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Wildfires: How they form, and why they're so dangerous.
Everything you need to know about wildfires.
As deadly wildfires continue to rage across Northern California’s wine country, with winds picking up speed overnight and worsening conditions to now include a combined 54,000 acres of torched land, it now seems more important than ever to understand how wildfires work, and their lasting implications on our health and the environment.
HOW A WILDFIRE STARTS
Though the exact source of Sonoma County’s wildfires is unclear, authorities have pointed to the fact that 95 percent of fires in the state of California are started by people, according to CNN.
Meteorologists aren’t yet able to forecast wildfire outbreaks, but there are three conditions that must be present in order for a wildfire to burn. Firefighters refer to it as the fire triangle: fuel, oxygen, and a heat source. Four out of five wildfires are started by people, but dry weather, drought, and strong winds can create a recipe for the perfect disaster—which can transform a spark into a weeks- or months-long blaze that consumes tens of thousands of acres.
Another possible cause of forest fires is lightning. Scientists have found that every degree of global warming sets off a 12 percent bump in lightning activity. Since 1975 the number of fires ignited by lightning has increased between two and five percent.
A TRICKY RELATIONSHIP
Historically, wildfires are actually supposed to be beneficial to certain natural landscapes, clearing underbrush in forests and triggering the release of seeds in some plant species, such as the Jack pine.
Unfortunately, the suppression of naturally occurring, low-intensity forest fires has actually aided in the ability for high-intensity wildfires to run rampant. (Watch a time-lapse of the beauty and danger of wildfires.)
In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service suffered from what historian Stephen Pyne calls “pyrophobia,” or the desire to suppress all wildfires (even the good ones). Since the science of forestry first took root in temperate Europe, which is home to a vastly different forest ecosystem than those found in the United States, fire was seen by early U.S. foresters as a problem caused by people.
In some places, the path toward a safer, more ecologically sound relationship with fire is being blazed with prescribed fire, and what’s being called by officials as “managed wildfire.” Fire crews put their efforts to suppress wildfires around the most fire-prone areas, such as communities, municipal watersheds, and sequoia groves. Otherwise they are learning to let some fires burn themselves out, as nature intended.
WILDFIRES CAN HAVE LONG-LASTING IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR PLANET
Forest fires actually have the ability to heat up the entire planet, a NASA study from 2016 revealed. In ecosystems such as boreal forests, which store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, the effects of climate change are playing out twice as fast.
Fires ravaged the boreal forests of Canada’s vast north woods in May 2016 and continued for months, consuming millions of acres of trees, and scorching the rich organic soil on the forest floor, which serves as a large reservoir for carbon. For every degree that our planet warms, the forest needs a 15 percent increase in precipitation to compensate for increased dryness. (See how megafires are remaking American forests.)
Similar to the case in Northern California, investigators believe that Canada’s boreal forest fire was caused by humans.
Barack Obama visited Alaska in 2015 to highlight the dangers of climate change, calling up images of the hundreds of wildfires that burned across the state just that summer. At the time, 2014 had been the warmest year on record, a milestone that has now been surpassed by 2016.
THE EFFECTS OF FIRE ON PEOPLE
Worldwide, wildfire smoke kills 339,000 people a year, mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to estimates. Tenfold increases in asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions have also been reported when smoke blankets the places where people live.
Common in places such as the western United States, layers of stagnant air called inversions can be created by fires and are responsible for holding smoke down where people breathe. Airborne, microscopic particles that slip past the body’s defenses and into the farthest reaches of the respiratory system can begin to coagulate the blood, forming a thick goo. Smoke also contains carbon monoxide, causing long-lasting damage to the heart. (Learn wildfire safety tips.)
Emergency room visits for heart failure jumped 37 percent, and saw a 66 percent increase for breathing problem-related visits following the smokiest days of a big 2008 peat fire in eastern North Carolina, EPA researchers found.
HOW FIRE IMPACTS WILDLIFE
Wildlife tend to have a very different relationship with fire. Some have evolved to live with it, and some even thrive after fires. That’s not to say all wild animals call fire a friend—there are some who can’t outrun the quickly moving flames, and young or small animals are particularly at risk.
Slow-moving animals such as koalas, whose natural instinct is to crawl up further into a tree, may end up trapped.
For many environments, fire doesn’t actually have to mean death, but instead change, re-birth, or new opportunities. For example, woodpeckers will fly in to feast on bark beetles in dead and dying trees, and leave when the beetles are gone.
A year-old forest will have a different set of flora and fauna inhabiting it than a forest that is 40 years old, and according to wildlife biologist Patricia Kennedy, “a lot of species require that reset,” which comes from a fire.
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19 Western species won’t receive federal protections.
The animals range from minuscule Nevada mollusks to dwindling Pacific walruses.
On Oct. 4, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that 25 animals were not warranted for listing under the Endangered Species Act. Nineteen of those species — ranging from a sooty-colored woodpecker that hunts beetles in burned forests, to tiny snails found only in a few isolated springs in the Great Basin desert — live in the West. In no case did the Service find the species’ numbers to be increasing at this time; still, the Service concluded that none were in danger of disappearing altogether in the future. Here are the Western species that didn’t make the cut:
14 different species of Nevada springsnail
A surprising diversity of these minuscule molluscs lives in freshwater springs scattered across the Great Basin desert of Nevada and Utah. But those tiny aquatic havens are challenged by the region’s growing aridity: As groundwater pumping increases, some springs will run dry, according to the Service’s assessment. For example, one of the three springs where a springsnail called the Corn Creek Pyrg dwells is likely to dry up in the coming years because of groundwater pumping. As the water goes, so will that population. But the species is not a candidate for listing, because two other populations will remain. Thirteen other springsnail species are also not candidates.
