What's Your Ecotype?

An Interesting Mix of Conservation-related Analyses

2011-12-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

Links to an interesting mix of conservation-related analyses.

Last updated: January 7, 2011
PLoS ONE: Mapping Migratory Bird Prevalence Using Remote Sensing Data Fusion: Mapping Migratory Bird Prevalence Using Remote Sensing Data Fusion. Open Access.

Identifying mismatches between habitat selection and habitat quality in a ground-nesting farmland bird - Gilroy - 2011 - Animal Conservation - Wiley Online Library: Identifying mismatches between habitat selection and habitat quality in a ground-nesting farmland bird. Open Access

ScienceDirect - Trends in Ecology & Evolution : Time for a change: dynamic urban ecology: Time for a change: dynamic urban ecology

Nest-site selection in the Canada Warbler (Wilsonia canadensis) in central New Hampshire - Canadian Journal of Zoology: Nest-site selection in the Canada Warbler (Wilsonia canadensis) in central New Hampshire

Avian responses to experimental harvest in southern boreal mixedwood shoreline forests: implications for riparian buffer management - Canadian Journal of Forest Research: Avian responses to experimental harvest in southern boreal mixedwood shoreline forests: implications for riparian buffer management

PLoS ONE: Avian Conservation Practices Strengthen Ecosystem Services in California Vineyards: Avian Conservation Practices Strengthen Ecosystem Services in California Vineyards

PLoS ONE: Noise Pollution Filters Bird Communities Based on Vocal Frequency: Noise Pollution Filters Bird Communities Based on Vocal Frequency

ScienceDirect - Forest Ecology and Management : Do mature forest birds prefer early-successional habitat during the post-fledging period?: Do mature forest birds prefer early-successional habitat during the post-fledging period?

Spatial ecology and core-area protection of Blanding’s Turtle (Emydoidea blandingii) - Canadian Journal of Zoology: Spatial ecology and core-area protection of Blanding’s Turtle (Emydoidea blandingii)

ScienceDirect - Trends in Ecology & Evolution : Minimum viable population size: not magic, but necessary: Minimum viable population size: not magic, but necessary

PLoS ONE: Identifying and Prioritizing Greater Sage-Grouse Nesting and Brood-Rearing Habitat for Conservation in Human-Modified Landscapes: Identifying and Prioritizing Greater Sage-Grouse Nesting and Brood-Rearing Habitat for Conservation in Human-Modified Landscapes

ScienceDirect - Trends in Ecology & Evolution : A general target for MVPs: unsupported and unnecessary: A general target for MVPs: unsupported and unnecessary

PLoS ONE: Maladaptive Habitat Selection of a Migratory Passerine Bird in a Human-Modified Landscape: Maladaptive Habitat Selection of a Migratory Passerine Bird in a Human-Modified Landscape

ScienceDirect - Biological Conservation : Seeds in farmland food-webs: Resource importance, distribution and the impacts of farm management: Seeds in farmland food-webs: Resource importance, distribution and the impacts of farm management

SpringerLink - Environmental Management, Online First™: Integrating Ecological Knowledge, Public Perception and Urgency of Action into Invasive Species Management

Influence of forest management on pre- and post-fledging productivity of a Neotropical migratory songbird in a highly fragmented landscape - Canadian Journal of Forest Research: Influence of forest management on pre- and post-fledging productivity of a Neotropical migratory songbird in a highly fragmented landscape

Productivity Is a Poor Predictor of Plant Species Richness: Productivity Is a Poor Predictor of Plant Species Richness

Biodiversity and Productivity: Biodiversity and Productivity

BioOne Online Journals - Marking Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds with Radio Frequency Identification Tags: Marking Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds with Radio Frequency Identification Tags

ScienceDirect - Forest Ecology and Management : Effects of even-aged timber harvest on stream salamanders: Support for the evacuation hypothesis: Effects of even-aged timber harvest on stream salamanders: Support for the evacuation hypothesis

ScienceDirect - Biological Conservation : Using multi-scale modelling to predict habitat suitability for species of conservation concern: The grey long-eared bat as a case study: Using multi-scale modelling to predict habitat suitability for species of conservation concern: The grey long-eared bat as a case study

ScienceDirect - Trends in Ecology & Evolution : Minimum viable populations: is there a ‘magic number’ for conservation practitioners?: Minimum viable populations: is there a ‘magic number’ for conservation practitioners?

Genetic mating system and population history of the endangered Western Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria virens auricollis) in British Columbia, Canada - Canadian Journal of Zoology: Genetic mating system and population history of the endangered Western Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria virens auricollis) in British Columbia, Canada

PLoS ONE: Collision Mortality Has No Discernible Effect on Population Trends of North American Birds: Collision Mortality Has No Discernible Effect on Population Trends of North American Birds

ESA Online Journals - Woodpeckers, decay, and the future of cavity-nesting vertebrate communities worldwide: Woodpeckers, decay, and the future of cavity-nesting vertebrate communities worldwide

Stable isotopes reveal strategic allocation of resources during juvenile development in a cryptic and threatened seabird, the Marbled Murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) - Canadian Journal of Zoology: Stable isotopes reveal strategic allocation of resources during juvenile development in a cryptic and threatened seabird, the Marbled Murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus)

ScienceDirect - Biological Conservation : Predation determines the outcome of 10 reintroduction attempts in arid South Australia: Predation determines the outcome of 10 reintroduction attempts in arid South Australia

Pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus) foraging over native and vineyard habitats in British Columbia, Canada - Canadian Journal of Zoology: Pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus) foraging over native and vineyard habitats in British Columbia, Canada

Economic and geographic drivers of wildlife consumption in rural Africa: Economic and geographic drivers of wildlife consumption in rural Africa

ESA Online Journals - Comparison of statistical and theoretical habitat models for conservation planning: the benefit of ensemble prediction: Comparison of statistical and theoretical habitat models for conservation planning: the benefit of ensemble prediction

ESA Online Journals - Where the wild things are: predicting hotspots of seabird aggregations in the California Current System: Where the wild things are: predicting hotspots of seabird aggregations in the California Current System

BioOne Online Journals - Habitat Suitability and Nest Survival of White-Headed Woodpeckers in Unburned Forests of Oregon: "Habitat Suitability and Nest Survival of White-Headed Woodpeckers in Unburned Forests of Oregon"

BioOne Online Journals - Sufficiency of Horseshoe Crab Eggs for Red Knots During Spring Migration Stopover in Delaware Bay USA: "Sufficiency of Horseshoe Crab Eggs for Red Knots During Spring Migration Stopover in Delaware Bay USA"

PLoS ONE: Aggregating, Tagging and Integrating Biodiversity Research: "Aggregating, Tagging and Integrating Biodiversity Research" Open Access.

Trophic theory of island biogeography - Gravel - 2011 - Ecology Letters - Wiley Online Library: "Trophic theory of island biogeography"

BioOne Online Journals - Modeling Nest Survival of Cavity-Nesting Birds in Relation to Postfire Salvage Logging: "Modeling Nest Survival of Cavity-Nesting Birds in Relation to Postfire Salvage Logging"

PLoS ONE: Egg Production in a Coastal Seabird, the Glaucous-Winged Gull (Larus glaucescens), Declines during the Last Century: "Egg Production in a Coastal Seabird, the Glaucous-Winged Gull (Larus glaucescens), Declines during the Last Century" Open Access.

ScienceDirect - Forest Ecology and Management : Combined long-term effects of variable tree regeneration and timber management on forest songbirds and timber production: "Combined long-term effects of variable tree regeneration and timber management on forest songbirds and timber production"

Analyzing Variability and the Rate of Decline of Migratory Shorebirds in Moreton Bay, Australia - WILSON - 2011 - Conservation Biology - Wiley Online Library: "Analyzing Variability and the Rate of Decline of Migratory Shorebirds in Moreton Bay, Australia"

Population Bottlenecks and Increased Hatching Failure in Endangered Birds - HEBER - 2010 - Conservation Biology - Wiley Online Library: "Population Bottlenecks and Increased Hatching Failure in Endangered Birds"

Population Viability Analysis with Species Occurrence Data from Museum Collections - SKARPAAS - 2011 - Conservation Biology - Wiley Online Library: "Population Viability Analysis with Species Occurrence Data from Museum Collections"

Habitat Loss and Fragmentation

2011-11-18T16:58:00.000-08:00

Last updated: January 20, 2012

Most recent:
Edge effects and their influence on habitat suitability calculations: a continuous approach applied to birds of the Atlantic forest - Zurita - 2012 - Journal of Applied Ecology - Wiley Online Library: Edge effects and their influence on habitat suitability calculations: a continuous approach applied to birds of the Atlantic forest

Differential effects of anthropogenic edges and gaps on the reproduction of a forest-dwelling plant: The role of plant reproductive effort and nectar robbing by bumblebees - MAGRACH - 2011 - Austral Ecology - Wiley Online Library: Differential effects of anthropogenic edges and gaps on the reproduction of a forest-dwelling plant: The role of plant reproductive effort and nectar robbing by bumblebees

Interactions between climate and habitat loss effects on biodiversity: a systematic review and meta-analysis - Mantyka-Pringle - Global Change Biology - Wiley Online Library: Interactions between climate and habitat loss effects on biodiversity: a systematic review and meta-analysis

On the limitations of graph-theoretic connectivity in spatial ecology and conservation - Moilanen - 2011 - Journal of Applied Ecology - Wiley Online Library: On the limitations of graph-theoretic connectivity in spatial ecology and conservation

JSTOR: Oikos, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Dec., 1994), pp. 355-366: Effects of Habitat Fragmentation on Birds and Mammals in Landscapes with Different Proportions of Suitable Habitat: A Review
1649 citations on Google Scholar.

JSTOR: Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Vol. 34 (2003), pp. 487-515: Effects of Habitat Fragmentation on Biodiversity
1259 citations on Google Scholar.

Habitat fragmentation and large-scale conservation: what do we know for sure? - Harrison - 2006 - Ecography - Wiley Online Library: Habitat fragmentation and large-scale conservation: what do we know for sure? Open Access.
429 citations on Google Scholar.

Cambridge Journals Online - Abstract - Confounding factors in the detection of species responses to habitat fragmentation: Confounding factors in the detection of species responses to habitat fragmentation. Open Access. Cited by 347, Google Scholar.

ESA Online Journals - The relative influence of habitat loss and fragmentation: Do tropical mammals meet the temperate paradigm?: The relative influence of habitat loss and fragmentation: Do tropical mammals meet the temperate paradigm?

Combining Measures of Dispersal to Identify Conservation Strategies in Fragmented Landscapes - LEIDNER - 2011 - Conservation Biology - Wiley Online Library: Combining Measures of Dispersal to Identify Conservation Strategies in Fragmented Landscapes

The disentangled bank: How loss of habitat fragments and disassembles ecological networks: "The disentangled bank: How loss of habitat fragments and disassembles ecological networks"

PLoS ONE: Breaking Functional Connectivity into Components: A Novel Approach Using an Individual-Based Model, and First Outcomes: "Breaking Functional Connectivity into Components: A Novel Approach Using an Individual-Based Model, and First Outcomes"

Road plan for Serengeti paved with ecological ruin: biologist

BioOne Online Journals - Identifying Habitat Linkages to Maintain Connectivity for Corridor Dwellers in a Fragmented Landscape: "Identifying Habitat Linkages to Maintain Connectivity for Corridor Dwellers in a Fragmented Landscape"

A Multiscale Network Analysis of Protected-Area Connectivity for Mammals in the United States - MINOR - 2010 - Conservation Biology - Wiley Online Library: "A Multiscale Network Analysis of Protected-Area Connectivity for Mammals in the United States"

ESA Online Journals - Assessing effects of land use on landscape connectivity: loss and fragmentation of western US forests: "Assessing effects of land use on landscape connectivity: loss and fragmentation of western US forests"

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Conservation Actions

2011-10-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

Here is a growing list of articles relevent to evaluating the effectiveness of conservation actions.

Last updated: December 17, 2011

Most recently added:
PLoS ONE: Recurrent Die-Offs of Adult Coho Salmon Returning to Spawn in Puget Sound Lowland Urban Streams: Recurrent Die-Offs of Adult Coho Salmon Returning to Spawn in Puget Sound Lowland Urban Streams

Assessing the Effectiveness of Marine Reserves on Unsustainably Harvested Long-Lived Sessile Invertebrates - LINARES - 2011 - Conservation Biology - Wiley Online Library: Assessing the Effectiveness of Marine Reserves on Unsustainably Harvested Long-Lived Sessile Invertebrates

Improving biodiversity monitoring - LINDENMAYER - 2011 - Austral Ecology - Wiley Online Library: Improving biodiversity monitoring

Incorporating Effectiveness of Community-Based Management in a National Marine Gap Analysis for Fiji - MILLS - 2011 - Conservation Biology - Wiley Online Library: Incorporating Effectiveness of Community-Based Management in a National Marine Gap Analysis for Fiji

SpringerLink - Journal of Coastal Conservation, Volume 15, Number 1: Evaluating the effects of foraging habitat restoration on shorebird reproduction: the importance of performance criteria and comparative design
Annie F. McIntyre

ScienceDirect - Trends in Ecology & Evolution : Adaptive monitoring in the real world: proof of concept: Adaptive monitoring in the real world: proof of concept

ESA Online Journals - River restoration success: a question of perception: River restoration success: a question of perception. (several 'effectiveness of restoration' articles in this issue)

Contributions of the US state park system to nature recreation: "Contributions of the US state park system to nature recreation" Open Access.

Carbon debt of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) grasslands converted to bioenergy production: "Carbon debt of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) grasslands converted to bioenergy production" Open Access.

ScienceDirect - Trends in Ecology & Evolution : Conservation successes at micro-, meso- and macroscales: "Conservation successes at micro-, meso- and macroscales"

ESA Online Journals - Effects of urbanization and urban stream restoration on the physical and biological structure of stream ecosystems.: "Effects of urbanization and urban stream restoration on the physical and biological structure of stream ecosystems."

Avian nest success, mammalian nest predator abundance, and invertebrate prey availability in a fragmented landscape - Canadian Journal of Zoology: "Avian nest success, mammalian nest predator abundance, and invertebrate prey availability in a fragmented landscape"

More on Red Knot Migration: Foraging Conditions in Tierra del Fuego

2011-09-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

A recent paper on red knot migration describes factors at the southern end of their migration route in Tierra del Fuego that may contribute to their decline in numbers, in addition to foraging conditions at the Delaware Bay migration stop-over area.

Escudero et al. (2011) studied foraging conditions at the southern end of red knot migration, a major over wintering site in Argentinean Tierra del Fuego (e.g. see here and here). In particular, they looked at " . . . food abundance, diet and intake rates during January–February in 1995, 2000 and 2008."

They found that in 2000, a year of extremely low migration survival for red knot which coincided with low egg deposition by horseshoe crabs at the Delaware Bay stop-over site(e.g., Baker et al. 2004), foraging at the Tierra del Fuego site was excellent relative to other known over-wintering sites. However, in 2008 foraging success at the southern site declined due to smaller prey and increased human disturbance.

The authors suggest that in 2000, red knot didn't face problems in the Tierra del Fuego overwintering area, which would be consistent with the previous evidence that problems at northern stop-overs negatively affected red knot survival.

However, the poor foraging condition in 2008 could have further contributed to the decline in red knot numbers, and they conclude this finding emphasizes the need for a broader, hemispheric approach, to red knot research and management.

Previous red knot posts:See these previous posts on this subject for more background information and links to scientific papers: Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knots Revisited, Ecosystem Connections: Humans, Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knot and Red Knot Migration and Horseshoe Crab Egg Abundance Continued

References:
ESCUDERO, G., NAVEDO, J. G., PIERSMA, T., DE GOEIJ, P. and EDELAAR, P. (2011), Foraging conditions ‘at the end of the world’ in the context of long-distance migration and population declines in red knots. Austral Ecology. doi: 10.1111/j.1442-9993.2011.02283.x

Rapid population decline in red knots: fitness consequences of decreased refuelling rates and late arrival in Delaware Bay.: Rapid population decline in red knots: fitness consequences of decreased refuelling rates and late arrival in Delaware Bay.

Foraging conditions ‘at the end of the world’ in the context of long-distance migration and population declines in red knots - ESCUDERO - 2011 - Austral Ecology - Wiley Online Library: Foraging conditions ‘at the end of the world’ in the context of long-distance migration and population declines in red knots

Red Knot Superstar “B-95” Seen Again in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina! | WHSRN.org: Red Knot Superstar “B-95” Seen Again in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina!

Shorebird Researchers Document Red Knot's Record-breaking Non-stop Flight and Total Migration Distance: Shorebird Researchers Document Red Knot's Record-breaking Non-stop Flight and Total Migration Distance

Marine Conservation Literature

2011-08-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a growing collection of links to interesting looking papers relevant to marine conservation.

Last updated: January 7, 2012

Most recently added:
ESA Online Journals - Life-history correlates of extinction risk and recovery potential: Life-history correlates of extinction risk and recovery potential

Extinction risk and bottlenecks in the conservation of charismatic marine species - McClenachan - 2011 - Conservation Letters - Wiley Online Library: Extinction risk and bottlenecks in the conservation of charismatic marine species

PLoS ONE: Competing Conservation Objectives for Predators and Prey: Estimating Killer Whale Prey Requirements for Chinook Salmon: Competing Conservation Objectives for Predators and Prey: Estimating Killer Whale Prey Requirements for Chinook Salmon

Reexamining the science of marine protected areas: linking knowledge to action - Fox - Conservation Letters - Wiley Online Library: Reexamining the science of marine protected areas: linking knowledge to action

Fisheries conservation and management: finding consensus in the midst of competing paradigms - Branch - 2011 - Animal Conservation - Wiley Online Library: Fisheries conservation and management: finding consensus in the midst of competing paradigms

PLoS ONE: Global Conservation Priorities for Marine Turtles: Global Conservation Priorities for Marine Turtles. Open Access.

ScienceDirect - Biological Conservation : Cumulative estimates of sea turtle bycatch and mortality in USA fisheries between 1990 and 2007: Cumulative estimates of sea turtle bycatch and mortality in USA fisheries between 1990 and 2007

ScienceDirect - Biological Conservation : Small marine reserves can offer long term protection to an endangered fish: Small marine reserves can offer long term protection to an endangered fish

ScienceDirect - Trends in Ecology & Evolution : Recovery of marine animal populations and ecosystems: Recovery of marine animal populations and ecosystems

Seasonal patterns in bycatch composition and mortality associated with a freshwater hoop net fishery - Larocque - 2011 - Animal Conservation - Wiley Online Library: Seasonal patterns in bycatch composition and mortality associated with a freshwater hoop net fishery

PLoS ONE: Large Recovery of Fish Biomass in a No-Take Marine Reserve: "Large Recovery of Fish Biomass in a No-Take Marine Reserve" Open Access.

National Geographic article: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/08/12/an-ocean-miracle-in-the-gulf-of-california%e2%80%93can-we-have-more-of-this-please/

Role of egg predation by haddock in the decline of an Atlantic herring population: "Role of egg predation by haddock in the decline of an Atlantic herring population"

Inter Research » ESR » v11 » n3 » p245-269: "Global research priorities for sea turtles: informing management and conservation in the 21st century" Open Access.

Global distribution and conservation of marine mammals: "Global distribution and conservation of marine mammals"

Small-scale fisheries of Peru: a major sink for marine turtles in the Pacific - Alfaro-Shigueto - 2011 - Journal of Applied Ecology - Wiley Online Library: "Small-scale fisheries of Peru: a major sink for marine turtles in the Pacific" Open Access.

SpringerLink - Environmental Management, Online First™: "Global Marine Protection Targets: How S.M.A.R.T are They?"

Significant Arctic fish catches going unreported: UBC researchers warn: "Significant Arctic fish catches going unreported: UBC researchers warn"

PLoS ONE: Global Diversity Hotspots and Conservation Priorities for Sharks: "Global Diversity Hotspots and Conservation Priorities for Sharks"

Unexpected patterns of fisheries collapse in the world's oceans: "Unexpected patterns of fisheries collapse in the world's oceans"

Great white shark population lower than previously believed - CSMonitor.com: "Great white shark population lower than previously believed"

CITES meeting rejects protection for marine species - CSMonitor.com: "CITES meeting rejects protection for marine species"

ESA Online Journals - Fish farms, parasites, and predators: implications for salmon population dynamics: "Fish farms, parasites, and predators: implications for salmon population dynamics"

Red Knot Migration and Horseshoe Crab Egg Abundance Continued

2011-08-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

Here are some recent papers about western Atlantic red knot (Calidris canutus rufa) migration and horseshoe crab egg abundance in Delaware Bay, USA.

Karpanty et al. (2011) examined the relationship between the temporal and spatial distribution of horseshoe crab eggs and red knot migration timing in 2004 and 2005 (see here). They found that there was a sufficient abundance of horseshoe crab eggs to sustain the red knot migration, at least at the current red knot population size, but noted that this finding does not rule out the hypothesis the observed decline in the red knot population is related to the decline in the horseshoe crab population and hence horseshoe crab egg abundance. They suggest that if the red knot population does not increase as horseshoe crab egg abundance increases, then managers need to examine other factors and areas.

An important quantitative link in the hypothesis is showing that horseshoe crab egg abundance affects red knot survival on the northward migration to their breeding grounds in the Canadian arctic. McGowan et al. (2011) addressed this link by modelling the relationship between weight gain (mass gain) and the ensuing apparent survival of red knot in relation to horseshoe crab egg abundance (see here). They used a relatively long data set (for ecology) capture-recapture/resighting data with over 16,000 individual captures and 13,000 resightings collected in Delaware Bay (12 years from 1997-2008) and found a positive relationship between horseshoe crab spawning abundance and red knot weight gain, mass and apparent annual survival. This suggests that management to increase horseshoe crab abundance in the Delaware Bay (e.g., reduce harvest) can potentially increase the red knot population.

Smith et al. (2011) looked at how weather can affect red knot foraging opportunities on horseshoe crab eggs in Delaware Bay as a variation on the match/mismatch hypothesis (see here). They found that onshore winds can disrupt foraging opportunities in certain locations and suggest that in addition to managing the harvest of horseshoe crabs to ensure adequate abundance of eggs available during migration, that it is also important to conserve beach areas that are resistant to such weather related impacts on foraging opportunities for migrating red knot on horseshoe crab eggs.

