NASA's 2013 HS3 hurricane mission to delve into Saharan dust

NASA: NASA's 2013 Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel or HS3 mission will investigate whether Saharan dust and its associated warm and dry air, known as the Saharan Air Layer or SAL, favors or suppresses the development of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean. The effects of Saharan dust on tropical cyclones is a controversial area of science. During the 2012 campaign, NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft gathered valuable data on the dust layer that swirled around Tropical Storm Nadine for several days.

The Saharan dust layer is composed of sand and other mineral particles that are swept up in air currents and whisked westward over the Atlantic Ocean. The extreme daytime heating of the Sahara creates instability in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, warming and drying the air near the surface and cooling and moistening the air near the top of the dust layer near 5 kilometers (16,500 feet). Once it exits the African coast, the dust-laden air moves over air that is cooler, and moister, and it's the temperature inversion of warm air over cold that prevents deep cloud development. This suppression of deep cloud formation along with the dry air within the dust layer is reasons why this Saharan air layer is sometimes thought to suppress tropical cyclone development. On the other hand, the southern boundary of this hot desert air essentially acts like a front whose attendant wind patterns are a major source of the African waves that are precursors to storm formation.

HS3 addresses the controversial role of the Saharan Air Layer, or SAL, in tropical storm formation and intensification by taking measurements from three instruments on board the Global Hawk. These instruments include a cloud physics lidar which uses a laser to measure vertical profiles of dust; a dropsonde system that releases small instrumented packages from the aircraft that fall to the surface while measuring profiles of temperature, humidity, and winds; and an infrared sounder that measures temperature and humidity in clear-sky regions.

...The dust data collected by the Global Hawk is important for scientific studies on the SAL. Other data was useful operationally to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the entity that issues forecasts for tropical cyclones. The forecasters at the NHC used data from dropsondes released from the Global Hawk in the discussion of Nadine at 11 a.m. EDT on Sept. 20, "The current intensity is kept at 45 knots (51.7 mph/83.3 kmh)…is in good agreement with dropsonde data from the NASA global hawk aircraft and AMSU [satellite instrument] estimates."...

The Global Hawk's flight pattern, from NASA

Ethiopia, Egypt tone down talk of war over Nile dam

Reuters: Africa's second and third most populous nations have traded barbs in past weeks about Ethiopia's new hydroelectric project, which Egypt fears will reduce a water supply vital for its 84 million people, who mostly live in the Nile valley and delta.

Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi said on June 10 he did not want war, but would keep "all options open", prompting Ethiopia to say it was ready to defend its $4.7 billion Great Renaissance Dam, which lies near the border with Sudan.

Ethiopia summoned the Egyptian ambassador this month after politicians in Cairo were shown on television suggesting they supported Ethiopian rebels and military action.

"Some pronouncements were made in the heat of the moment because of emotions. They are behind us," Mohamed Kamel Amr, Egypt's foreign minister, told a joint news conference with his Ethiopian counterpart Tedros Adhanom in Ethiopia's capital....

Blue Nile meeting the White Nile below Khartoum, shot by NASA

Environmental protests of the Middle East show eco awareness in Arab world

Moshe Terdiman in Green Prophet: During the last six years, the words energy security, water security, and food security could be found a lot in the Arab media. Since most of the Arab media is controlled by the Arab regimes, the appearance of these items shows that the environmental awareness of the Arab regimes has been on the rise.

Indeed, as a result of climate change and global warming the Middle East has been facing five major environmental security challenges: water security, food security, energy security, desertification, and land degradation.

These issues have been further aggravated by other socio-economic processes, which characterize the Middle East and include: the huge population growth, the rapid urbanization process and the development of mega-cities on the expense of rural areas.

The urban infrastructures, such as sewage and waste disposal, which have been inadequate anyway and are in dire need for modernization, could not stand the ever-growing human pressure and in a few cities, some of them have totally collapsed.

Moreover, the natural resources, such as water and food, which were just sufficient for the cities’ residents, have been stressed to the limit due to the huge population density within the cities. In addition, green spaces within the cities have given place to gray buildings which have been built whenever possible in order to supply the lodging needs of the incessant stream of new immigrants and local citizens....

Praying in Tahrir, shot by Sherine Tadros, Al-Jazeera English, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license 

14,000 square kilometers of India's land at risk due to sea level rise

Moneycontrol.com (India): The Indian subcontinent may lose close to 14000 sq km of land with rise of a one metre of sea level due to climate change, a study has warned.

"Total areal loss due to marine intrusion into coastal areas of the Indian subcontinent is estimated at approximately 13,973 sq km and 60,497 sq km of land area under 1m (metre) and 6m sea-level rise scenarios, respectively," says a report published in the latest issue of Journal of Threatened Taxa.

Prepared by a group of ecologists led by Dr M Zafar-ul Islam, the study presents an overview of potential consequences of 1m and 6m sea level rise for coastal conservation areas on the Indian subcontinent.

Sea level is rising due to thermal expansion of the ocean, mountain glacier melting, and discharge from ice sheets as a result of global warming. Several coastal eco-regions and conservation areas are predicted to lose over half of their land areas to marine intrusion, particularly under the 6m sea level rise scenario....

Sea Shore at Kanyakumari with Our Lady of Ransom Church at the backdrop. Shot by Pp391, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Weather disasters cost US $110 billion in 2012

Doyle Rice in CIO Today: With $110 billion in damage, 2012 was the second-costliest year for weather and climate disasters since these records began to be kept in 1980, federal climate scientists announced Thursday. Only 2005 was costlier, with $160 billion in damage, when Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast.

The National Climatic Data Center reported the USA in 2012 had 11 separate weather and climate events that each had losses exceeding $1 billion in damage. This follows another catastrophic year, 2011, when a record 14 separate billion-dollar disasters were documented

So is the weather really getting worse?  "2011 and 2012 were truly extreme years climatologically, as we saw several types of all-time records shattered," reports climate scientist Adam Smith of the climate center. "We experienced historic tornado outbreaks and large-scale  flooding in 2011, crippling drought and heat waves in both 2011 and 2012, and of course, tropical cyclones Irene and Sandy damaging the Northeast. "This is all compounded by the growing amount of property that exists in harm's way," Smith says.

The two major drivers of damage costs in 2012 were Hurricane Sandy (at approximately $65 billion) and the year-long drought (at approximately $30 billion.) Sandy was also the nation's deadliest disaster, causing more than 130 fatalities, the climate center reported....

Hurricane Sandy at Marblehead, Massachusetts, shot by The Brikes, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Leave coal in ground, Australian scientists urge governmen

Ben Cubby in the Sydney Morning Herald: Most of Australia's coal reserves will have to be left unburned if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a major new report from the federal government's Climate Commission. The report puts the key science advisory body on a collision course with some of the nation's biggest export industries, and marks the first time a government agency has endorsed calls for fossil fuel industries to be phased out because of their contribution to climate change.