Black-backed woodpecker
These dusky-backed birds blend in against the burned trees where they often forage. Because they have only three toes on each foot, they are not the most agile climbers, but their modified feet — and heads — make them excellent at clinging to burned trees and excavating beetle larvae. Though their range extends across the boreal forests of the northern U.S. and southern Canada, black-backed woodpeckers are rare. While petitioners for listing argued that the woodpeckers in the Pacific Northwest and in the Badlands of South Dakota were unique enough to warrant separate protections — and might even be two new subspecies, based on genetic research — the Service disagreed.
Boreal Toad
Living in shallow, slow-moving water in high elevation forests and meadows in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, boreal toads are dwindling mainly because of chytrid fungus, an infection that's wiped out amphibians across the planet. It’s unknown how many boreal toads are left. Toads with chytridiomycosis stop absorbing electrolytes through their skin; eventually, their hearts stop. The Service believes that the toads will develop adequate resistance to the chytrid fungus over the next 50 years to survive this global epidemic, and that climate change will not further decimate the toads’ remaining populations in the meantime.
Fisher
Close relatives of otters, minks and weasels, fishers are among the only predators capable of taking down porcupines. These tough little solitary creatures live in complex, mature forests, where they den in naturally occurring cavities in downed timber and old snags. Fur trappers decimated fisher populations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The northern Rocky Mountain population, ranging from northern Idaho to southwestern Montana, has been found to be genetically distinct from other fisher populations, but it’s unknown how many count among its numbers. The species was rejected for listing because the Service found that trapping — which continues legally in Montana and incidentally in Idaho — does not pose a significant threat to the animals.
Great Sand Dunes Tiger Beetle
This half-inch, brown and white beetle, with an iridescent green and brown head and giant chomping mandibles, is adapted to life on the sand. It’s covered in white hairs that protect it from abrasion, and it burrows into the sand to get out of the heat and cold. It’s unknown how many of these shiny arthropods, which live only in southern Colorado’s Great Sand Dune formation, exist, or how connected to one another their sub-populations are. According to the Service, neither gas and oil leases held by private corporations on tiger beetle habitat, nor future predictions of a hotter and drier climate, nor ongoing trampling by sand dune tourists, elk, or ranched bison pose enough danger to the endemic beetle for its existence to be in jeopardy.
Pacific Walrus
One of the largest fin-footed mammals in the world, the Pacific walrus lives in the shallow continental shelf waters of the Bering and Chukchi seas, where it depends on patches of frozen pack ice to reach offshore breeding and feeding areas. It’s unknown how many Pacific walruses remain. Their migration patterns are intertwined with sea ice patterns: In the winter, they spend time on Bering Sea ice. As that ice melts, females and juveniles migrate north to feeding areas in the Chuchki sea, where sea ice historically has remained year-round. The Service agreed in 2011 that the Pacific walrus was sliding toward extinction and declared its listing under the ESA “warranted but precluded.” Yes, the walrus was going extinct and should be protected by listing, the agency decided, but other listings were more pressing. Now, nearly seven years later, the Service has backtracked. While acknowledging that sea ice loss from climate change is the biggest threat to the pinniped’s survival, the Service concluded that the magnitude of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on marine ecosystems — including sea ice loss, prey reduction, and walrus responses — can’t accurately be predicted beyond 2060. The Service further found that Pacific walruses will be able to adapt to using terrestrial habitat, rather than ice, for breeding and feeding.
Maya L. Kapoor is an associate editor with High Country News. Follow her at @Kapoor_ML
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Carbon emissions from warming soils could trigger disastrous feedback loop.
26-year study reveals natural biological factors kick in once warming reaches certain point, leading to potentially unstoppable increase in temperatures.
Warming soils are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought, suggesting a potentially disastrous feedback mechanism whereby increases in global temperatures will trigger massive new carbon releases in a cycle that may be impossible to break.
The increased production of carbon comes from the microbes within soils, according to a report in the peer-review journal Science, published on Friday.
The 26-year study is one of the biggest of its kind, and is a groundbreaking addition to our scant knowledge of exactly how warming will affect natural systems.
Potential feedback loops, or tipping points, have long been suspected to exist by scientists, and there is some evidence for them in the geological record. What appears to happen is that once warming reaches a certain point, these natural biological factors kick in and can lead to a runaway, and potentially unstoppable, increase in warming.
Slow-freezing Alaska soil driving surge in carbon dioxide emissions
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Other tipping points posited by scientists include the disappearance of ice in the Arctic, which creates areas of dark water that absorb more heat, and the release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from thawing permafrost.
In the Science study, researchers examined plots of soil in the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, a mixed hardwood forest in the US. They experimented by heating some of the plots with underground cables to 5C above normal levels, leaving others as a control.
The long-term study revealed that in the first 10 years there was a strong increase in the carbon released from the heated plots, then a period of about seven years when the carbon release abated. But after this second calmer period, which the scientists attribute to the adjustment of the soil microbes to the warmer conditions, the release of carbon resumed its upward path.
