Category: Environment

{US expert Alan Robock raises concern over who would control climate-altering technologies if research is paid for by intelligence agencies
}

A senior US scientist has expressed concern that the intelligence services are funding climate change research to learn if new technologies could be used as potential weapons.

Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has called on secretive government agencies to be open about their interest in radical work that explores how to alter the world’s climate.

Robock, who has contributed to reports for the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), uses computer models to study how stratospheric aerosols can cool the planet in the way massive volcanic eruptions do.

But he was worried about who would control such climate-altering technologies should they prove effective, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.

​Last week, the National Academy of Sciences published a two-volume report on different approaches to tackling climate change. One focused on means to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the other on ways to change clouds or the Earth’s surface to make them reflect more sunlight out to space.
Is geoengineering a bad idea?

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The report concluded that while small-scale research projects were needed, the technologies were so far from being ready that reducing carbon emissions remained the most viable approach to curbing the worst extremes of climate change. A report by the Royal Society in 2009 made similar recommendations.

The $600,000 report was part-funded by the US intelligence services, but Robock said the CIA and other agencies had not fully explained their interest in the work. “The CIA was a major funder of the National Academies report so that makes me really worried who is going to be in control,” he said. Other funders included Nasa, the US Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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The CIA established the Center on Climate Change and National Security in 2009, a decision that drew fierce criticism from some Republicans who viewed it as a distraction from more pressing terrorist concerns. The center was closed down in 2012, though the agency said it would continue to monitor the humanitarian consequences of climate change and the impact on US economic security, albeit not from a dedicated office.

Robock said he became suspicious about the intelligence agencies’ involvement in climate change science after receiving a call from two men who claimed to be CIA consultants ​three years ago. “They said: ‘We are working for the CIA and we’d like to know if some other country was controlling our climate, would we be able to detect it?’ I think they were also thinking in the back of their minds: ‘If we wanted to control somebody else’s climate could they detect it?’”

He replied that if a country wanted to create a stratospheric cloud large enough to change the climate, it would be visible with satellites and ground-based instruments. The use of the weather as a weapon was banned in 1978 ​under the Environmental Modification Convention (Enmod).

Asked how he felt ​about the call, Robock said he was scared. “I’d learned of lots of other things the CIA had done that didn’t follow the rules. I thought that wasn’t how my tax money was spent,” he said. The CIA did not respond to requests for comment over the weekend.

The US dabbled in weather modification before Enmod was introduced. In the early 1960s, researchers on Project Storm Fury seeded thunderstorms with various particles in the hope of diminishing their destructive power. A similar process was adopted during the Vietnam war, with clouds seeded over the Ho Chi Minh trail in a bid to make the major supply route for North Vietnamese foot soldiers too muddy to pass.

“I think this research should be out in the open and it has to be international so there won’t be any question that this technology will used for hostile purposes,” Robock said.

{{Source: The Guardian}}

{{Smart agricultural practices and an extensive grain-trade network enabled the Romans to thrive in the water-limited environment of the Mediterranean, a new study shows. But the stable food supply brought about by these measures promoted population growth and urbanization, pushing the Empire closer to the limits of its food resources.}}

Smart agricultural practices and an extensive grain-trade network enabled the Romans to thrive in the water-limited environment of the Mediterranean, a new study shows. But the stable food supply brought about by these measures promoted population growth and urbanisation, pushing the Empire closer to the limits of its food resources. The research, by an international team of hydrologists and Roman historians, is published today in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Stretching over three continents and persisting for many centuries, the Roman Empire was home to an estimated 70 million people. In such a vast area ensuring a stable food supply was no easy task, particularly given the variable and arid climate of the Mediterranean region. So how did the Romans maintain reliable food supplies to their cities for centuries under such challenging conditions?

To find out, Brian Dermody, an environmental scientist from Utrecht University, teamed up with hydrologists from the Netherlands and classicists at Stanford University in the US. The researchers wanted to know how the way Romans managed water for agriculture and traded crops contributed to the longevity of their civilisation. They were also curious to find out if these practices played a role in the eventual fall of the Empire.

“We can learn much from investigating how past societies dealt with changes in their environment,” says Dermody. He draws parallels between the Roman civilisation and our own. “For example, the Romans were confronted with managing their water resources in the face of population growth and urbanisation. To ensure the continued growth and stability of their civilisation, they had to guarantee a stable food supply to their cities, many located in water-poor regions.”

In the Hydrology and Earth System Sciences paper, the team focused on determining the water resources required to grow grain, the staple crop of the Roman civilisation, and how these resources were distributed within the Empire. It takes between 1000 and 2000 litres of water to grow one kilo of grain. As Romans traded this crop, they also traded the water needed to produce it – they exchanged virtual water.

