Monthly Archives: December 2010

Waterways contribute to growth of potent greenhouse gas

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Michigan State University

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, has increased by more than 20 percent over the last century, and nitrogen in waterways is fueling part of that growth, according to a Michigan State University study.

Based on this new study, the role of rivers and streams as a source of nitrous oxide to the atmosphere now appears to be twice as high as estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to Stephen Hamilton, a professor at MSU’s Kellogg Biological Station. The study appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences.

The increased production of nitrous oxide in streams can be traced to the growth of nitrogen fertilizers and the cultivation of crops that return nitrogen to the soil naturally, both of which have the unintended consequence of increasing nitrogen in streams. Some of the nitrogen entering streams is converted to nitrous oxide.

While many studies have focused on how agricultural soils contribute to the production of this greenhouse gas, little attention has been given to nitrous oxide originating from streams and rivers, according to the study.

Nitrous oxide exists at low levels in the atmosphere, yet is thought to be responsible for 6 percent of climate warming and also contributes to stratospheric ozone destruction. It packs a much bigger punch – on a molecular level – than carbon dioxide, Hamilton said.

“Nitrous oxide is the leading human-caused threat to the atmospheric ozone layer, which protects the earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation,” said Hamilton, who works with MSU’s Long-Term Ecological Research program. “And on a per molecule basis, its global warming potential is 300-fold greater than carbon dioxide.”

Hamilton was part of a team of researchers led by Jake Beaulieu of the Environmental Protection Agency and formerly with the University of Notre Dame. The team conducted experiments on 72 U.S. rivers and streams and ran their findings through a global river network model. They studied the production of nitrous oxide from the process of denitrification, in which bacteria convert nitrates to nitrogen gases.

“Even with more than 99 percent of denitrified nitrogen in streams and rivers being converted to the inert gas, dinitrogen, river networks still contribute to at least 10 percent of global anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions,” Hamilton said.

Reducing use of agricultural fertilizer and other sources of nitrogen are examples of how to decrease humanity’s contribution to the growth of nitrous oxide produced in waterways, the study concluded.

Michigan State University via Eurekalert

Once sewers, UK’s rivers are now the cleanest in 150 years

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Sify

The quality of water in Britain has improved. Some of the country’s rivers were little better than sewers a generation ago, but are now the cleanest in more than a century.

Figures show that water quality has improved year on year for the past two decades, and serious water pollution incidents have more than halved since 2001.

In the past decade, British waterways have returned to conditions not seen since before the 19th century Industrial Revolution, the UK Environment Agency claims.

The improved quality of water has resulted in the return of wildlife species such as salmon, otters and water voles, reports The Independent.

It quoted Ian Baker, the head of water in the UK Environment Agency, as saying: “Rivers in England and Wales are at their healthiest for over a century, with otters, salmon and other wildlife returning to many rivers in record numbers in locations across the country. The last decade shows how far we’ve come in reducing pollution and improving water quality and river habitats.”

A generation ago many British rivers were little better than foul-smelling drains. Such channels of untreated pollution are now largely a thing of the past, thanks to policing by the agency and investment by water companies, and also to the fact that most of Britain’s heavy, old-fashioned smokestack industry, once the major pollution source, has disappeared.

River like the Thames in London, the Mersey in Merseyside and Greater Manchester, and the Tyne in Newcastle, are seeing a major resurgence of life.

This year the Thames beat hundreds of other rivers across the world to win the International Theiss River Prize, which celebrates outstanding achievement in river management and restoration.

The prize recognised the astonishing transformation which the river has undergone, especially since the introduction of treatment for London’s sewage, which once was dumped raw into the river.

A 1958 survey at Tower Bridge found no fish in the river, the Thames is now home to at least 125 different fish species, including smelt and shad - while its estuary supports shellfisheries and is a nursery for commercial sole and bass stocks.

The Mersey, which once was also biologically dead, now also has a run of salmon and sea trout, while the river Tyne is now the most productive salmon river in England.

A new European law, the Water Framework Directive, will make ecological quality the new benchmark, and from 2015 Britain’s rivers will be expected to be of “good” ecological quality.

At the moment, only 26 per cent of rivers in England and Wales hit that target, with 56 per cent of “moderate” quality, 14 per cent “poor” and 2 per cent “bad”. (ANI)

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UN calls for global water strategy to counter glacier shrinkage

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By ClickGreen staff.

The United Nations environment chief is calling for the urgent development of adaptation strategies ranging from urban planning to improved water storage in the face of intensified rain fall and glacier shrinkage that threaten the food security and livelihoods of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.

“Over half of the world’s population lives in watersheds of major rivers originating in mountains with glaciers and snow,” UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director Achim Steiner says in the preface to a new report – High Mountain Glaciers and Climate Change: challenges to human livelihoods and adaptation.