In the last three years, the release of carbon has once again dropped back, which scientists attribute to another reorganisation of the microbes present. They suggest an increase in the number of microbes that can feast on the hard-to-digest organic matter, such as plant-based lignin, which gives clues to the possible cyclical nature of the process.
From 1991, when the experiment began, the plots subjected to 5C warming lost about 17% of the carbon that had been stored in the top 60cm of the soil, where the greatest concentration of organic matter is to be found.
Scientific understanding of the complexities of soil microbial activity is still limited, but the long-term nature of the study provides valuable insights into what might be happening, and is likely to happen in future, to vast swaths of forest soils across the world.
While deforestation has been the focus of most research into forests’ effects on climate change, with a recent study suggesting tropical forests are turning into carbon sources rather than carbon stores as a result, the impact of warming soils has remained much of a mystery. Soils are one of the world’s biggest natural carbon sinks, along with trees and the oceans.
Daniel Metcalfe, of Sweden’s Lund University, said: “If these findings hold more widely across major terrestrial ecosystems, then a much greater portion of the global soil carbon store could be vulnerable to decomposition and release of carbon dioxide under global warming than previously thought.”
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The study was carried out by scientists at the US Marine Biological Laboratory, led by Jerry Melillo, with contributions from the universities of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Melillo, who holds the position of distinguished scientist at the MBL, said: “Each year, mostly from fossil fuel burning, we are releasing about 10bn metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The world’s soils contain about 3,500bn tons of carbon. If a significant amount of that is added to the atmosphere, due to microbial activity, that will accelerate the global warming process. Once this self-reinforcing feedback begins, there is no easy way to turn it off. There is no switch to flip.”
He added: “The future is warmer. How much warmer is the issue.” While emissions from fossil fuels can be cut back, the reactions of the natural world to a warming climate may be impossible to control.
Some recent work has suggested that the warming of the globe may be progressing at a slightly slower rate than the upper range of previous studies estimated. However, feedback loops and tipping points have the potential to create sudden disruptions that are hard to take account of in standard climate modelling, and these could mean much greater changes and far higher rates of warming in the future.
Separately, research from Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and other institutions, published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, and Global Change Biology, called for more work on how soil could be used as a carbon store. When agricultural soils are well-managed, they can store more carbon than they emit, which would allow them to be used as potential carbon sinks.
But the scientists warn that “we still don’t have a strong understanding of the interactions among biological, chemical and physical processes regulating carbon in soils”. They say much more research is needed, particularly as there are dangers in soils in Siberia that are rapidly warning, and could release vast quantities of carbon. They also warn that there may be 25-30% less organic matter in some soils than previously estimated.
“Soil has changed under our feet,” said Jennifer Harden, a visiting scholar at Stanford. “We can’t use the soil maps made 80 years ago and expect to find the same answers.”
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UNEP official calls for ‘coherent planning’ as Aichi falters in Africa.
International agreements are increasingly looking at conserving forests as a way to mitigate global warming, preserve biodiversity and safeguard human communities from environmental disasters.
International agreements are increasingly looking at conserving forests as a way to mitigate global warming, preserve biodiversity and safeguard human communities from environmental disasters.
An assessment by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has found many forest-related Aichi Targets of the Convention of Biological Diversity will not achieve their goals at their current rates of progress.
Over the past few years, more forest-conservation goals have been adopted by UN member countries. But a UNEP official says this duplication of efforts may actually be derailing forest conservation.
He recommends a more streamlined approach focused on the Aichi Targets and Sustainable Development Goals.
Forests cover about 40 million square kilometers – around 30 percent – of the Earth’s surface. They provide habitat for countless species, as well as important ecosystem services for human communities. Tree roots prevent land degradation and desertification by stabilizing soils, and help maintain water and nutrient cycling in soils.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that about 1.6 billion people depend on forests for employment, income generation and subsistence. The FAO warns that deforestation sparked by an ever-increasing demand for food, materials and fuel is degrading ecosystems and diminishing water availability.
Forests are also huge carbon sinks and, as such, feature prominently in international strategies to combat climate change. According to a report by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), forests may be capable of absorbing approximately 10 percent of all global emissions by 2050.
Research indicates that, globally, an estimated 570 million hectares could be available for forest restoration. If restored, these areas could sequester about 440 billion metric tons of CO2.
Because of the ability of forests to sequester large amounts of carbon, forest restoration has become a critical part of the Paris Agreement. The multinational accord, signed by 195 countries in 2016, seeks to keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees or more above a preindustrial baseline in the hopes of staving off the worst effects of climate change.
The Paris Accord wasn’t the first global effort by governments to tackle forest conservation. The 1992 Earth Summit, which gathered leaders from 105 nations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, resulted in the adoption of the Rio Convention aimed at conserving biodiversity, mitigating global warming and combating desertification. Participating governments also agreed on a framework for sustainable development – but via forestry principles that weren’t legally binding.
Tony Simons, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), told Mongabay that despite harboring 90 percent of the world’s biodiversity, forests were largely left behind when the Rio Convention was devised and adopted in 1992.
“Forestry was a political battle: this saw it lag behind as the first three got a framework convention,” Simsons told Mongabay. “This was until the Bali Action in 2007 during COP13 [when] Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) was included in the Bali Action Plan as a component of curbing emissions.”
REDD is a U.N. policy mechanism first negotiated under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in 2005 to help developing countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions by providing financial incentives for keeping their forests in the ground. In 2010 it was expanded to include other conservation and management principles, and is now denoted as REDD+.