See these previous posts on this subject for more background information and links to scientific papers: Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knots Revisited and Ecosystem Connections: Humans, Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knot

References:

Karpanty, S.M., J. Cohen, J.D. Fraser and J. Berkson. 2011. Sufficiency of Horseshoe Crab Eggs for Red Knots During Spring Migration Stopover in Delaware Bay USA. Journal of Wildlife Management Jul 2011 : Vol. 75, Issue 5, pg(s) 984-994 doi: 10.1002/jwmg.129

McGowan, C.P., J.E. Hines, J.D. Nichols, J.E. Lyons, D.R. Smith, K.S. Kalasz, L.J. Niles, A.D. Dey, N.A. Clark, P.W. Atkinson, C.D.T. Minton, and W. Kendall. 2011. Demographic consequences of migratory stopover: linking red knot survival to horseshoe crab spawning abundance. Ecosphere 2:art69.[doi:10.1890/ES11-00106.1]

Smith, D. R., N.L. Jackson, K.F. Nordstrom and R.G. Weber, R. G. 2011. Beach characteristics mitigate effects of onshore wind on horseshoe crab spawning: implications for matching with shorebird migration in Delaware Bay. Animal Conservation. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-1795.2011.00481.x

Green Grazing: More Articles about Sea Turtle Conservation

2011-08-07T15:25:00.000-07:00

Here are links to recent articles and blogs about sea turtle conservation. First, new research shows how loggerhead turtles use the earth's magnetic field to navigate the thousands of miles along their oceanic migration routes during the years they spend at sea after hatching. Not only may these results be useful in sea turtle conservation, they may also bring new insights into navigation technology for humans. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) categorizes loggerhead sea turles as endangered. (see BBC News - Sea turtles' migration mystery is 'solved'). In a second story, U.S. conservations are pushing for regulatory action under the Endangered Species Act for the leatherback turtle along the U.S. West Coast (see World Environment News - Conservationists Push Action On Protected Turtles - Planet Ark). Finally, here is an interesting blog post from a marine conservation scientist travelling to Ecuador to research the effectiveness of efforts to encourage fishers to use marine conservation technologies, including special fish hooks, to reduce the unintentional catch of sea turtles (bycatch) (see To Ecuador, With Sea Turtles in Mind - NYTimes.com).

Pollinator papers

2011-07-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

An eclectic and growing collection of pollinator papers and articles.

Last updated: December 23, 2011
Significant expansion of the distribution of the bumble bee Bombus moderatus (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in Alberta over 20 years11 This paper is dedicated to the memory of Adolf Scholl. - Canadian Journal of Zoology: Significant expansion of the distribution of the bumble bee Bombus moderatus (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in Alberta over 20 years

ESA Online Journals - Landscape-scale resources promote colony growth but not reproductive performance of bumble bees: Landscape-scale resources promote colony growth but not reproductive performance of bumble bees

PLoS ONE: Field Margins, Foraging Distances and Their Impacts on Nesting Pollinator Success: Field Margins, Foraging Distances and Their Impacts on Nesting Pollinator Success. Open Access.

PLoS ONE: Quantitative Historical Change in Bumblebee (Bombus spp.) Assemblages of Red Clover Fields: Quantitative Historical Change in Bumblebee (Bombus spp.) Assemblages of Red Clover Fields. Open Access.

ScienceDirect - Biological Conservation : Gardens benefit bees and enhance pollination in intensively managed farmland: "Gardens benefit bees and enhance pollination in intensively managed farmland"

Pollination ecology in the 21st century: key questions for future research - Parade@Portsmouth: "Pollination ecology in the 21st century: key questions for future research"

Mayer, C., Adler, L., Armbruster, Scott, Dafni, A., Eardley, C., Huang, S., Kevan, P., Ollerton, J., Packer, L. and Ssymank, A. (2011) Pollination ecology in the 21st century: key questions for future research. Journal of Pollination Ecology, 3 (2). pp. 8-23. ISSN 1920-7603

Stability of pollination services decreases with isolation from natural areas despite honey bee visits - Garibaldi - 2011 - Ecology Letters - Wiley Online Library: "Stability of pollination services decreases with isolation from natural areas despite honey bee visits" Open Access.

Translating research into action; bumblebee conservation as a case study - Goulson - 2010 - Journal of Applied Ecology - Wiley Online Library: "Translating research into action; bumblebee conservation as a case study" This paper is Open Access.

Bumble bee species' responses to a targeted conservation measure depend on landscape context and habitat quality

SpringerLink - Environmental Management, Online First™: "Honeybees Increase Fruit Set in Native Plant Species Important for Wildlife Conservation"

PLoS ONE: Space Use of Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) Revealed by Radio-Tracking: "Space Use of Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) Revealed by Radio-Tracking"

PLoS ONE: A Quantitative Model of Honey Bee Colony Population Dynamics: "A Quantitative Model of Honey Bee Colony Population Dynamics"

Decision-making in Conservation

2011-07-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

Green Grazing: Some Good News for Sharks

2011-02-18T22:46:00.000-08:00

Finally, some good news for sharks on both the recreational and commercial fishing fronts.

Sports fishermen in British Columbia have agreed to support the development of new federal sportfishing regulations to reduce the catch of sharks off the province's coast (see here). The new regulation would ban fishing for sharks for which there is a science-based conservation concern and any sharks caught by accident would have to be released. This ban will include the Tope, wide ranging pacific shark species that is, unfortunately for it, also known as the soupfin shark, and listed as 'special concern' under Canada's federal Species at Risk Act.

Meanwhile, across the border in the United States congress recently brought in a law prohibiting catching sharks and taking only their fins (known as 'finning') in U.S. waters (see here). Now boats have to bring sharks into port with the fins attached. Since whole sharks take up more room than just fins, this reduces the number of sharks killed by each vessel.

Beyond Ocean Fertilization: The CBD Moratorium on Geoengineering

2011-02-03T18:41:00.000-08:00

After last week's post on the recent UN report on ocean fertilization, I came across an interesting post on the blog Resilience Science that does a great job of contrasting two points of view about the potential effectiveness of a recent moratorium on geoengineering (see A Moratorium on Geoengineering? Really?). Effectiveness in this case is the likelihood of this moratorium actually controlling the implementation of large-scale geoengineering experiments or projects at the international scale.

The participants in the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) included this moratorium in their October 2010 agreement to protect biodiversity (the CBD previously called for a ban on ocean fertilization in 2008). The post has lots of useful links to background information on the CBD, other reports on geoengineering (pro and con), as well as general material about the potential role for geoengineering in combating global warming.

cheers.

Ocean Fertilization: Is the Verdict In?

2011-02-02T19:42:00.000-08:00

I found this article on Planet Ark - Fertilizing Oceans seen fruitless in climate fight. It's about a recent UN report on the utility of ocean fertilization (see here and here) as a tool for fighting climate change by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. Some of the issues raised in the report were:

It's hard to monitor ocean fertilization's effectiveness, which is key both for carbon credits and understanding impacts on ocean ecosystems.
It can only store relatively small amounts of carbon dioxide; only about 1-15% of the carbon taken up during nutrient stimulate phytoplankton blooms rains into the deep as 'marine snow' (the tiny carcasses of dead plankton).
It has a low chance of success; the results of a number of large experiments over recent years have brought declining optimism about it.
It might help grow fish in some places, but rob the ocean of nutrients in others.

The report was also skeptical about the utility of 'ocean pipes' for drawing naturally occurring nutrients to the ocean's surface waters.

Here's the the link to the UN report - Ocean Fertilization: A scientific summary for policy makers

Cheers.

Green Grazing: Penguins, Turtles and Whales

2011-01-23T10:19:00.000-08:00

Here are links to some articles on penguins, turtles and whales that captured my attention over the last couple of weeks. The common thread is how new technologies are helping scientists learn about the secrets of wide ranging and hard to observe animals, and also that there is still a lot to learn about the world around us.

Penguins
The 30 second summary: Scientists have found that penguins banded with traditional flipper-bands are at a survival disadvantage compared to unbanded penguins. Banded king penguins didn't live as long, had fewer chicks and exhibited delayed migration-timing relative to unbanded penguins. These results need to be taken into account when interpreting changes in penguin mortality rates over time relative to factors such as fishing and climate change.

The news article: Black, R. (January 12, 2011). 'Unethical' flipper tags are damaging to penguins. BBC News website.

The scientific paper: Saraux, C., C. Le Bohec, J.M. Durant, V.A. Viblanc, M. Gauthier-Clerc, D. Beaune, Y. Park, N.G. Yoccoz, N.C. Stenseth and Y. Le Maho. 2011. Reliability of flipper-banded penguins as indicators of climate change. Nature, 469: 203–206, (13 January 2011), doi:10.1038/nature09630, Received 26 August 2010 Accepted 29 October 2010. Published online12 January 2011.

Turtles
The 30 second summary: Researchers tracked leatherback turtles nesting on the beaches of the African nation of Gabon on their post-nesting treks through the Atlantic and found that they frequent three areas, probably due to the initial areas they were carried to by currents when they first entered the ocean upon hatching. Information shows that they end up in some of the most heavily fished areas of the sea. This data will be useful for conservation purposes as it shows the turtles, for example, traverse the coastal waters of 11 nations as they move down the Atlantic coast of Africa. They are in danger of becoming by-catch in longline fisheries and from being entangled in gillnets used in coastal fisheries.

The news story: Black, R. (January 5, 2011). Leatherback turtles tracked on Atlantic 'danger' trips. BBC News website. (Accessed January 9, 2011)

The scientific paper: Witt, M.J. et al. 2011. Tracking leatherback turtles from the world's largest rookery: assessing threats across the South Atlantic. Proc. R. Soc. B, Published online before print January 5, 2011, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2467

Whales
The 30 second summary: Scientists have found that Transient Killer whales in the eastern pacific prey heavily upon young grey whales, eating up to third of the calves born each year. Not only that, but the Killer whales also store the carcasses, a behaviour not previously observed. Because the whales store and feed on the carcasses in shallow nearshore waters, the dead grey whale calves also provide food for Alaskan bears and sleeper sharks (ironically, another group of Killer whales appears to feed almost exclusively on sleeper sharks).

The news story: Lavoie, J. (January 22, 2011). A third of young grey whales eaten by killer whales, scientists say. The Vancouver Sun.

The scientific paper: Barrett-Lennard LG, Matkin CO, Durban JW, Saulitis EL, Ellifrit D (2011) Predation on gray whales and prolonged feeding on submerged carcasses by transient killer whales at Unimak Island, Alaska. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 421:229-241

Cheers

Tumbling Bumble bees

2011-01-05T20:33:00.000-08:00

This week's hot science story is about declines in North American bumble bees. A paper just published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has been getting a lot of press, with articles appearing in numerous print and online media sources (e.g., see here, here and here . . . ). The researchers studied 8 of the 50 bumble bee species found in North America and found large declines in four of them. It appears that like the honey bee and Nosema ceranae, bumble bee declines may be partially due to a pathogen, Nosema bombis. Here's the link to the paper:

Cameron, S.A., J.D. Lozier, J.P. Strange, J.B. Koch, N. Cordes, L.F. Solter and T.L. Griswold. 2011. Patterns of widespread decline in North American bumble bees. PNAS January 3, 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1014743108

The Power of the Press Release Redux

2010-12-30T22:05:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a modern press campaign and its influence on the public understanding of a scientific paper and its relative importance (see here). The paper in question addressed a breakthrough in the study of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which at the time was much in the press. Several press releases hinted and many news articles boldly stated that the research presented in the paper showed CCD was caused by a virus, the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), though I should make it clear the paper's authors did themselves make such a strong claim themselves.

Well, time has passed and the scientific process has tested the IAPV-CCD hypothesis. Subsequent research has been unable to corroborate the original findings and it fallen by the wayside as more convincing evidence arises for other causes (e.g. the microsporidian Nosema ceranae). In short, while the research was an important part of the science behind understanding CCD, it was not the breakthrough that the press juggernaut conveyed.

The IAPV-CCD juggernaut was launched by savvy use of new media technology to publicize science and accelerated by the public need to know more, or at least something, about the cause of the mysterious disappearance of honey bees across the United States.

A more recent example of this phenomenon comes from a press campaign by NASA that seems to similarly have gone awry. Hints of a big announcement from NASA scientists were followed, somewhat anticlimactically (I think many were expecting an announcement of the discovery of extraterrestrial life), by a press release from NASA scientists reporting the discovery of a species of bacteria capable of incorporating arsenic into its DNA structure in place of phosphorous, a finding at odds with prior understanding and which suggested that the search for extraterrestrial life was perhaps too narrowly focused.

This reminded me of the IAPV story because the hype was incredible for a story that turned out to be not nearly as interesting to the general public as, say, the discovery of actual extraterrestrial life. Perhaps even more odd that the IAPV story because it was not in relation to an issue currently high in the public radar as CCD was, and especially as it was hard to explain to the public - so the bacteria use arsenic instead of phosphorous, so what? Important yes, exciting, perhaps not if you don't study bacteria and think deeply about the conditions necessary to support extraterrestrial life. Yet, there it was in the news, on the Internet, on TV and in the newspaper for what seemed like days.

It seems that we've learned how to market science really well on the Internet, now we just need to learn the appropriate intensity at which to do it.

For more details about the bacteria-phosphorous research and its repercussions from a more scholarly angle read this interesting post from RealClimate.org that looks at this story and the controversy it generated as an example the scientific process in action (see here).

If you find this interesting, you might also want to check out another recent article on scientific peer review on the blog Dot Earth: On Warming, Antarctica, Clouds and Peer Review

Cheers.

Managing Nutrient Pollution in Coastal Ecosystems: Two Examples

2010-12-30T09:16:00.000-08:00

Excess nutrients entering the ocean from sources like the runoff of agricultural fertilizers pose serious problems for coastal marine ecosystems.In some cases, hypoxic (low oxygen) 'dead zones' form, reducing marine biodiversity, fish habitat, and ultimately impacting fisheries (e.g., see here and here). Two well known examples of coastal ecosystems impacted by nutrient pollution are the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay.

Two recent scientific papers provide interesting examples of different, but equally important approaches to the challenge of managing nutrient pollution, forecasting its impacts and assessing management actions intended to reduce it.

Ecosystem modeling is a valuable tool for evaluating trade-offs between environmental policies and management actions (e.g., see here). Evans and Scavia (2011) provide an example of the development and application of ecosystem models for predicting future hypoxic events in both Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. One goal of their analysis is to develop robust approaches to calibrating such models that optimize the accuracy and precision of forecasts for highly variable systems, such as the Bay and the Gulf, are changing over time.

Ruhl and Rybicki(2010) provide a different sort of analysis. Rather than using data to model and forecast future hypoxic conditions in Chesapeake Bay, they analyze past data from 18 years of restoration efforts to understand pattern of change observed in an indicator of ecosystem condition, Submerged Aquatic Vegetation(SAV) (see here). Contrary to general opinion about the ineffectiveness of such actions, their analysis suggests that, ". . . environmental policies that reduce anthropogenic nutrient inputs do result in improved habitat quality, with increased diversity and native species abundances."

Both papers are Open Access.

References for this post:

Evans, M.A. and D. Scavia. 2011. Forecasting hypoxia in the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico: model accuracy, precision, and sensitivity to ecosystem change. Environmental Research Letters 6(1): doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/015001. O/A

Ruhl, H. A. and N. B. Rybicki. 2010. Long-term reductions in anthropogenic nutrients link to improvements in Chesapeake Bay habitat. Published online before print September 7, 2010, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1003590107. O/A

Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knots Revisited

2010-12-21T22:08:00.000-08:00

Here's some more detailed information about horsehoe crabs and red knots as a supplement to my 2008 post, "Ecosystem Connections: Humans, Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knot."

Niles et al. 2009a provide an excellent primer on the important connection between the timing of horseshoe crab spawning and red knot migration in Delaware Bay, including factors driving the decline in the horseshoe crab population, the impact of this decline on red knots, the managment actions taken to address the decline, and the effectiveness of these actions for recovering both horseshoe crabs and red knots. They propose an adaptive management strategy to help recover the red knot and horseshoe crab populations to recover.

As a bonus, I've included links to a couple of follow up papers as an example of the scientific process in action - Smith et al. 2009 critique aspects of the Niles et al. 2009a paper, while Niles et al. 2009b responed to this critique.

Also, as an fyi, there is a link to a paper by Cohen et al. 2010. This paper further expands the science underlying red knot conservation.

References for this post:

Niles LJ, J Bart, HP Sitters, AD Dey, KE Clark, PW Atkinson, AJ Baker, KA Bennett, KS Kalasz, NA Clark, J Clark, S Gillings, AS Gates, PM González, DE Hernandez, CD T Minton, RIG Morrison, RR Porter, RK Ross, CR Veitch. 2009a. Effects of Horseshoe Crab Harvest in Delaware Bay on Red Knots: Are Harvest Restrictions Working? BioScience 59(2): 153–164, doi 10.1525/bio.2009.59.2.8 Posted online on February 11, 2009.

Smith, D.R., E.M. Hallerman, M.J. Millard, J.A. Sweka and R.G. Weber. 2009. An Incomplete Analysis. BioScience 59:7, 541-541. Online publication date: 1-Jul-2009.

Niles L.J., H.P. Sitters, A.D. Dey, J. Bart, A.J. Baker, R.I.G. Morrison, K.S. Kalasz and N.A. Clark. 2009b. Response from Niles and colleagues. BioScience 59:7, 541-542. Online publication date: 1-Jul-2009.

Cohen, J.B., S.M. Karpanty, J.D. Fraser and B.R. Truitt. 2010. The effect of benthic prey abundance and size on red knot (Calidris canutus) distribution at an alternative migratory stopover site on the US Atlantic Coast. J Ornithol (2010) 151:355–364, DOI 10.1007/s10336-009-0462-7.

More research on mosquito-borne viruses in Italy

2010-12-17T18:16:00.000-08:00

More mosquito info:

Calzolari M, Bonilauri P, Bellini R, Albieri A, Defilippo F, et al. 2010 Evidence of Simultaneous Circulation of West Nile and Usutu Viruses in Mosquitoes Sampled in Emilia-Romagna Region (Italy) in 2009. PLoS ONE 5(12): e14324. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014324 O/A

see also: Tiger Mosquitoes Tour Italia

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) VII: IAPV, Nosema ceranae, and CCD

2009-09-26T13:08:00.000-07:00

Is Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) caused by new or re-emerging pathogens? This is one hypothesis put forward by US researchers in 2007 and two candidates, the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) and the microsporidian parasite Nosema ceranae, have received the most mention in the press.

I reviewed the available scientific literature to evaluate the weight of scientific evidence for the role of each pathogen in CCD and found that in terms of both the number of scientific papers and their substantial content the weight of evidence supports Nosema ceranae over IAPV as a cause of CCD, at least in Spain. Additionally, recent research does not support IAPV as a cause of CCD, in either the United States or Europe.

However, despite this evidence, there is a knowledge gap in the literature about the role of Nosema ceranae in CCD in the United States, which may arise from early US research focus on IAPV, the later start on research on IAPV relative to Nosema ceranae, or different causes of CCD in Europe and the United States. More experimental research is required to confirm that Nosema ceranae does, or does not, play a role in CCD in North America.

Until then, the current weight of evidence for a cause-effect link between Nosema ceranae and CCD supports the adoption of precautionary bee-keeping practices that account for it.

Background

Soon after colony collapse disorder (CCD) emerged in 2006, US researchers focused on a suite of hypotheses, one of which was that CCD is caused by new or re-emerging pathogens (see here).

In 2007, a paper in journal Science reported that a relatively new virus, the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), was associated with observed occurrences of CCD, a finding that not only generated a tremendous amount of press coverage (see here), but some international intrigue as well (see here). As recently as this year, US researchers were still discussing of the role of IAPV in CCD in a general science magazine.

Nosema ceranae, while recognized as an emerging threat to honey bees prior to CCD, was quickly dismissed as a candidate pathogen for CCD by the primary US researchers. Little was written in the general press about Nosema ceranae until early in 2009 when it received its own press boost after a paper was published by Spanish researchers which appeared to convincingly connect it to CCD (see here).

The challenge to the layperson following developments in CCD research is keeping such press reports on scientific research results in perspective. Reporters often rely on press releases prepared by research institutions and may let the researchers themselves place their results in context.

While this is an important part of reporting on science, reporters rarely dig deep enough or follow a particular issue long enough to be able to establish the relative importance of a particular paper for the reader, beyond the immediate research being reported. This is especially the case for a topic as significant, complex and long-lasting as CCD; it is difficult for the interested layperson keep abreast of the research initiatives and findings, many of which are not reported upon in the general press.

The purpose of this analysis, then, is to determine the relative weight of evidence for the role of IAPV and Nosema ceranae as causes of CCD by finding and evaluating the peer-reviewed scientific evidence available for each.

Methods

I used Google Scholar to search the peer-reviewed scientific literature for research papers on both IAPV and Nosema ceranae (search is current up to the date of this posting). For each pathogen, I considered both the number of scientific papers published about it, from its first appearance in the literature until the present, and their substantive nature in relation to CCD. That is, for each pathogen, I considered how directly the observational or experimental evidence reported in the papers supported a cause-effect link between it and CCD.

To make the direct case for a cause-effect link between a particular pathogen and CCD, the research had to show that infection by the pathogen in question caused symptoms of CCD:
1) most adult bees have left and failed to return to the hive leaving the queen behind (uncharacteristic of bee behaviour);
2) colony losses are rapid and occur in large numbers; no dead adult bees are found within or near the hive;
3) delayed honey robbing behaviour from nearby colonies and honey predators (highly unusual); and
4) the few adults found within abandoned colonies are often highly infected with multiple pathogens.

Results

Evidence for a Cause-Effect Link between the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) and CCD

The first published description of IAPV in the scientific literature is in 2007. Maori et al. (2007) report that following unusually high honey bee colony losses in Israel, they isolated IAPV, a virus closely related to two previously known bee viruses, the kashmir bee virus and acute bee paralysis virus.