Its findings mean that most of Australia's known coal, oil and gas reserves – many of which are already subject to minerals production licences held by companies such as BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto – must somehow be left alone if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.

The Climate Commission acknowledged its conclusions were "sobering" and that the potential for economic disruption could be serious, but said there was no alternative if the world was to avoid dangerous climate change.

"How people react to this is up to the policymakers and governments, as well as investors," said Professor Lesley Hughes, co-author o
f the report The Critical Decade 2013 – Climate change science, risks and responses, to be released on Monday.

"It isn't our job to reconcile the politics of this with the science," she said. "We are simply presenting the facts as best we know them. Just because the facts may be unpalatable to some people doesn't make them any less important."...

Trains and overburden dredge on the former 900mm gauge railway in the open cut coal mine at Yallourn, Victoria, Australia. Taken in 1948 or thereabouts. Scanned from Gill, Herman (1949) Three Decades: The story of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria from its inception to December 1948, Hutchinson & Co

Early flooding analysis shows european insurers well positioned

Fort Mill Times: A.M. Best Co. has been analysing the impact of the heavy rain and subsequent flooding throughout Central Europe. The downpours at the beginning of June, which followed persistent rains throughout May, have resulted in severe flooding and the bursting of rivers including the Danube, Elbe, Rhine, Main, Vltava, and Neckar.

In a new Best’s Briefing titled, “Early Flooding Analysis Shows European Insurers Well Positioned”, A.M. Best states that the final loss that the insurance industry will face currently remains unclear given the situation is still developing in the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Switzerland. Many towns remain submerged, and water must recede before loss adjusters are able to determine the full extent of the damages. However, based on the coverage dynamics in these markets, A.M. Best expects economic losses will far exceed insured losses.

This briefing is the result of various discussions that A.M. Best has held with market participants in the affected region over the past fortnight. A.M. Best has visited and interviewed a range of industry figures with involvement in the countries impacted by the recent flooding.

The recent flooding is the worst to hit Central Europe since 2002, which resulted in economic damages of EUR 17 billion and estimated insured losses of E

UR 3.4 billion. However, in the past decade, flood protection has improved and insurers have introduced higher deductibles or withdrawn cover in loss-prone areas. Compared to the floods of 2002, to date fewer major economic centres and municipal towns have been flooded. Rural areas have tended to be the most severely impacted, and underinsurance is common in the affected towns. In Eastern Europe, many residential property owners are uninsured.

For A.M. Best’s rated insurers and reinsurers, the recent floods are expected to be an earnings event rather than a hit to capital. Stefan Holzberger, managing director, analytics, said: “The first five months of 2013 have been benign for natural catastrophes and large losses, and as a result, the flood losses are well within most companies’ cat loss budgets for 2013.”...

The Elbe's peaking in Dresden, shot by Dr. Bernd Gross, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Satellites identify hotspots for drought in coming years

Sarah Fecht in Popular Mechanics: Despite heavy rains this week, drought persists throughout much of the Midwest and Southern U.S., forcing residents to pump more water from deep underground. Now a new paper in Science points out that our nation's groundwater reserves are also being depleted throughout large swaths of the U.S., partly because we're not doing a good job of keeping track of how much groundwater we're extracting versus how much gets replenished through precipitation.

"We don't really monitor water use," says James Famiglietti, an earth scientist at University of California, Irvine, and coauthor on the new paper. "It's crazy that we don't. It's like having a bank account and not keeping track of your deposits and withdrawals."

Famiglietti says NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites can help monitor groundwater on a global scale, and could even enhance flood and drought predictions. ...Using data from GRACE, Famiglietti's team has created a comprehensive map of groundwater levels across the United States, and it reinforces the identification of some troubling trends. For one, the northern U.S. is getting wetter over time, leading to increased risk from floods, and the southern U.S. is getting drier, leading to heightened risk of drought.

The map pinpoints six hotspots at high risk for water-related catastrophes: California's Central Valley, the Southern High Plains Aquifer in East Texas, and the areas around Houston, Alabama, and the mid-Atlantic states have all suffered steady groundwater depletion. Without proactive management, the authors say, aquifers in those regions could run dry within a few decades, putting the nation's food supply at risk. Meanwhile, water storage is increasing in the Missouri River Basin, making the region more prone to dangerous flooding.

"There's a picture that emerges from looking at these maps," Famiglietti says. "The subtext is that we have a national-scale problem that requires national-scale, coordinated, comprehensive water management . . . I don't think people realize the extent of the problem."...

This panoramic NASA view of east-central Texas on September 6, 2011, highlights numerous smoke plumes caused by wildfires burning across the state

Pakistan can expect worse heatwaves to come, meteorologists warn

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK): Near-record temperatures in Pakistan have claimed hundreds of lives and devastated crops in the third major heatwave in four years. But as temperatures on Friday dipped to under 38C (100F), signalling the end of nearly four weeks of blistering heat, leading meteorologists warned that the country could expect longer, more intense and more frequent events in future.

Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, a vice-president of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and former director of Pakistan's Met Office, said the recent extreme summer temperatures that are commonly followed by massive floods could largely be attributed to climatic warming. "If we look at the frequency and the trend of the extreme weather events impacting Pakistan then it is easy to find its link with climate change," he said.

Chaudhry, who wrote Pakistan's climate change policy, authored a report in 2013 that showed the number of heatwaves in Pakistan had increased from 1980 to 2009 and that average temperature in the Indus delta was steadily rising. In 2010, the May temperature in Mohenjo-daro, a semi-ruined city in Sindh province, reached 53.5C (128F), the fourth highest temperature ever recorded in the world and the highest ever in Asia....

Behind the rhetoric what is really being done to combat desertification?

Gavin Haines in the Independent (UK): Like most people living along the Sahel – the drylands between Africa’s tropical savannahs and the Sahara Desert – Mustafa Ba is all too familiar with the effects of desertification. Thanks to a combination of overgrazing and deforestation, he has watched the countryside around his Senegalese village, Mboula, turn into a dusty, unproductive wasteland.

“Trees provide us with many benefits,” explains Mustafa, as we sit on a mat in the centre of his village. “They are good for the soil and important for food security.” But in impoverished regions of rural Africa, selling firewood is a source of quick cash and many trees along the Sahel have been felled. Communities have paid a high price for such enterprise; with no trees to protect the land, vast swathes of the Sahel have succumbed to desertification.

According to the United Nations, Mustafa is one of 850 million people – nearly one eighth of the global population – to be directly affected by this process of land degradation. But it’s not just a local problem; desertification has an impact on food production, which pushes up grocery bills around the world (the UN estimates Guatemala alone loses 24 per cent of its agricultural GDP due to desertification). 