The Rio Convention, which includes the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCDD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), acknowledge that forests are critical in achieving their respective goals.
Tim Christophersen, chief terrestrial ecosystems expert at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) told Mongabay that the CBD later revised its forest biodiversity program, which contributed to subsequent global conservation agreements.
“This paved the way for the forest-related Aichi Targets (5, 7, 11 14 and 15), which are very ambitious and cover almost all aspects of sustainable forest management,” Christophersen said.
The Aichi Biodiversity targets are part of the 2011-2020 Strategic Plan for Biodiversity adopted during the tenth Conference of the Parties (COP10) in 2010 in Nagoya, Japan. There are 20 targets in all, which aim to achieve broad biodiversity safeguards by 2020. For instance, Target 5 seeks to halve the overall rate of habitat loss while significantly reducing degradation and fragmentation.
Progress in Africa – and lack thereof
Africa contains a significant portion of the world’s forest cover – including its second-largest rainforest. To see how Africa was faring in its progress towards the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, UNEP conducted a 2016 mid-term review.
Overall, UNEP found nine out of the 20 targets were progressing towards their goals, but at an “insufficient rate,” five showed no progress and three appear to be regressing further away from target goals. These three – Targets 4, 5 and 12 – pertain to sustainable production and consumption, habitat loss reduction and extinction prevention. The report indicates only two targets – 16 and 17 – which are concerned with international agreement ratification and action plan documentation are on track to achieve their goals. For one target – 14 – there was not enough data for UNEP to make an assessment.
One of the three targets UNEP assessed as regressing is Target 5, which aims to reduce habitat loss. The report indicates the continent lost between 0.2 percent and 2.57 percent of its forest cover every year from 2001 through 2013. Satellite data referenced in the report indicate deforestation accelerated in that period, with 2013 experiencing the most tree cover loss.
Professor Godwin Kowero, executive secretary of the African Forest Forum (AFF), told Mongabay that while some regions are seeing progress, Africa as a whole is not likely to achieve Target 5 as its forest loss has accelerated.
“The rate of forest loss globally has decreased in developed countries, and places like Latin America has seen an increase in forest cover, but the rate of deforestation is still a bother in developing countries, Kowero said. “Forest degradation is difficult to monitor, but we still have a long way to go in achieving the target.”
Africa’s deforestation drivers are many. Among the biggest, says Harrison Kojwang, an environment and natural resources consultant based in Namibia, are charcoal production, timber harvesting, agriculture expansion, mining, oil and gas exploration, and the curing of tobacco.
Target 15 is one of the five targets that show little to no progress, according to UNEP. This target aims to conserve and restore at least fifteen percent of degraded ecosystems by 2020, and one way Africa is exploring to meet this goal is through the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100). AFR100 is a country-led program devised to restore 100 million hectares of land by 2030. The program’s restoration activities are supported through national development financing amounting to around $1 billion and $540 million in private sector funding.
AFR100 was launched during COP21 in Paris in 2015. So far, 21 African countries have committed at least 63.3 million hectares of land for forest landscape restoration.
However, there appears to have been some progress made towards other forest-related Aichi targets, such as Target 11. Focused on aquatic environments, Target 11 aims to see 10 percent of coastal and marine areas and 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas conserved by 2020. These areas include peatlands, coastal wetlands and mangrove forests.
Peatlands and mangroves are particularly high carbon-value ecosystems. A report by Wetlands Internationals referenced by UNCCD found 25 to 30 percent of the world’s terrestrial carbon is stored in peatlands, and that the decomposition of drained peatland generates 1.3 billion tons of C02 per year. A 2010 study published in Nature found mangrove degradation releases between 0.07 and 0.42 billion tons of CO2 annually.
In its progress report, UNEP notes that protected area coverage in Africa has steadily increased since 1990 and is making progress towards the terrestrial and marine coverage elements of Aichi Target 11. The report found 13.8 percent of terrestrial and inland aquatic environments and 3.7 percent of marine and coastal areas were included in protected areas in 2014.
Yet, despite that progress, UNEP considers progress towards Target 11 insufficient to meet its goal unless efforts are improved.
Dr. Martin Nganje, president of the Africa Section of the Society for Conservation Biology and a consultant at the African Forest Forum based in Cameroon, disagrees with this. He said that at its current rate of progress, Africa is likely to meet the requirements of Target 11.
“Reducing the rates of loss and degradation of these natural ecosystems offer cost-effective strategies that deliver immediate climate action,” Nganje told Mongabay.
Trans-boundary policies enacting wildlife monitoring activities outside protected areas are also beginning to create incentives for protection of forest and forest resources used as wildlife corridors by member states, according to Kojwang.
“Forest management is riding on the objectives of the wildlife protection,” he said. “Namibia and Botswana have a joint elephant monitoring policy that is benefiting forest protection within the corridors. Also, strong community-based conservancies within which these corridors existing in Southern Africa countries are resulting in better protection of forests.”
For one target – Target 14 – a lack of available data prevented UNEP from assessing its progress. This goal pertains to the safeguarding of ecosystem services, which are benefits conveyed to human communities by surrounding natural environments.
One ecosystem benefit is drought mitigation by forests. Trees help bind water in soil and shade the ground from drying sunlight; scientists also believe forests also aid cloud formation as stored water molecules pass from leaves into the air. Research indicates that this lends to more resilience from droughts, with models showing forests have evaporation rates that are 30 percent less than savannahs.
