Tropical forest destruction accounts for some 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But quantifying these emissions has not been easy, particularly for tropical nations. New technology, developed by a team of scientists at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, is revolutionizing forest monitoring by marrying free satellite imagery and powerful analytical methods in an easy-to-use, desktop software package called CLASlite. Thus far, 70 government, non-government, and academic organizations in five countries have adopted the technology, with more on the horizon.
The team announced its new web site for CLASlite users at the Copenhagen climate meetings today. See http://claslite.ciw.edu.
To support international policy discussions and to solve on-the-ground needs for forest monitoring, CLASlite is being rapidly disseminated through a tailored, demand-driven technology transfer to government, academic and non-government institutions of the Andes and Amazon regions.
“We’re providing CLASlite to support the U.N. program for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation [REDD] and other tropical forest monitoring efforts,” remarked Greg Asner, the lead scientist for the CLASlite project. “My team has already trained more than 240 users from 70 organizations in the Andes-Amazon region, and we will do more workshops in 2010.”
CLASlite is a software package designed to automatically identify deforestation and forest degradation from satellite imagery. The power of CLASlite rests in its unique ability to convert seemingly green “carpets” of dense tropical forest cover in raw satellite images into highly detailed maps that can be readily searched for deforestation, logging, and other types of forest degradation. CLASlite is also a key component of a cost-effective new method developed by Carnegie that integrates satellite and airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) mapping to support high-resolution forest carbon mapping.
“It is how we use CLASlite that will make the difference,” remarked Guayana Paez-Acosta, the CLASlite coordinator for capacity building. “The new CLASlite user website is a space for collective knowledge building to improve forest monitoring and management in the Andes-Amazon region.”
In addition, Carnegie has teamed up with Google.org to provide “CLASlite Online” via the web, which will greatly extend the ability of users to monitor their forests, officials from both organizations announced today. Amy Luers, Senior Environment Program Manager for Google.org, stated that “working with Carnegie and others, we have developed a prototype imagery analysis engine to power forest-monitoring systems such as CLASlite online. By providing computational horsepower and easy access to massive data sets, this new technology will dramatically lower the cost and complexity for tropical nations to monitor their forests using CLASlite and other forest analysis programs.”
In 2010, the group plans to extend the training and technology transfer to other countries in the Amazon region, and will provide the web-based version to support tropical forest mapping anywhere in the world. The CLASlite project is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Google.org, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Delegates to the climate change conference in Copenhagen have been told that ecosystem-based strategies offer cost-effective and sustainable solutions to climate change that can deliver multiple benefits.
This is according to a report from Dr Kerrie Wilson from UQ’s The Ecology Centre, who is attending Attending COP15 on the second day of plenary sessions.
“With many of the impacts of climate change already being felt, methods to adapt to climate change are a key focus of discussions at the climate change meeting in Copenhagen," she said.
"Ecosystem-based approaches to climate change – referred to by some scientists as a ‘convenient solution to an inconvenient truth’ – are one mechanism on the negotiating table."
Dr Wilson said the broader issue was the Reducing Emissions through Avoided Deforestation and Degradation mechanism (REDD) to reward nations and communities for voluntarily improving forest protection and management.
Greenhouse gas emissions from forests were caused by logging and conversion to agriculture, resulting in a release of stored carbon which was the largest source of emissions caused by humans, second to combustion of fossil fuels.
“The advisory group responsible for the technical support of mechanisms to lessen and adapt to climate change revealed optimism today that a decision on REDD will be made at this meeting," she said.
"Acceptance of REDD as a viable means of international emissions could offer a new platform and financing mechanism for protecting biodiversity, ecosystem services, and the livelihoods of those that depend on forests.”
Dr Wilson said representatives of developing nations were calling for enhanced capacity to promote readiness for REDD and secure funding commitments, along with acknowledgement of the role that indigenous communities can play in implementation and monitoring. The realities of REDD and issues surrounding corruption and law enforcement were also being openly discussed.
The original form of REDD was now being replaced by REDD +, where forest management, reforestation and carbon sequestration in other landscapes are also compensated.
With multiple objectives, and multiple ways to achieve these objectives, the careful planning and prioritization for REDD implementation would become pivotal.
Dr Wilson said not everyone could be a winner and trade-offs between objectives were inevitable. "Our research has proven that it is feasible to integrate the dual objective of conserving biodiversity and reducing the release of greenhouse gases. We can analyze in a transparent way the winners and losers, and thereby inform decision-making for REDD.”