To raise awareness of the issue, the UN reserved June 17 as World Day to Combat Desertification, but behind the rhetoric it has also been supporting projects to tackle the phenomenon head on. One of those is Great Green Wall of Africa, a 4,800-mile “wall” of trees that is being planted across the continent between Senegal and Djibouti....

A desert encampment at Lompoul, Senegal, shot by G.No, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Warm ocean drives most Antarctic ice shelf loss

UC Irvine News: Ocean waters melting the undersides of Antarctic ice shelves, not icebergs calving into the sea, are responsible for most of the continent’s ice loss, a study by UC Irvine and others has found. The first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice shelves discovered that basal melt, or ice dissolving from underneath, accounted for 55 percent of shelf loss from 2003 to 2008 – a rate much higher than previously thought. Ice shelves, floating extensions of glaciers, fringe 75 percent of the vast, frozen continent.

The findings, to be published in the June 14 issue of Science, will help scientists improve projections of how Antarctica, which holds about 60 percent of the planet’s fresh water locked in its massive ice sheet, will respond to a warming ocean and contribute to sea level rise. It turns out that the tug of seawaters just above the freezing point matters more than the breaking off of bergs.

“We find that iceberg calving is not the dominant process of ice removal. In fact, ice shelves mostly melt from the bottom before they even form icebergs,” said lead author Eric Rignot, a UC Irvine professor who’s also a researcher with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “This has profound implications for our understanding of interactions between Antarctica and climate change. It basically puts the Southern Ocean up front as the most significant control on the evolution of the polar ice sheet.”

Ice shelves grow through a combination of land ice flowing to the sea and snow falling on their surfaces. The researchers combined a regional snow accumulation model and a new map of Antarctica’s bedrock with ice shelf thickness, elevation and velocity data captured by Operation IceBridge – an ongoing NASA aerial survey of Greenland and the South Pole. (Rignot will host a planning session of Operation IceBridge scientists at UC Irvine on June 17 and 18.)

Ocean melting is distributed unevenly around the continent. The three giant ice shelves of Ross, Filchner and Ronne, which make up two-thirds of Antarctica’s ice shelves, accounted for only 15 percent of the melting. Meanwhile, less than a dozen small ice shelves floating on relatively warm waters produced half the total meltwater during the same period....

In this NASA image, two massive icebergs drifted along the coast of East Antarctica in early March 2010. In mid-February 2010, the Rhode Island-sized Iceberg B-09B collided with the protruding Mertz Glacier Tongue along the George V Coast.

UCLA climate study predicts dramatic loss in local snowfall

Alison Hewitt in the UCLA Newsroom: By midcentury, snowfall on Los Angeles–area mountains will be 30 to 40 percent less than it was at the end of the 20th century, according to a UCLA study released today and led by UCLA climate expert Alex Hall.

The projected snow loss, a result of climate change, could get even worse by the end of the 21st century, depending on how the world reacts. Sustained action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions could keep annual average snowfall levels steady after mid-century, but if emissions continue unabated, the study predicts that snowfall in Southern California mountains will be two-thirds less by the year 2100 than it was in the years leading up to 2000.

"Climate change has become inevitable, and we're going to lose a substantial amount of snow by midcentury," said Hall, a professor in UCLA's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. "But our choices matter. By the end of the century, there will be stark differences in how much snowfall remains, depending on whether we begin to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions."

"This science is clear and compelling: Los Angeles must begin today to prepare for climate change," said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. "We invested in this study and created the AdaptLA framework to craft innovative solutions and preserve our quality of life for the next generation of Angelenos."

Less snowfall in general and a complete loss of snow at some lower elevations doesn't just have implications for snow enthusiasts who enjoy skiing and sledding in the local mountains; it also could mean sizeable economic losses for snow-dependent businesses and communities. Less snow could also mean changes in the seasonal timing of local water resources, greater difficulty controlling floods, and damage to mountain and river ecosystems....

Los Angeles with mountains in the background, shot by Todd Jones, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Legally binding ban proposed on ocean fertilisation

Dyna Rochmyaningsih in SciDev.net: Australia has joined with Nigeria and South Korea to propose a legally binding ban on commercial ocean fertilisation. But the move would not prevent legitimate scientific research, according to Tony Burke, Australian Minister of the Environment.

The proposal was sent to the London Convention and Protocol, which governs marine pollution and dumping at sea, on 16 May, and it will be considered when signatory nations meet in October.

Ocean fertilisation is a controversial geoengineering technique in which nutrient particles like iron, phosphorous and nitrogen are poured into the sea to induce growth of photosynthetic microorganisms — known as phytoplankton — that can fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

When phytoplankton die and sink they transfer carbon into the deep ocean, but their growth is usually limited in nutrient-poor water. The technique has attracted scientific and commercial interest as a way to generate carbon credits, and as a potential climate change mitigation mechanism. Some also proposed it as a way to boost fish populations.

Last year, American businessman Russ George, then a director of the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, dumped 100 tonnes of iron near the Haida Gwaii Islands, off the coast of Western Canada. The aim was to increase phytoplankton populations, thereby boosting marine productivity — and eventually the salmon population. The act enraged scientists and environmentalists, many of whom say iron fertilisation is unscientific and unproven, especially on a large-scale....

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba (Feb. 10, 2012) Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Shane Tuck films diving operations off the coast of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Expeditionary Combat Camera's Underwater Photo Team conducts semi-annual training to hone its divers' specialized skill set and ensure valuable support of Department of Defense activities worldwide. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jayme Pastoric/Released) 120210-N-XD935-048 

Papaya-clay combo could cut cost of water purification in developing countries

American Chemical Society: An inexpensive new material made of clay and papaya seeds removes harmful metals from water and could lower the cost of providing clean water to millions of people in the developing world, scientists are reporting. Their study on this “hybrid clay” appears in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Emmanuel Unuabonah and colleagues explain that almost 1 billion people in developing countries lack access to reliable supplies of clean water for drinking, cooking and other key uses. One health problem resulting from that shortage involves exposure to heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury, released from industrial sources into the water. Technology exists for removing those metals from drinking water, but often is too costly in developing countries. So these scientists looked for a more affordable and sustainable water treatment adsorbent.

They turned to two materials readily available in some developing countries. One was kaolinite clay, used to make ceramics, paint, paper and other products. The other: seeds of the Carica papaya fruit. Both had been used separately in water purification in the past, but until now, they had not been combined in what the scientists term “hybrid clay.” Their documentation of the clay’s effectiveness established that the material “has a strong potential for replacing commercial activated carbon in treatment of wastewater in the developing world.”...

New report identifies "regret-free" approaches for adapting African agriculture to climate change

AllAfrica.com via CGIAR: Whether it's swapping coffee for cocoa in Central America or bracing for drought in Sri Lanka with a return to ancient water storage systems, findings from a new report from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) chart a path for farmers to adapt to climate shifts despite uncertainties about what growing conditions will look like decades from now.