Over the past several years, drought has ravaged parts of Africa – particularly the eastern and southern parts of the continent – leading to widespread famine as agricultural yields plummeted. Experts say better land use and protection could help reduce damage from future droughts; UNEP notes farmer-managed agroforestry projects in several countries has led to greater resilience from drought, as well as bigger yields of corn and other crops.
Kojwang says that while there is a lack of data on overall progress towards Target 14’s ecosystem services protection goal, countries like Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya are showing some headway through REDD+ projects that are collaborating with local communities. However, he said efforts are lacking in the conservation of water catchment areas outside national parks in several regions.
Too much of a good thing?
In September 2015, 193 UN member countries gathered in New York and adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The SDGs are aimed at protecting the environment while addressing poverty, increasing economic growth and prosperity, and improving access to health, education, and social resources.
At the January 2017 UN Forum on Forests (UNFF), participating nations adopted the UN 2017-2030 Strategic Plan for . The plan includes a set of six Global Forest Goals (GFGs) and 26 associated targets. These goals intend to, among other things, increase forest area by 3 percent worldwide, enhance forest-based economic, social and environmental benefits, and increase both the area of protected forests and the proportion of forest products produced from sustainably managed forests.
The GFGs are also aimed at supporting the objectives of the International Arrangement on Forests and making progress towards the SGDs, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the Paris Agreement and other international forest-related commitments.
While having in place so many international agreements focused on conserving and restoring forest may sound like a good thing, UNEP’s Christophersen said it is leading to a duplication of efforts that may be negatively affecting forest protection.
“It is contributing to a lack of impact on forests as the projects are too small and fragmented,” he said. “We cannot afford it anymore after the adoption of the SDGs. It costs too much, but more importantly we need to send clear, coherent policy signals to governments and the private sector on forest policy, and this can only come from legally binding instruments, and by implementing the SDGs.”
Christophersen calls for streamlining international forest protection efforts and have countries adopt comprehensive land use plans that aim to restore forest landscape, mitigate climate change effects and conserve biodiversity
“All these efforts related to forest ecosystem and climate change, desertification and combating loss of biodiversity should be coherently planned and implemented under the SDG’s if forests are to be protected,” he said.
Christophersen thinks a merger between the UNFF and CBD forest-focused goals would be the best bet. Barring that, he suggests a slimming-down of UNFF priorities.
“If not [a merger], UNFF should at least only focus on monitoring the forest-related aspects of the SDG implementation, together with the CBD and other key players, and not engage in any other activities,” Christophersen said.
Mongabay reached out to UNFF for comment, but had received no response by press time.
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Idaho engineer to bring fresh eyes to Maryland's Chesapeake Bay research.
Peter Goodwin has spent much of his career engineering ways to restore salmon populations in dammed Pacific Northwest rivers or analyzing the downstream effects of water supply management decisions in drought-stressed California.
Peter Goodwin has spent much of his career engineering ways to restore salmon populations in dammed Pacific Northwest rivers or analyzing the downstream effects of water supply management decisions in drought-stressed California.
The closest the University of Idaho professor has come to studying the Chesapeake Bay was on the opposite site of the Delmarva Peninsula, exploring how to restore Delaware Bay marshes disrupted by man-made dikes and ditches.
Starting on Monday, however, the nation’s largest estuary will be his focus. Goodwin will take over the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, home to the preeminent research on the state’s most significant natural resource. He will replace the current president, Donald Boesch, who has led the center since 1990.
The leadership transition comes as environmentalists hope the bay has turned a corner in reversing decades of pollution and over-harvesting of crabs and oysters, and that a more hands-off approach by regulators doesn’t stall progress. Both Boesch and Goodwin acknowledge the job is as much political as it is scientific.
“I know I’m going to be on a very steep learning curve,” Goodwin said. “Specifically relative to the Chesapeake Bay, I know actually very little about that, but what I do bring is extensive experience from other systems in the U.S. and around the world.”
University System of Maryland officials say they see that unfamiliarity as a strength.
“It wasn’t my first impression this was the perfect fit — you don’t think of Idaho, since it’s not coastal, as having the same kind of emphasis we have had at UMCES on the bay,” said Robert Caret, the university system’s chancellor. “He just had a broad background that encompassed everything we were looking for.”
That included a global perspective, leadership skills and scientific curiosity, Caret said.
UMCES, nearly a century old, is actually composed of four research centers around the state, with 100 faculty members and about 85 graduate students.
Its Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge and Chesapeake Biological Laboratory on Solomons Island are home to the institution’s well known research on fisheries, water quality and the chemistry and biology of estuarine ecosystems. The Appalachian Laboratory in Frostburg adds investigations into management of terrestrial wildlife, forests and agriculture, and the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology in Baltimore explores microbiology, molecular biology and biotechnology.
Goodwin’s background leans toward engineering — specifically, a field known as ecohydraulics. The term, coined in the late 1980s, combines the study of aquatic animals and plants with analysis of the waters they’re swimming and floating in. The work informs operation, construction and even removal of dams and man-made reservoirs.
Goodwin has been a leading voice applying the discipline to debates mostly in the western U.S. He served as lead scientist for a group overseeing management of the water supply that comes through the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, an estuary in northern California that is tapped to fill pipes and irrigation ditches in homes and farms across the state. Some of his other projects have explored flood prevention, sediment control and fishery management in places such as Idaho’s Red River, the Columbia River in Oregon and the Tijuana estuary in Southern California.