[Cox-Foster and vanEngelsdorp (2009) write that IAPV was first described in 2004 by Ilan Sela of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; however, I could not find a published paper to support this. It may be referenced in another paper as a personal communication, or just common knowledge in the bee virus research community. Sela is a co-author of Maori et al. 2007].

That same year, Cox-Foster et al. (2007) published a paper in the journal Science reporting an association between the presence of IAPV and dead colonies exhibiting the symptoms of CCD. This research received much press, but though it showed an association between IAPV and CCD, it did not establish a causal link between them (Anderson and East 2008). For example, CCD could have made the bees susceptible to IAPV infection (Cox-Foster and vanEngelsdorp 2009).

A third IAPV paper published in 2007 reported that the virus had been present in honey bees in the United States for a number of years prior to the onset of CCD (Chen and Evans 2007). So, if IAPV was a cause of CCD, something must have changed to make it more virulent. This ‘something’ could be a new strain arising through genetic mutation, or the arrival of a more virulent strain from outside the US.

Papers relevant to IAPV and CCD that have been published since Cox-Foster et al. (2007) include:
- Palacios et al. (2008): found distinct clusters of the IAPV virus in the United States.
- Blanchard et al. (2008): reported the first detection of IAPV in France, but their results were inconclusive about its relationship to observed colony losses.
- Maori et al. (2009): reported that IAPV can be ‘silenced’ by dsRNA ingestion, suggesting a potential future treatment for the virus.

None of these papers strengthen the support for IAPV as a cause CCD, and recent research weakens the link even further. vanEngelsdorp et al. (2009) report that a replication of the work reported by Cox-Foster et al (2007) did not show IAPV was associated with CCD – that is, they were unable to replicate those earlier results, though they found that the prevalence of other viruses was generally comparable to the prior results.

In summary, the published scientific evidence on IAPV to date does not support the hypothesis that IAPV is a cause of CCD, however, the primary US researchers of CCD remain convinced that a virus of some kind lies at the bottom of the mystery: “The growing consensus among researchers is that multiple factors such as poor nutrition and exposure to pesticides can interact to weaken colonies and make them susceptible to a virus mediated collapse.” (Cox-Foster and vanEngelsdorp 2009)

Evidence for a Cause-Effect Link between Nosema ceranae and CCD

Meanwhile, in Europe there is little or no support for IAPV as a cause of CCD, but lots for Nosema ceranae. There CCD is also called Honey Bee Colony Depopulation Syndrome (HBDS) and research into the role of Nosema ceranae in honey bee colony losses has been going on since before the onset of CCD in the United States, with the pathogen gradually becoming the primary suspect.

Nosema ceranae is a microsporidian (fungal) parasite of the Asian honeybee Apis ceranae that is closely related to Nosema apis, a long known pathogen of the European honeybee Apis mellifera. Nosema ceranae is first mentioned in the scientific literature as a parasite of Apis ceranae in 1996 (see Fries et al. 1996), but not long after that it emerges as a pathogen of Apis mellifera being reported first in Taiwan by Huang et al. (2007) (research submitted for publication in 2005) and then in Spain (Higes et al. 2006).

Since then, research on N. ceranae has steadily accumulated with the publication of at least twenty more papers. For this analysis, I focused on a subset of those papers that describe N. ceranae’s spatial distribution, its pattern of temporal emergence, and the experimental evidence of its role in honey bee colony collapse; however, the citations for the other papers are also included at the end of this article for those interested.

Spatial Distribution of Nosema ceranae:

Nosema ceranae is now widespread throughout the world as a pathogen of Apis mellifera. Klee et al. (2007) summarised its global dispersal as of 2006, when it was present in at least 15 countries across the Americas and Caribbean (Brazil, Martinique, Washington DC), Asia (Vietnam, Taiwan), Europe and Near East (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland). They attributed its rapid long distance dispersal to the transport of infected honey bees by commercial or hobbyist bee keepers.

Since then, Nosema ceranae has been found in Canada (the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) and extended its range in the United States (Minnesota) (Williams et al. 2008). It has also been found in Uruguay (Inverrnizzi et al. 2009), Australia (Giersch et al. 2009) and Hungary (Tapaszti et al. 2009).

Temporal Emergence of Nosema ceranae:

Not only does the scientific literature show that Nosema ceranae has become globally distributed, it also shows that it has been infecting Apis mellifera probably since it was first reported in the literature as a parasite of Apis ceranae. Klee et al. (2007) concluded that N. ceranae had jumped to Apis mellifera ‘within the last decade’ (their paper was submitted for publication in October 2006), a finding consistent with the research of Paxton et al. (2007), who reported that Nosema ceranae had been present in Apis mellifera in Europe since at least 1998.

Where it has become established, N. ceranae has gradually displaced N. apis as the most prevalent nosema infection. Martin-Hernandez et al. (2007) found evidence of Nosema ceranae’s growing severity over time in Europe, with the gradual replacement of N. apis by N. ceranae as the most prevalent nosema infection in in bees samples from Spain, Switzerland, France and Germany. Similar results were found in North America by Chen et al. (2008), who reported that N. ceranae had not only been present there for longer than previously thought (since at least 1995), but that by 2007 it was the primary nosema infection of the honey bees they tested.

Experimental Link between Nosema ceranae and CCD

The rapid spread of Nosema ceranae around the globe and its temporal pattern of emergence and intensification coincided with increasing numbers of colony collapses (e.g., Martin-Hernandez et al 2007). Nevertheless, ‘correlation is not causation’, a saying exemplified by the IAPV case above - and further scientific work would be required to establish the cause-effect link between N. ceranae and CCD.

As Klee et al. (2007) remarked, “Analyses of colonies with and without apparent nosema disease combined with experimental infection trials are needed to determine if there is a causal link between Nosema ceranae and colony collapse.” The scientific research into Nosema ceranae gradually provided strong experimental evidence of a cause-link, at least in Europe. Below is a sketch of the key research findings that establish this connection.

First, Fries et al. (2006) confirmed that Nosema ceranae has become established as a naturally recurring and persistent new infection of European honey bees and could no longer be thought of as a sporadic, exotic infection caused only by the importation of bees or bee products.

Second, experimental infection trials demonstrated that not only was Nosema ceranae able to infect and kill Apis mellifera, it was far more pathogenic than its relative Nosema apis (Higes et al. 2007). In fact, it was soon established that the relative risk of bee depopulation observed in colonies with both Nosema species or N. ceranae only was almost 6 times greater than in colonies without such infections (Martin-Hernandez et al. 2007).

Third, Higes et el. (2007) also described a plausible ‘mechanism of collapse’. They found that bees infected with Nosema ceranae died suddenly after a period of infection, which supported a hypothesis that infected bees die away from the hive while foraging, leading to a steady colony depopulation that would only be detected when a hive (i.e. the queen) could not keep up with the disappearance of foragers in the field (i.e. by laying more eggs and producing worker bees). To an observer, say a commercial beekeeper, this would appear to be a sudden loss and thus one of the key symptoms of CCD – colonies found without adult worker bees and no dead bees near the hive.

Fourth, Higes et al. (2008) showed that natural infection of bee colonies by Nosema ceranae could cause colony collapse. Consistent with the hypothesized ‘mechanism of collapse’ of Higes et al. (2007), they found that signs of colony weakness were not observed until the queen could no longer replace the loss of infected worker bees and that the long period asymptomatic N. ceranae infection helped explain the absence of obvious symptoms until colony collapse occurred.

Importantly, Higes et al. (2008) also showed that Nosema ceranae could be isolated from infected bees, used to infect non-infected colonies, that these colonies subsequently collapsed, and that Nosema ceranae could then be isolated from in bees from those colonies. Theses steps follow Koch’s postulates, a key part of the process for establishing a cause-effect link between a candidate pathogen and a disease. The lack of these steps was a key criticism of the conclusions drawn by Cox-Foster et al. (2007) about the link between IAPV and CCD (e.g., Anderson and East 2008).

Fifth and finally, Higes et al. (2009) reported how Nosema ceranae caused colony collapse in two commercial bee operations, the first such case observed under field conditions. In both cases, analyses supported the conclusion that the observed collapse was due to infection by Nosema ceranae. The researchers searched for and did not find other significant pathogens (e.g., IAPV) or pesticides (e.g., neonicotinoids).

The Weight of Scientific Evidence Favours Nosema ceranae over IAPV as a Cause of CCD

The weight of scientific evidence favours Nosema ceranae over IAPV as a cause of CCD. Not only have more scientific papers been published on Nosema ceranae than IAPV (23 vs. 7), but these papers include a series of substantive papers that experimentally establish a causal link between Nosema ceranae and colony collapse in Europe.

This substantive research shows that Nosema ceranae jumped from Apis ceranae, its natural host, to Apis mellifera sometime in the early to mid-1990’s, that it quickly increased its spatial distribution around the world during the same period of time that Europe and other areas in the world saw increasing instances of colony collapse, that it is now a natural pathogen of Apis mellifera, that it is highly pathogenic to Apis mellifera, that experimental infection of Apis mellifera by Nosema ceranae produces colony collapse exhibiting a key symptom of CCD, that this symptom can be accounted for through a plausible biological ‘mechanism of collapse’, and that natural infections cause colony collapse in commercial beekeeping operations under field conditions in the absence of other suspected causes, such IAPV or pesticides.

No comparable body of research exists for IAPV, and in fact scientific support for IAPV as a cause of CCD in the US has recently waned after vanEngelsdorp et al. 2009 failed to replicate the findings of Cox-Foster et al (2007) – that is, IAPV was not correlated with CCD in this new study.

Thus, based on my two performance measures of number of publications and their substantive content, I conclude that there is a greater weight of scientific evidence for Nosema ceranae as a cause of honey bee colony collapse than for IAPV.

There is No Published Evidence that Nosema ceranae causes CCD in the United States

Yet, a problem remains: while scientific support for IAPV as a cause of CCD has declined since 2007, there is currently no published scientific evidence that Nosema ceranae plays a role in CCD in the United States. This could be for several reasons.

First, the early US research into CCD quickly dismissed Nosema ceranae as a culprit after it was not detected at levels considered high enough to cause colony collapse (see Russell 2007 and also Cox-Foster et al. 2007). This could explain why, in their recent Scientific American article about CCD, Cox-Foster and vanEngelsdorp (2009) do not specifically mention of N. ceranae at all, just that two nosema species were found and dismissed as a possible cause of CCD.

This early dismissal of Nosema ceranae by senior and influential researchers may have biased the direction of research and research funding in the US away from N. ceranae and towards IAPV. This may change with more recent US research that found that in some cases N. ceranae was present in levels high enough to cause colony collapse (van Engelsdorp et al. 2009).

Additionally, perhaps the time has come for greater collaboration between European and US scientists on the potential role of Nosema ceranae in North American cases of CCD. It would at least be useful to rule it out through direct experimentation, rather than indirectly through correlation, especially given the substantial scientific support for its role in CCD in Europe.

Second, research on Nosema ceranae in Europe has been going on a lot longer than research on CCD and IAPV in particular, in the North America. The first papers suggesting a role for N. ceranae in colony collapse were published in 2006, based on research completed in 2005 or earlier, while IAPV emerged as a pathogen of concern in 2007. Based on the publication pattern observed for N. ceranae ( 1 paper in 1996, 2 papers in 2006, 5 papers in 2007, 6 papers in 2008, and 8 papers in 2009) perhaps we can expect more substantive papers on the link between IAPV, or some other virus, and CCD over the next few years.

For example, in their recent article in the popular science magazine Scientific American, Cox-Foster and vanEngelsdorp (2009) describe an experiment in which honey bees were experimentally infected with IAPV and then exhibited symptoms consistent with CCD 1-2 weeks later. While this is consistent with the hypothesis that that IAPV causes CCD, they also observed colonies infected with IAPV that did not collapse, and in fact, some of them even managed to rid themselves of the virus. (While this information is interesting, it was not reported in a peer-reviewed journal, thus I did not consider it in the weight of evidence analysis.)

Third, it is important to remember that CCD is not a ‘thing’, but a collection of symptoms. It is possible these symptoms may arise from multiple causes and that CCD in North America may result from a different set of factors than colony collapse in Europe. This ‘multiple factor’ hypothesis is also one of the contenders brought forward during the early days of CCD, and as noted earlier, seems to be where some US researchers are beginning to focus.

In the meantime, the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence for the cause-effect link between Nosema ceranae and colony collapse in Europe, as well as the presence of N. ceranae in North America, supports the adoption of precautionary beekeeping practices. In fact, some professional beekeepers already manage their operations under the assumption that N. ceranae is the primary culprit in colony collapse (Vass 2009).

Next post CCD post: Pesticides and CCD. Cheers.

References for This Post:

Anderson, D. and I.J. East. 2008. The Latest Buzz About Colony Collapse Disorder. Science 8 February 2008: 724c-725c. Letter in response to Cox-Foster et al. 2007.

Blanchard P, Schurr F, Celle O, Cougoule N, Drajnudel P, Thiéry R, Faucon JP, Ribière M. 2008. First detection of Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) in France, a dicistrovirus affecting honeybees (Apis mellifera). Journal of Invertebrate Pathology. July 30, 2008 online

CBC news (April 22, 2009). ``Parasite behind European honeybee colony collapse, researchers say`` (about the Higes et al 2009 paper below)

Cox-Foster, D. and D. vanEngelsdorp. (April 2009). Saving the Honeybee. Scientific American Magazine. See this link – online version: Solving the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees

Cox-Foster, D.L., S. Conlan, E.C. Holmes, G. Palacios, J.D. Evans, N.A. Moran, P. Quan, T. Briese, M. Hornig, D.M. Geiser, V. Martinson, D. vanEngelsdorp, A.L. Kalkstein, A. Drysdale, J. Hui, J. Zhai, L. Cui, S.K. Hutchison, J.F. Simons, M. Egholm, J.S. Pettis and W.I. Lipkin. 2007. A Metagenomic Survey of Microbes in Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder. Science 318 (5848): 283 – 287.

Chen, Yanping and J.D. Evans 2007. Historical Presence of Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus in the United States. American Bee Journal (here too)

Chen, Y., J.D. Evans, I.B. Smith and J.S. Pettis. 2008. Nosema ceranae is a long-present and wide-spread microsporidian infection of the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) in the United States. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 97(2): 186-188.

Fries I., R. Martin, A. Meana, P. Garcia-Palencia, M. Higes. 2006. Natural infections of Nosema ceranae in European honey bees. J Apicult Res 45: 230–233.

Fries, I., F. Feng, A. da Silva, S.B. Slemenda, N.J. Pieniazek. 1996. Nosema ceranae n. sp. (Microsporidia, Nosematidae), Morphological and Molecular Characterization of a Microsporidian Parasite of the Asian Honey bee Apis cerana (Hymenoptera, Apidae). European Journal of Protistology, 32(3): 356-365.

Giersch, T., T. Berg, F. Galea and M. Hornitzky. 2009. Nosema ceranae infects honey bees (Apis mellifera) and contaminates honey in Australia. Apidologie 40 (2009) 117-123

Higes, M., R. Martín-Hernández, E. Garrido-Bailón, A.V. González-Porto, P. García-Palencia, A.Meana, M.J. del Nozal, R. Mayo and J.L. Bernal. 2009. Honeybee colony collapse due to Nosema ceranae in professional apiaries. Environmental Microbiology Reports Volume 1 Issue 2, Pages 110 – 113, Published Online: 16 Feb 2009.

Higes, M., Raquel Martín-Hernández, Cristina Botías, Encarna Garrido Bailón, Amelia V. González-Porto, Laura Barrios, M. Jesús del Nozal, José L. Bernal, Juan J. Jiménez, Pilar García Palencia and Aránzazu Meana. 2008. How natural infection by Nosema ceranae causes honeybee colony collapse. Environmental Microbiology, doi:10.1111/j.1462-2920.2008.01687.x

Higes, M., P. García-Palencia, R. Martín-Hernández and A. Meana. 2007. Experimental infection of Apis mellifera honeybees with Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia). Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 94(3), March 2007, Pages 211-217

Higes, M., R. Martína and A. Meana. 2006. Nosema ceranae, a new microsporidian parasite in honeybees in Europe. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 92(2): 93-95, June 2006. doi:10.1016/j.jip.2006.02.005

Huang, W., J. Jiang, Y. Chen and C. Wang. 2007. A Nosema ceranae isolate from the honeybee Apis mellifera. Apidologie 38 (2007) 30-37, DOI: 10.1051/apido:2006054

Invernizzi, C. , C. Abud, I.H. Tomasco, J. Harriet, G. Ramallo, J. Campá, H. Katz, G. Gardiol and Y. Mendoza. 2009. Presence of Nosema ceranae in honeybees (Apis mellifera) in Uruguay. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology, 101(2): 150-153, June 2009.

Klee, J., A.M. Besana, E. Genersch, S. Gisder, A. Nanetti, D.Q. Tam, T.X. Chinh, F. Puerta, J.M. Ruz, P. Kryger, D. Message, F. Hatjina, S. Korpela, I. Fries and R.J. Paxton. 2007. Widespread dispersal of the microsporidian Nosema ceranae, an emergent pathogen of the western honey bee, Apis mellifera. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology Volume 96, Issue 1, September 2007, Pages 1-10

Maori, E., N. Paldi, S. Shafir, H. Kalev, E. Tsur, E. Glick and I. Sela. 2009. IAPV, a bee-affecting virus associated with Colony Collapse Disorder can be silenced by dsRNA ingestion. Insect Molecular Biology 18(1): 55 – 60, Published Online: 19 Jan 2009.

Maori, E., S. Lavi, R. Mozes-Koch, Y. Gantman, Y. Peretz, O. Edelbaum, E. Tanne and I. Sela. 2007. Isolation and characterization of Israeli acute paralysis virus, a dicistrovirus affecting honeybees in Israel: evidence for diversity due to intra- and inter-species recombination. J Gen Virol 88 (2007), 3428-3438; DOI 10.1099/vir.0.83284-0.

Martín-Hernández, R., A. Meana, L. Prieto, A.M. Salvador, E. Garrido-Bailón and M. Higes. 2007. Outcome of Colonization of Apis mellifera by Nosema ceranae. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 73(20): 6331-6338

Paxton, R.J., J. Klee, S. Korpela and I. Fries. 2007. Nosema ceranae has infected Apis mellifera in Europe since at least 1998 and may be more virulent than Nosema apis. Apidologie 38:558-565, DOI: 10.1051/apido:2007037.

Palacios, G. et al. 2008. Genetic Analysis of Israel Acute Paralysis Virus: Distinct Clusters Are Circulating in the United States. Journal of Virology, July 2008, p. 6209-6217, Vol. 82, No. 13 doi:10.1128/JVI.00251-08

Russell, S. (April 25, 2007). “UCSF scientist tracks down suspect in honeybee deaths” San Francisco Chronicle

Tapaszti, Z., P. Forgách, C. Kővágó, L. Békési, T. Bakonyi, M. Rusvai. 2009. First detection and dominance of Nosema ceranae in Hungarian honeybee colonies. Acta Veterinaria Hungarica 57(3): 383-388, September 2009, DOI 10.1556/AVet.57.2009.3.4. Online Date Monday, July 27, 2009

vanEngelsdorp, D., J.D. Evans, C. Saegerman, C. Mullin, E. Haubruge, B.K. Nguyen, M. Frazier, J. Frazier, D. Cox-Foster, Y. Chen, R. Underwood, D.R. Tarpy, J.S. Pettis. 2009. Colony Collapse Disorder: A Descriptive Study. PLoS ONE 4(8): e6481. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006481 (Received: March 6, 2009; Accepted: June 29, 2009; Published: August 3, 2009)

Vass, Keith. (July 20, 2009). Bees are back as scientists uncover cause of colony collapse disorder. Saanich News.

Williams, G.R., A.B.A. Shafer, R.E.L. Rogers, D. Shutler and D.T. Stewart. 2008a. First detection of Nosema ceranae, a microsporidian parasite of European honey bees (Apis mellifera), in Canada and central USA. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 97(2): 189-192 (February 2008), doi:10.1016/j.jip.2007.08.005.

Other IAPV and Nosema ceranae references of interest:

Antúnez, K., R. Martín-Hernández, L. Prieto, A. Meana, P. Zunino and M. Higes. 2009. Immune suppression in the honey bee (Apis mellifera) following infection by Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia). Environmental Microbiology, doi:10.1111/j.1462-2920.2009.01953.x

Cornman, R.S., Y.P. Chen, M.C. Schatz, C. Street, Y. Zhao, B. Desany, M. Egholm, S. Hutchison, J.S.
Pettis, W.I. Lipkin and J.D. Evans. 2009. Genomic Analyses of the Microsporidian Nosema ceranae, an Emergent Pathogen of Honey Bees. PLoS Pathog. 2009 June; 5(6): e1000466. Published online 2009 June 5. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1000466.

Hayley, J. (July 19, 2007). Asian Parasite Killing Western Bees. Planet Ark.

M. Higes, R. Martín-Hernández, P. García-Palencia, P. Marín and A. Meana. 2009. Horizontal transmission of Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia) from worker honeybees to queens (Apis mellifera). Environmental Microbiology Reports, doi:10.1111/j.1758-2229.2009.00052.x.

Higes, M., Raquel Martı´n-Herna´ndez, Encarna Garrido-Bailo´n, Pilar Garcı´a-Palencia, Ara´nzazu Meana. 2008. Detection of infective Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia) spores in corbicular pollen of forager honeybees. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 97 (2008) 76–78.

Maori, E., Tanne, E. & Sela, I. 2007. Reciprocal sequence exchange between non-retro viruses and hosts leading to the appearance of new host phenotypes. Virology 362, 342–349. {cited by Cox-Foster et al 2007 as paper that says IAPV first reported in 2004}

Maori, E., E. Tanne and I. Sela. 2007. Corrigendum to “Reciprocal sequence exchange between non-retro viruses and hosts leading to the appearance of new host phenotypes” Virology 362: 342–349. Virology 368(1), 10 November 2007, Page 218.

Mayack, C. and D. Naug. 2009. Energetic stress in the honeybee Apis mellifera from Nosema ceranae infection. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 100(3): 185-188.