As this week's UN climate talks in Bonn continue to sideline a formal deal on agriculture, the study, Addressing uncertainty in adaptation planning for agriculture, which was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS), finds that the cloudy aspects of climate forecasts are no excuse for a paralysis in agriculture adaptation policies.

"Climate projections will always have a degree of uncertainty, but we need to stop using uncertainty as a rationale for inaction," said Sonja Vermeulen, head of research at CCAFS and the lead author of the study.

"Even when our knowledge is incomplete, we often have robust grounds for choosing best-bet adaptation actions and pathways, by building pragmatically on current capacities in agriculture and environmental management, and using projections to add detail and to test promising options against a range of scenarios."...

Rain dampens Colorado’s worst-ever wildfire

Environment News Service: A welcome rain [Friday] afternoon is helping to extinguish the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history. The Black Forest Fire within the Colorado Springs city limits killed two people Tuesday while they were trying to flee, and before the rain began it was still raging out of control.

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa told reporters the bodies of two people were found about 2 pm Thursday in their garage with the car doors open. They are believed to have died Tuesday afternoon as their Black Forest neighborhood was being evacuated. Their identities have not yet been released.

Since it started on Tuesday, the wind-driven Black Forest Fire has consumed 24.5 square miles, destroyed 389 homes and forced the evacuation of 41,000 people. Since the rain began, law enforcement officials have lifted all mandatory evacuation notices, warning that they could be re-imposed if the fire spreads again.

An estimated 800 responders are working to contain the the Black Forest fire, which before the rain started was just five percent contained. At least 140 personnel from the Colorado National Guard and National Guard members from as far away as North Carolina are assisting civil authorities with firefighting support.

Until Thursday, last year’s Waldo Canyon fire, 10 miles west of the current blaze, had topped the list of Colorado’s most destructive fires, with 346 homes destroyed. Now the Black Forest fire is considered the state’s most destructive....

A night time image of the Black Forest Fire at 9:30 pm on the night of the first day, 11 June 2013. Photo was taken from the Broadmoor Bluffs neighborhood of Colorado Springs on the lower slope of Cheyenne Mountain, about 20 miles away.  Shot by Ahodges7, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Developing world bucks decline in green energy funding

Siobhan Chan in SciDev.net: Spending on renewable energy is undergoing a geographic shift, with developing countries investing more last year despite an overall 12 per cent drop in global spending since 2011, according to two reports published this week (12 June).  The reports found that developing countries invested a total of US$112 billion in renewable energy in 2012, up 19 per cent from 2011.

Just under four per cent of the US$244 billion invested globally went on research and development, rising — albeit only slightly — for an eighth consecutive year. At US$9.6 billion in 2012, global R&D funding has almost doubled since 2004.

'Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2013', by the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance and information service Bloomberg New Energy Finance, was published alongside 'Renewables 2013: Global Status Report' by REN21, a global renewable energy policy network.

Two-thirds of the 138 countries with renewable energy policies and targets were in the developing world, the Global Trends report found.  Of the developing countries, China continued to dominate the sector, increasing its investment by 22 per cent to US$67 billion. Latin American countries such as Chile and Mexico also increased their investment in the sector.

However, countries in the Middle East and Africa had the greatest growth, increasing spending by 228 per cent to US$12 billion....

A wind farm in Mongolia, shot by Steven Buss, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Tillage and reduced-input rotations affect runoff from agricultural fields

Seed Daily via SPX: No-till management practices can reduce soil erosion, but evidence suggests they can also lead to increased runoff of dissolved phosphorus from soil surfaces. Meanwhile, farmers looking to avoid herbicides often have to combat weeds with tillage, which causes erosion. With all of the tradeoffs of different management systems, which one should growers use? To answer that question, researchers from the USDA Agricultural Research Service compared nutrient and sediment loss from no-till, conventional tillage, and reduced-input rotation watersheds in a study published online in Soil Science Society of America Journal.

By keeping a protective layer of plant matter on the soil surface, no-till practices reduce the loss of soil and phosphorus (P) attached to soil particles. But no-till requires herbicides to control weeds, and even after adoption of the practice by many farmers, harmful algal blooms were still occurring in surface waters. It looked as if no-till, while decreasing particulate P loss, was leading to increased runoff of dissolved P.

"Normally when you apply P-containing fertilizers, you would incorporate them into the soil," says Martin Shipitalo, lead author of the study. "With no-till, you're just broadcasting it on the soil surface, leading to high P concentrations at the surface. Even if you get less particulate loss, runoff will pick up that dissolved P that's highly concentrated at the soil surface."

Shipitalo and his team decided to look at data from a 16-year experiment to compare soil and nutrient runoff in watersheds managed in three different ways - no-till, conventional tillage (chisel-till), and reduced-input rotations. "The idea with the reduced-input rotation was to have a conservation practice that worked for farmers who do not want to use herbicides or large amounts of mineral fertilizers," explains Shipitalo.

In the current study, researchers provided most of the nutrients to crops in the reduced-input watersheds by planting red clover and spreading manure instead of fertilizers. They minimized the amount of bare soils and used just a shallow disking instead of total inversion tillage to leave some crop residue on the soil surface. While herbicides were used in the experiment, they aren't necessary because the light tilling and in-row cultivation that was done kept weeds under control.

"Reduced-input rotations strike a medium between conventional tillage and no-till," says Shipitalo. "And they could easily be adapted to be organic rotations."...

Ferdynand Rusczcyc's 1898 painting, "The Soil"

An ESA satellite measure's Europe's soil moisture before flood

European Space Agency: As parts of central Europe are battling with the most extensive floods in centuries, forecasters are hoping that ESA’s SMOS satellite will help to improve the accuracy of flood prediction in the future.

As its name suggests, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission monitors the amount of water held in the surface layers of the soil and the concentration of salt in the top layer of seawater. This information is helping scientists understand more about how water is cycled between the oceans, atmosphere and land – Earth’s water cycle. It is also helping to improve weather forecasts.

The massive flooding that central Europe is currently suffering was brought about by a wet spring and sudden heavy rains.

 SMOS carries a novel microwave sensor to capture images of ‘brightness temperature’ to derive information on soil moisture. Prior to the torrential rains, SMOS showed that soils in Germany were showing record levels of moisture – in fact, the highest ever observed.

The animation above shows the wet soils in blues and the dryer soils in yellows. ESA’s SMOS mission scientist, Matthias Drusch, explains, “Data from SMOS can be used to monitor the saturation of the soil.

“At the end of May we see that the soil was almost fully saturated, with record values for moisture. More rain meant that it immediately ran off as the surplus water could not soak into the soil, and this resulted in these terrible floods....

GIF from the ESA website

Study helps managers identify regions with multiple threat potential, including wildfires

Terra Daily via SPX: A recent study in the Journal of Forestry now offers managers a tool to help them identify regions exposed to multiple forest threats. The tool uses a novel 15-mile radius neighborhood analysis to highlight locations where threats are more concentrated relative to other areas, and identifies where multiple threats may intersect. It is a technique that may have never been used before to describe forest threats, according to the researchers.