While those waterways may differ from the Chesapeake ecologically, they share similar challenges — they are a long way from becoming truly restored, and restoration efforts are complicated by politics. Goodwin’s understanding of such thorny debates means he won’t be in altogether unfamiliar terrain when he arrives in Maryland, Boesch said.
“He’s very practically minded,” Boesch said of his successor. “He’s not inexperienced and naive.”
Boesch said he plans to stay on the center’s faculty into 2018, introducing Goodwin to the major players and policy debates in Annapolis. After that, he plans to write one or more books intended for a general audience about the ecology of the Chesapeake and the Gulf of Mexico.
Boesch will be handing over a position that influences a broad range of state programs and policies. He serves or has served on state committees that oversee management of the bay’s oyster and crab populations, preparations for climate change, prevention of harmful algal blooms in waterways and responses to invasion by species like snakehead fish. He also held positions on advisory panels outside Maryland, including a federal commission created by the Obama administration to prevent or lessen the damage of oil spills.
Goodwin said he admires the way Boesch has maintained his identity as an impartial scientist while educating and advising politicians. He described himself as embracing a similar philosophy — one in which a scientist’s role is as an “honest broker” who doesn’t shy away from sharing controversial research but also doesn’t tell policymakers what to do with the information.
“Scientists are trained not to believe in anything — they're trained to question things,” Goodwin said. “It’s important to understand where science stops and where the decisions are made.”
Goodwin was attracted to UMCES because its independence and organization are unusual among similar research efforts around the country. Many centers are housed within larger universities, or are staffed by researchers spread across multiple departments or institutions. The distinction helps give UMCES a level of authority and credibility in policy debates that it might not otherwise have, Goodwin said.
“You’ve got an entire independent institution set up to design the science to inform policy and management actions,” he said. “Having that core focal expertise to build on is pretty unique. I’ve not seen that in any of the other large ecosystem restoration projects around the country.”
Boesch said he’s confident things won’t change under Goodwin given the priority the university system’s regents gave to finding a successor.
“Without hesitation, they said, ‘Let’s move forward and get a new president,’” Boesch said. “I think that’s a good sign.”
If anything, university system officials appear interested in strengthening the institution. Caret said he hopes to see Goodwin broaden the funding sources UMCES taps for its research so it’s less susceptible to state and federal funding cuts.
“I’m really coming in here to learn — to understand what the issues are and perhaps give independent, outside perspective,” he said.
While Boesch acknowledged Goodwin’s background might make his appointment seem unorthodox, he said he trusts his successor’s experience will help him navigate the institution forward.
”The times change and you need fresh perspective and a new generation of leaders,” Boesch said.
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Alert: Nature, on the verge of bankruptcy.
Pressures on global land resources are now greater than ever, as a rapidly increasing population coupled with rising levels of consumption is placing ever-larger demands on the world’s land-based natural capital, warns a new United Nations report.
ROME, Sep 12 2017 (IPS) - Pressures on global land resources are now greater than ever, as a rapidly increasing population coupled with rising levels of consumption is placing ever-larger demands on the world’s land-based natural capital, warns a new United Nations report.
Consumption of the earth’s natural reserves has doubled in the last 30 years, with a third of the planet’s land now severely degraded, adds the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) new report, launched on 12 September in Ordos, China during the Convention’s 13th summit (6-16 September 2017).
“Each year, we lose 15 billion trees and 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil,” the UNCCD’s report The Global Land Outlook (GLO) says, adding that a significant proportion of managed and natural ecosystems are degrading and at further risk from climate change and biodiversity loss.
In basic terms, there is increasing competition between the demand for goods and services that benefit people, like food, water, and energy, and the need to protect other ecosystem services that regulate and support all life on Earth, according to new publication.
At the same time, terrestrial biodiversity underpins all of these services and underwrites the full enjoyment of a wide range of human rights, such as the rights to a healthy life, nutritious food, clean water, and cultural identity, adds the report. And a significant proportion of managed and natural ecosystems are degrading and at further risk from climate change and biodiversity loss.
The report provides some key facts: from 1998 to 2013, approximately 20 per cent of the Earth’s vegetated land surface showed persistent declining trends in productivity, apparent in 20 per cent of cropland, 16 per cent of forest land, 19 per cent of grassland, and 27 per cent of rangeland.
These trends are “especially alarming” in the face of the increased demand for land-intensive crops and livestock.”
More Land Degradation, More Climate Change
Land degradation contributes to climate change and increases the vulnerability of millions of people, especially the poor, women, and children, says UNCCD, adding that current management practises in the land-use sector are responsible for about 25 per cent of the world’s greenhouses gases, while land degradation is both a cause and a result of poverty.
“Over 1.3 billion people, mostly in the developing countries, are trapped on degrading agricultural land, exposed to climate stress, and therefore excluded from wider infrastructure and economic development.”
Land degradation also triggers competition for scarce resources, which can lead to migration and insecurity while exacerbating access and income inequalities, the report warns.
“Soil erosion, desertification, and water scarcity all contribute to societal stress and breakdown. In this regard, land degradation can be considered a ‘threat amplifier’, especially when it slowly reduces people’s ability to use the land for food production and water storage or undermines other vital ecosystem services. “
High Temperature, Water Scarcity
Meanwhile, higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and increased water scarcity due to climate change will alter the suitability of vast regions for food production and human habitation, according to the report.