Pajuelo, A.G., C. Torres, F.J.O. Bermejo. 2008. Colony losses: A double blind trial on the influence of supplementary protein nutrition and preventative treatment with fumagillin against Nosema ceranae. J Apicult Res 47: 84–86.

Williams, G. R., Michelle A. Sampson, Dave Shutler and Richard E.L. Rogers. 2008. Does fumagillin control the recently detected invasive parasite Nosema ceranae in western honey bees (Apis mellifera)? Journal of Invertebrate Pathology Volume 99, Issue 3, November 2008, Pages 342-344 doi:10.1016/j.jip.2008.04.005

“The copyright of the article ‘Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) VII: IAPV, Nosema ceranae, and CCD’ on ‘What’s Your Ecotype?’ is owned by Ian Parnell. Permission to republish ‘Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) VII: IAPV, Nosema ceranae, and CCD’ in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.”

Previous posts about CCD:

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) I: Should we really be surprised? (May 28, 2007)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) II: What’s causing it? (May 30, 2007)

Green Grazing: Water, Flying Food, Ground-level Ozone, Farmland Biodiversity and Colony Collapse Disorder (July 28, 2007)

Green Grazing: SUDS, Biodiversity Stuff, More About Bees, African Agriculture, and Satellite Fish (August 2, 2007)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) III: The Power of the Press Release (September 28, 2007)

Honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) IV: IAPV, CCD, Australian Bees and the Silence of the Press (March 27, 2008)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) V: Trends in Reporting and Research (June 12, 2009)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) VI: The Global Status of CCD (July 10, 2009).

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) VI: The Global Status of CCD

2009-07-10T23:07:00.000-07:00

What is the global status of honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder? Where is it occurring? Is it getting better or worse? Is its range increasing, or decreasing? Such questions might seem easy to answer given the worldwide concern about CCD; however, they turned out to be surprisingly difficult to address.

Using Google and Google Scholar, I searched for quantitative data on honey bee colony losses collected in the context of CCD and that was published in peer reviewed journal papers, association magazines, or industry and government reports.

I found little recent information: three consecutive years of surveys of US beekeepers starting in 2006, one industry summary report from Canada for 2008, and one paper reporting the results of a survey of beekeepers from Turkey in 2007, and the proceedings of a recent (March 2009) conference on colony losses.

The questionnaire-based US surveys specifically track the location, timing, and intensity of winter losses of honey bee colonies and one index of CCD-like losses (dead colonies found in spring with few or no adult bees). In the most recent survey conducted over the winter of 2008/09 total losses were 28.6% while overall CCD-like losses were 15%, much lower than the 60% reported for 2007/08. Unfortunately, the first survey, conducted over the winter of 2006/07, did not report an overall percentage of CCD-like losses.

Outside of the US I only found two reports that provided statistics on winter colony losses: a report on Canadian colony losses for 2007/08 (about 35% over all provinces) and a paper reporting the results of a survey of Turkish beekeepers over the winter of 2006/07 (close to 40% overall). Interestingly, neither source attributed the high reported colony losses to CCD.

The dearth of published data on colony losses may soon be over. I found the proceedings of a conference on honey bee colony losses. It summarizes talks by bee researchers from more than thirty, mostly European, countries. For each country, the researchers discuss data on colony losses and suspected causes. A review of the summaries indicates that CCD is not yet prevalent in Europe. Researchers tend to attribute losses to familiar pests and pathogens and poor management practices.

In summary, the patchwork of published quantitative data does not support a cohesive assessment of the global status of CCD, but does allow these answers to my initial questions: CCD still occurs in the US, it seems to be less intense there this year, and it is not occurring in other countries for which data could be found. Cheers.

References for this post:

Canadian Association of Professional Beekeepers. 2008. CAPA Statement on Honey Bees Losses in Canada (Spring 2008) – Final Revision.

COLOSS 2009. Proceedings of the 4th COLOSS Conference Prevention of honeybee COlony LOSSes in the Faculty of Agriculture University of Zagreb Svetosimunska cesta 25 Zagreb, Croatia March 3-4, 2009.

Giray, T., B. Çakmak, L. Aydin, I. Kandemir, A. Inci, D. Oskay, M. Ali Döke, M. Kence and A. Kence. 2007. Preliminary survey results on 2006-2007 colony losses in Turkey. Uludag Bee Journal August 2007, pp 101-107

vanEngelsdorp, D., J. Hayes, Jr., R.M. Underwood, J. Pettis. 2009a. A Survey of Honey Bee Colony Losses in the U.S., Fall 2007 to Spring 2008. PLoS ONE.

vanEngelsdorp D., J. Hayes, and J Pettis. 2009b. Preliminary Results: A Survey of Honey Bee Colonies Losses in the U.S. Between September 2008 and April 2009. Abstract issued by MAAREC (Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium. (May 19, 2009). {Paper to follow later.}

vanEngelsdorp, D., R. Underwood, D. Caron, J. Hayes, Jr. 2007. An Estimate of Managed Colony Losses in the Winter of 2006 - 2007: A Report Commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America. American Bee Journal 147 (7) 599-603.

Previous posts about CCD:

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) I: Should we really be surprised? (May 28, 2007)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) II: What’s causing it? (May 30, 2007)

Green Grazing: Water, Flying Food, Ground-level Ozone, Farmland Biodiversity and Colony Collapse Disorder (July 28, 2007)

Green Grazing: SUDS, Biodiversity Stuff, More About Bees, African Agriculture, and Satellite Fish (August 2, 2007)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) III: The Power of the Press Release (September 28, 2007)

Honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) IV: IAPV, CCD, Australian Bees and the Silence of the Press (March 27, 2008)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) V: Trends in Reporting and Research (June 12, 2009)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) V: Trends in Reporting and Research

2009-06-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

What ever happened to Colony Collapse Disorder? Since the IAPV breakthrough of 2008 the press has been relatively quiet on this subject. The journalistic stampede that accompanied CCD`s emergence in 2006 has calmed down to an occasional stray article, most of which simply rehash what is already known and reported.

This makes sense when you consider that in some cases it appears the press stampede was driven by press releases from scientific organizations: no breakthroughs = no press releases = no news articles. Nevertheless, while there may be no big news, or at least big press releases, when you dig down, you will find that lots of research is being done as science continues its slow steady pursuit of CCD’s cause. Let’s take a look at some numbers.

The observation that CCD is currently not a hot news item is easy to demonstrate. A search on Google’s News Archive using the phrase ‘colony collapse disorder’ on May 18, 2009 yielded these results, reported as ‘search year (total hits)’:

2005 (0),
2006 (4),
2007(1,680),
2008 (1,150),
2009 (202 to May 18, 2009, linear projection to 534 for whole year).

Clearly, the number of news articles about CCD increased steeply from 2005 to a peak in 2007. Over this period, the press became aware of the CCD phenomenon and scrambled to learn and communicate about it. There was much uncertainty and concern about what was going on. Then, as fresh information became scarce, the number of articles declined dramatically in 2008 (down by 60% from 2007). Projecting from the numbers up to the search date, it looks like barring any major breakthrough the numbers will continue to drop in 2009.

On the other hand, the number of scientific review and research papers related to CCD has increased each year since 2005, as shown by a search on Google Scholar. Using Scholar’s advanced search option and searching on the phrase ‘colony collapse disorder’ ‘anywhere in article’, restricted to the ‘Biology, Life Sciences, and Environmental Sciences’ category yielded these results, reported as ‘search year (total hits, number relevant)’:

2005(7, 0),
2006(1, 0),
2007(36, ~ 25 – mostly general articles outlining the current scientific thinking about CCD, that is, the hypotheses about causative factors),
2008(67 hits, almost all reference the phrase CCD somewhere, many are research papers, also moving into discussions about the need for wild pollinators),
2009 (31 hits up to May 18/09, mostly original research on aspects of CCD, e.g., pathogens and pesticides. Liner projection to 81 publications).

No doubt as more CCD research is published, press releases will stimulate period increase in press coverage. In subsequent posts I will explore the largest blips on the CCD radar the IAPV breakthrough, focusing on three areas: 1) the (relatively) current status of CCD in the US and around the world, 2) the relative roles of suspect pathogens (e.g., IAPV and Nosema ceranea) appear to play in CCD, and 3) and the growing focus on the link between certain classes of systemic pesticides and CCD. Cheers.

Previous posts about CCD:

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) I: Should we really be surprised? (May 28, 2007)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) II: What’s causing it? (May 30, 2007)

Green Grazing: Water, Flying Food, Ground-level Ozone, Farmland Biodiversity and Colony Collapse Disorder (July 28, 2007)

Green Grazing: SUDS, Biodiversity Stuff, More About Bees, African Agriculture, and Satellite Fish (August 2, 2007)

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) III: The Power of the Press Release (September 28, 2007)

Honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) IV: IAPV, CCD, Australian Bees and the Silence of the Press (March 27, 2008).

“The copyright of the article ‘Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) V: Trends in Reporting and Research’ on ‘What’s Your Ecotype?’ is owned by Ian Parnell. Permission to republish ‘Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) V: Trends in Reporting and Research’ in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.”

Measuring Environmental Performance: One Number Is Not Enough

2009-06-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

In his article ‘Saving the Planet by Numbers’, David MacKay offers the quantitatively minded enviro-skeptic a new energy standard for comparing the relative performance of green actions and technologies to each other and the status quo. (MacKay, David. (April 23, 2009). “Saving the planet by numbers” BBC News website).

Unfortunately, a single measure of environmental performance usually is not enough to tell the whole story. MacKay proposes a new standard for putting, “. . . green lifestyle ideas under the spotlight.” This standard would measure energies in Kilowatt-hours and how fast activities use or produce energy in Kilowatt-hours per day, or some other unit of time or distance. He provides an overview of how this standard might be used to compare activities and technologies for four categories: ‘Simple Individual Actions’ like you might find on green top-ten lists; ‘Transport’; ‘Heating’; and ‘Decentralized Power Generation’.

For example, under the ‘Transport’ category, MacKay reports that the average fossil-fuelled British car outperforms hydrogen vehicles at 80 KWh/100 km versus 254 KWh/100 km, respectively. He also includes the performance of electric vehicles (6-20 KWh/100 Km) noting that “. . . even if electricity comes from traditional fossil-fuel power stations, electric cars are still more efficient than petrol cars.”

Multiple Measures of Environmental Performance Help Us to Assess Trade-offs Between Alternatives

Unfortunately, a single measure of environmental performance doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, MacKay’s single-number energy standard can’t be used to compare the relative performance of the transport options in terms of reduced emissions of carbon dioxide.

Since we are usually interested in more than one thing when we address environmental concerns, looking at multiple performance measures can provide a clearer picture of the relative tradeoffs inherent to alternative options, transportation-related or otherwise.

Comparing PHEV Impacts Using Ground-Level Ozone Production and Carbon Dioxide Emissions

This is illustrated by the multiple performance measure approach taken in a paper I recently reviewed that used simulation modeling to explore the impact of large-scale use of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) on air quality: it compared both ground-level ozone production and carbon dioxide emissions across a range of alternative PHEV-use scenarios (see here).

Interestingly, not only did the researchers find that the large-scale use of PHEVs reduced ground-level ozone production, the main focus of their study, but also that carbon dioxide emissions were lower too.

The latter result was somewhat counterintuitive since the virtual PHEVs were charged using electricity from coal-fired generating stations, increasing the greenhouse gas emissions of these facilities above baseline conditions.

The reason was that the large-scale replacement of gasoline-powered vehicles with PHEVs drastically reduced total car-related emissions, more than compensating for the increased emissions from the coal-fired stations.

Multiple Performance Measures Can Also Increase Confidence in Results

This result would have been missed by focusing on ground-level ozone alone as a performance measure. Thus, in this case at least, using multiple performance measures helped build a stronger-case for the expanded use of PHEVs in areas with power-grids fed with electricity from fossil-fuelled generating stations.

My intent here is not to detract from MacKay’s proposed energy standard. It looks like a useful tool for comparing the energy performance of green actions and technologies – in conjunction with other measures. But I think it’s important to remember that environmental choices usually consider, explicitly or implicitly, multiple objectives and values. Focusing too narrowly on a single measure of performance leaves us open to wrongly interpreting results and can also preclude the opportunity to learn. Cheers.

References for this post:
MacKay, David. (April 23, 2009). “Saving the planet by numbers” BBC News website.

“The copyright of the article ‘Do Measuring Environmental Performance: One Number Is Not Enough’ on ‘What’s Your Ecotype?’ is owned by Ian Parnell. Permission to republish ‘Measuring Environmental Performance: One Number Is Not Enough’ in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.”

Washing Our Car With Rain Barrel Water: How Many Buckets?

2009-05-03T17:37:00.001-07:00

It rained hard last night and our rain barrel was full by morning. Since the garden was nicely watered, I decided to use some of that dewy fresh rain water to wash our car. I wanted to try out something I'd read about being able to wash a car using only two buckets of water. So, I went to the rain barrel and filled up our one bucket for the soapy water and our battered watering can for rinsing . . . then I went back to the rain barrel the watering can several more times (six I think). Turns out I couldn't wash our car using two buckets of water - either it's too big, or the buckets are too small! In the end, I'm not sure I saved much water over just using a hose with a spray gun, but at least it was rain water that would have gone down the drain otherwise. With a little practice, though, I think I'll be able to get it down to maybe three or four cans. We'll see. Cheers.

End of Post

Do Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) Really Reduce Emissions?

2009-04-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) are touted as a technology for reducing vehicle related emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants that affect human health. However, do they really achieve net improvements in emissions or just shift them from cars to power stations? Recent research has addressed this question, focusing specifically on the potential of PHEVs for improving air quality by reducing emissions of the pollutants that lead to increased low-level ozone concentrations.

Low-Level Ozone is Geographically Localized Problem with Health Implications

Unlike the global problem of stratospheric ozone loss (i.e. the ‘ozone hole’), ground-level ozone is a geographically localized problem arising when sunlight reacts with Volatile Organic Carbons (VOC) and nitrous oxides (NOx). These precursor chemicals occur naturally, but their primary source is the internal combustion engine, a source which ensures the chemicals are especially concentrated near urban centres. High concentrations of these chemicals can create high levels of ground-level ozone, which harms not only human health (see here), but also the yield of agricultural crops (see here).

Reducing Vehicle Emissions Can Lower Low-Level Ozone Concentrations

Fortunately, ground-level ozone is potentially easier to control than stratospheric ozone loss since more local control can be exerted over emissions that create it. Since ground-level ozone is produced by a photochemical reaction between sunlight and some of the chemicals found in car exhaust, the intensity of its production varies by season, time of day and geographic location – factors that affect the how much sunshine and meets how much air pollution. For example, ground-level ozone production is greatest in the summer during the morning hours in areas with lots of traffic (e.g. city centres during the morning rush hour).

For this reason, one way to control ground-level ozone levels is by shifting the timing and intensity of vehicle emissions. This can be done, for example, by prohibiting the use of certain equipment (e.g., lawn mowers) at certain times of the day, or by using tolls or fees to reduce how many cars enter city centres (e.g., London, England).

Another way is to reduce emissions at the source and low-emission vehicles, like PHEV’s can also play an important role. However, it is important to evaluate how and how much such technology can contribute to reducing the problem rather than just assuming it will always help. A question of particular importance is what is the impact on air quality and greenhouse gas emissions of transferring emissions in one sector (on-road vehicles) to emissions in another sector (power plants burning fossil fuels)?

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) Reduce Vehicle Emissions and Improve Air Quality

In a recent scientific paper, Thompson et al. (2009) analysed the effectiveness of PHEVs for reducing vehicle-related ozone concentrations. They tested the assumption that charging PHEVs at night with the unused base-load electricity of coal-fired generating stations would lower the diffuse daytime emissions of VOCs, NOx’s from cars enough to offset the increased localized emissions of these pollutants at coal-fired generating stations. They also looked for a net decrease in carbon dioxide emissions.

The researchers based their analysis on a real power-grid covering the N.E. US states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland (PJM). They calculated that the ‘excess’ power available at night from the grid’s base-load power plants (largely coal-fired) could support the substitution of 20% of the grid area’s car fleet with PHEVs. This corresponded to roughly a 20% reduction in diffuse vehicle-related emissions during the day and a 20% increase in localized power plant emissions due to coal at night.

The Effect of PHEVs on Air Quality was Evaluated Using a Complex Photochemical Model

The researchers evaluated the impact of these relative changes in vehicle and power plant emissions using historic emissions data for a severe pollution event in August of 2002 in the power-grid area in combination with a sophisticated and complex photochemical model. The model was used to predict the movement of emissions over space and time of air pollutants while accounting for factors that affect the concentration and creation of pollutants like weather conditions, chemical reactions under varying conditions, and the deposition chemicals from air to ground.

The analysis considered four scenarios: 1) a “base case” scenario with the same emission pattern as found for the August 2002 event; 2) an emissions scenario based on the full utilization of PHEVs during the day and then charging them at night using electricity from coal-fired power plants; 3) a less optimistic scenario where emission reductions due to PHEV use were only half of scenario 2; and 4) a scenario where only car emissions changed and there was no increase in the night time emissions from coal-fired power plants. This latter scenario represents increased used of pollution controls for coal-fired plants, or the increased use of alternative non-emitting power sources like wind generation.

The model results for scenario 1, the “base case” scenario, were compared to the actual 2002 data to see how well the model performed and were found to be highly comparable. This provided confidence that the results found under the other three scenarios would follow realistic patterns of behaviour. The results for scenarios 2-4 were then compared to the modelled “base case” results and expressed in terms of changes from the “base case” numbers over a suite of performance measures.

Increased Use of PHEVs Decreased Low-Level Ozone Concentrations and Carbon Dioxide Emissions

The overall results showed that shifting emissions from cars to coal-fired power plants had the potential to significantly reduce ozone levels over most of the power grid area. However, there were also ‘disbenefits’, or worsened conditions in some areas, arising due to the complex chemistry of ozone. Nevertheless, the researchers concluded that increased PHEV use could generally reduce ozone concentrations, especially for cases where PHEVs were charged at night using lower or non-emitting power sources (e.g., wind power, or controlled coal combustion).

Additionally, the results confirmed that using the shift in emissions from cars to power plants did not increase overall carbon dioxide emissions. The additional power generation from the coal-fired power plants led to an increase of about 99,610 tons of carbon dioxide emissions for the grid-area, while the decrease in vehicle related emissions from replacing cars with PHEVs was about 122,670 tons. This is a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of about 23,000 tons. Given their analytical assumptions, the researchers cautiously concluded that, at the least, the scenarios they evaluated would not lead to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

Thompson et al. (2009) is a Rich Source of Information on Air Quality Science and Regulations

The answer to the question posed at the beginning of this post is thus, “Yes, increased use of PHEVs can lead to a net-reduction in the emissions and improve air quality – most of the time.”

However, this paper is a rich resource for several reasons beyond just answering that question. First, it provides references for quantitative data and regulatory information on emissions science. Secondly, it illustrates how computer modeling is used to explore complex large-scale environmental issues, in this case to better understand how and if proposed regulations and technology can improve air quality. Third, the work is presented in a straightforward way that is accessible to readers interested in the science behind sustainability and green technologies, but without expert training in air quality science. Finally, the results emphasize that ‘sustainability’ is a context-dependent concept; achieving it can depend on your specific objectives as well as how, where and when it is measured - when it comes to living sustainably, details matter.

Related posts: Gasoline vs. Electric Cars

Reference for this post:
Thompson, T., M. Webber, and D.T. Allen . 2009. Air quality impacts of using overnight electricity generation to charge plug-in hybrid electric vehicles for daytime use. Environ. Res. Lett. 4 014002 (12pp) doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/1/014002

“The copyright of the article ‘Do Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) Really Reduce Emissions?’ on ‘What’s Your Ecotype?’ is owned by Ian Parnell. Permission to republish ‘Do Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) Really Reduce Emissions?’ in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.”

Reemerging: Some Recent Articles

2009-03-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

It's been a - long- while since my last post. What can I say, life can get busy. Among the many things I've been doing is writing articles for Suite 101 on varied topics that include:

adaptive management;
the value of scientific information;
statistical power analysis;
the link between bushmeat hunted in forests and plains of Ghana and its coastal fisheries; and,
and the link between agricultral fertilizers and ocean dead zones.

A varied list, indeed, but you might find some of these articles interesting. Click 'read more' for the links to these articles. Cheers.

Mar 14, 2009
Adaptive Management: Learning by Doing
Adaptive management structures choices as experiments so resource managers can learn about ecological and socio-economic systems and improve future choices. more...

Mar 14, 2009
Adaptive Management of Sea Lamprey: Using Science to Improve Assessment Methods for Fisheries
Using adaptive management, two scientists evaluated alternative larval lamprey assessment methods and improved the Great Lakes Sea Lamprey management program. more...

Nov 9, 2008
Statistical Power Analysis: Design Powerful Experiments Capable of Detecting Important Effects Statistical power analysis helps design experiments and monitoring programs that protect against Type I and II errors and have high probability of detecting true effects. more...

Nov 8, 2008
Components of Statistical Power: The Four Pieces of the Power Puzzle
Statistical power is a function of sample variance, sample size, the level of statistical significance, and the effect size of interest. more...

Nov 8, 2008
Think About Statistical Power: The Probability of Detecting a True Effect
Before drawing conclusions based on a non-significant hypothesis, test check its statistical power to detect important effects. more...

Nov 2, 2008
Digital Corn: Using Computer Models to Simulate Agricultural Ecosystems
By growing virtual crops with computers, scientists learn how agriculture interacts with the environment at very large scales. more...

Nov 2, 2008
Biofuels and Dead Zones: More Corn-Ethanol Means More Nitrogen Pollution
The unexpected impact of increased corn-ethanol production on a coastal ecosystem illustrates the challenge of creating sustainable solutions to environmental problems. more...

Sep 4, 2008
'Dead Zones' and Climate Change: Hypoxia in Coastal Ecosystems May Increase As Oceans Warm
Low-oxygen 'dead zones' caused by nutrient pollution are spreading through coastal ecosystems worldwide. Climate change may make this serious environmental problem worse. more...