“A warming climate is now causing a global recession in glaciers, and some areas may lose their glaciers entirely in this century.”

He notes that worldwide, and particularly in Asia, floods strongly affect over 100 million people every year, killing tens of thousands and increasing cases of disease and ill health as cities with limited or no sewage become flooded and drinking water polluted.

“Here lies a crucial message for all nations involved,” he writes. “Changes in the intensity and timing of rains, added to variable snow and glacier melt will increasingly challenge food security and the livelihoods of the most vulnerable under various climate change scenarios.

“With urban populations expected to nearly double to over 6 billion people in 40 years, and land pressures rising in the surrounding hills, the development of strategies for adaptation is urgently needed with women often being in the centre of the ability of families to cope.”

Such strategies need to be wide ranging, covering urban planning, improved water storage and efficiency in agriculture, and the restoration of critical ecosystems like forests and wetlands that can enhance water supplies and act as buffers against extreme climatic events such as flooding.

The report, compiled from scientists and research centres worldwide, including the Norwegian Polar Institute and Norut Alta, stresses that although glacier systems show a great amount of inherent complexity and variation, clear overall trends indicate that global glacier recession is likely to accelerate in coming decades.

“One of the chief challenges in the coming decades will be to capture and store excess water during periods of high water availability,” it says. “We are likely to experience more extreme melting, as well as extreme events of rainfall. With great land-use pressures in many mountain regions, including deforestation and heavy grazing combined with extreme rainfall, flashfloods and flooding will likely increase…

“Storing excess water, adapting to floods and developing and implementing more effective irrigation systems will become crucial to future food security in regions dependent upon mountains for their water supply.”

The report notes that glaciers in Patagonia in Argentina and Chile followed by those in Alaska and its coastal mountain ranges have overall been losing mass faster and for longer than those in other parts of the world.

The third fastest rate of loss is in the northwest United States and southwest Canada followed by the high mountains of Asia, including the Hindu Kush of the Himalayas, the Arctic and the Andes.

Overall Europe’s glaciers had been putting on mass since the mid-1970s but this trend was reversed around the year 2000. While the overall trend is down, higher levels of precipitation in some places has increased the mass and in some cases the size of glaciers, including in western Norway, New Zealand’s South Island and parts of Tierra del Fuego in South America.

Some mountain ranges are experiencing apparently contradictory effects. In smaller areas of the Karakoram range in Asia, for example, advancing glaciers have even over-ridden areas that have been ice-free for some 50 years, while in the Tianshan and Himalayan ranges, glaciers are receding – some rapidly.

Melting glaciers could, in some places and perhaps in a matter of a few decades, cause a reduction in water in dry areas, such as Central Asia and parts of the Andes. In dry regions of Central Asia, Chile, Argentina and Peru, where there is little rainfall, receding glaciers will have much more impact on seasonal water availability than in Europe or in parts of Asia where monsoon rains play a much more prominent role.

Many glaciers may take centuries to fully disappear but many low-lying, smaller glaciers, which are often crucial water sources in dry lands, are melting much faster, the report notes. Most glaciers have been shrinking since the end of the Little Ice Age around 150 years ago, but the rate of loss has increased substantially in many regions since the start of the 1980s.

In some regions, it is very likely that glaciers will largely disappear by the end of this century, whereas in others glacier cover will persist but in a reduced form for many centuries to come.

As glaciers melt, lakes held back by walls of mud, soil and stones can form, sometimes containing millions of tonnes of water which can put at risk villagers and infrastructure, such as power plants, the report adds.

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Also Visit Our Mekong Pages here to see a short documentary from The Asia Society called “The Melt” and review comparative photos from some of the major Asian glaciers…

Farmers to denounce “market-based solutions” to climate change

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Meena Menon for The Hindu.

CANCUN: Very different from the Arctic temperatures at Moon Palace, where the United Nations climate change conference is under way, a large open-air gymnasium and basketball court is the venue for the alternative Global Forum for Life, Environmental and Social Justice, which began here on Saturday.

Protests planned

Led by Via Campesina, or the International Peasant Movement, farmers have been travelling around Mexico before their caravans arrived here. Among the major actions planned is a day of protests on December 7 to reject the “false and market-based solutions” to climate change.

Positioned as a direct challenge to the United Nations meetings, Via Campesina, which has a presence in more than 70 countries, has been uniting farmers, workers and indigenous people to stake a claim for their rights and make their voices heard.

At the open-air meeting at the Via Campesina Forum, the fragrance of flowers and incense waft through the air, as speakers make their points forcefully.

There are stalls selling T shirts and crafts and music. The atmosphere may seem relaxed, but the people are determined.

