the region.  Extreme drought conditions persist, and many areas have not seen rain for as many as 95 days.

Longer, hotter fire seasons where extreme fire behavior has become the new norm, as well as increased development in forested areas, is dramatically driving up the cost of fighting fires and squeezing funding for the very efforts that would protect watersheds and restore forests to make them more resilient to fire. Last year fire management alone consumed 56 percent of the Forest Service’s budget and is anticipated to rise to 67 percent in by 2025.

November 2016 in Review

Leave a reply

Sometimes you look back on a month and feel like nothing very important happened. But November 2016 was obviously not one of those months! I am not going to make any attempt to be apolitical here. I was once a registered independent and still do not consider myself a strong partisan. However, I like to think of myself as being on the side of facts, logic, problem solving, morality and basic goodness. Besides, this blog is about the future of our human civilization and human race. I can’t pretend our chances didn’t just take a turn for the worse.

3 most frightening stories

  • Is there really any doubt what the most frightening story of November 2016 was? The United Nations Environment Program says we are on a track for 3 degrees C over pre-industrial temperatures, not the “less than 2” almost all serious people (a category that excludes 46% of U.S. voters, apparently) agree is needed. This story was released before the U.S. elected an immoral science denier as its leader. One theory is that our culture has lost all ability to separate fact from fiction. Perhaps states could take on more of a leadership role if the federal government is going to be immoral? Washington State voters considered a carbon tax that could have been a model for other states, and voted it down, in part because environmental groups didn’t like that it was revenue neutral. Adding insult to injury, WWF released its 2016 Living Planet Report, which along with more fun climate change info includes fun facts like 58% of all wild animals have disappeared. There is a 70-99% chance of a U.S. Southwest “mega-drought” lasting 35 years or longer this century. But don’t worry, this is only “if emissions of greenhouse gases remain unchecked”. Oh, and climate change is going to begin to strain the food supply worldwide, which is already strained by population, demand growth, and water resources depletion even without it.
  • Technological unemployment may be starting to take hold, and might be an underlying reason behind some of the resentment directed at mainstream politicians. If you want a really clear and concise explanation of this issue, you could ask a smart person like, say, Barack Obama.
  • According to left wing sources like Forbes, an explosion of debt-financed spending on conventional and nuclear weapons is an expected consequence of the election. Please, Mr. Trump, prove them wrong!

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

Bjorn Lomborg on food

1 Reply

Bjorn Lomborg, who is known for not being a big fan of controls on carbon emissions, is concerned about the food supply.

Affordable, nutritious food is one of people’s top priorities everywhere, and one in nine people still do not get enough food to be healthy. With today’s population of 7.3 billion expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050, food demand will increase accordingly. Along with more mouths to feed, stresses on food supplies will include conflicts, economic volatility, extreme weather events, and climate change…

Investment in research and development is vital. According to research conducted for Copenhagen Consensus, which I direct, investing an extra $88 billion in agricultural R&D over the next 15 years would increase yields by an additional 0.4 percentage points each year, which could save 79 million people from hunger and prevent five million cases of child malnourishment. Achieving these targets would be worth nearly $3 trillion in social good, implying an enormous return of $34 for every dollar spent.

Scientific breakthroughs also play a key role in fighting specific nutritional challenges such as vitamin A deficiency, the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness. Robert Mwanga was awarded this year’s World Food Prize for inspiring work that resulted in the large-scale replacement of white sweet potato (with scant Vitamin A content) by a vitamin A-rich alternative in the diets of Uganda’s rural poor.

More R&D seems like a great idea. But I wonder if Bjorn is making the mistake of just projecting past trends linearly into the future. In the past, crops were often limited by the availability of water and nutrients. Once you solve those problems, you can work on breeding plants that make maximum use of the sun’s energy to produce plant parts that humans and animals can eat. Once you solve that problem, the next limit would seem to be sunlight itself, which you can’t increase.

climate change, ecosystems, and food

Leave a reply

This 17-author paper in Science describes evidence for how natural organisms and ecosystems are already adapting themselves to climate change, and what it means for humans.

The broad footprint of climate change from genes to biomes to people

Species are undergoing evolutionary adaptation to temperature extremes, and climate change has substantial impacts on species physiology that include changes in tolerances to high temperatures, shifts in sex ratios in species with temperature-dependent sex determination, and increased metabolic costs of living in a warmer world. These physiological adjustments have observable impacts on morphology, with many species in both aquatic and terrestrial systems shrinking in body size because large surface-to-volume ratios are generally favored under warmer conditions. Other morphological changes include reductions in melanism to improve thermoregulation, and altered wing and bill length in birds.