Nov 8, 2008
Bushmeat Links Land and Sea: How Fluctuations in Ocean Fisheries Can Affect Wildlife Conservation
In Ghana, when the catch from ocean fisheries declines, people eat more 'bushmeat', increasing the hunting pressure on inland wildlife populations. more...

Nov 2, 2008
Assessing Corn-Ethanol's Impacts: Modeling Corn-Ethanol’s Impact on Nitrogen Pollution
Ecosystem modeling is a valuable tool for assessing conflicts between environmental policies, quantifying consequences, and making trade-offs clear. more...

Sep 12, 2008
The Value of Information: Better Science in Natural Resource Management Comes at a Cost
Is better science always worth it? Environmental managers can assess if better science helps achieve broader management goals by considering its 'Value of Information'. more...

Aug 25, 2008
Agriculture Impacts Oceans: Runoff of Agricultural Fertilizers Pollutes Coastal Ecosystems
Agricultural fertilizers pollute coastal ecosystems with excess nutrients, creating hypoxic 'dead zones' that reduce habitat, lower biodiversity and impact fisheries. more...

Green Grazing: hockey sticks, droughts and rising sea levels

2008-09-02T11:13:00.000-07:00

Three climate stories caught my eye today: A revived ‘hockey stick’ model, the impacts of Australia’s long drought, and the risk rising sea levels present for Metro Vancouver, British Columbia.

Revived 'hockey stick' model: Black, Richard. (September 1, 2008). “Climate 'hockey stick' is revived”. BBC News website. Mann et al. continue their 1998 work, collating numerous new proxy measures of climate and using two different analytical approaches to conclude that their original, slightly controversial, ‘hockey stick’ model of an abrupt increase in global temperatures starting in the late 20th century is still ‘broadly correct’. The new Mann et al. paper is in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes, Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni. 2008. Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. PNAS published September 2, 2008, doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105.

Australia's drought: Bryant, Nick. (August 31, 2008). “'Big Dry' turns farms into deserts”. BBC News website. This article contains personal accounts by farmers of the impact of Australia’s long drought on their farms and the environment. Also discusses the interaction of drought, the longest in 100 years, and the mismanagement, over-allocation, of water supplies in the Murray-Darling basin. Author Tim Flannery is quoted as saying it’s, “. . . a 130% over allocation and that’s in a good year.”

Risks of Rising Sea Levels: Meaney, Ken, Phil Couvrette and Kelly Sinoski (September 1, 2008). “Rising sea levels threaten Metro Vancouver”. The Vancouver Sun. The title is pretty misleading because the article mainly discusses the risk rising sea levels present for one municipality in Metro Vancouver, Richmond, which is mostly at or below sea level. However, what is interesting is that it highlights how municipal officials are already engaged in risk management and adaptation to climate change, making Richmond more flood-worthy by raising dikes, implementing weekly checks of dikes and conducting 24/7 monitoring of river water-levels. Similar climate change exercises and considerations have been carried out in Delta (see here), which also has a significant portion of its land base at or below sea level.

Cheers.

Solar-Powered Ships and Planes

2008-08-26T07:03:00.000-07:00

Two Japanese companies hope to sail a (partially) solar-powered ship, while two Swiss adventurers are set to soar in their solar-powered plane.

This December, two Japanese corporations, Nippon Yusen KK and Nippon Oil Corp, will sail a prototype of a solar-powered ship. Solar panels have been placed on a 60,000 tonne car-carrier ship this December to offset fuel costs and reduce carbon emissions. The panels will generate 40Kw of power to conserve 6.5% of the fuel used to power the diesel engines used to generate electricity. This equates to a 1-2% reduction in carbon emissions, about 20 tonnes/yr. If the systems stands up well to salt air and ship vibrations the partners will eventially develop it for sale on a commercial scale.

Meanwhile, Swiss adventurers Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg are making plans to fly a solar-powered plane around the planet. It will have the wingspan of a commercial airliner, weigh as much as an automobile, and carry solar panels capable of powering a large christmas tree. This won't be the first solar powered fligh, but it will be the first to fly both day and night. To enable this feat, excess energy will be stored in batteries during the day. Hence the challenge: generate enough power to fly, charge batteries while keeping the weight under 3500 lbs. They hope for a test run in the spring of 2009 with the global flight in 2011.

Cheers.

Watch Garbage Warrior

2008-08-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

The other night we watched a documentary from director Oliver Hodge called, Garbage Warrior. It's the story of pioneering American architect Mike Reynolds and his quest to build sustainable homes and communities in Taos, New Mexico. Known as the father of the 'Earth Ship', his perseverance and ingenuity has stimulated interest in 'Earth Ships' around the world.

It's easy to see why. His homes are sustainable from the ground up. Built of recycled tires, cans, and bottles, Reynold's 'Earth Ships' are completely off 'all grids', using thermal mass to maintain internal temperatures of 70 F year round, generating all their own electricity, catching and storing rainwater, and serving as greenhouses for growing food. Throw in a few goats and chickens and as Reynolds says at one point, 'Living in this house, a family of four would never have to go to the store.'

This story is about more than sustainable living, though. It's also a story about the creative spirit, companionship in the quest for new ideas, and fighting the resistance of established society to new ideas. It illustrates once again that sometimes the fastest way to quash innovation is to put someone behind a desk with a rule book.

Perhaps most of all though, its the story of an interesting man who couldn't quit, who had the vision, tenacity and energy to pursue the grail of sustainable living in the face of faceless adversity.

Garbage Warrior is well worth watching; watch it once and I guarantee you'll watch it again.

Cheers.

(Image downloaded as part of Garbage Warrior press kit available at http://www.garbagewarrior.com/.)

End of Post.

Green Grazing: Healing Wind Power Health Impacts

2008-08-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

As with almost anything, building renewable energy infrastructure means trade offs. Wind power, for example, provides clean electricity in terms of zero carbon dioxide emissions and can provide an economic boost to rural communities, but it also negatively impacts aesthetic, ecological (poor bats!) and perhaps even health values.

Richard Cockle describes such a situation in Willow Creek, Oregon (“Wind whips up health fears”, The Oregonian, August 10, 2008) where a couple of large wind farm projects are in the works. While the County looks forward to the tax revenues and residents with windmills built on their land will gain income, others worry about the windmills' aesthetic impact on the visual and audio landscape as well as the negative health impacts that may follow. Such health impacts are described by Dr. Nina Pierpont in her upcoming book, "Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on the Natural Experiment", and include, amongst others, headaches, difficulty sleeping, and ringing in the ears.

However, a solution may have been found. Eoin O'Carroll write in "Scientists develop silencer for wind turbines" (The Christian Science Monitor, Bright Green Blog, August 22, 2008) that German scientists have developed a way to dampen the low frequency vibrations generated by wind turbines by generating negative vibrations to cancel them out. While more testing needs to be carried out, it's possible that wind turbines could soon be moving into more densely populated areas, perhaps even into your neighbour's backyard. Yay.

Cheers.

End of Post.

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Green Grazing: Renewable energy in Germany

2008-08-22T06:40:00.001-07:00

In this trio of articles in The Christian Science Monitor, Mariah Blake describes how Germany's pioneering 'feed-in tariff' that requires power companies to buy power from renewable sources at premium rates has made it a leader in solar and wind power generation and technologies.

First, in "In Germany, ruddy-cheeked farmers achieve (green) energy independence" (August 21, 2008), she describes a green energy revolution that occurred at the village scale: a dairy farmer who harvests heat from the milk of her cows, a baker who bakes with wind power and solar panels that power homes and pocketbooks. In fact, this village produces more power than it uses and makes a tidy profit selling the excess back to the grid.

Then, in "Germany’s key to green energy" (August 20, 2008), Blake provides the details of the 'feed-in tariff' designed to encourage the small local production of renewable energy that made this renewable energy eden possible. She writes:

"Advocates argue that requiring utilities to offer premium rates encourages renewable energy production and investment. This creates new jobs, speeds up development, and eventually drives down costs – while fossil fuel prices are likely to keep rising."

Well, it seems to be working. Since 2004, employment in Germany's green-energy sector has nearly doubled to 300,000, since 2000 (when the feed-in tariff was introduced) renewable energy has grown from 6% to 14% of the market, and Germany has become a destination resort for green-technology investment with US $14 billion travelling there in 2007 alone!

Finally, in "Interview: Hermann Scheer, German pioneer in renewable energies" (August 20, 2008), Blake talks with the man who helped implement the feed-in tariff in order to decentralise energy generation and remove the barriers to clean renewable energy generation presented by conventional power structures. As he puts it:

"Giving renewable producers a privileged rate is a way to compensate for the ecological damage created by the power companies, which they don’t have to pay for."

Cheers.

End of Post.

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Green Grazing: Drought, Water Summit, Urban Water Conservation

2008-08-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Drought in the U.S. Southwest: We've just had three days of rain in Vancouver and our water barrel is bulging full once again, but the U.S. southwest hasn't been so lucky. As David Biello writes in Scientific American ("Fewer April Showers for U.S. Southwest as Climate Changes", August 20, 2008), the American southwest is experience drier conditions due to both climate change and holes in the ozone layer. The combined effects of these human-caused phenomena have shifted the moisture carrying jet stream northward. The result is more moisture for the Midwest, but less in the southwest, where the shift also means an earlier shift to summer weather.

Water Summit in Stockholm: 2500 experts are meeting this week in Stockholm, Sweden to discuss the world's water crises. Matt McGrath writes on the BBC News website ("Summit targets world water issues", August 17, 2008) that discussions will focus on the challenges of sanitation and ensuring there is enough water for growing food and drinking both now and under the stressors of an increasing human population and climate change.

Enforced Urban Water Conservation: In a sign of things to come for many areas, Los Angeles has begun to find wasters of water. David Zanhiser writes in the Los Angeles Times ("Los Angeles doubles fines for residents who waste water", August 15, 2008) that the city of Los Angeles is coming down harder on those who abuse water use restrictions. (Though, in some cases the city needs to follow those restrictions too).

End of Post.

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‘Up-Green’ Your Water-Use Ecotype: Install a Rain Barrel to Conserve Water

2008-08-10T22:19:00.000-07:00

Fresh water is fast becoming scarce in many regions of the world, not only for drinking and growing food, but also for sustaining natural ecosystems (see more here). And while you’ve probably heard how some developing nations are struggling to find enough water to support industrial expansion, urban growth, expanding food production and wildlife (e.g., China, see here and here), you may not be aware that its becoming a major issue in some developed nations too. For example, in the United States, continuing drought in the US Southwest is challenging the ability of that region’s water management infrastructure (e.g., supply, storage and distribution) to satisfy the often conflicting demands of its many customers. Meanwhile, in the southern hemisphere, Australia’s long drought has not only impacted world supplies of rice (see here), but is forcing massive change in how Australians use their water (see here).

Even without drought supplies of fresh water supplies are becoming limiting. Our home region, British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, has a reasonably abundant supply of freshwater, but a rapidly expanding population has made lawn watering restrictions necessary during the summer months. Nevertheless, there’s lots of room for improvement as up to 50% of residential water consumption during the summer goes to watering lawns and gardens. Given climate change projections of decreased supply and increased demand for water in many of the parts of the world already experiencing shortfalls, now is the time to begin practicing water conservation at home. One easy way to do this and ‘up-green’ your water-use ecotype is to install a rain barrel. That’s what we did this summer; here’s how we did it.

While rain barrels come in a variety of styles and are available at many home and garden centres, our city has a water conservation program that provides rain barrels. We purchased ours for a cost 70 dollars (CDN), including taxes and delivery. This price was comparable to other sources and frankly, it would have been impossible to fit the barrel in our car anyway, so having delivery included in the price was a big plus.

The ‘barrel’ is really a large tank, in the shape of a half-cylinder, about 137 cm (4’ 6”) tall, 53 cm (1’ 9”) deep and 107 cm (3’ 7”) wide and moulded from thick green recycled plastic. It holds 341 litres of water (75 imperial gallons) when full, weighs about 20.5 kg (45 lbs) empty, and has a mesh screen on its top to keep out leaf litter and mosquitoes - a must in these days of West Nile disease. The water it collects is dispensed through either of two taps, one located high enough for filling a watering can, the other at the barrel’s bottom for attaching a hose. The barrel is obviously durable and functional, but it’s not aesthetic, so we placed it beside a downspout at the back of the house, out of site. Fortunately, what the barrel lacked in beauty it compensated for by its ease of set-up: here are the three major steps we completed to set it up:

First, we built a solid base from flagstones left over from last summer’s Earthwise garden project (cement patio squares would have worked well too). The base was necessary because the barrel site was on soil, I don’t think you would have to do this if your chosen location was on a concrete patio or sidewalk. We wanted the base to be strong and level since the barrel weighs 362 kg (795 lbs) when full and is relatively tall for its width, so it could be tippy.

Second, we redirected the adjacent downspout to the top of the barrel. This required measuring and cutting a new length of downspout pipe (which we already had), positioning the pipe’s end over the rain barrel’s screen, and then fastening it to the wall of the house so it wouldn’t slip off the top of the barrel. It was actually raining as we worked, the first rain in over a month, so we had the immediate gratification of hearing water trickling into the barrel as soon as the downspout pipe was in place.

Finally, we built the overflow pipe leading from the barrel’s overflow outlet to the downspout drain. This required the purchase of some additional materials: a 10 foot length of one and quarter inch (inside diameter) PVC pipe, four PVC ‘elbows’, and PVC primer and glue. The cost of these materials was about 27 dollars (CDN)). This step took the most time since we had to measure, cut and glue together several different lengths of the PVC pipe and PVC elbows to bring the pipe down the side of the barrel, along the wall of the house to the corner, then around the corner and down into the drain (see picture). Altogether, setting the barrel up only took about an hour, including a trip to the local hardware store for the PVC pipe.

Our reward came quickly as the rain continued overnight and the barrel was full by the morning. Since then we’ve used our barrel water to water our less dry tolerant plants and our vegetable garden. It’s not a lot of water savings, after all, one full water barrel (341 litres) is just a little more than the average daily household consumption for our area, while watering a 10m x 10m area of lawn to the recommended depth per watering of 2.5 cm (1”) of water requires 2.5 m3 (2500 litres) of water, or 7.3 full rain barrels! (That’s one reason we don’t water our lawn anymore.) Still, it’s a small step in the right direction and being able to collect 341 litres water with barely 24 hours of rain from only one downspout already has us planning for more barrels. Cheers!

Musings on My Trip to Italy

2008-07-04T11:10:00.001-07:00

July 4th already, how did that happen? (Happy Birthday United States!). Time goes by quickly in the summertime, especially after a long trip. My wife and I spent a month in Italy over this May and June and it's taken me longer than I anticipated to re-focus on the tasks at hand, such as regular blog postings. Sure, there's been the usual things to clean up after a long trip - the garden, the house (our son house sat for us), and the pile of snail mail, email, and voice mail sitting on my real and virtual desks, but this time there's something else, something more than just the lure of a gentle summer breeze that's distracting me from my work. I'm think my heads too full of travel images, so this post is a somewhat random purging of those that pertain to the concept of 'sustainability'.

I've been thinking about sustainability a lot over the last year, what it is to me and what it means to other people. I've done much reading and wrote a lot of posts as I thought through its different aspects. In Italy, I was removed from English newspapers and television and really just focused on seeing new things, meeting new people and talking to them (as best I could, I understand, but speak little Italian). I began to process the information I've been absorbing and applying it, unconsciously for the most part, to what I saw as we travelled. And we travelled a lot!

We landed in Rome and from there we travelled first to the Adriatic provinces of Abruzzo and Molise to visit relatives and then from there, north to Umbria and Tuscany, visiting the hilltown of Orvieto on the way and spending several days in Florence. From Florence, we took a train to Pisa and while my wife photographed the famous leaning tower, I walked to the University of Pisa (Galileo Galilei's alma mater) to interview Professor Lisandro Benedetti-Cecchi about his work on Beyond-BACI monitoring designs for environmental impact assessment (I'll be posting on this interview soon).

While in Tuscany we also attended the wedding of our dear friends' daughter in the small mountain village of Careggine, which lies high in the Apennine Alps, north of Lucca. After the wedding, we went back down to Abruzzo for a family reunion in a coastal Villa near San Vieto, high on a hill above the endless blue waters of the Adriatic. Then a few more days in San Salvo on the Abruzzo / Molise border, including a visit to my mother-in-law's ancestral village, before heading back to Rome and flying home.

A whirlwind tour, to be sure, but where does sustainability fit into all this?

First, obviously, there's fossil fuels, carbon emissions and climate change. We flew to Italy and then rented a car, and we didn't buy carbon offsets. So our journey wasn't carbon neutral by any means. Why didn't we buy offsets? Well, frankly, I'm not convinced they're real yet. I've been researching carbon offsets (see posts Are Carbon Offsets Just Hot Air? I and II, I'm still working on III), and while I think they're a good idea in principle, I'm not yet convinced that any of the organizations I've reviewed provide 'real' offsets. Until I do understand how they work and I believe in the offset product I'm buying I'm not going to shell out money just to feel less guilty (and I do feel guilty . . . ). When I do, I'll purchase enough credits to offset our trip's emissions.

We were paying about 1.55 euros per litre for diesel in Italy (approximately $2.45 CAN at the time), and the price were rising, just like here in North America. In the Adriatic port city of Pescara we saw fishermen protesting at the docks because the price of fuel was getting too high for them to make a living. Surely a sign of things to comes here.

Second, we never drank tap water once, just bottled water, which is offered with every meal (Naturale or frizzante?). I don't know if this is because it's unhealthy to drink tap water there or not. Everyone we knew in Italy drank bottled water, so we did too and we generated a lot of plastic waste. I'm not sure why I brought this up yet, but it'll come clear soon and I'll post further on it. Perhaps it's because while we were in Italy, the army was busy forcing Naples to clean up the garbage that's been accumulating in it's streets over the last while (years?).

Third, we saw firsthand some results of the quest to produce renewable energy. Italy is the first place I have seen wind turbines in situ. And I saw them everywhere. It was an interesting juxtaposition. Picture this. A medieval hilltown in the foreground, clustered tightly around a castle, and in the background, a line of massive white wind turbines spread across the crest of a distant ridge, like an army of advancing tripods from The War of the Worlds. Or, how about this image. A beautiful alpine scene, peaks rising in successively higher waves into the distance, meadows patching higher elevations, dark green forests trailing down the mountains' flanks from snow capped peaks. And then, there, right in the middle of this, along two mountain ridges run two parallel lines of wind turbines. Right in the middle of the viewscape. Is this what we have to look forward to in North America? Is it good, bad, or just ugly?

Fourth, sustainable agriculture. Our relatives and my mother-in-law are still tied to their ancestral lands, though they have not necessarily made a living from the land for years. The stories of their youth revolve around the agrarian lifestyle they lived in their mountain village. As we ate, drank and talked late into the warm nights, I learned how farms used to be run, what was planted when, how it was harvested and prepared. What was sold, what was kept. How different types of meat and sausages were cured and prepared. It was fascinating to learn how tightly connected their lifestyles were to the cycles of the seasons . . . and how much work it took just to ensure there was food on the table throughout the coming winter.

Now though, like everywhere it seems, the children move away from the land as they grow up. It's not longer enough just to own land and eat well, but new things are required - cars, fuel, televisions, electricity . . . leisure time - things that require hard cash and office jobs. Even olive oil, one of the symbols of rural living in Italy, has become too labour intensive and costly for most families to produce on their own and many olive groves have become condominiums.

Well, I'll stop here for now. If you've read this far you can see my dilemma, too many images, too many things to digest. This post has helped order some of them, so I expect more travel observations will pop up in future posts. Until then, cheers!

Blog Update

2008-06-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

Hello. I'm still here and will be posting again in the very near future. We've just returned home from a long trip overseas (to Italy) and are presently re-synchronizing our psyches with the North American collective unconscious. There is some resistance. See you soon.

cheers.

Ecosystem Connections: Humans, Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knot

2008-05-16T08:19:00.001-07:00

I recently saw an excellent PBS Nature documentary that illustrated cross-ecosystem linkages and inter-species dependencies. “Crash: A tale of two species” explores the intricate relationship between human exploitation of horseshoe crabs on the US east coast, the status of the Horseshoe crab population, and the Red Knot, a species of sandpiper. It asks the question: can human exploitation of Horseshoe crabs (e.g., for bait and biomedical supplies) be reconciled with the red knot’s need for lots and lots of horseshoe crab eggs to fuel their northward migration of thousands of kilometres from Tierra del Fuego to the Canadian arctic?

The gist of the story is this: The horseshoe crab population has been heavily exploited by humans and consequently has declined drastically. This is bad news for Red knot because their northward migration is timed to coincide with the Horseshoe crab spring spawning season. The crabs spawn on beaches, burying their eggs under the sand, but they breed in such dense congregations that lots of eggs get churned up and become easy energy-packed pickings for the birds

The fat these little birds pack on is not required just for the flight north; however, it must also sustain them over the first few days after their arrival on the breeding grounds because there will often still be snow covering the ground and little food available.

Unfortunately, the declining crab population means there’s a lot fewer eggs available for the birds these days, which makes it hard for them to build up the fat reserves necessary for the next stage of their long northward migration. Additionally, as a consequence of the declining crab population the spawning season is now shorter. This means that Red Knot arriving at the tail end of their migration period have a very hard time finding enough crab eggs to fuel further flight.

One ornithologist said that some of the later migrating birds might just get to a point where they haven’t enough energy left to either make it to the breeding grounds, or to make it back to warmer climes, so they just drop from the sky and die. At the end of the show, a group of bird biologists were shown searching an area of Baffin Island (near Cambridge Bay) where breeding red knot had been seen the year before, none were found.

Not surprisingly, Red knot numbers have been declining as the Horseshoe crab population has been declining. It’s now a race against time as human management agencies and scientists rush to understand how to rebuild Horseshoe crab populations and save the red knot.

“Crash: A tale of two species” was written, produced, directed, and narrated by Allison Argo (see ArgoFilms Ltd.).

Update (December 29, 2010): "Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knots revisited"

Cheers.