"Policymakers and managers often rely on maps showing where forest threats are most prevalent; they then assess these threats in relation to the forest resources most valued by the public," explains Jeff Kline, the study's lead author and a research forester at the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station.

"Management priorities are then made based on this information. We have devised a way to combine and display forest threat data at its appropriate spatial scale and in a way that transcends political boundaries, using readily available GIS [geographic information system] analytical tools."

"To our knowledge, this is the first time that data describing different threats have been displayed in this manner," adds co-lead and research ecologist, Becky Kerns, "Our approach recognizes that a single point mapped as potentially highly vulnerable to a threat may not be all that important from a regional or national planning perspective. What is important is the concentration of threats within a defined and appropriate spatial scale of interest."...

The Beaver Creek fire in the Grand Tetons, 2012, National Park Service

Questions rise about seeding for ocean C02 sequestration

DOE Argonne National Laboratory: A new study on the feeding habits of ocean microbes calls into question the potential use of algal blooms to trap carbon dioxide and offset rising global levels. These blooms contain iron-eating microscopic phytoplankton that absorb C02 from the air through the process of photosynthesis and provide nutrients for marine life. But one type of phytoplankton, a diatom, is using more iron that it needs for photosynthesis and storing the extra in its silica skeletons and shells, according to an X-ray analysis of phytoplankton conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. This reduces the amount of iron left over to support the carbon-eating plankton.

“Just like someone walking through a buffet line who takes the last two pieces of cake, even though they know they’ll only eat one, they’re hogging the food,” said Ellery Ingall, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-lead author on this result.  “Everyone else in line gets nothing; the person’s decision affects these other people.”

Because of this iron-hogging behavior, the process of adding iron to surface water – called iron fertilization or iron seeding – may have only a short-lived environmental benefit. And, the process may actually reduce over the long-term how much C02 the ocean can trap.

Rather than feed the growth of extra plankton, triggering algal blooms, the iron fertilization may instead stimulate the gluttonous diatoms to take up even more iron to build larger shells. When the shells get large enough, they sink to the ocean floor, sequestering the iron and starving off the diatom’s plankton peers.

Over time, this reduction in the amount of iron in surface waters could trigger the growth of microbial populations that require less iron for nutrients, reducing the amount of phytoplankton blooms available to take in C02 and to feed marine life....

A phytoplankton bloom in Shark Bay off the West coast of Australia, NASA image

Chinese 'container hospitals' ready to deploy in Africa

Li Jiao in SciDev.net: Africa's first 'container hospital', developed by Chinese scientists, could be ready for use by the end of the month (June), following two years of development. It will be located in either Cameroon or Namibia, depending on government approval.

Its developers say that the hospital's ten component containers can be slotted together in different configurations, like toy blocks, depending on individual countries' needs.

Each hospital consists of ten containers with rooms for general clinics, waiting patients, treatments, a pharmacy and back-up power supply. The hospitals developers say they can be used for decades if properly maintained, and are intended for long-term service. It is hoped that several African countries will eventually benefit.

In 2010, Liu Yandong, the new Chinese vice premier, signed a memorandum to develop a portable hospital suitable for Africa. The concept was subsequently developed at The Low Cost Health Programme Centre (LCHPC) at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has led and funded the project, so far to the tune of 14 million renminbi (US$2.2 million). However, according to Zhou Shumin, director of LCHPC, the funding is not enough, and so the ministry has pledged to invest further.

Zhou says that container hospitals function in the same way as general hospitals — the only key difference is the size....

Stacks of shipping containers, shot by Danny Cornelissen, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Merkel urges greater flood protection as tours region

Space Daily via SPX: Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday that Germany still had much to do in bolstering the country's flood defences as she toured a northern water-logged region battling historic river levels.

Merkel made her fourth trip to flooded zones in around a week, visiting Hitzacker in Lower Saxony whose 4,000 residents have been told to leave their homes despite an anti-flood barrier set up after devastating 2002 floods.

The defence system has prevented the swollen River Elbe gushing into the town and Merkel said it showed the protective measure was worth having but said "there remains a lot to do", pledging further steps. She earlier went to Lauenburg, 40 kilometres (25 miles) southeast of Hamburg, where the town centre is covered by about 30 centimetres (a foot) of water.

The water level stabilised at around 9.5 metres (31 feet) overnight in the picturesque town of half-timbered houses but was still almost twice as high as normal.

Disastrous floods in Germany began to subside Wednesday after leaving at least 19 people dead in central Europe. While the River Elbe has begun to stabilise, thousands of volunteers are still working to shore up sodden dykes and some 10,000 soldiers are still helping in flooded regions....

The Elbe's high water mark in Dresden, shot by Coffins, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Czechs hope wealth-destroying floods can lift growth

Michael Winfrey in Reuters: Floods that have caused billions of euros in damage across central Europe may actually provide an economic boost for the Czech Republic, a country struggling to shrug off its longest recession in more than two decades.

Governments and insurers from Germany to Romania will have to pick up the costs of helping families and business recover from the floods, which have killed at least a dozen people and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes since the start of June.

But central bank Governor Miroslav Singer cautioned against confusing gross domestic product (GDP) growth with wealth. "The repair of flood damage will probably result in an acceleration of the tempo of GDP," he predicted in a presentation last week, adding: "This variable measures economic activity, or the creation of new value each year; GDP does not measure wealth!"

The rising waters have forced factories to halt production and snarled logistics, cutting into output, while sludge dredged up from river bottoms has wiped out crops in low-lying areas in the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

Those factors, however, could be outweighed - if only just - by the funds will governments pump into rebuilding infrastructure and the cash families and firms will spend on replacing lost or damaged items....

Flood in Prague 2013, Štvanice water-power plant. Shot by Jiří Sedláček, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Severe typhoon season expected

Wang Qian in China Daily: At least seven typhoons are expected to hit China this year, the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters said in May. Typhoon season runs from July to September, with the most intense storms occurring between August and October.

Zhang Ling, chief typhoon forecaster at the typhoon and marine forecast center under the China Meteorological Administration, said the number of typhoons likely to land in the country is similar to the average number recorded since 1949.

The first typhoon is expected to hit about mid-June, a little earlier than usual, Li Benxia, a typhoon expert at the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center of the State Oceanic Administration, said.

She said Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, near the East China Sea, may see more than six typhoons, and the local authorities should prepare for a harsh typhoon season. The South China Sea area is likely to be mild compared with the East China Sea, according to Li.

Experts have warned local authorities to pay close attention to the coming typhoon season, because the severe weather can cause damage and casualties on a massive scale. CMA Spokesman Chen Zhenlin said heavy rainfall is also expected....