Broader-scale responses to climate change include changes in the phenology, abundance, and distribution of species. Temperate plants are budding and flowering earlier in spring and later in autumn. Comparable adjustments have been observed in marine and freshwater fish spawning events and in the timing of seasonal migrations of animals worldwide. Changes in the abundance and age structure of populations have also been observed, with widespread evidence of range expansion in warm-adapted species and range contraction in cold-adapted species. As a by-product of species redistributions, novel community interactions have emerged. Tropical and boreal species are increasingly incorporated into temperate and polar communities, respectively, and when possible, lowland species are increasingly assimilating into mountain communities. Multiplicative impacts from gene to community levels scale up to produce ecological regime shifts, in which one ecosystem state shifts to an alternative state…

The many observed impacts of climate change at different levels of biological organization point toward an increasingly unpredictable future for humans. Reduced genetic diversity in crops, inconsistent crop yields, decreased productivity in fisheries from reduced body size, and decreased fruit yields from fewer winter chill events threaten food security. Changes in the distribution of disease vectors alongside the emergence of novel pathogens and pests are a direct threat to human health as well as to crops, timber, and livestock resources. Humanity depends on intact, functioning ecosystems for a range of goods and services. Enhanced understanding of the observed impacts of climate change on core ecological processes is an essential first step to adapting to them and mitigating their influence on biodiversity and ecosystem service provision.

As smug as we are about the advanced state of our civilization, this planet still gives us an enormous amount for free, and we simply can’t afford to replace all the free goods and services with our own effort and technology. I continue to hear alarm bells sounding from many different quarters on one particular issue – food.

climate change and agriculture

1 Reply

This section of the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Risk Report explains in a fair amount of detail how climate change is likely to cause food shortages.

The risk to food security is especially great because agriculture is already straining to meet a rapidly growing demand from a finite resource base. The combined impact of a rising population and growth of the middle class – wealthier people eat more cereal-intensive meat – is set to drive a demand increase of 60% by 2050.3Yet the global average yield growth for cereals has slowed in recent years; it already lags behind demand growth. This gap cannot be covered by an expansion of cropland because of the need to protect forests and other areas of high value for conservation and carbon sequestration. Agriculture is increasingly competing with other uses for land – such as urbanization, transport, bioenergy, forestry and mining – and so crop production is pushed towards ever more marginal soils.4

Yet more worrying is the fierce competition for water, the lifeblood of agriculture. Water withdrawals have increased threefold over the last 50 years, and demand is anticipated to rise by a further 40% by 2030.5 With a shift in global production towards intensive systems that rely on groundwater resources for irrigation, along with the current growth in demand for water-intensive animal products, agriculture becomes even thirstier. At the same time, urbanization and industrialization in emerging and developing economies are also driving up demand for fresh water in energy production, mineral extraction, and domestic use, further stretching the already tight supply.6

Against this backdrop of tightening constraints, climate change seriously threatens food security in two ways. First, it will harm agricultural production: rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will slow yield gains, contributing to higher food prices and an increasingly precarious supply-demand balance that will make markets more prone to volatility. Second, it will increasingly disrupt food systems: more extreme weather will destabilize tighter markets and exacerbate volatility, imperil transport infrastructure and trigger local food crises. As a result, the risks of humanitarian emergencies, national or regional instability and mass migration will increase. In the words of a former Executive Director of the World Food Programme, “without food, people have only three options. They riot, they emigrate, or they die.”7 The security implications will be felt by developing and developed countries alike.

In other words, the world might be in trouble on food even if climate change were not a factor. The combination of heat and drought that will be brought on by climate change will add to the risk, potentially destabilizing many populous areas of the world. The world’s response to climate change has been too little, too late, but at least there have been steps in the right direction the last few years. Being willfully ignorant of the risk and reversing the small progress we are making would be an evil, immoral thing to do.

70-99% chance of a U.S. Southwest “megadrought”

Leave a reply

According to USA Today,

A group of researchers estimated in a new study published Wednesday that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unchecked, the odds of a monster drought ravaging the region for 35 years or longer this century would be between 70 percent and 99 percent, depending on a range of precipitation scenarios.