Alberto Gomez, a leader of the peasant movement in Mexico and of Via Campesina, reckons that the U.N. conference will end in failure, and that will be a failure for all human beings who are worried about climate change.

As opposed to the U.N. meeting, which is meant to make a business out of climate change, the Via Campesina Forum is a collective space for people and non-governmental organisations to debate on the crucial issues affecting their communities. No one here has faith in the U.N. meeting yielding any result.

Since November 28, people having been travelling around Mexico, and this Forum is a means of bringing pressure on the government.

“This is not an exclusive matter of the government; the people have to be involved too. The Mexican government is promoting programmes that will help U.S. interests and transnational companies,” Mr. Gomez says. Seventy per cent of the Mexican territory is given over to mining, and some 25 per cent in concessions to Canadian companies. All its rivers are polluted, but everything is a business — garbage, water, he says.

Grass root movements

The Global Forum is a platform for grass root movements that need a space for expressing their dissent and discussing solutions. “It is impossible for people to go near the conference or have any say,” says Paul Nicholson, member of the Basque Farmers Union.

“I think it is better to have no agreement than have a bad one.” The solutions to the problem of climate change, as suggested by the governments, have more to do with making money than with resolving the issue at hand, he says.

Opposing carbon trading and making money out it, he says it is senseless that the U.N. conference is going to strengthen privatisation and selling air and forests as a solution.

Nandini Kardahalli Singaragowda of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, a farmers group, says people who are polluting the atmosphere are not paying for it. Agriculture and climate go together, and the farmers suffer in many ways. At forums like this, it is the people-to-people exchange, and these views must be heard.

For indigenous people and farmers in Guatemala, the struggle for land rights and the need to have good climate policies go hand in hand. Maria Canil Grave says the impact of climate change in Guatemala is huge because of extensive deforestation. Mining and hydroelectric projects are putting more pressure on land, she says, and the U.N. climate change conferences only help to increase privatisation.

For the past 500 years, the land of the indigenous people was traded or sold, and no government is interested in giving them any rights, says Dolores Sales.

“Our people are not going after riches; we want our cultural rights and values to be respected. Ours is a better way of looking at the world. Indigenous people are affected the most by climate change.” Is anyone listening?

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Google Earth Engine debuts

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By Juliet Eilperin for The Washington Post

In what promises to be one of the most impressive innovations to come out of the Cancun climate talks, the philanthropic arm of Google is launching a new technology platform Thursday that will allow worldwide monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment.

Google Earth Engine draws on 25 years of satellite images collected by LANDSAT, the longest continuing orbiting satellite on earth, to provide what the project’s engineering manager Rebecca Moore calls “a living, breathing model of the earth with all of the data and analysis that’s available.”

The new product, which Google.org developed over the past two years and will post online for free, could prove critical in helping developing nations track deforestation rates in real time as well as other key environmental changes. One of the few substantive achievements the United Nations climate talks may produce is an agreement on how to compensate rainforest nations for preserving their forests in order to absorb carbon dioxide, but these efforts need to be validated by tracking data that proves the regions in question face the pressure of deforestation and have been able to resist it.

Google also will provide 20 million CPU hours free of charge to the developing world and scientific community in order to help these groups take advantage of the new analytical tool. This could provide a basis for enforcing agreements forged under the U.N. initiative known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries, or REDD, which may be finalized as early as next week in Cancun.

Moore said the project aims to show “how the earth is changing under a changing climate, and use that information to drive public policy… We’re hoping that it will elevate people’s understanding of the planet.”

Unlike some Google Labs products that have been cloaked in secrecy, Google has collaborated with scientists such as Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Carlos Souza of Imazon and Matt Hansen of the Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University to help hone its forest monitoring tool.

Along with Hansen and CONAFOR, Mexico’s national forestry commission, Google has already used the platform to create the finest-scale forest and water map ever made of Mexico. It required 15,000 hours of computation, which normally would have taken three years if run on a single computer, but the group completed it in less than a day on Google Earth Engine by using 1,000 computers in parallel to process more than 53,000 LANDSAT scenes taken between 1984 and 2010. CONAFOR provided data it had collected on the ground to calibrate and validate the algorithm.

“No one has ever been able to analyze that entire data set for Mexico, or even come close,” Moore said.

Scientific experts are optimistic that policymakers can make progress on saving tropical forests worldwide, in part because of technological advances and the political will developing countries such as Brazil have shown in recent years.

In a telephone press conference organized by Avoided Deforestation Partners Wednesday, Doug Boucher, who directs the Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the global trend in deforestation “is one of the few bright spots amid the otherwise gloomy news as far as climate change is concerned.”

Brazil, Boucher noted, has cut its annual carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation from 5.5 billion tons several years ago to an average of 3.5 billion over the past five years.

See the gallery of Google Earth Engine’s satellite images here.

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Hooray for Google!