Managing Green Fatigue Syndrome: One Advocate’s Perspective

2008-05-14T00:11:00.000-07:00

One trigger of Green Fatigue Syndrome is looking at the gap between what we’re doing now and what we really need to do to combat climate change. That was the topic of my last post in which I wrote about Michael Pollan’s essay ‘Why Bother’ and his perspective on why it’s important to keep taking little steps despite many excuses not to (see here). While Pollan’s perspective was that of the individual struggling with GFS, today’s post explores GFS from the perspective of the environmental advocate concerned with encouraging pro-environmental behaviour in society. After the breakthrough of the environmental message in recent years the environmental movement’s challenge is no longer to get the environmental message out, but to maintain society’s momentum for pro-environmental change while raising itself above the rising tide of green wash. According to one such advocate, this is as simple as exchanging ‘extrinsic’ for ‘intrinsic’ values. Here’s why.

Tom Compton is Change Strategist for WWF-UK and in a recent BBC News article (see here) he writes about his concerned that the ‘cumulative small changes’ approach to fighting climate change is ineffective because climate change is now progressing too quickly for such campaigns to make a difference. Their ineffectiveness is in part due to the environmental movement’s great success in recent years in adapting the consumption-based strategies of the marketing industry to its own purposes (e.g., use compact fluorescent bulbs because they save you money and fight climate change).

Despite their success, Compton says these consumption-based strategies are not preparing the way for the large changes required (e.g., massive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions) for three reasons. First, consumption-based strategies encourage increased consumption when the opposite is required. Second, when green behaviour or technologies save the consumer money, the savings may simply be spent on something more damaging to the environment than the original product. Finally, once people adopt a few easy changes to their lifestyle they tend to stop and not continue climbing up the ‘virtue ladder’. As a result, under the ‘cumulative small changes’ approach, behavioural changes aren’t accruing quickly enough to trigger the really big changes need to fight climate change.

His solution is simple: environmental organizations need to return to their core values and focus their limited communication resources on communicating these intrinsic (internal) rather than extrinsic (outward, consumption-based) values. This, he argues, will increase the adoption of more radical and effective behaviour towards climate change. The reconciliation between intrinsic values and the environmental message is very similar to the process of ‘healing the split’ between what we feel and what we do described by Pollan (see here).

Unfortunately, although Compton’s essay starts out strong on the rationale for change, it finishes weak on how to do it. Yes, it’s true that there are challenges associated with keeping momentum towards adopting green practices going after initial small steps, especially those changes triggered by marketing campaigns and product purchases. (A loss of momentum that is, I think, partly due to Green Fatigue Syndrome brought on by an overexposure to green campaigns and slogans.) However, the notion that ‘intrinsic’ values need to be ingrained to make the next step possible seems an obvious and rather tepid conclusion. Isn’t this what environmental organizations do already? Don’t they already, by their existence, reflect their intrinsic values? And exactly which intrinsic values is Compton referring to? Do all environmental organisations share the same intrinsic values? How do environmental organizations make the transition anyway, is there enough time? The articles weak conclusion obviously left me with more questions than answers.

I got a somewhat clearer idea of how Compton proposes to approach the transition between extrinsic and intrinsic values while thumbing through the WWF report his article is based upon (Weathercocks and Signposts: the environmental movement at a crossroads). Chapter 4 includes these ‘eight practical steps’ (pg 35) for making the transition:

1) Achieve greater clarity on the values that motivate the environment movement;

2) Emphasise intrinsic goals in environmental communications;

3) Begin to deploy a broader vocabulary of values in policy debates;

4) Find common ground with development agencies on these values;

5) Help responsible businesses think beyond ‘the business case for sustainable development;

6) Highlight the way in which the marketing industry works to manipulate our motivations;

7) Work to support and embolden public figures in the course of articulating intrinsic values in public discourse; and,

8) Identify and promote mechanisms to make public affinity for nature more salient.

In the end, while I share Compton’s concern about the gap between slowly cumulating small steps and effecting real changes to greenhouse gas emissions, I disagree with his conclusion that the environmental movement should abandon its encouragement for making small changes. Consistency with core values (as per step 1 above) is good, but I think it could take as long for the environmental movement to agree on what its core values are as Compton fears it will take the ‘cumulative small steps’ approach to avert catastrophic climate change.

No, I think a more useful set of products would be clear, consistent, and coordinated ‘maps’ to guide people through the tangled maze of green alternatives, around the thickets of green wash, and over the tectonic upheaval of green advice. Environmental organizations would do more good by sitting down together and drawing up such maps than strategizing about how to return to their intrinsic values. A clearer path upon which to cumulate small steps would go a long way to managing Green Fatigue Syndrome. Cheers.

Sources:

Compton, Tom. (April 22, 2008). “Begging for more than small change”. BBC News website. (Good comments at the end of the article).

Dr. Compton’s article is an overview of his recent report prepared for WWF-UK:

Compton, T. 2008. Weathercocks and Signposts: the environmental movement at a crossroads. Prepared for WWF, April 2008..

Managing Green Fatigue Syndrome One Step at a Time

2008-04-29T22:33:00.000-07:00

If your response to Earth Day was “big whoop!” you may be suffering from Green Fatigue Syndrome. GFS results from overexposure to ‘green speak’ and includes symptoms like a sudden lack of motivation to recycle, doubt that it matters anyway, and increasing cynicism about the neo-green stance of marketers and politicians, especially with regard to climate change. In severe cases of GSF, even an obscure allusion to compact fluorescent bulbs can lead to the purchase of a gas-powered leaf blower. If you’re experiencing any of the above symptoms, put yourself on the road to recovery by taking a few minutes to read Michael Pollan’s essay, ‘Why Bother?’ You’ll be glad you did. Here’s why.

‘Why Bother?’ explores of the some of the same questions you might be asking yourself. Is it worth making the small lifestyle changes that we’re encouraged to make to fight climate change? They seem so inconsequential in the face of the massive changes occurring around the world. Besides any savings you generate will be quickly erased by someone elsewhere in the world. Should you make the changes for personal virtue? Virtue doesn’t seem to be held in high regard in these days. Even if you do decide to go green, how do you get it right? There’s so much information out there and much of it is contradictory. Given these questions, it all seems too little too late, so why bother doing anything at all?

We should bother, Pollan writes, because “. . . the climate change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle . . .”, the “. . . sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us . . ., and most of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.”
There’s no point in waiting for new environmental legislation or green technology to save us. Such stalling only signals our politicians that we’re not ready to make tough changes. It’s a Catch 22 situation, we’re waiting for our leaders to take a tough stance, but few politicians will do so until their sure of broad base support for such measures. Pollen says we need to break this standoff by healing the split between what we think and what we do, to reconcile our intrinsic values with our extrinsic behaviour.

In the end, the responsibility for lasting change rests upon the shoulders of individuals; we can each play a role by setting personal examples – for ourselves as well as others. Few of us could up and run a marathon without training; all the small changes we have to make to our lifestyles are training for the marathon changes we need to make. This is pretty high minded talk, so how does one put it into action?

Here’s what Pollan suggests: “ . . . find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world, but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that . . . offers its own rewards.”

There’s a lot more to Pollan’s article, but that’s for you to discover. I’ll leave you with this familiar but appropriate quotation from the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step”. So, go ahead, get up off the couch, give yourself a shake, and take a step forward. Cheers.

P.S. Here’re 10 easy things you can do – for free – to combat climate change:

Learn more about climate change. Start by watching “An Inconvenient Truth” (get the video or DVD out of your local library). Then read “The Weather Makers” by Tim Flannery, check it out from your local library too. Then, go online to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) website and read the Climate change 2007: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers. For a good overview of some of the technical issues surrounding climate change science, check out the RealClimate.org (www.realclimate.org).
Tell politicians what you think. Write a letter about your climate change concerns to the Prime Minister, the federal Minister of Environment and your Member of Parliament. They’d love to hear from you and it’s free (no stamp required, but don’t forget the address . . .). Heck, send letters to all your provincial and municipal political representatives too. I’m not sure if it’s free postage for these folks too, but you can always send them an email.
Talk to your acquaintances about climate change. Tell someone you know about what you learned about climate change. If it’s someone you don’t know too well, make sure you leave them a clear escape route.
Drive less; walk to the store, or take the bus, at least once a week.
Don’t use synthetic fertilizer on your lawn. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is made using natural gas and releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. (Other lawn tips here and here)
Use less electricity. Turn off your television or computer one night a week (read “The Weather Makers” instead).
Eat less meat. Why? Well there’s lots of reasons, but one is that cows ‘release’ lots of methane, which is a greenhouse gas about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Eat more locally grown food. Locally grown and seasonal fruit and vegetables don’t have as far to travel to the store, so less carbon dioxide is emitted.
Recycle more. Recycling keeps waste out of the landfill and reduces the consumption of natural resources. For example, recycling paper means fewer trees need to be cut down; among many other things trees extract carbon dioxide from the air and can store it for a long time.
Compost your kitchen waste. Composting removes waste from the landfill (which means less methane escaping from it) and adds organic matter to the soil, which is a form of carbon storage. Spread the resulting compost on your lawn as a substitute for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
Bonus Step – visit one of the many ‘green tip lists’ on the web.

Source:

Pollan, Michael. (April 20, 2008). “Why Bother?” The New York Times..

Honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) IV: IAPV, CCD, Australian Bees and the Silence of the Press

2008-03-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

Last September, a team of US researchers published a paper in the journal Science that reported an association between the presence of Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) and colony collapse disorder (CCD) in US honey bees (see Cox-Foster et al. 2007). A link was also made between the virus’s presence in US bees and the importation of Australian honey bees. This research was well publicized, appearing in several press releases, which resulted in extraordinarily wide media coverage (see here for an earlier post about this effect). While some hailed Cox-Foster et al.’s work as a major breakthrough in the science of CCD, Australian scientists disagreed.

It wasn’t long before two new developments cast doubt on the conclusions of Cox-Foster et al. First, researchers in the US found IAPV in US bees collected several years before the importation of Australian honey bees began. Second, a letter published in Science by two Australian scientists directly challenged the validity of Cox-Foster et al.’s conclusions, claiming that the results actually showed that the Nosema species of parasite was associated with CCD.
These developments were important, not only because they advance the science of CCD and provide insight into how science works, but also because of the original paper’s repercussions for trade relations with Australia. Yet despite this, and in marked contrast to the publicity received by the Cox-Foster et al.’s research, the press has remained virtually silent. Why?

The answer to this question benefit’s from a review of the original IAPV research and the more recent developments. By reviewing this information, reading between the lines of the formal scientific exchange, and doing a little background research, it quickly becomes apparent that the IAPV-CCD-Australia story is interesting on more than just the scientific level. While this makes the lack of press coverage even more puzzling, it goes a long way towards explaining why the story hasn’t been more widely publicized.

The Evidence for the IAPV-CCD-Australia Connection

Cox-Foster et al. (2007) used cutting edge “metagenomic” techniques to sift through the genetic material of CCD bees and locate the DNA signatures of known pathogens (bacteria, viruses and parasites). They reported three key results: 1) an association between the presence of Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) and CCD, 2) a match between a strain of IAPV found in CCD bees and Australian bees, and 3) the emergence of CCD in the US at about the same time that Australian honey bees began to be imported. Taken together and diluted through the press reports these results implied that the import of Australian bees was responsible for the CCD crisis in the US.

The Consequences for Trade with Australia

Though Cox-Foster et al. did not claim that IAPV caused CCD, the tenuous link to Australian bees meant their conclusions quickly crossed from the realm of science to that of international trade. Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey sought a ban on Australian bee imports (see here and here) and officials with the US Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service asked Australian authorities to explain why bans should not be imposed (see here). This alarmed both Australian bee exporters and the American beekeepers and farmers who relied on these imports to replenish commercial bee populations and ensure adequate pollination of commercial crops (see here for the perspective of Danny Weaver of Bee Weaver Apiaries, a US company that imports Australian bees).

However, given the mystery surrounding CCD and the importance of commercial pollination to the US agricultural economy, it’s a sensible risk-averse approach for the US to want to protect its honey bees from risk of further infection, even though the evidence was incomplete with respect to the IAPV-CCD-Australia connection. The ecological and economic consequences of continuing to import IAPV to the US far outweigh the trade consequences of banning Australian honey bee imports (e.g., ~14 billion in pollination services vs. a few million in export revenues). Thus, even if Australian bees were later exonerated banning their import would still be a wise, precautionary decision. Unfortunately, global trade agreements don’t see it that way and neither did Australia.

Small wonder. From the Australian perspective, honey bee exports are a growing industry worth nearly $5 million per year to Australian bee exporters (see here). The industry will probably grow even faster now as US bee keepers seek to replace their CCD devastated hives. Thus, Australia aggressively protested the proposed US ban and challenged the results of Cox-Foster et al, arguing that any decision to ban bee imports based on their results was premature because they hadn’t proven that IAPV, and in particular IAPV from Australian bees, was the cause of CCD. It wasn’t long before more information emerged to bolster Australia’s case.

The Evidence against the IAPV-CCD-Australia Connection

In the December 2007 edition of the American Bee Journal, US researchers Yanping Chen and Jay Evans reported finding IAPV in US bee samples collected as far back as 2002 (see here), almost three years before imports of Australian bees began in 2005. This finding appeared to invalidate Cox-Foster et al.’s conclusion that the onset of CCD coincided with the import of Australian bees. Then, in the February 8 2008edition of Science, two Australian bee scientists, Denis Anderson and Iain East, published a letter in which they challenged the results and conclusions of Cox-Foster et al. in 7 terse points (see here):

1) Importation of honey bees from Australia into the US didn’t start until 2005, whereas Cox-Foster et al. reported finding the virus in US honey bees as far back as 2004;
2) No evidence was presented for a causal link between IAPV and CCD (re Koch’s Postulates as modified for viruses);
3) The ‘case definition’ of CCD is ambiguous and indistinguishable from normal winter colony collapse observed in the US since the early 1980’s that has been attributed to Nosema infection and/or secondary infestation by varroa mites. Anyway, many scientists are unconvinced that CCD is a new disorder;
4) Members of the bee virus group to which IAPV belongs are harmless infections in honey bee colonies, only causing sickness in combination with a primary pathogen such as the parasite Nosema apis;
5) Neither CCD, nor large unexplained mortality events have occurred in the Australian honeybee industry; and
6) Other countries reporting CCD, such as Greece, Poland and Spain, have not imported bees from Australia.
7) a recent study found IAPV in US bees as far back as 2002, more than two years prior to the importation of Australian bees (this is the study by Chen and Evans noted above).

Anderson and East then throw down the scientific gauntlet: “It would now be appropriate for the authors of the Science Report to issue a retraction of the claims linking CCD to importation of Australian bees.” They close on a conciliatory note, calling for better cooperation between US and Australian bee researchers, because it, “. . . can only lead to a better understanding of colony collapse and IAPV and result in more secure trade for package honeybees to meet the growing demands of the United States pollination industry.”

Dr. Anderson was slightly blunter in a news article published November 2007, (see here). He stated that Cox-Foster et al. had “misinterpreted their results”, which really showed that CCD, “. . . was linked to Nosema, a widespread honeybee disease . . . “, and that this was overlooked due to lack of experience and knowledge of general bee pathology on the part of the researchers, which, “. . . can’t reflect well on a journal such as Science and (its) selection of referees.” Ouch!

Cox-Foster et al.’s equally terse response to Anderson and East’s letter appears in the same issue of Science. They state that:
1) CCD is not an ambiguous disorder, it has specific symptoms;
2) They made no claim to have found the cause of CCD;
3) Viruses within the same group can cause different symptoms; the strain of IAPV from Australia could be more virulent than pre-existing strains in the US;
4) Most evidence points to a link between bee viruses and varroa mites, which can both carry the virus and activate it; Varroa mites don’t occur in Australia, which may be why no instance of CCD have been reported there; and finally,
5) Anderson’s own work on “disappearing bees” suggests that Australia does suffer from large unexplained mortality events in honeybees. (Touché)

Cutting through the honey to the comb, Cox-Foster et al. then state: “We appreciate that research on products important to international trade may lead into politically and economically sensitive territory. However, trade issues should not color research.” Implying, I guess, that Anderson and East’s letter has more to do with trade issues than flaws in a scientific argument.

And there’s more. Cox-Foster et al. went on to say that although recent research has indeed shown that IAPV in US honeybees predates reports of CCD and the “the formal importation of bees from Australia” (my emphasis, more on this point later), IAPV is widespread and found elsewhere in the world and no doubt further investigation will show it is more widespread than previously believed. Finally, regardless of the new findings, a genetic correlation was found between a strain of IAPV in Australian bees and that found in US CCD bees, so the presence of IAPV in older bees does not eliminate a role for this virus in CCD. Whew!

All in all, a rather robust response sans olive branch: no retraction; no offer of collaboration.

Now, it’s one thing to put up a robust defence of one’s research, but was the response of Cox-Foster et al entirely fair? Below I scrutinize two key points: 1) the assertion that Anderson’s own research suggests large bee mortality events do occur in Australia, counter to Anderson and East’s claim, and 2) the timing of arrival of Australian bees in the US relative to their “formal importation” beginning in 2005.

Evidence for Large Bee Mortality Events in Australia

Cox-Foster et al. suggest that Anderson’s own work shows large bee mortality events are indeed an issue in Australia, despite Anderson and East’s claim to the contrary. To support their claim, they cite one of Anderson’s reports. I located and read this report (see here) and now feel the suggestion by Cox-Foster et al. is unfair, even inaccurate.

First, although Anderson’s report has the phrase “Disappearing Disorder” in the title, the disappearing bee problem the report is about has completely different symptoms than CCD, most tellingly, it kills the larvae and the adult bees are found wandering disoriented on the ground outside the hive. With CCD, as Cox-Foster et al. succinctly stated in their response to Anderson and East, hives are found empty of adults with no adult bodies nearby and the brood are in relatively good health. Second, “Disappearing Disorder” has been around for a long time and fluctuates in locality and intensity from year to year. Third, while the exact cause of Australian honeybee “Disappearing Disorder” is unknown, research to date indicates that it is most likely related to the bees’ forage (pollen and nectar).

The forage hypothesis is supported by experiments which show the disorder can be controlled by preventing bees from carrying forage into their hive. It is also a regional effect, not associated with a particular plant species, and thus it is probably due to something taken up by forage plants from the soil. Anderson notes that “invariably”, the problem is worse in areas where forage plants grow in acidic soils and that beekeepers have found the problem quickly goes away when hives are relocated to areas with more alkaline (less acidic) soils. Micronutrients are a suspected cause, but experiments have so far failed to identify which ones are the culprits. For example, experiments where bees were fed pollen deliberately laced with high levels of zinc and aluminum were inconclusive.

When these three points are taken together, it’s clear that while the exact cause of “Disappearing Disorder” may not be known, it is not CCD, it has a familiar presence in the Australian honey bee industry, and quite a bit more is known about possible causes and how to manage it.

Evidence for early arrival of Australian Honey Bees in the US

Cox-Foster et al may have exaggerated their claim about Anderson’s research into Australian bee mortality events, but Anderson and East don’t come out smelling like gum trees either. Recall the curious comment by Cox-Foster et al that the occurrence of IAPV in US honeybees predates the “formal importation” of Australian bees to the US. It seemed like a clue left for the reader to pursue; perhaps Australian bees were informally entering the US prior to 2005. This appears to be so.

I found two references which state that Australian bees were being imported into Canada as early as 1987, and if Australian bees were in Canada that early, it’s quite likely that hives of Australian bees were brought into the US from Canada long before 2005 (see here and here). It seems that Anderson and East were being rather disingenuous in their argument, or perhaps they are just really bad at geography. On the other hand, even though Canadian beekeepers have been importing Australian bees since 1987 they don’t seem to be experiencing CCD. So, even if IAPV was entering the US through the “back door” from Canada prior to 2004 it still doesn’t appear to be the sole cause of CCD.

Why so Little Press Coverage?

It’s apparent from the scientific tit-for-tat outlined above that the debate over the IAPV-CCD-Australia connection is heating up. For science, this pretty exciting stuff. Not only are there implications for ecosystems and agriculture, but also for the politics of international trade and the academic reputations of researchers in two nations, human facets which can appeal even those disinterested in the technical scientific details. The press should be all over it, but they’re not. I did a search on “IAPV” using Google.ca and in the first 20 results, 9 relevant hits pertained to the older IAPV story, while only 1 discussed the new IAPV developments (search done March 8, 2008). Why?

I think there are two reasons for this lack of press coverage. The first is that so little publicity accompanied the new developments. The institutions behind the Cox-Foster et al. research made a lot of noise about those results (see here), but not this time around. I only found one posting about the new IAPV research results of Chen and Evans 2007. It was on the website of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (see here) and I don’t think it was actually a press release, just a ‘what’s going on’ news story. Plus, I only found it after a deliberate search, not through a general press article like I did for the press releases about the Cox-Foster et al. IAPV paper. The lack of publicity isn’t too surprising, though, since the recent exchanges outline above don’t necessarily show either the US or the Australian scientists in the best light.
The second reason is a lack of follow up on the original story by the press, which smacks of laziness. Whatever, happened to investigative reporting? Weren’t any reporters curious to see whether the hype over the original IAPV paper was justified in terms of subsequent research results?

So, it appears that not only can strong publicity overhype research results, carrying them beyond the support of the data they’re based upon, but that lack of follow up from the press can effectively hide important scientific developments from the public. This story brings to mind the age-old philosophical question: “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” (see here for the definitive answer). The same question can be rephrased to apply to science: If science takes place, but no press release goes out, will the press pay attention? (Answer: No).

Cheers.

Sources for this post:

Anderson et al 2008. The Latest Buzz About Colony Collapse Disorder. Science 8 February 2008: 724c-725c. “A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "A Metagenomic Survey of Microbes in Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder," by D.L. Cox-Foster et al. in the October 12, 2007 issue.” [Have – saved in Bogs/CCD directory under Anderson et al]

Cox-Foster et al. 2007. A Metagenomic Survey of Microbes in Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder. Science 318 (5848): 283 – 287.

Chen, Yanping and J.D. Evans 2007. Historical Presence of Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus in the United States. American Bee Journal (here too)

Dayton, Leigh. (November 21, 2007.) “Bee acquittal stings journal”. The Australian. Accessed March 3, 2008. Apparently IAPV introduced through Australian bees wasn’t the cause of CCD in the US after all, relates to Anderson et al 2008 article above. Anderson works with CSIRO in Australia.