Brief bio of Dr. Wilson Dr Kerrie Wilson holds a degree in Environmental Science from The University of Queensland (top graduate in 1999, University Medalist). She obtained a DPhil in ecology from the University of Melbourne in 2004. Kerrie is author of approximately 50 scientific publications (including publications in Science and Nature) and one edited book. In 2009 she was awarded an Australian Leadership Award and an European Erasmus Mundus Fellowship. Kerrie has previously held leadership positions with non-government organizations including Director of Conservation for The Nature Conservancy Australia. Her research into the socio-economic aspects of conservation involves collaborations with national and international government and non-government organizations.
Despite oft-repeated claims by sources ranging from the United Nations to music star Paul McCartney, it is simply not true that consuming less meat and dairy products will help stop climate change, says a University of California authority on farming and greenhouse gases.
UC Davis Associate Professor and Air Quality Specialist Frank Mitloehner says that McCartney and the chair of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ignored science last week when they launched a European campaign called "Less Meat = Less Heat." The launch came on the eve of a major international climate summit, which runs today through Dec. 18 in Copenhagen.
McCartney and others, such as the promoters of "meatless Mondays," seem to be well-intentioned but not well-schooled in the complex relationships among human activities, animal digestion, food production and atmospheric chemistry, says Mitloehner.
"Smarter animal farming, not less farming, will equal less heat," Mitloehner said. "Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries."
Mitloehner traces much of the public confusion over meat and milk’s role in climate change to two sentences in a 2006 United Nations report, titled "Livestock’s Long Shadow." Printed only in the report’s executive summary and nowhere in the body of the report, the sentences read: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.”
These statements are not accurate, yet their wide distribution through news media have put us on the wrong path toward solutions, Mitloehner says.
"We certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk.
"Rather, in developed countries, we should focus on cutting our use of oil and coal for electricity, heating and vehicle fuels."
Mitloehner said leading authorities agree that, in the U.S., raising cattle and pigs for food accounts for about 3 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, while transportation creates an estimated 26 percent.
"In developing countries, we should adopt more efficient, Western-style farming practices, to make more food with less greenhouse gas production," Mitloehner continued. In this he agrees with the conclusion of "Livestock’s Long Shadow," which calls for “replacing current suboptimal production with advanced production methods — at every step from feed production, through livestock production and processing, to distribution and marketing.”
"The developed world’s efforts should focus not on reducing meat and milk consumption," said Mitloehner, "but rather on increasing efficient meat production in developing countries, where growing populations need more nutritious food."
Mitloehner particularly objects to the U.N.’s statement that livestock account for more greenhouse gases than transportation, when there is no generally accepted global breakdown of gas production by industrial sector.
He notes that "Livestock’s Long Shadow" produced its numbers for the livestock sector by adding up emissions from farm to table, including the gases produced by growing animal feed; animals’ digestive emissions; and processing meat and milk into foods. But its transportation analysis did not similarly add up emissions from well to wheel; instead, it considered only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving.
"This lopsided ‘analysis’ is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue," Mitloehner said.
Most of Mitloehner’s analysis is presented in a recent study titled "Clearing the Air: Livestock’s Contributions to Climate Change," published in October in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Agronomy. Co-authors of the paper are UC Davis researchers Maurice Piteskey and Kimberly Stackhouse.
"Clearing the Air" is a synthesis of research by the UC Davis authors and many other institutions, including the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture, California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board. Writing the synthesis was supported by a $26,000 research grant from the Beef Checkoff Program, which funds research and other activities, including promotion and consumer education, through fees on beef producers in the U.S.
Since 2002, Mitloehner has received $5 million in research funding, with 5 percent of the total from agricultural commodities groups, such as beef producers.
In the long term, the Earth’s temperature may be 30-50 per cent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week.
The results show that components of the Earth’s climate system that vary over long timescales – such as land-ice and vegetation – have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but these factors are often neglected in current climate models.
Dr Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, and colleagues compared results from a global climate model to temperature reconstructions of the Earth’s environment three million years ago when global temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations were relatively high. The temperature reconstructions were derived using data from three-million-year-old sediments on the ocean floor.
Lunt said, “We found that, given the concentrations of carbon dioxide prevailing three million years ago, the model originally predicted a significantly smaller temperature increase than that indicated by the reconstructions. This led us to review what was missing from the model.”