The researchers created a virtual water network of the Roman world. “We simulated virtual water trade based on virtual-water-poor regions (urban centres, such as Rome) demanding grain from the nearest virtual-water-rich region (agricultural regions, such as the Nile basin) in the network,” explains Dermody.

The team used a hydrological model to calculate grain yields, which vary depending on factors such as climate and soil type. The authors used reconstructed maps of the Roman landscape and population to estimate where agricultural production and food demand were greatest. They also simulated the trade in grain based on an interactive reconstruction of the Roman transport network, which takes into account the cost of transport depending on factors such as distance and means of transportation.

Their virtual water network indicates that the Romans’ ability to link the different environments of the Mediterranean through trade allowed their civilisation to thrive. “If grain yields were low in a certain region, they could import grain from a different part of the Mediterranean that experienced a surplus. That made them highly resilient to short-term climate variability,” says Dermody.

But the Romans’ innovative water-management practices may also have contributed to their downfall. With trade and irrigation ensuring a stable food supply to cities, populations grew and urbanisation intensified. With more mouths to feed in urban centres, the Romans became even more dependent on trade whilst at the same time the Empire was pushed closer to the limits of their easily accessible food resources. In the long term, these factors eroded their resilience to poor grain yields arising from climate variability.

“We’re confronted with a very similar scenario today. Virtual water trade has enabled rapid population growth and urbanisation since the beginning of the industrial revolution. However, as we move closer to the limits of the planet’s resources, our vulnerability to poor yields arising from climate change increases,” concludes Dermody.

Science Daily

{The climate warming caused by a single carbon emission takes only about 10 years to reach its maximum effect. This is important because it refutes the common misconception that today’s emissions won’t be felt for decades and that they are a problem for future generations.}

For the first time, a study conducted by Carnegie’s Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira has evaluated how long it takes to feel the maximum warming effect caused by a single carbon emission. Their work is published in Environmental Research Letters.

“A lot of climate scientists have intuition about how long it takes to feel the warming from a particular emission of carbon dioxide,” Ricke said. “But that intuition might be a little bit out of sync with our best estimates from today’s climate and carbon cycle models.”

Many climate model simulations focus on the amount of warming caused by emissions sustained over decades or centuries, but the timing of temperature increases caused by particular emission has been largely overlooked. Ricke and Caldeira sought to correct that by combining the results from two large modeling studies one about the way carbon emissions interact with the global carbon cycle and one about the effect of carbon on the Earth’s climate used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They found that actions taken to avoid emissions today would be felt within the lifetimes of the people who acted, not just by future generations.

“CO2 emissions cause global temperatures to increase for about a decade, but then temperatures stay high for a long time,” Caldeira said. “This means if we avoid an emission, we avoid heating that would otherwise occur this decade. This will benefit us and not just our grandchildren. This realization could help break the political logjam over policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The authors note, however, that while the warming caused by a single emission reaches a maximum quickly, damage caused by this warming can play out over longer periods, including effects of sea level rise and harm to ecosystems caused by sustained warming.

From:{{ Carnegie Institute for Science}}

{Rwanda today marks the 39th Tree Planting Day by beginning to plant 30,739,957 seedlings around the country. This year’s event is being held under the theme “Enhancing climate change resilience through agroforestry” and recognises the role played by forests in the restoration of ecosystems and in enhancing climate change resilience. The country’s tree planting season will be launched in Kanama Sector in Rubavu District. }

The Minister of Natural Resources, Dr Vincent Biruta, said Rwanda will continue to increase the surface area covered by forests as they contribute significantly to sustainable development and building a green economy.

By 2018, Rwanda aims to have 30% its surface area covered by forests, up from 28.8% as of the end of 2013/2014. Every year, Rwanda will plant trees on 8,150 hectares to achieve that target.

“We will plant over 30 million trees this season of which 60% will be agroforestry species. Individuals wishing to plant trees on their own farm can register at their Umudugudu (village) to get seedlings,” said Minister Biruta.

Every year, Rwanda marks Tree Planting and Afforestation Day by dedicating a whole season to activities of planting trees and afforestation. The celebration of Tree Planting Day is a good opportunity to raise awareness on the importance of increasing forest resources. Activities will be carried out in all districts and will continue for the entire planting season. The prepared seedlings include woodlots, agroforestry and fruits trees.

All citizens, local authorities, government institutions, civil society organisations as well as private sector institutions are encouraged to participate in afforestation activities and forest management.