“The mass extinction of flora and fauna, including the loss of crop wild relatives and keystone species that hold ecosystems together, further jeopardises resilience and adaptive capacity, particularly for the rural poor who depend most on the land for their basic needs and livelihoods.”
Our food system, UNCCD warns, has put the focus on short-term production and profit rather than long-term environmental sustainability.
Monocultures, Genetically Modified Crops
The modern agricultural system has resulted in huge increases in productivity, holding off the risk of famine in many parts of the world but, at the same time, is based on monocultures, genetically modified crops, and the intensive use of fertilisers and pesticides that undermine long-term sustainability, it adds.
And here are some of the consequences: food production accounts for 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals and 80 per cent of deforestation, while soil, the basis for global food security, is being contaminated, degraded, and eroded in many areas, resulting in long-term declines in productivity.
In parallel, small-scale farmers, the backbone of rural livelihoods and food production for millennia, are under immense strain from land degradation, insecure tenure, and a globalised food system that favours concentrated, large-scale, and highly mechanised agribusiness.
This widening gulf between production and consumption, and ensuing levels of food loss/waste, further accelerates the rate of land use change, land degradation and deforestation, warns the UN Convention.
Global Challenges
Speaking at the launch of the report, UNCCD Executive Secretary Monique Barbut said, “Land degradation and drought are global challenges and intimately linked to most, if not all aspects of human security and well-being – food security, employment and migration, in particular.”
“As the ready supply of healthy and productive land dries up and the population grows, competition is intensifying, for land within countries and globally. As the competition increases, there are winners and losers.
No Land, No Civilisation
According the Convention, land is an essential building block of civilisation yet its contribution to our quality of life is perceived and valued in starkly different and often incompatible ways.
A minority has grown rich from the unsustainable use and large-scale exploitation of land resources with related conflicts intensifying in many countries, UNCCD states.
“Our ability to manage trade-offs at a landscape scale will ultimately decide the future of land resources – soil, water, and biodiversity – and determine success or failure in delivering poverty reduction, food and water security, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.”
A Bit of History
Except for some regions in Europe, human use of land before the mid-1700s was insignificant when compared with contemporary changes in the Earth’s ecosystems, UNCCD notes, adding that the notion of a limitless, human-dominated world was embraced and reinforced by scientific advances.
“Populations abruptly gained access to what seemed to be an unlimited stock of natural capital, where land was seen as a free gift of nature.”
The scenario analysis carried out for this Outlook examines a range of possible futures and projects increasing tension between the need to increase food and energy production, and continuing declines in biodiversity and ecosystem services.
From a regional perspective, these scenarios predict that sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa will face the greatest challenges due to a mix of factors, including high population growth, low per capita GDP, limited options for agricultural expansion, increased water stress, and high biodiversity losses.
The Solution
These are the real facts. The big question is if this self-destructive trend can be reversed? The answer is yes, or at least that losses could be minimised.
On this, Monique Barbut said that the GLO report suggests, “It is in all our interests to step back and rethink how we are managing the pressures and the competition.”
“The Outlook presents a vision for transforming the way in which we use and manage land because we are all decision-makers and our choices can make a difference – even small steps matter,” she further added.
For his part, UN Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner stated, “Over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and about one billion people in over one hundred countries are at risk.”
They include many of the world’s poorest and most marginalised people, he said, adding that achieving land degradation neutrality can provide a healthy and productive life for all on Earth, including water and food security.
The Global Land Outlook shows that “each of us can in fact make a difference.”
Can Mother Nature recover? The answer is a clear yes. Perhaps it would suffice that politicians pay more attention to real human real needs than promoting weapons deals — and that the big business helps replenish the world’s natural capital.
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Military shows concern over climate change.
Concerns over possible coastal habitat changes on military bases prompt a government-funded, multi-year study of Onslow County’s New River.
MOREHEAD CITY – There probably are relatively few people who understand the importance that the U.S. military, particularly the Marine Corps, places on understanding and protecting the environment of the land and water it uses.
Hans Paerl, professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, is one of them. He and colleagues from UNC and other universities are preparing to publish a paper that will outline the results of a multi-year study they conducted in and around the New River, which flows as an estuary through Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, then enters Onslow Bay in the Atlantic Ocean through New River Inlet.
The overall study, funded by the government, looked at the terrestrial portion of the area as well as the aquatic, and Paerl’s portion mostly involved quantifying the carbon and nutrient flows through what’s technically called “the freshwater-marine continuum of a temperate, micro-tidal estuary.”
Carbon, of course, is the building block of life as we know it. But carbon dioxide, or CO2, the main greenhouse gas that most climate experts believe traps the Earth’s heat and is leading to significant changes in the climate, including sea level rise. And because Camp Lejeune and many other Marine Corps bases are near coastal waters – Marines are the nation’s amphibious fighters, and need to train in and around those waters – sea level rise and coastal habitat changes are important to them.
“They want to know what’s going on, on their properties and around them,” Paerl said. “And they want to know what their role is in what’s going on.”
Part of that is economic, part of it is planning.
“Many of the generals and others at the top are very forward-thinking,” Paerl said. “They can look down the road and see that at some point in the future, there might very well be carbon regulations and taxes. They want to know where they stand.”