The authors demonstrate that the increased temperatures indicated by the reconstructions can be explained if factors that vary over long timescales, such as land-ice and vegetation, are included in the model. This is primarily because changes in vegetation and ice lead to more sunlight being absorbed, which in turn increases warming.
Including these long-term processes in the model resulted in an increased temperature response of the Earth to carbon dioxide, indicating that the Earth’s temperature is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously recognized. Climate models used by bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change often do not fully include these long-term processes, thus these models do not entirely represent the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to carbon dioxide.
Alan Haywood, a co-author on the study from the University of Leeds, said “If we want to avoid dangerous climate change, this high sensitivity of the Earth to carbon dioxide should be taken into account when defining targets for the long-term stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations”.
Lunt added: “This study has shown that studying past climates can provide important insights into how the Earth might change in the future.”
Queensland researchers have unveiled a new strategy for saving the world’s forests on the eve of crucial climate change talks in Copenhagen.
Published today in leading journal Science, the research suggests wealthy countries participate in a carbon payment system to encourage developing countries to keep their forests to avert a looming extinction crisis, in addition to avoiding dangerous climate change.
Experts from The University of Queensland and James Cook University assessed the ability to slow down species extinctions using both carbon-focused and biodiversity-focused strategies.
“We found that, dollar for dollar, a carbon-focused approach will contribute little to slowing biodiversity loss and save far fewer species than will a biodiversity-focused strategy that targets the most imperiled forests,” said lead author and The University of Queensland researcher Oscar Venter.
The study reveals if carbon payments focus narrowly on carbon and ignore threatened biodiversity, carbon-trading alone won’t be enough to stave off large-scale extinctions of tropical species, according to co-author Dr Kerrie Wilson from The University of Queensland.
“The problem is that the Amazon basin in South America, where there’s still quite a lot of surviving forest, is the cheapest place to reduce emissions, but threatened species are concentrated in countries like Madagascar and the Philippines, where only a few scraps of forest remain,” said co-author Professor William Laurance from James Cook University.
Fortunately, the authors found that a compromise is possible. “If you tweak things a little, putting some carbon funds into countries that are good value for carbon but also biodiversity-rich, like Cameroon and the Philippines, you can save twice as many threatened species and still do a great deal to combat global warming,” said co-author and director of The University of Queensland’s Ecology Centre Professor Hugh Possingham.
Mr Venter said billions of dollars will be spent on forest carbon initiatives in the next decade, and these could hold huge benefits for vanishing ecosystems and wildlife if engineered in the right way.
The team’s findings are expected to draw much attention at the forthcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen, where international leaders are hoping to hammer out a final strategy for combating global warming.
Environmental scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Durham University have employed a novel combination of geological and model reconstructions of wetland environments during a 10,000-year period to address spatial variations in sea-level history and provide quantitative estimates of subsidence along the east coast of England.
The findings indicate that glacial rebound — the rise or fall of land masses that were depressed by the huge weight of ice sheets during the last glacial period — explains differences in relative sea levels along the English coast. Current sea levels in Northeast England, the most northerly study area, have been receding to their present level for the past 4,000 years. Unlike Northeast England, however, the Tees Estuary, Humber Estuary, Lincolnshire Marshes, Fenlands and North Norfolk area all reveal sea-level histories trending upward during the past 10,000 years. Using data from sediment cores up to 20 meters deep, researchers found that sediment compaction explained the variations in sea-level observations at every study area, revealing striking correlations to the thickness of overlying sediment.
Coastal subsidence enhances recent sea-level rise, which leads to shoreline erosion and threatens to permanently submerge socio-economically and environmentally valuable wetlands. Yet the causes of subsidence remain controversial, and estimates of subsidence rates vary widely. This collaborative study offers insight into the future behavior of these environmental systems and is an effort to inform policy and management decisions for coastal protection.
“Rising sea levels threaten to permanently submerge wetland environments,” said Benjamin P. Horton, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Penn. “Management decisions regarding the best way to intervene to protect these environments depend upon empirically informed, scientific data for each of the processes operating in wetland systems, including sediment compaction. This is a high-profile topic, which is subject to a great deal of controversy, especially concerning the on-going discussions of why deltas around the world are losing wetlands at a particularly alarming rate.”
The study is published in the current issue of the journal Geology and was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and the Natural Environment Research Council.
It was performed by Horton and by Ian Shennan of the Department of Geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom.