Graphic from China Daily

China approves imports of GM soybean from Brazil

Seed Daily via AFP: China, the main buyer of Brazilian soybeans, has approved imports of three genetically modified varieties of the crop, to be produced on a large scale in the South American country.

The Agriculture Ministry said Monday that China gave its green light for the Intacta RR2 PRO variety, which can resist pests such as a type of caterpillar, as well as for the herbicide-resistant CV 127 and Liberty Link.

The agreement followed a meeting of Chinese and Brazilian agriculture ministers in Beijing. Many Brazilian soybean producers were awaiting China's approval before embarking on production of these genetically modified varieties, the ministry said.

Of the 7.2 million tons of soybean exported by Brazil in April, more than 5.6 million went to China. "This approval is even more important in view of the spread of the Helicoverpa armigera caterpillar in several Brazilian states," the ministry said in a statement....

Soybean seeds, shot by Scott Bauer of the US Department of Agriculture

Large-scale biodiversity is vital to maintain ecosystem health

Terra Daily via SPX: Over the years ecologists have shown how biological diversity benefits the health of small, natural communities. New analysis by ecologists at UC Santa Cruz demonstrates that even higher levels of biological diversity are necessary to maintain ecosystem health in larger landscapes over long periods of time.

Think of it as patches on a quilt, says Erika Zavaleta, UCSC associate professor of environmental studies. Each patch may be a diverse habitat of plants, animals, and insects but it is equally important that the landscape "quilt" is made up of a diversity of patches that are different from each other.

"A mix of meadows, young forest, old forest and shrub lands, for example, might provide more benefits than a landscape of continuous young forest, even if that young forest itself has high biodiversity," Zavaleta said.

Zavaleta and two ecologists who recently received Ph.D.s from UCSC illustrate the importance of landscape diversity in their article "Several scales of bioversity affect ecosystem multifunctionality" published this week in PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

..."We used the simulation models to create imaginary landscapes with many kinds of habitats," she said. The team was able to test combinations of "patches" in order to determine the overall potential health of the "quilt." The authors write: "In addition to conserving important species, maintaining ecosystem multifunctionality will require diverse landscape mosaics of diverse communities."...

A 1915 American quilt shot by Sean Pathasema, public domain

Cultivation of climate-change adapting crops a must for food security in Bangladesh

Dhaka Tribune (Bangladesh): Agri experts at a function urged farmers to cultivate climate-change adapting crops in disaster prone areas to boost food production of the country. As our country has been experiencing adverse impact of climate change over the last few years, creating a grave concern to agriculture, human health, livelihood, navigation, ecology, soil, environment and biodiversity, they said.

They made the comments while addressing a concluding session of a daylong training workshop for the farmers on the disaster risk in agri sector and its coping strategies at the agriculture training centre at Khamarbari of Gaibandha town on Monday.

Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) organised the function with the support of Food and Agriculture Organisation service project to educate the farmers to cultivate crops in all seasons and keep agro activities movable at any cost all year round facing the negative and adverse impacts caused by climate change.

Deputy Director of DAE Mir Abdur Razzak attended the function and addressed it as the chief guest and crops production specialist Golam Mostafa was present as the special guest while district training officer Zulfiquer Haider presided over the function.

...DD of DAE Mir Abdur Razzak said as the agro production is being hampered seriously and change in seasons is being noticed due to climate change, he suggested the farmers to take different steps for adaptation of the climate change....

A rice paddy in Bangladesh, shot by Balaram Mahalder, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

European coal pollution causes 22,300 premature deaths a year, study shows

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK): Air pollution from Europe's 300 largest coal power stations causes 22,300 premature deaths a year and costs companies and governments billions of pounds in disease treatment and lost working days, says a major study of the health impacts of burning coal to generate electricity.

The research, from Stuttgart University's Institute for energy economics and commissioned by Greenpeace International, suggests that a further 2,700 people can be expected to die prematurely each year if a new generation of 50 planned coal plants are built in Europe. "The coal-fired power plants in Europe cause a considerable amount of health impacts," the researchers concluded.

Analysis of the emissions shows that air pollution from coal plants is now linked to more deaths than road traffic accidents in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. In Germany and the UK, coal-fired power stations are associated with nearly as many deaths as road accidents. Polish coal power plants were estimated to cause more than 5,000 premature deaths in 2010.

The cumulative impact of pollution on health is "shocking", says an accompanying Greenpeace report. A total of 240,000 years of life were said to be lost in Europe in 2010 with 480,000 work days a year and 22,600 "life years" lost in Britain, the fifth most coal-polluted country. Drax, Britain's largest coal-powered station, was said to be responsible for 4,450 life years lost, and Longannet in Scotland 4,210....

The picture is of Queen Elizabeth and King George Dock in the background and the storage area for cheap imported Eastern European coal in the foreground. All but the bottom left hand side of this area is within the specified square (TA1528). The area of the coal heap is huge - about 16 hectares (39 acres). The picture was taken (from memory) at about 1200 feet. Shot by Andy Beecroft, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Water -- conflict or cooperation?

Asia Society-Northern California: “To what extent is water a factor in conflict and to what extent can we reduce water being a factor in conflict?” The question, posed by Peter Gleick, Co-Founder and President of the Pacific Institute, helped set the context for a panel discussion at ASNC on June 5 that looked at the potential security implications of water scarcity.

Gleick was joined by Brahma Chellaney of the Center for Policy Research (New Delhi), whose research has focused on water scarcity as a source of regional tensions, particularly in regions where the resource is shared. His 2012 book, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, deals at length with this topic and also won Asia Society’s 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award. The event was moderated by Peter Schwartz, a well-known futurist who founded the scenario planning organization Global Business Network. Schwartz is now Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning at Salesforce.com.

“Armies don’t have to march to battle to wage a water war,” argued Chellaney. “Water can be fashioned into a weapon depending on whether the state is located upstream or downstream.” He noted that international rivers create power struggles, such as when upstream countries reengineer water flows or downstream countries withhold data of their water endowments. In short, water can provide tremendous leverage among countries and can be used as a part of a larger strategy to elicit compliance among recipients.

Chellaney has spent his career focusing on emerging security issues that affect the world including climate change and energy, but believes that water scarcity will be the big issue in the coming years. This is especially true in Asia where climate change and other factors such as more demand for meat is intensifying and placing even greater strains on the region’s already finite supply of water. He argues that Asia's policy makers are not giving water the attention it deserves in public discourse. Instead “water policy is often left to hydrologists and engineers and not looked at strategically.” Integrating water in policy and planning will help to secure water over the long-term...

Water drop shot by Fir0002, Wikimedia Commons, under the following Creative Commons license:
Attribution NonCommercial Unported 3.0

New York City weather will get much more severe over next 3 decades

CBS News New York: If you thought Hurricane Sandy was bad, the mayor’s office says conditions are ripe for far worse weather around here: like heat waves, droughts and coastal flooding. The study that Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered on the city’s weather future predicts a grim scenario of more heat waves, more rain and wind and more coastal flooding that will affect increasing numbers of people. A panel of climate change experts compiled the study.