On the flipside, the scientists found that if steps are taken to aggressively reduce greenhouse gases, the risks of a decades-long drought could be cut nearly in half…

The researchers found that under a “business-as-usual” emissions scenario, the risk of a decades-long drought would be 90 percent in the southwestern U.S. if precipitation is unchanged. If there’s a modest increase in precipitation, the region would still face a 70 percent risk of a megadrought by the end of the 21 century. And if precipitation decreases under that warming scenario, the scientists estimated the risk at 99 percent.

Nice job, states like Utah and Arizona, voting to go back to “business as usual” just when, after 40 years of inertia when we already should have known better, we were taking some modest steps in the right direction. Perhaps your neighbors in Colorado, New Mexico (not to mention Old Mexico), and California have reasons to be less than happy with you.

learn about carbon trading and R

Leave a reply

This is pretty cool – an interactive website that lets you explore a real-world carbon trading research problem while learning new tricks in R.

Many economists would agree that the most efficient way to fight global warming would be a world-wide tax or an emmission trading system for greenhouse gases. Yet, if only a part of the world implements such a scheme, a reasonable concern is that firms may decide to relocate to other parts of the world, causing job losses and less effective emmission reduction…

In their article ‘Industry Compensation under Relocation Risk: A Firm-Level Analysis of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme’ (American Economic Review, 2014), Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls, Laure B. de Preux and Ulrich J. Wagner study the most efficient way to allocate a fixed amount of free permits among facilities in order to minimize the risk of job losses or carbon leakage. Given their available data, they establish simple alternative allocation rules that can be expected to substantially outperform the current allocation rules used by the EU.

As part of his Master’s Thesis at Ulm University, Benjamin Lux has generated a very nice RTutor problem set that allows you to replicate the insights of the paper in an interactive fashion. You learn about the data and institutional background, run explorative regressions and dig into the very well explained optimization procedures to find efficient allocation rules. At the same time you learn some R tricks, like effective usage of some dplyr functions.

It’s an interesting question at a time when some U.S. states and Canadian provinces have started introducing carbon trading and taxation schemes that differ from their neighbors (sometimes because their neighbors have nothing at all). Perhaps there is a win-win where a policy can gradually phase out less productive, dirtier industries while replacing them with cleaner and higher-value-added industries, then sharing enough of the wealth so everyone benefits.

reduced work week as a carbon emissions strategy

Leave a reply

Reducing the work week to four days would reduce carbon emissions.

Worktime Reduction as a Solution to Climate Change: Five Scenarios Compared for the UK

Reducing working hours in an economy has been discussed as a policy which may have benefits in achieving particular economic, social and environmental goals. This study proposes five different scenarios to reduce the working hours of full-time employees by 20% with the aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions: a three-day weekend, a free Wednesday, reduced daily hours, increased holiday entitlement and a scenario in which the time reduction is efficiently managed by companies to minimise their office space. We conceptually analyse the effects of each scenario on time use patterns through both business and worker activities, and how these might affect energy consumption in the economy. To assess which of the scenarios may be most effective in reducing carbon emissions, this analytical framework is applied as a case study for the United Kingdom. The results suggest that three of the five scenarios offer similar benefits, and are preferable to the other two, with a difference between the best and worst scenarios of 13.03 MTCO2e. The study concludes that there is a clear preference for switching to a four-day working week over other possible work-reduction policies.

Washington State’s carbon tax vote

1 Reply

Washington State voters are considering a carbon tax. The proceeds would be used to offset other taxes, making it revenue neutral. This could be a national model, if we weren’t all so allergic to the word tax.

The proposal is strikingly simple and refreshingly bipartisan. According to Yes on I-732.org, I-732 would:

  • Directly address climate change by adding a tax of $25/ton on carbon emissions;
  • Reduce the statewide sales tax by 1%;
  • Add a tax credit of $1500/year for low-income households; and
  • Lower the Business and Occupation (B&O) tax on manufacturers to .001%.

This type of fossil fuel tax would be first of its kind in the United States, though it has been implemented elsewhere. According to the World Bank, 15 countries currently tax carbon. Sweden’s policy is the most aggressive, at rate of $168/ton. Closer to home, a carbon tax has been in place in British Columbia, Canada, since 2008, which has resulted in a 5-15% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. BC’s tax is much lower than Sweden’s, at a rate of $30/ton.