Report recommends harnessing energy potential of rooftops, roads, aqueducts
As world leaders prepare for climate change talks in Copenhagen, innovative programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are finding promise in California. Yet, as global leaders struggle to find consensus, energy innovators are similarly blocked by a lack of state financing and political support.
But a new study shows how to lift those barriers and increase the local production of renewable energy at a faster and more efficient pace than nascent worldwide initiatives.
The report, "In Our Backyard: How to Increase Renewable Energy Production on Big Buildings and Other Local Spaces," is a joint project of the UCLA School of Law and the UC Berkeley School of Law.
"In Our Backyard" shows the power and potential of producing renewable energy by installing technology atop commercial rooftops and along aqueducts and highway right-of-ways. It’s a step-by-step guide to make the promise of locally produced renewable energy a viable enterprise — and an effective tool in the effort to slow climate change.
"California has tremendous potential to unleash a renewable energy revolution," said primary author Ethan Elkind, Bank of America Climate Change Research Fellow at UCLA Law and Berkeley Law. "With our abundant sunshine, wind and other natural resources, we could become a world leader in renewable energy production just by focusing on the opportunities that exist on big buildings and public spaces in our own backyards."
But Elkind says California has focused too much attention on long-term efforts to build large-scale and remote renewable energy facilities, including centralized wind and solar plants. These projects are usually located far from most energy consumers and face significant land-use and related hurdles that take years to resolve.
A simpler and more immediate solution to complement those grand efforts, according to Elkind, is decentralized electricity production from the same natural sources: sunlight and wind.
"By leveraging renewable energy technology to draw solar and wind power from the roofs of buildings, wastewater treatment plants and along highway right-of ways, we can initiate one of the fastest and most feasible means of producing renewable energy on a broad scale," he said. "These smaller but powerful energy projects can avoid many of the delays plaguing the more expansive programs."
"While we wait for remote, utility-grade renewable facilities to come on-line, we have untapped opportunities to produce renewable energy from large buildings and public land," said California Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley). "This report offers comprehensive policy recommendations to help California realize this potential."
Leading energy suppliers, advocates, agency heads and private company officials met at a June workshop hosted by the UCLA and Berkeley law schools to prioritize the most effective methods of permitting widespread, decentralized production of renewable energy. They identified short- and long-term actions that include:
Expanding the net-metering program, which gives renewable energy producers a retail credit for energy they produce that offsets their electricity bill.
Improving and broadening the feed-in tariff program, which requires utilities to provide cash payments to renewable energy producers who sell their energy back to the grid.
Prioritizing renewable energy production as a critical part of the mission and performance expectations for state and local agencies.
Bringing more renewable energy production on-line locally. As a start, California’s Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) should include decentralized renewable energy production as a preferred alternative to remote central-station projects.
"This report provides a practical and innovative blueprint for increasing renewable energy production and fighting climate change," said California Special Assistant Attorney General Cliff Rechtschaffen. "If California takes advantage of its local untapped resources, it can not only generate additional renewable energy but also create more green jobs."
According to a separate UC Berkeley study, renewable energy creates at least twice as many jobs as the equivalent fossil fuel–based energy production. And the jobs, like the energy production, would be located close to the areas where most workers live.
Over 30,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity are installed across the United States and an increasing number of communities are considering new wind power facilities. Given these developments, there is an urgent need to empirically investigate typical community concerns about wind energy and thereby provide stakeholders involved in the wind project siting process a common base of knowledge. A major new report released today by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluates one of those concerns, and finds that proximity to wind energy facilities does not have a pervasive or widespread adverse effect on the property values of nearby homes.
The new report, funded by the DOE, is based on site visits, data collection, and analysis of almost 7,500 single-family home sales, making it the most comprehensive and data-rich analysis to date on the potential impact of U.S. wind projects on residential property values.
“Neither the view of wind energy facilities nor the distance of the home to those facilities was found to have any consistent, measurable, and significant effect on the selling prices of nearby homes,” says report author Ben Hoen, a consultant to Berkeley Lab. “No matter how we looked at the data, the same result kept coming back - no evidence of widespread impacts.”
The team of researchers for the project collected data on homes situated within 10 miles of 24 existing wind facilities in nine different U.S. states; the closest home was 800 feet from a wind facility. Each home in the sample was visited to collect important on-site information such as whether wind turbines were visible from the home. The home sales used in the study occurred between 1996 and 2007, spanning the period prior to the announcement of each wind energy facility to well after its construction and full-scale operation.