{UNDP partners with Conservation International, the World Bank, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Global Environment Facility to showcase more than 100 nature-based solutions to tackle global development challenges}

The World Parks Congress, a once-in-a-decade gathering of policy-makers and scientists who shape the global conservation agenda, got underway in Sydney on Wednesday with calls for stronger global recognition of the importance of environmental protection in attaining lasting and equitable development.

The weeklong event is expected to see some of the world’s leading experts on conservation and biodiversity cite ‘increasing evidence’ of the ever-stronger role that protected areas play in achieving a nations’ development goals, including food and water security, disaster risk reduction, protecting livelihoods, and driving poverty reduction.

One third of all the largest cities depend upon forest protected areas for their municipal drinking water. Protected areas also provide water filtrations systems that help avoid the costs of billions of dollars of water treatment facilities around the world. The Catskill Mountains in New York, for example, have saved tax payers over $10 billion since 1997. Protected areas generate jobs and act as engines of local development through the tourism and other sectors, and maintain ecosystem services that sustain livelihoods for hundreds of millions around the world.

These discussions come at a critical time, as the United Nations leads worldwide efforts to create a new global compact expected to succeed the Millennium Development Goals after their deadline in 2015.

Seventy per cent of the world’s poorest people depend critically on biodiversity to provide them with life’s basic necessities of food, water, medicines and livelihoods. Yet a third of the world faces water stress, more than 700 million hectares of tropical forest have been cleared since 1990, and the number of fish stocks over-exploited has tripled in the past 40 years.

Hosted jointly by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the New South Wales Government in Australia, the Congress will feature more than 1,700 presentations and events, with heads of state, environment ministers and more than 4,000 delegates from 160 countries in attendance.

UNDP has partnered with Conservation International (CI), the World Bank, IUCN and the GEF to help governments, the private sector and civil society, better understand the potential role protected areas can play in ensuring sustainable development.

“There is ever stronger evidence that if we make protected areas an integral part of our economies, development and well-being, we can achieve some of the world’s most elusive development ambitions,” said Nik Sekhran, Director of Sustainable Development under the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support, at UNDP.

“The significant contributions of protected areas to livelihoods, job creation, economic development and maintenance of critical ecosystem services is not currently reflected in national development planning processes, public funding or in the underlying economic decision-making frameworks that drive public and private investments,” said Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, Vice-President at Conservation International.

At the Congress, under the programme Stream 5: Reconciling development challenges that UNDP is co-leading with CI and the World Bank, policymakers, practitioners, scientists and businesses will showcase more than 100 innovative solutions from around the world that reconcile sustainable development with the major development challenges of our time.

While significant advances have been made in expanding protected natural eco-systems since the previous Congress held in South Africa in 2004, few countries sufficiently recognise the contributions protected areas make in creating jobs and spurring economic growth, say experts.

Through the GEF Small Grants Programme, UNDP, with the global Indigenous Community Conserved Area (ICCA) Consortium, the German International Development Agency, and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, is also jointly leading programme Stream 6: Enhancing the diversity and quality of governance of protected areas. UNDP will also be hosting the World Indigenous Network (WIN) Pavilion space organized by the Equator Initiative, as well as numerous inputs to the Conservation Finance Pavilion and other events across the Congress.

The coming year is expected to be critical in setting pathways to strengthening the role of protected areas in defining and delivering on the world’s Sustainable Development Goals, the global compact expected to succeed the Millennium Development Goals.

The Congress is expected to culminate in an outcome document titled The Promise of Sydney, which will capture the most strategic thinking of those present, inspiring solutions for the challenges we all face globally and charting the future direction for protected areas.

{Bangladesh, Sierra Leone and South Sudan led a ranking of countries facing extreme risks as a result of climate change, exacerbating the chances of civil conflict, according to a study by U.K. researcher Maplecroft. }

A total of 32 countries out of 196 surveyed face that level of threat, the Bath, England-based analyst said today in an e-mailed statement. Nigeria, Chad, Haiti, Ethiopia, the Philippines, the Central African Republic and Eritrea rounded out 10 most at risk.

The threatened nations all depend heavily on agriculture, which accounts for 28 percent of their combined economic output relying on farm-related revenue, and 65 percent of the working population employed in the sector, according to Maplecroft. The climate risk combined with food insecurity act as “threat multipliers” escalating the danger of civil conflict, it said.

“Global business and the military now view climate change as an important risk management imperative,” James Allan, head of environment at Maplecroft, said in the statement. “Identifying future flashpoints will help proactive organizations and governments make strategic decisions.”

Other nations deemed at extreme climate risk included India, Pakistan and Guatemala.

Eleven countries — South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Chad, Ethiopia, Haiti, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Burundi and Afghanistan — faced extreme risk from both climate change and food insecurity, according to Maplecroft.

{{Bloomberg}}