Fischer, James. 2007. “World Trade, Realpolitik, and Beekeeping”. Bee Culture Magazine.

Kaplan, Kim. (November 19, 2007). “Imported Bees Not Source of Virus Associated with Colony Collapse Disorder” On News and Events Section of the Agricultural Research Services US Department of Agriculture Website, via their CCD section. Accessed March 6, 2008.

Parnell, Ian. (September 28, 2007). “Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) III: The Power of the Press Release.” What’s Your Ecotype?

Stockstadt, E. (November 2, 2007). Disappearing bee mystery deepens. ScienceNOW Daily News.

Stokstadt, E. (September, 2007). Puzzling decline of U.S. bees linked to virus from Australia. Science 317: 1304-1305.

Recent Advances and Potential Synergies for a Technology-based approach to Fighting Global Warming (CCS, HAS, ZIFs and CHP)

2008-03-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear: Global Warming is a problem of our own creation (see pg 5 of the IPCC Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policy Makers). Yes, earth’s climate does naturally change, but the warming trend of the last thirty years is caused by the enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide, we’ve generated from burning fossil fuels, expanding intensive agriculture, and living energy-dense lifestyles. Now that we now, what do we do? Well, one part of our new reality is learning how to live with the effects of earth’s changing climate. A second part is figuring out how to slow or stop the human-caused component of Global Warming. Many ingenious schemes have emerged, but it really boils down to this: we need to drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We can start on this voluntarily by taking actions like driving less, turning down our thermostats, and buying less ‘stuff’, but we’ll also need well thought through technological approaches. The topic of this post is a look at some recent advances and potential synergies for a technology-base approach to fighting Global Warming. Click ‘Read More’ to carry on.

Technology-based approaches to fighting Global Warming either remove the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, or prevent more of it from getting there. ‘Removal’ schemes tend to be on the grand scale, and the scientists and engineers with the necessary expertise don’t have a lot of confidence yet that they can either predict how much such schemes would cost, or how much carbon they might actually remove (e.g., ocean iron fertilization). On the other hand, ‘prevention’ approaches address known point sources of carbon emissions and often build upon pre-existing technologies, like those used to control emissions from the smokestacks of coal-fired power stations. For this reason, both their costs and the amount of carbon dioxide they can prevent from getting into the atmosphere can be predicted with greater confidence.
Nevertheless, just because their details are better understood doesn’t mean such ‘prevention’ technologies are more likely to be widely used; high cost and energy requirements can still act as an economic barrier. Such is the case with Carbon Capture and Storage.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a ‘prevention’ approach where carbon dioxide is removed from industrial emissions and then stored in a secure place for a very long time. Emission sources include the smokestacks of factories and coal-fired power plants and potential carbon storage sites include abandoned oil wells, or the depths of the ocean (details here). There are still questions that must be answered with CCS, such as how long stored carbon will remain in storage and what impact it could have on the surrounding environment if it escapes - major concerns if it’s store in the ocean’s depths. There is little question, though, about how much carbon could be captured, since the capture technologies already exist and the main point source ‘targets’ are easily identified.

Unfortunately, current carbon capture technologies have two major shortcomings: they either use materials that are expensive and require a lot of energy to make, or they aren’t easily recycled. High cost and energy requirements create a ‘cost-energy’ barrier to the wide-spread use of CCS by industry because not only would it be expensive for the emitters to operate these systems, but these costs would be passed along to consumers. Additionally, if the carbon capture material can’t be recycled, then wide-spread use of CCS systems would create a new and large source of industrial waste, or a ‘cost-energy-waste’ barrier.

Now, recent advances in carbon storage technology hold promise for reducing the ‘cost-energy-waste’ barrier to using CCS systems. Scientists have recently produced carbon capture materials that are low cost, require less energy to make, can be recycled and are even environmentally benign (i.e. non-toxic). Furthermore, by combining these new CCS systems with Combined Heat and Power (CHP) technology, the ‘cost-energy-waste’ barrier could be lowered even further, enhancing the feasibility of CCS as a major technological tool for fighting global warming. Here’s how it might work.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a low-cost reusable carbon capture material called HAS (short for hyberbranched aluminosilica) [1]. It has several advantages over existing carbon capture materials: it can remove up to 5 times as much carbon dioxide as these other materials; it can be made in a simple one-step process; it is low-cost; and it can be recycled many times. While HAS shows great promise it has one particular challenge that must be overcome to use it on an industrial scale. It releases a lot of heat as it captures carbon dioxide molecules, which engineers must find a way to "thermally recycle”.

Meanwhile, scientists at the University of California Los Angeles have also created a different carbon capture material called ZIFs (short for zeolitic imidazolate frameworks) [2]. Like HAS, ZIFs can absorb a lot more carbon dioxide than current carbon capture materials - one litre of ZIFs can store about 83 litres of carbon dioxide. ZIFs require little energy to make, remain stable for long periods of time and are non-toxic.

While ZIFs seems efficient at capturing carbon, it’s not clear how easy it is to make relative to HAS. The manufacturing process requires combining raw materials in “thousands of chemical reactions, similar to the high-throughput methods used in pharmaceutical research.” This may be a straightforward process to the scientist who created ZIFs, but it sounds more complicated than the ‘one step’ process for making HAS. It’s also not clear whether ZIFs is recyclable, like HAS, or is meant to be a permanent storage. Nevertheless, while there is still much work to do for both materials, both HAS and ZIFs show promise for lowering the ‘cost-energy-waste’ barrier and making the carbon capture portion of CCS more feasible for wide-spread industrial use.

HAS and ZIFs could go a long way towards reducing the ‘cost-energy-waste’ barrier to CCS technology. Creating synergies with existing heat recycling technology could lower the barrier further still. How? Well, since the carbon capture process requires energy to make the materials used to capture the carbon dioxide (e.g., HAS and ZIFs) and heat is released as part of the carbon capture process (e.g., the need for thermal recycling with HAS) an ideal solution would be to recycle the heat released from the capture process and use it to manufacture of the carbon capture material. The technology exists to do this.

In a recent article, environmental writer Bill Mckibben wrote about recycling waste heat from industrial processes to generate electricity [3], a process, sometimes called Combined Heat and Power (CHP), and another excellent example of an area where the technology for reducing carbon emissions already exists and is in use. McKibben describes, for example, the work of a company called Recycled Energy Development (RED) that specializes in installing ‘waste heat recovery boilers’ on top of factory smokestacks. In this case, carbon dioxide emissions are reduced because no fossil fuel is burned to generate the additional electricity produced in the CHP process.

The CHP approach is astoundingly effective for recycling waste heat into usable energy. For example, in 2004 a steel plant outfitted with CHP technology (by another company, not RED) generated about the same amount of clean energy as was produced by “all of the grid-connected solar collectors throughout the world.” In fact, McKibben adds, recycling waste heat from US factories could produce about 14% of the electric power the US uses now and if power plants were included, it could be as high as 100% while only using half the fossil fuel!

Thus CHP technology could help achieve a huge savings in both the amount of fossil fuel used to generate energy and thus the amount of carbon dioxide released. Now, if it was used to power the manufacture of CCS carbon capture materials on site, the ‘cost-energy-waste’ barrier to using CCS would be even lower than just using new capture materials like HAS and ZIFs.

Learning about the recent advances in CSS with HAS and ZIFs and its possible synergies with CHP really got me thinking about the positive application of technology-based approaches to fighting global warming. Could it be taken further? What if these new carbon capture methods could be combined with waste heat recycling for use at the residential scale? It would be wonderful if we could recycle the waste heat going up the stack vents from our natural gas boilers and furnaces and use it to generate electricity. Perhaps we could even combine our residential heat recycling system with a low cost recyclable carbon capture system to remove the carbon dioxide going up the vent pipes too. Then periodically, say whenever you check your furnace filter, or drain your hot water tank to check for corrosion, you’d replace the carbon capture cartridge. Later, you could just take the used one down to your local recycling centre. This approach, in combination with energy efficient boilers and furnaces, could go a long way towards reducing residential personal energy and carbon footprints. Cheers.

Sources:

[1] Georgia Institute of Technology Research News. (March 7, 2008). “Low-cost reusable material could capture carbon dioxide from power plants”. Via ENN.

[2] CBC News website. (February 15, 2008). “New materials can selectively capture CO2, scientists say”. Accessed February 17, 2008.

[3] McKibben, Bill. (November/December 2007). “The Unsung Solution”. Orion Magazine. Good list of comments at the end of the article, also check out the Gristmill coverage of same article..

Green Tips: Rinsing Off the Greenwash

2008-02-28T07:31:00.000-08:00

Are you tired of hearing every new product advertised as “green”? Me too! It doesn’t seem to matter whether the product is technology, toilet paper, or political policy, marketers are quick to paint it with a thick green sheen. What’s an environmentally conscious consumer to do? Well, when it comes to buying green, caveat emptor is as relevant now as ever, so here are two resources to help you rinse off the greenwash.

The David Suzuki Foundation provides a quick primer on the subject called “The dirty business of greenwashing” that lists seven advertising ‘tricks’ and ways to avoid them: 1) the outright lie (e.g., fake organic certification), 2) telling only half the story (A product may be non-toxic, but how is it made and where did it come from?), 3) making unverifiable claims (green claims should be easy to follow up on), 4) using popular catch words (don’t buy something just because its label uses prefixes like “eco-“, or “bio-“), 5) irrelevant additions (watch for information that has nothing to do with the product), 6) the logical fallacy (Do you need to buy a plastic bag, even if it is recyclable?), and 7) not saying anything at all (Products that aren’t good for the environment often choose to say nothing at all). The site provides a definition for each ‘trick, along with tips for avoiding it and links to further helpful references.

TerraChoice, an environmental marketing company (it manages Environment Canada’s EcoLogo program), lists the “6 Sins of Greenwashing”: 1) the Sin of the Hidden Tradeoff (e.g., a recycled product that must be driven thousands of kilometres to your local store); 2) the Sin of No Proof (lack of certification or evidence for a green claim); 3) the Sin of Vagueness (lack of explanation why a product is green.); 4) the Sin of Irrelevance (Is a claim relevant and important to a product, or do all products in that category have to meet the same standards?); 5) the Sin of Fibbing (False use of third-party certifications, usually easy to check up on); and 6) the Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils (making the consumer feel green about a product that is already of questionable environmental benefit). Visit the TerraChoice site for all the details of each “sin”.
TerraChoice also provides a downloadable pdf-format report on its sire for those who want more details on their research into greenwashing (see here). A quick glance at that report suggests that no product is completely without sin, but that some are more prevalent than others. In a review of 1018 products TerraChoice found the following sin breakdown: Sin 1 (57%), Sin 2 (26%), Sin 3(11%), Sin 4(4%), Sin 5 (1%), and Sin 6 (1%).

These two resources focus on how to recognize and avoid being deceived by greenwashing in product advertising. Unfortunately, the relentless surge of green imagery and rhetoric in advertising also has the more subtle effect of fostering complaisance and cynicism towards environmental issues. Hopefully, the current onslaught of greenwash will be replaced by more thoughtful and mature imagery over time. At least that’s the opinion expressed by Rebecca Swift in an interesting opinion piece on the BBC News website (see here).

Swift is a director of Getty Images, a company that generates imagery for news wires and advertising. She writes that her company has noticed a global shift in interest towards green iconography with many ads recycling the same narrow range of the colour green, borrowing imagery from established non-profit organizations and using nature images like leaves and grass to such an extent they have become clichéd. She feels this indicates that green advertising is still searching for its “visual language”, but that it will soon move out of its current “propaganda phase”. As she concludes, “Expect the imagery of the future to be any colour but green and imagery of the natural world to leave the cliché behind.” Let’s also hope the new imagery is attached to more transparent and accountable green claims. Cheers.

(See the bottom of this post for some additional links to material about greenwashing.)

Sources for this Post:

Swift, Rebecca. (February 18, 2008). “'Greenwash' is losing its shine”. BBC News website – Viewpoint. Accessed online, February 27, 2008.

Terrachoice Environmental Marketing. “The Six Sins of Greenwashing”. Accessed online February 28, 2008. (PDF version Accessed February 25, 2008.)

The David Suzuki Foundation. “The dirty business of greenwashing”. Accessed February 28, 2008.

Links to more information about greenwashing:
Greenwashing - Sourcewatch.org
The Greenwash Brigade – Publicradio.org
Greenwash Awards – Corpwatch.org
Greenwashing – BusinessEthics.ca
Stories About: Greenwashing – Grist.org.

Green Grazing: Mapping Ocean Impacts, Limiting Fishing Subsidies, Ending Ocean Iron Fertilization

2008-02-20T19:43:00.000-08:00

Three items on an ocean theme: a map of ocean impacts, a proposal to limit global subsidies that promote overfishing, and the demise of Planktos Corp.’s plans to conduct ocean iron fertilization tests.

No Tern Left Unstoned: Ever feel like you can’t get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life no matter where you go? Well, new research published last week in the journal Science suggests oceans may feel the same way. An international team of 20 scientists produced a global map showing different human activities in the oceans layered on top of each other to get the ‘big picture’ (details here and here). They call it as the first attempt to describe and quantify the combined threats facing the world’s oceans and their marine ecosystems from human factors including commercial shipping and over fishing. The two biggest drivers destroying marine habitats were climate change and over-fishing, which together with pollution have taken a heavy toll on about 50% of earth’s marine waters. In fact, only 4% of the world’s oceans remain undamaged by human activity, with only the icy areas near poles remaining relatively pristine. These results are a message to policy makers to implement conservation actions that cut across the whole set of human impacts now and in many places around the globe. In this respect, the map can be used to prioritise marine conservation efforts for human impacts that overlap in space and time.

Fortunately, the following two stories provide some hope for lessening future impacts.

Source: Briggs, Helen. (February 14, 2008). “Map shows toll on world's oceans”. BBC News website. [See Halpern et al. 2008. A Global Map of Human Impact on Marine Ecosystems. Science, 319(5865): 948-952. February 15, 2008. for the original research.]

Removing the Props for Fishing Profits: A proposal to drastically limit subsidies that encourage overfishing was recently brought forward in global trade talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha round (details here). These subsidies include things like boat building, fuel, repair, or fleet operations and globally add up to about $20 billion per year. The UN says that 52% of marine fish stocks are at or near maximum sustainable output levels, about 20% are over exploited. Last year, the US WTO plan provided exceptions for subsidies that don’t encourage overfishing, e.g., boat buybacks, the enhancement of fish stocks, or fisheries research. The current draft released in November 2007 provided further leeway for developing countries where the poor rely on fishing for their livelihoods; however, such countries would have to create conservation plans. Not surprisingly, the proposal has been opposed by some countries with major fishing industries, including a tepid reception from the European Union. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), China, Peru and the US were the world’s top fish producers in 2004, a year in which the global fishing fleet numbered about 4 million vessels, mostly in Asia. A spokesperson for one activist organization noted that it if the proposal moves forward it will be important to craft rules to ensure China cannot, “. . . use developing country treatment as a loophole to subsidize its massive global fishing activity.”

Source: Ryan, Missy. (February 15, 2008). “Ocean advocates hopeful of WTO cut in fishing support”. Reuters via ENN. WTO will discuss a proposal to remove subsidies that encourage overfishing.

An End to False Profits: Planktos Corp., the carbon offset company with highly publicized plans to fertilize oceans with iron to capture carbon and generate carbon offsets (see here and here), has shut down operations indefinitely after running out of cash, calling its research vessel, the Weatherbird II, back from the Portuguese island of Madeira in the Atlantic, where it had been stranded for months (see here).

Why has this happened? Well, this is how Planktos explained it in a comment issued as part of a short statement on its website: “A highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders has provoked widespread opposition to plankton restoration in the environmental world, and has caused the company to encounter serious difficulty in raising the capital needed to fund its planned series of ocean research trials.” (http://www.planktos.com/, February 13, 2008, accessed online February 20, 2008).

The “anti-offset crusaders” included Greenpeace (see here) as well as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society which threatened to block Planktos’s previously planned iron fertilization tests off the Galapagos Islands (see here), causing it to change its plans, and was on its way to block the Atlantic tests (see here).

Planktos’ claims to the contrary, however, it wasn’t just “anti-offset crusaders” who opposed its plans. As I have reported in previous posts (see here and here), opponents to its private ocean iron fertilization experiments included both the US Environmental Protection Agency, which warned Planktos that the their tests may be subject to regulation under the Ocean Dumping Act, and the International Maritime Organization. Additionally, a number of marine and climate scientists recently released a joint policy statement stating that it’s premature to use ocean iron fertilization to generate carbon offsets until the necessary research has been completed that shows it is both effective at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and that it does not hold any unexpected nasty surprises for ocean ecosystems.

Source: Revkin, A.C. (February 13, 2008). “Commercial Ocean Fertilization Project Halted”. The New York Times, Dot Earth. Accessed online February 19, 2008).
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A Local Perspective on Food-Based Biofuels

2008-02-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

I’ve been posting quite a bit on the subject of food-based biofuels, focusing mostly on global scale issues like negative impacts to biodiversity and food security, and the uncertainty about their effectiveness for actually reducing net carbon dioxide emissions. For this reading session I decided to narrow my scope and touch base with biofuels at the smaller and more local scale of my home province, British Columbia.

I figured that no community would be more in touch with biofuels issues here than our agricultural community, so I scooped up the January and February 2008 issues of a local agricultural paper, “Country Life in BC”, modestly promoted as “The agricultural news source in British Columbia since 1915”, and started reading. I like reading this paper because it grounds me after the breathing the rarefied atmosphere that surrounds the politics and policy; of agriculture its articles cover issues of real importance to the BC farmers who earn their living growing the food I eat. I quickly discovered that my provinces own agricultural industry is as divided on the topic of biofuels as the rest of the world: depending on where farmers sit on the agricultural food chain, biofuels are either a bummer or a bonus.

Looking first at the bummer end of the biofuels food chain, the lead story of the January 2008 issue reported on government plans to provide loans to cattle and hog farmers to help them deal with a ‘crisis’, a crisis caused in part by feed costs that have increased substantially because of the push for biofuels [1]. As one industry spokesman noted in the article, “[Governments] are subsidizing the ethanol industry to the detriment of the feeding sector. I don’t know why the government can’t see the hurt that creates.”

A few pages later, an editorial expanded on this sentiment [2]. Its ominous title, “The end of cheap food” was borrowed from a recent issue of The Economist magazine, which also introduced the word “agflation”. “Agflation”, the editorial explained, describes the current global situation where record prices for wheat and cereal crops are occurring in a time of abundance rather than scarcity. It added that Canadian livestock producers are bearing the brunt of the current “agflation” as feed costs are driven up by government biofuels policies, further commenting that the livestock feed increases will eventually turn into higher food prices for all Canadians. It ended with this question: “Does the government know for a fact they are actually serving society by turning food into fuel, or will they literally put food beyond reach?”

This is an especially pertinent question for British Columbia’s government. As the editorial points out, B.C.’s Progress Board recently reported that our province ranked second to last in Canada for both the number of families below the ‘low income cut-off level’ and in ‘overall social conditions’. A fact that brings the impact of biofuels on food prices a little closer to home than tortilla riots in Mexico or soy bean protests in Indonesia.

Now, it’s easy to get swept up onto the anti-biofuel bandwagon with negative press like this and rail at the government to do something, but the government is motivated by more than just reducing carbon emissions when it comes to biofuels, it also sees compelling economic reasons for encouraging a provincial biofuels industry. Encouragement helped along, no doubt with a little lobbying by biofuels beneficiaries. This brings us to the bonus end of the biofuels food chain and this was exemplified in another article called, “Biofuel plant for Peace promising.” [3]

The “Peace” in this case is the Peace River region in the north east corner of BC, our province’s little piece of the Canadian prairies. Located east of the Rocky Mountains, its rolling hills and flat plains are ideal for growing wheat and canola (rapeseed), two crops used as feedstock for the production of ethanol and biodiesel, respectively. According to the article, the B.C. Grain Producers Association (BCGPA) figures the Peace region has the “. . . potential to sustain an environmentally-friendly agriculture-based biodiesel production facility.” [3] The article provides numbers that would be sure to attract the attention of any politician.

The proposed biodiesel facility would focus on canola as its feedstock and provide $25 million annually to the local economy, including a payroll of $1.7 million for 24 skilled employees and $1.5 million in local, provincial and federal taxes. It would also provide the region’s 300 grain producers the opportunity to participate locally in the biofuels boom, rather than paying to ship their product elsewhere. The 22.7 million litre plant will be able to process up to 56,000 tonnes of canola per year (BC producers currently grow only 43,000 tonnes of canola annually, so reading between the lines farmers will be growing more canola in the Peace Region if the plant gets built). Of course, the plant would also contribute to BC’s renewable fuel target of 5% by 2010. (At this time, plans are on hold while the Peace Biofuels Steering Committee waits for clarification of the federal government’s new ecoEnergy for Biofuels program.)

The article provided a few more details on the cost of preparing the business plan and the current status of the financial planning, etc, but its focus really was the economic benefits of the plant for the Peace region. It added nothing about other, less positive concerns about biofuels, certainly nothing about impacts on livestock producers or food prices. In the case of the Peace Region cereal growers, then, food-based biofuels are a good.

So good in fact that the Peace biofuels initiative has even stimulated a research and development program to help develop the most appropriate feedstock crops for the region. [4] The B.C. Grain Producer’s research committee is searching for crops that do well in the high latitude Peace region’s short but intense growing season (short spring and fall seasons with long summer days). The committee’s five year research program includes a ‘Cereal Variety Selection for Ethanol End-Use Suitability’ project that “relates well to a proposed bio-fuel plant to be built in the region.” [4] Its goal is to test and report on early maturing varieties that meet the required sustainable ethanol feedstock.