In Lejeune’s case, Paerl said, the base is in pretty good standing. The study shows that 85 percent of the “nutrient budget” in the estuary – carbon is a nutrient, as are such things as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium – comes from upstream, not from the base.
The river, which is only about 50 miles long and entirely contained in Onslow County, rises in the northwestern region and flows east-southeast past Jacksonville, where it widens into a tidal estuary about 2 miles wide. But before it gets to Jacksonville, it flows through mostly rural and agricultural land. That agriculture includes not only row crops, but also many hog farms with millions of hogs and their necessary waste lagoons. Nutrients abound.
So, Paerl said, it’s not surprising that the estuary’s nutrient load mostly comes from upstream, and the military officials are surely “delighted” to know that.
“What it means is that if we start getting more nutrient regulations, they’re in a pretty good position to show that they are not primarily responsible” for the problems that cause the need for regulations, Paerl said.
And there are plenty of examples of regulations arising from water quality problems. The state declared the Neuse River “nutrient sensitive” in the 1980s, after numerous algae blooms and fish kills, and developed and implemented rules designed to regulate sources of nutrient pollution in the basin, including wastewater, stormwater and agricultural runoff. The rules also require vegetative buffers along the water.
But beyond that, Paerl said, the Marine Corps and other branches of the military are concerned about climate change. At Camp Lejeune, they want to protect and maintain their ecosystem, because it’s similar to conditions in many areas of the world that Marines might have to fight. So they need to train in that ecosystem. Sea level rise and other ramifications of climate change could threaten those training grounds.
And, Paerl noted, military officials have long been concerned that an increasingly less stable climate with more droughts that disrupt food supplies, more major storms and continually rising sea levels, will create less stability in other countries, possibly leading to more need for U.S. intervention. They’re interested, perhaps more than most politicians these days, in limiting climate change.
What did the study find out specifically about organic, or vegetative, carbon and carbon dioxide, that predominant greenhouse gas, in the New River estuary?
Interestingly, Paerl said, it turns out that the estuary is, in general, pretty balanced between being a carbon sink, or holding carbon so it’s not released as carbon dioxide, and a contributor of CO2 to the atmosphere.
“But that can change year-to-year,” he said. It turns out that much of that variation is related to weather, which is affected by climate.
“What we’ve found is that when we have major perturbations, chiefly storms, much more CO2 is released,” Paerl said. “There were five or six major perturbations (during the study period), and we had the opportunity to look at (the effects) of those.”
What they’ve found is that “you can lose almost as much carbon to the atmosphere” from one major storm as had been stored away, or “fixed” by plants, in the estuary during the entire year in which the storm occurred.
“It’s kind like a gigantic ‘burp,’” the scientist said, that can, instantly negate a year of carbon storage by the algae and other plants.
Algae, another area of expertise for Paerl, can be terribly bad for estuaries, as it robs the water of oxygen when it decomposes, sometimes leading to fish kills. But, Paerl quipped, “I don’t think storms are really a good way to clean up our estuaries.”
At any rate, it sets up what Paerl said is a classic feedback loop.
“The more storms we have, then (based on the research) the more emissions we get,” he said. “And the more emissions we get, the more unstable the climate is likely to become, which means more storms. You have to wonder where it ends. Are we eventually to going to end up with 10 times more storms?”
It’s not, of course, “a perfectly linear world,” Paerl acknowledged, as there are other factors, such as El Nino, that influence the number of hurricanes and other storms. But you have to look at it not just from one year to the next, but decade by decade.
The New River work pretty much confirmed what previous work by Joseph Crosswell, also of UNC-IMS, found previously through work in the Neuse River, the largest tributary of the huge Pamlico Sound estuary, Paerl said.
The bottom line, he added, is that estuarine systems are very effective at holding carbon, unless disturbed. Some carbon even comes out and is “stored” by humans, through harvest and consumption of seafood.
But when those storms do hit, the negative atmospheric carbon effects can be quick, as in the windy Hurricane Irene in 2011, or slower and more sustained in the case of other, less windy storms that are mainly rainfall and flooding events.
Paerl said the overall study was funded by the Department of Defense’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, and has been headed by RTI International, an independent, nonprofit research institute based in the Research Triangle Park. Other researchers have come from private companies, as well as from Duke University, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the College of William and Mary and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
“It’s been a big effort, with a lot of parts,” Paerl said, and he credits the Department of Defense for being interested.
“They are really pretty good stewards of their environment, and it makes sense for them to be,” he said.
Paerl noted that the military also help preserve habitat outside the base gates by sometimes giving money to local governments to protect properties in the flight paths of Marine Corps aircraft that would otherwise be developed.
That’s happening now in Carteret County, where Emerald Isle is working with Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point officials to get money to help pay for the purchase of 30 acres of undeveloped land behind the town hall. That property, mostly maritime forest, has been zoned for years for more than 200 condominiums, and is in the flight path of planes going to and from nearby Bogue Field, an auxiliary landing strip for Cherry Point.
If the town gets the land, it will preserve up to 20 acres of it.
“A lot of people don’t realize how much they do,” Paerl said of the Marines. “It was good to work on this project to try to help them identify what’s going on in the estuary that runs through (Lejeune).”
And, he said, the study aids the cause of science and scientific research, which has recently been under attack in some circles, because the modeling involved should be applicable to not just other coastal military installations, but to similar estuarine systems that aren’t in government hands.
“We’ve learned a lot,” he said.
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