The conclusions of the study are drawn from eight different hedonic pricing models, as well as repeat sales and sales volume models. A hedonic model is a statistical analysis method used to estimate the impact of house characteristics on sales prices. None of the models uncovered conclusive statistical evidence of the existence of any widespread property value effects that might be present in communities surrounding wind energy facilities.
“It took three years to collect all of the data and analyze more than 50 different statistical model specifications,” says co-author and project manager Ryan Wiser of Berkeley Lab, “but without that amount of effort, we would not have been confident we were giving stakeholders the best information possible.”
“Though the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes or small numbers of homes have been negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, their frequency is too small to result in any widespread, statistically observable impact,” he added.
The analysis revealed that home sales prices are very sensitive to the overall quality of the scenic vista from a property, but that a view of a wind energy facility did not demonstrably impact sales prices. The Berkeley Lab researchers also did not find statistically observable differences in prices for homes located closer to wind facilities than those located further away, or for homes that sold after the announcement or construction of a wind energy facility when compared to those selling prior to announcement. Even for those homes located within a one-mile distance of a wind project, the researchers found no persuasive evidence of a property value impact.
“Although studies that have investigated residential sales prices near conventional power plants, high voltage transmission lines, and roads have found some property value impacts,” says co-author and San Diego State University Economics Department Chair Mark Thayer, “the same cannot be said for wind energy facilities, at least given our sample of transactions.“
Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research for DOE’s Office of Science and is managed by the University of California.
As the world’s seawater becomes more acidic due to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, some shelled marine creatures may actually become bigger and stronger, according to a new study.
The finding, based on research by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill marine scientist Justin Ries, could have important implications for ocean food webs and the multi-billion dollar global market for shellfish and crustaceans.
Previous research has shown that ocean acidification – the term for falling pH levels in the Earth’s oceans as they absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere – is likely to slow the growth or even dissolve the shells of such creatures.
However, the new study, published in the December issue of the journal Geology, suggests that sediment-dwelling marine organisms may exhibit a wider range of responses to CO2-induced acidification than previously thought: some may get weaker while others become stronger.
Researchers also found that creatures whose shells grew the most, such as crabs, tend to prey on those whose shells weakened the most, such as clams.
Such changes could have serious ramifications for predator and prey relationships that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, said Ries, Ph.D., assistant professor of marine sciences in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.
“There is no magic formula to predict how different species will respond, but one thing you can be sure of is that ecosystems as a whole will change because of these varied individual responses,” Ries said.
Researchers grew 18 different species of economically and ecologically important marine calcifiers (creatures that make their shells out of calcium carbonate) at various levels of CO2 predicted to occur over the next several centuries. When CO2 combines with water, it produces carbonic acid, raising the overall amount of carbon in seawater but reducing the amount of the carbonate ion used by organisms in their calcification.
Seven species (crabs, lobsters, shrimp, red and green calcifying algae, limpets and temperate urchins) showed a positive response, meaning they calcified at a higher rate and increased in mass under elevated CO2. Ten types of organisms (including oysters, scallops, temperate corals and tube worms) had reduced calcification under elevated CO2, with several (hard and soft clams, conchs, periwinkles, whelks and tropical urchins) seeing their shells dissolve. One species (mussels) showed no response.
“Shelled marine organisms need carbonate ions to build their shells that protect them from the intense predation that defines everyday life on the shallow sea floor,” Ries said. “The organisms that responded positively to higher CO2 levels are apparently more adept at converting the elevated dissolved inorganic carbon in the seawater, which results from elevated atmospheric CO2, back into a form that they can use directly in their calcification. The others, however, appear to be less adept at manipulating dissolved inorganic carbon.”
Ries said the varied responses may reflect differences in organisms’ ability to regulate pH levels at their sites of calcification; their ability to generate a protective organic layer that limits their exposure to surrounding seawater; whether they use more soluble forms of calcium carbonate in their shells; and their ability to utilize CO2 directly via photosynthesis.
The co-authors of the Geology study are Anne L. Cohen and Daniel C. McCorkle from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass.
Image Credits: Justin Ries
Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
been easy, particularly for tropical nations. New technology, developed by a team of scientists at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, is revolutionizing forest monitoring by marrying free satellite imagery and powerful analytical methods in an easy-to-use, desktop software package called CLASlite. Thus far, 70 government, non-government, and academic organizations in five countries have adopted the technology, with more on the horizon. 