“When they’ve looked at what the potential storm surge from a so-called hundred-year flood could be, the height of that hundred-year flood could be five to six feet higher than Sandy in the out years, and maybe over six feet higher,” city Rebuilding and Resiliency director Seth Pinsky told reporters including WCBS 880′s Rich Lamb. “We’re likely to have more frequent heavy downpours and for those heavy downpours to be heavier.”

The city estimates that by the year 2050 there will be a 101 percent increase in the number of people affect by coastal flooding — from 398,000 in 2013 to 801,000 in 2050. Lost jobs will go up 59 percent from 271,000 this year to 434,000 in 2050.

“Our focus should not be on preparing for the next Sandy — in other words, preparing for a storm that is going to do precisely the same thing in precisely the same places, in precisely the same way as Sandy,” NYC Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway told CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer on Monday.

The city report predicts a significant increase in heat waves — three or more days with temperatures in the 90s, saying it could go from two a year to seven a year. “At the high end of their estimates, by the 2050s, New York could have as many 90-degree days as Birmingham, Alabama,” Pinsky said.

“It makes our infrastructure extremely vulnerable,” Holloway said. “It is clear that we’re going to need to make investments as a city, significant investments if we’re going to be protected over the long term.”...

Easter Sunday on Fifth Avenue in 1900

The Amazon rainforest's silent killer, understory fires, outburns deforestation

Keerthi Chandrashekar in Latinos Post: Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest may capture most of the headlines, but NASA scientists have found a previously-undiscovered killer lurking under the tree tops: understory fires. The extent of damage caused by these fires is so great that it has destroyed more of the Amazon in recent years than deforestation.

These understory fires have escaped NASA's satellites throughout the years because they are hidden from view and all that escapes through the thick tree canopies are wisps of smoke. The team of researchers had to utilize new techniques when analyzing satellite data.

...According to the study, understory fires between 1999 and 2010 ravaged 2.8 percent of the Amazon, or 33,000 square miles of forest. While grasses and shrubs in the Amazon savannah can handle fires that can spread up to 330 feet per minute, the trees and plants underneath the thick forest canopy cannot. Understory fires burn at a slow rate of only a few feet per minute, but destroy 10-50 percent of the burn area's trees. A slow but efficient killer of the forest.

The study also found no correlation between deforestation for farmland done through burning and understory fires. The highest rates of destruction done by the understory fires were in 2005, 2007, and 2010, while the most prolific years for manmade deforestation were 2003 and 2004.

...The scientists are hoping the study will help drive further research into the way climate change is contributing to understory fires. The existence of these understory fires changes the way carbon emissions from rainforests should be looked at....

Amazon fire smoke seen from space, via NASA

NASA to study how pollution, storms and climate mix

Space Daily via SPX: NASA aircraft will take to the skies over the southern United States this summer to investigate how air pollution and natural emissions, which are pushed high into the atmosphere by large storms, affect atmospheric composition and climate.

NASA will conduct its most complex airborne science campaign of the year from Houston's Ellington Field, which is operated by the agency's Johnson Space Center, beginning Aug. 7 and continuing through September. The field campaign draws together coordinated observations from NASA satellites, aircraft and an array of ground sites.

More than 250 scientists, engineers and flight personnel, including several from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are participating in the Studies of Emissions, Atmospheric Composition, Clouds and Climate Coupling by Regional Surveys (SEAC4RS) campaign. The project is sponsored by the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Brian Toon of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is the lead scientist.

Aircraft and sensors will probe the atmosphere from top to bottom at the critical time of year when weather systems are strong enough and regional air pollution and natural emissions are prolific enough to pump gases and particles high into the atmosphere. The result is potentially global consequences for Earth's atmosphere and climate.

"In summertime across the United States, emissions from large seasonal fires, metropolitan areas and vegetation are moved upward by thunderstorms and the North American Monsoon," Toon said. "When these chemicals get into the stratosphere they can affect the whole Earth. They also may influence how thunderstorms behave. With SEAC4RS we hope to better understand how all these things interact."

The campaign will provide new insights into the effects of the gases and tiny aerosol particles in the atmosphere. The mission is targeting two major regional sources of summertime emissions: intense smoke from forest fires in the U.S. West and natural emissions of isoprene, a carbon compound, from forests in the Southeast....

Aftermath of the Bastrop, Texas, fires in October 2011, shot by Ed Schipul, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Study reveals significant leakage of carbon stored on land to rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal regions

University of Exeter: When carbon is emitted by human activities into the atmosphere it is generally thought that about half remains in the atmosphere and the remainder is stored in the oceans and on land. New research suggests that human activity could be increasing the movement of carbon from land to rivers, estuaries and the coastal zone indicating that large quantities of anthropogenic carbon may be hidden in regions not previously considered.

The research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience and led by researchers from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Exeter, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement, the University of Hawai’i and ETH Zürich, has for the first time shown that increased leaching of carbon from soil, mainly due to deforestation, sewage inputs and increased weathering, has resulted in less carbon being stored on land and more stored in rivers, streams, lakes, reservoirs, estuaries and coastal zones – environments that are together known as the ‘land-ocean aquatic continuum’.

The study reviewed previously published data and showed that a significant fraction of the carbon emitted through human activity that is taken up by the land is not actually stored there, but in the aquatic continuum.

Pierre Regnier from Université Libre de Bruxelles said: “The budget of anthropogenic CO2 reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently does not take into account the carbon leaking from terrestrial ecosystems to rivers, estuaries and coastal regions. As a result of this leakage, the actual storage by terrestrial ecosystems is about 40% lower than the current estimates by the IPCC.”

The ‘land-ocean aquatic continuum’, has not previously been considered an important carbon sink. Future assessments of carbon storage must now take into account the surface areas of the land-ocean aquatic continuum to ensure accurate estimation of carbon storage. This will also require an improved knowledge of the mechanisms controlling the degradation, preservation and emissions of carbon along the aquatic continuum to fully understand the impact of human activity on carbon transfer....

Dzhantshey Lagoon, Ukraine, shot by Yuriy Kvach, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

How do you feed 9 billion people?

Michigan State University Today: An international team of scientists has developed crop models to better forecast food production to feed a growing population – projected to reach 9 billion by mid-century – in the face of climate change.

In a paper appearing in Nature Climate Change, members of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project unveiled an all-encompassing modeling system that integrates multiple crop simulations with improved climate change models. AgMIP’s effort has produced new knowledge that better predicts global wheat yields while reducing political and socio-economic influences that can skew data and planning efforts, said Bruno Basso, Michigan State University ecosystem scientist and AgMIP member.

“Quantifying uncertainties is an important step to build confidence in future yield forecasts produced by crop models,” said Basso, with MSU’s geological sciences department and Kellogg Biological Station. “By using an ensemble of crop and climate models, we can understand how increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, along with temperature increases and precipitation changes, will affect wheat yield globally.”

The improved crop models can help guide the world’s developed and developing countries as they adapt to changing climate and create policies to improve food security and feed more people, he added.

Basso, part of MSU’s Global Water Initiative, and his team of researchers developed the System Approach for Land-Use Sustainability model. SALUS is a new generation crop tool to forecast crop, soil, water, nutrient conditions in current and future climates. It also can evaluate crop rotations, planting dates, irrigation and fertilizer use and project crop yields and their impact on the land....

A wheat field in Poland, shot by Ondrej.konicek, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Ganges, Nile and Amazon seen suffering more floods from warming

Reuters: Climate change is likely to worsen floods on rivers such as the Ganges, the Nile and the Amazon this century while a few, including the now-inundated Danube, may become less prone, a Japanese-led scientific study said on Sunday.

The findings will go some way to help countries prepare for deluges that have killed thousands of people worldwide and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage every year in the past decade, experts wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Given enough warning, governments can bring in flood barriers, building bans on flood plains, more flood-resistant crops and other measures to limit damage. Overall, a "large increase" in flood frequency is expected in south-east Asia, central Africa and much of South America this century, the experts in Japan and Britain wrote.

Severe floods would happen more often on most of the 29 rivers reviewed in detail, including the Yangtze, Mekong and Ganges in Asia, the Niger, the Congo and the Nile in Africa, the Amazon and the Parana in Latin America and the Rhine in Europe.

Flooding would become less frequent in a handful of river basins including the Mississippi in the United States, the Euphrates in the Middle East and the Danube in Europe. The experts predicted that northwestern Europe, where the Rhine flows, would be damper while a band from the Mediterranean Sea through eastern Europe - including the Danube region - into Russia would be drier....

The scientists said there were wide bands of uncertainty.

The edge of the Nile's flood plain, shot by Andrew®, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Academies urge action on drug resistance and development policy

T.V. Padma in SciDev.net: Science academies from eight developed and five emerging economies have urged developing countries to take a lead in tackling increasing drug resistance and pledged to support policymaking for sustainable development.

In two joint statements released last week (29 May) they noted the need for new drug discovery and development to tackle growing drug resistance worldwide, and they pledged to support policymaking for sustainable development through inter-academy and research collaboration.

In the statement on drug resistance, the academies say there is a need for enhancing research and development capacity in developing countries; regular monitoring of drug sensitivity; tracking resistance in real-time; carrying out regular surveys on the impacts of antibiotics released into the environment; and promoting drug regulation policies.

On sustainable development policy after 2015, the deadline for meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they pledge to proactively engage with international, national and regional policymakers with an eye on "providing objective expertise" and ensuring "scientific rigour to gathering evidence"....

Potentially 'catastrophic' changes underway in Canada's northern Mackenzie River Basin: report

EurekAlert via the Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy: Canada's Mackenzie River basin -- among the world's most important major ecosystems -- is poorly studied, inadequately monitored, and at serious risk due to climate change and resource exploitation, a panel of international scientists warn today.

In a report, nine Canadian, US and UK scientists convened by the US-based Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy, say effective governance of the massive Basin, comprising an area three times larger than France -- holds enormous national and global importance due to the watershed's biodiversity and its role in hemispheric bird migrations, stabilizing climate and the health of the Arctic Ocean.

The panel agreed the largest single threat to the Basin is a potential breach in the tailings ponds at one of the large oil sands sites mining surface bitumen. A breach in winter sending tailings liquid under the ice of the tributary Athabasca River, "would be virtually impossible to remediate or clean-up," says the report, available in full at http://bit.ly/13gc01K

"Extractive industries should be required to post a substantial performance bond which would be used to cover the costs of site clean-up should the enterprise fail financially or otherwise fail to fully remediate damage and destruction at the site in question," the report says. "The performance bond should be secured prior to site development and the commencement of operations."

Researchers have compared the Mackenzie Basin to Africa's Serengeti Plain, an area of comparable size. Both ecosystems harbour high biodiversity and biological productivity compared to others in their respective regions. There are some 45,000 biologically productive lakes in the Mackenzie Basin....

Researchers have compared the Mackenzie Basin to Africa's Serengeti Plain, an area of comparable size. Both ecosystems harbor high biodiversity and biological productivity compared to others in their respective regions. There are some 45,000 biologically productive lakes in the Mackenzie Basin. Meanwhile, the ice and snow cover in the Mackenzie Basin provides a vital refrigerator-like cooling role, in weather and climate patterns throughout the northern hemisphere. Credit: Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy

El Salvador mining ban could establish a vital water security precedent

Meera Karunananthan in the Povertymatters blog in the Guardian (UK): Five hundred scientists meeting in Bonn last month warned that 9 billion people would face the consequences of severe water shortages within a generation or two, but did not point the finger at industries devastating fresh water supplies.

Meanwhile, a battle against a metal mining industry that has ravaged freshwater supplies in El Salvador shows just how difficult it is for a developing country to build economic alternatives for a water-secure future. Two mining companies are dragging El Salvador through a costly legal challenge at an international trade tribunal for attempting to protect limited water supplies by refusing permits for their operations.

With 90% of its surface water heavily contaminated and a quarter of its rural population lacking access to safe drinking water, El Salvador is embroiled in a clean water crisis. More than two-thirds of the population rely on the Lempa river basin for drinking water – the same number that would be threatened by water-intensive and water-contaminating metal mining projects were El Salvador to reopen its doors to the industry.

In 2008, after strong public pressure to protect water from mining, Antonio Saca, El Salvador's president at the time, declared he would not issue any new mining permits. There are no active metal-mining operations in the mineral-rich country, which a majority of Salvadorans would like to become the first in the world to prohibit metal mining permanently. A bill to ban the industry has the support of more than 62% of the population and was initially backed by the ruling FMLN party....

Europe floods: Hungary Danube set for record high

BBC News: Hungarians have been warned to prepare for their country's worst floods ever as the Danube is set to reach record levels this weekend. "We are facing the worst floods of all time," said PM Viktor Orban.

Europe's second-longest river is set to hit unprecedented levels in the capital Budapest in the next few days. A state of emergency has been declared, and thousands of volunteers have been working to reinforce the banks of the swelling river.

Water levels are set to reach 8.85m (29ft), some 25cm (10in) higher than the Danube's previous record high in 2006. Emergency workers have set up camps along the river as residents packed sandbags around their homes amid an atmosphere of concerned expectation, says the BBC's Nick Thorpe in Budapest.

Kristalina Georgieva, the EU Commissioner for International Co-operation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, tweeted: "Hungary well prepared for highest ever measured water levels on Danube. We are monitoring & ready to assist."...

High water in Linz, Germany, in February 2013, shot by Liberaler Humanist, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license