Pondering the Peace prospect for biofuels profitability, I moved on to the February 2008 issue of Country Life and was immediately (on page 2) sent right back to the bummer end of the biofuels food chain. There’s no end in sight for rising livestock and poultry prices a feed industry executive told a gathering BC chicken growers. [5] Expectations that feed prices would level off over winter did not occur and spot markets for wheat, soy, and corn have increased by $40-$70 a tonne since the end of 2007. These record high prices have come at a time when world grains supplies are at record high levels (the “agflation” I noted earlier) and last winter was one of the most volatile seen in the history of commodity markets due to a growing middle class in India and China, which has set world meat consumption is at a record high, and unprecedented demand for feedstock as biofuels production increased by 69%.

For example, in Canada last year ethanol plants consumed 3 billion bushels of corn and this is expected to increase to 3.8 billion bushels this year. The expanded Husky ethanol plant in Manitoba and two new plants in Saskatchewan are expected to consume over 1 million of the 3-5 million tonnes of wheat grown in Canada (the article noted that this projection caused the Canadian Wheat Board to do something, but I didn’t quite understand what). The executive concluded by saying the current high prices are pressuring chicken growers and feed producers alike (so don’t kill the messenger).

Whew. With this kind of pressure on producers, I wondered, how long will it be before food prices begin to rise? I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Only 4 pages later, a related chicken story described how chicken growers would like to increase the price of chicken by about $.08/kg to make up, in part, for the high cost of their chicken feed. [6] Chicken feed ain’t just chicken feed anymore!

So, there you go. Even my little corner of the world is feeling the biofuels pinch and reflects many of the same issues arising from the production of food-based biofuels at the global scale. Everything is connected, Cheers.

Sources:

[1] Schmidt, David. (January 2008). “Livestock producers lukewarm to loan promises”. Country Life in BC, 94(1), pg 1.

[2] Editorial. (January 2008). “The end of cheap food”. Country Life in BC, 94(1), pg 4.

[3] Birley, Brenda. (January 2008). “Biofuel plant for Peace promising”. Country Life in BC, 94(1), pg 9.

[4] Birley, Brenda. (January 2008). “The heat is on for short-season varieties in B.C. Peace”. Country Life in BC, 94(1), pg 17.

[5] Schmidt, David. (February 2008). “Instability sends feed prices soaring”. Country Life in BC, 94(2):2.

[6] Schmidt, David. (February 2008). “Chicken growers disillusioned over lower returns”. Country Life in BC, 94(2): 6..

Rust in the Deeps: More on Geoengineering and Ocean Iron Fertilization

2008-02-03T12:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve posted a few times on the misguided geoengineering scheme of some private companies to seed the ocean with iron in order to generate and sell carbon offsets (see “Green technology and the deep blue sea” (July 10, 2007), “Green Grazing: Ocean Theme - Seabirds in trouble, Low Tuna Catches, Plankton to the Rescue (again)”(August 29, 2007), and “Green Grazing: Plankton, Jellyfish, Tuna, Evolution” (November 22, 2007)). It sounds wonderfully simple, just dump some iron filings in the open ocean to stimulate a plankton bloom, the exploding plankton population takes up enormous amounts of carbon dioxide as It grows, then as the individual little planktons die, they sink slowly into the ocean depths, taking the carbon fixed in their little bodies with them to their watery grave. Problems is, not only does the available science provide little support for the effectiveness of ocean iron fertilization as a carbon sequestration tool, too little is known about ocean ecosystems in general to understand iron fertilization’s potential impacts.

Just monitor it carefully you say? Well, it’s hard enough to do long-term monitoring of environmental problems and questions on dry land, just imagine how difficult it must be in the middle of the ocean. There’s just too much specialized research that needs to be completed before we get carried away with plans to alter ocean food chains, at least more than we already have through overfishing and pollution. Thus, the possibility that a private business could chug out into international waters and dump rust wherever they please frightens the hell out of me, and for them to do it under the banner of fighting climate change is criminal.

That’s just my opinion, though; you can read the facts and make up your own mind ocean iron fertilization. To help you with this, I’ve pulled together some information on recent research results, a link to and comments from a recent international symposium on ocean iron fertilization, an update on the state of international regulation for ocean fertilization schemes, a plea from the scientific community for better fertilization science, and the plans of one company, Planktos Corp., which not long ago was proceeding with plans to conduct a private fertilization experiment in the waters about 350 km off the Galapagos Islands. (Yes, the same Galapagos Islands that served as Darwin’s evolutionary laboratory, that have become a destination for thousands of ecotourists every year, and where very recently, dozens of sea lions were slaughtered for what appears to be an unknown reason at this time). Click Read more to continue . . .

First, recently published research does not support ocean iron fertilization as a tool for carbon sequestration. Lutz et al. (2007) tested the ‘biological pump’ theory of plankton carbon dioxide sequestration. [That is, the more plankton in a bloom, the more carbon is transported from the atmosphere to the deep ocean]. They looked at seasonal patterns in plankton abundance and carbon sinking rates. They were surprised to find that less carbon than expected was transported to deep water during a summertime bloom, than during the rest of the year. This finding suggests that the ‘biological pump’ leaks as natural ecological processes recycle more material in shallower waters and less of it sinks. The implication is that since ocean iron fertilization is a kind of artificial summer, fertilization schemes “. . . may not remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as has been suggested because they ignore the natural process revealed by this research.”

A recent symposium on Ocean Iron Fertilization at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute brought together experts to discuss the scientific, economic, legal, and political basis for ocean fertilization. The group included optimists enthusiastic about the economic potential of ocean fertilization on the global carbon offset market (e.g., estimates of $100 billion!), as well as scientists eager to push forward in cooperation with commercial interests to implement experiments, concluding that past experiments may not have been large enough to stimulate a positive fertilization effect. Others are not so eager to move forward.

“Ocean fertilization projects are currently not regulated under any carbon credit regulatory scheme and the scale of offsets or credits from ocean fertilization on the unregulated voluntary markets is basically nothing short of fraudulent”, noted one participant at the symposium, Professor Rosemary Rayfuse from the University of New South Wales, Australia, an expert on International Law and the Law of the Sea. She noted that ocean fertilization is considered ‘dumping’, which is illegal under the Law of the Sea.

In fact, the London Convention, the International Maritime Organization body that oversees the dumping of wastes and other matter at sea, recently decided to regulate controversial commercial ocean fertilization schemes and advised that such schemes are currently not scientifically justified.

Another symposium participant, John Cullen of Dalhousie University, said that he seriously doubts our ability to ever understand and verify impacts of ocean fertilization over the long term because the ocean is constantly moving – the same water that is fertilized is not in the same place 100 years later, additionally, other greenhouse gases, like nitrous oxide may be emitted, countering the effect of planktonic carbon sequestration.

Out of the discussions at the Woods Hole symposium arose a policy position paper, authored by several of the participants, which was published in the journal Science (see Buessler et al. 2008). In their paper, the authors outline the key scientific uncertainties associated with ocean iron fertilization, namely: experiments to date have not been designed to characterize ocean iron fertilization as a carbon mitigation strategy; the efficacy of carbon dioxide transfer from the atmosphere to the deep sea is poorly constrained; we do not understand the intended and unintended biogeochemical and ecological impacts; environmental perturbations are non-local and spread over a large area by ocean circulation, which makes long-term verification and assessment very difficult; and modeling studies suggest ocean iron fertilization would be unlikely to sequester more than several million tons of carbon a year, which is a best only a partial contribution to global carbon mitigation.

The paper also outlines the components of an integrated research program for reducing this uncertainty. Together they are specifically targeted to exploring the feasibility of ocean iron fertilization and a tool for carbon mitigation. They include: field studies that are wider in scale and longer in duration; comparison of the effects of iron fertilization between high and low nutrient areas of the ocean for more contrast in ecosystem responses; .better measurements of what happens to fixed carbon once it sinks into the ocean depths; more comprehensive assessment of ecological impacts for all levels of life from bacteria to sea lions, better assessment of the biogeochemical impacts, including the generation of other greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxides; long-term monitoring of effects; development of computer models to integrate, interpolate and extrapolate the research results; and cost/benefit analyses relating ocean iron fertilization to other carbon mitigation methods, as well as not doing anything to mitigate carbon (‘business as usual’).

Finally, the authors note that coordination across multiple research partners is critical for these kinds of large-scale experiments, which must include the participation of private companies, academic institutions and non-governmental organizations. However, academics must remain neutral and this can be done by regulating the experiments in a uniform manner under international agreements such as the London Convention (see above), being open about plans and results, and requiring clear statements of conflict of interest. Only when this scientific work has been done, they caution, should politicians consider moving forward with policies that include ocean iron fertilization as a carbon mitigation strategy and only then with explicit public acceptance and acknowledgement of the risks.

So that’s where the scientific community sits on the topic of ocean iron fertilization, what about industry? Well, Planktos Corp., the company that planned to conduct a private ocean iron fertilization experiment in the ocean off of the Galapagos Islands? Well, for the time being at least, its plans are on hold. The company is in trouble, reporting financial problems to its investors and shareholders in December 2007. Could this be a result of the negative press it received over unilateral fertilization plans? Perhaps it wasn’t a shrewd PR move to boldly forge ahead with its iron fertilization plans after receiving opposition, not just from NGO’s, but also from the US EPA. In true industry fashion, however, a Planktos Corp. spokesman contended that the fertilization controversy arises from a ‘turf battle’ over whether research should be done by private companies or academia. When it comes to a common good like the ocean, I vote for academia, which will at least provide the public access to results of research.

In the end, more than just scientific criteria will be used to support a decision to move forward with large scale ocean iron fertilization. For example, in a rapidly warming world it may become the lesser of two evils, a choice between possible harm to ocean ecosystems from ocean iron fertilization and certain harm from global warming, harm such as is already being seen with coral reefs. This will be a political decision, however, not a decision made by private interests. In the meantime, it’s clear, ocean fertilization schemes for the purpose of carbon sequestration are not yet justified by the available science: those who claim it is are being dishonest.

Sources:

Munro, Margaret. January 29 2008. “Ocean fertilization Plan on Hold”. The Vancouver Sun.

Agence France Presse. (November 13, 2007). “World Body Warns Over Ocean ‘Fertilization’ To Fix Climate Change”. Found on CommoDreams.org.

Buesseler et al.2008. “Ocean Iron Fertilization--Moving Forward in a Sea of Uncertainty”. Science 319(5860): 162.

University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science. (January 11, 2007). “Ocean Fertilization 'Fix' For Global Warming Discredited By New Research”. via ENN.

Lutz, M. J., K. Caldeira, R. B. Dunbar, and M. J. Behrenfeld (2007), Seasonal rhythms of net primary production and particulate organic carbon flux to depth describe the efficiency of biological pump in the global ocean, J. Geophys. Res., 112,.

Sustainable Agricultural Reading Day 2

2008-01-29T11:54:00.000-08:00

Grass Fed vs. Grain Fed Beef: Here’s an interesting article about the benefits of grass fed beef. (Harvey, Graham. January 29, 2008. “Farming should return to its roots”. BBC News website – viewpoint.). In summary, Harvey argues for a return to the more sustainable farming practices (e.g., less erosion, soil carbon storage, natural nitrogen fixing, less irrigation) and improved human health benefits provided by growing and eating grass fed beef. He notes that the beef production playing field is currently tilted in favour of the industrial grain fed cattle production. This is because government subsidized grain production has led to surpluses that make feeding cattle up on feedlots more economical than raising them on grass. Unfortunately, the farming practices and crops used to feed the cattle have high environmental impacts in terms of synthetic fertilizer use, soil erosion and water consumption. Ironically, another government subsidy, that encouraging growing crops for the production of biofuels, is tilting the playing field back in favour of traditional grass fed beef production (one of the few possible positive effects of crop based biofuels I’ve come across). As grains become feedstock for the production of biofuels, they have become more expensive for industrial feedlot beef producers, making it more economical to raise cattle on grass.

This is an encouraging switch, but a temporary one, I fear. Unless the driver for causing producers to switch from industrial grain fed to traditional grass fed beef production is the consumer’s choice for a healthier and more sustainable product, they will probably switch back to grain fed production practices once grain prices drop again after governments begin to recognize the perverse social and environment effects of their current biofuels policies and second generation biofuels (e.g., cellulose based biofuels) become commercially viable. If you find Harvey’s article interesting, you'll enjoy reading Michael Pollacks’s eloquent comparison of the corn fed industrial cattle and cattle grown on the ecologically integrated and sustainable system of the Polyface ‘grass farm’ in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. (see here for a previous post on this).

Soil Enhancement in Africa: Below are links to two related articles that address recent funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to agricultural initiatives in the developing world, in particular an initiative in Africa to rehabilitate degraded soils. (see here for a previous post on soil problems in North America).

BBC News website. (January 25, 2008). “Boost for Africa's depleted soils”. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) will work with 4.1 million farmers, mostly women, to rehabilitate 6.1 million hectares of degraded soils. Initial funding has been provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($164.5 million, see below) and the Rockefeller Foundation ($15 million). The objectives of AGRA’s soil enhancement program is to boost incomes, increase crop yields, and protect soils, reversing past encroachment on forests and grasslands by farmers search for arable land. (see here and here for previous posts about AGRA).

Petherick, Anna. (January 29, 2008). “Gates funds agricultural development”. Nature.com News. Petherick writes about the $306 donation by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to agricultural initiatives and how its split between AGRA’s soil enhancement program (see above) and “. . . outfits that develop micro-irrigation technologies for small-holder farmers in India, boost high-quality coffee production or milk quality in Kenya and elsewhere, and improve dairy farmers’ access to markets in Bangladesh . . .”

Cheers.

End of Post.

Biofuels: Less Food For Thought: Rising Soybean Prices in Asia

2008-01-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

Another real example of the tradeoff between growing food to feed people or fill gas tanks. In a crisis reminiscent of the tortilla riots in Mexico that took place almost a year ago, world soybean prices have climbed to record highs over the last week, creating protests and social unrest in Indonesia and concern throughout Asia. Price have increased due to decreased production of soybeans by farmers in the US and Asia, who have instead been growing corn, palm oil and other crops to cash in on the biofuels bonanza stimulated by the ravenous biofuels market. In Indonesia soybean prices have risen 125% in the last year, a calamity in a country where soybeans may make up more than a 40 percent of the dietary protein of its poor, who make up more than half of that nation’s population.

Price increases are being felt throughout the soybean food chain as food producers are quick to pass the costs on to consumers. In Japan, miso companies have announced price increases of 10-15%. In South Korea, soy bean prices increased by 10% in December alone, translating into a 30% increase in soy milk and other soy products. Tofu sellers in Hong Kong have raised prices for the first time in 10 years.

Asia is being hit hard because Asian counties rely heavily on soybean imports. For example, Japan imports about 95% of its annual 4million tonnes of soybeans from the US. China is rapidly coming to dominate the soybean imports; as China becomes more affluent, increasing volumes of soybean are going to feed up livestock for meat rather than direct human consumption. Soybean shortages are driving up the cost of meat in China. There seems to be a bit of a conflict between sustainable agriculture and sustainable energy. Cheers.

Source:
Raphael Minder, John Aglionby, and Jung-a Song. (January 18, 2008). “Soaring Soybean Prices Stir Anger Among Poor”. Financial Times (FT.com).

End of Post.

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Mercury Rising . . . in Tuna

2008-01-23T11:41:00.000-08:00

January has been a big month for things mercury. On the positive side, Nasa’s Messenger probe spacecraft flew by the planet Mercury, snapping the first close up pictures of that planet’s surface since the Mariner 10 spacecraft in the 1970’s - a stellar technological achievement. On the negative side, extremely high levels of mercury have been found in tuna sushi in restaurants in New York City – a not so stellar result of past technological achievements.

In a study commissioned by the New York Times, tuna sushi was collected from several New York sushi restaurants and tested for mercury levels. The tests found levels of mercury high enough to make even eating two to three pieces a week, in some restaurants, a health hazard for the average adult (based on US EPA guidelines). In fact, 8 of the 44 pieces tested had mercury levels high enough to trigger US FDA legal action to remove the fish from market. While sobering, these findings are not without precedent, a similar study commissioned by Canada’s CBC News in February 2007 also found higher than allowed levels of mercury in canned albacore tuna.

Although the NYT tests were specific to New York City, experts believe mercury levels could be high in tuna everywhere. A scientist with the environmental organization, Environmental Defence, said mercury levels in bluefin tuna are likely high regardless of location. It is most likely that the tuna sampled in the NYT study was bluefin.

More expensive tuna, like bluefin, usually contains more mercury because it is more likely to come from larger species that accumulate mercury from the fish they eat. This is an example of the biological process of bioaccumulation in which hard to get rid of toxins like methylmercury (the biologically active form of mercury), DDT and PCB’s are found in progressively higher concentrations moving up the food chain from plankton to the top level predators – e.g., bigger fish eat lots of smaller fish that have lower levels of the toxin. Smaller species of tuna like yellowfin, bigeye and albacore generally have less mercury than bluefin. (but see the CBC study re albacore).

The NYT article also notes that studies have found high mercury levels in people who eat diets rich in seafood. This is problematic – we’re encouraged to eat more fish because it is high health benefits, like heart healthy omega-3 fatty acids, yet eating too much fish could place you at risk from raised mercury levels. So how can you resolve this paradox? Well, a first and obvious step is to reduce your consumption of tuna, especially for young children and pregnant and nursing women. More generally, the NYT article quotes one expert as saying, “. . . to maintain reasonably low mercury exposure you have to eat fish low in the food chain, the smaller fish. . .”, advice based on the concept of bioaccumulation described above.

More precautions are listed in articles I’ve cited; full citations and links to them are listed below and more information on fish in mercury can be found on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) website. Cheers.

Sources:
Burros, Marian. (January 23, 2008). “High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi”. The New York Times.

CBC News website. (February 20, 2007). “Canned tuna exceeds guidelines on mercury: CBC investigation”

End of Post.

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Soil in Trouble

2008-01-22T16:20:00.000-08:00

I came across this interesting article on the web today, about the global threat of soil loss through erosion (see Paulson, Tom. January 22, 2008. “The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing - Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat.” Seattle Post Intelligencer). Here’s the gist of the article.

The thin layer of topsoil that enables us to grow our food and feed ourselves is known as the ‘thin brown line’ and it truly is. Globally, the layer is on average only about 3 feet thick, yet it is the ‘shallow skin of nutrients’ that nurture our crops. Despite its importance to our existence, we’re not treating it with great care; experts estimate that we’re losing about 1% of our topsoil each year to erosion, mostly due to agricultural practices, though urban development and pollution contribute too. As topsoil regenerates very slowly, at a rate of about 1-2 inches over hundreds of years, we’re rapidly outstripping the earth’s natural ability to restore these losses. For example, cropland in the US is being eroded 10 times faster than it is being replaced. While conservative farming practices have helped slow these losses (e.g., in the US, federal payments to farmers to leave some natural ground cover in highly erodible areas), these practices, such as no-till agriculture can be expensive in terms of equipment and training. Fortunately, there are examples of forward thinking out there, like the King County (in Washington State) voter approved bond program that buys back farmland to protect it from development.

That’s the article in an organic nutshell and kudos to King County. Unfortunately, in other cases, it seems that backward thinking is the new forward thinking. In Europe, for example, the European Union has stopped making payments to farmers to leave some land fallow as wildlife ‘set asides’. In the US, there is concern that the recent biofuels boom, especially with regards to corn for ethanol production, will encourage farmers to bring marginal land into production. It’s time to reverse the tide and get the dirt back in. Cheers.

End of Post.

Green Tips: Disposal/Recycling of Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs)

2008-01-16T18:18:00.000-08:00

Just saw a helpful story on our local news channel (Global TV) about the disposal of compact fluorescent lights (see here for a previous post on CFLs). It focused on the mercury content of CFLs (~5 mg) and asked first why there was no warning of this on the packaging (good point)and also why if the government is promoting their use, why is there no advertised disposal/recycling options for them.

On the mercury question, it was pointed out that a single mercury thermometer of the type many people have in their homes is equivalent to about 100 CFLs, though care is still required when cleaning up after a broken bulb.

On the disposal/recycling question, while the government may not yet be providing such opportunities, it turns out that both two Lower Mainland big box stores do (Home Depot, Ikea)!

This information applies to the Lower Mainland, but it's worth checking out in other areas too. Cheers.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: Comparing Green Options - cars and leather

2008-01-16T07:06:00.000-08:00

We're inundated with so many green claims these days it's difficult to follow up and check on their validity. It's time consuming and when you get into the details, 'green' becomes a multi-dimensional state of being - it often depends on what mix of green criteria you choose to use. As a good example of this, and why it's always good to look a little closer at green claims when you can, here are links to two interesting articles by Brendan Koerner on Slate.com that explore the relative green performance of gasoline vs electirc cars and leather vs pleather goods.

Gasoline vs. Electric Cars: In the first article, Koerner compares the relative environmental performance, in terms of carbon emission statistics, of gasoline and electric powered cars. While your first thought may be that electric is better, it turns out that it depends on how the electricity you're charging your car with is generated. For example, whether it is predominantly hydroelectric power, or it is generated in a coal-fired power plant. My thought is that at least with an electric car, you have the option of being greener if you purchase green power and it also has the potential to improve over time as power generation systems change (i.e. from old coal to low emission coal power).

Source: Koerner, Brendan I. (December 11, 2007). “The Electric Vehicle Acid Test: Are EVs really any better for the environment than gas-guzzling cars?” Slate.com. An interesting article with a number of excellent points that further illuminate this topic.

Leather vs. Pleather: In the second article, Koerner comapres the relative greeness of leather (made from cows, moo) and pleather (made from oil, its polyurethane). Koerner takes the view that this is a more challenging comparison that gasoline vs electric cars because not only are carbon emissions an issue, but there is also the questions of animal cruelty, sustainable agriculture, etc. (however, hydroelectric power can impact wildlife values etc.)

Again, your first instinct may be to choose leather over pleather, but once again, closer scrutiny of the details behind the production of each yields counterintuitive results. While both emit greenhouse gases, cows in the form of methane, pleather as carbon dioxide, pleather does not have the toxicity issues associated with other petroleum products (like polyvinyl chloride, or PVC), it is made from oil, a product that is associated with a lot of misery is some parts of the world. On the other hand, most commercial tanneries use hexavalent chromium a potent carcinogen. While there are vegetable-based options for tanning leather, they are more expensive and not necessarily less polluting.

In the end, it seems, your choice of a leather over a pleather jacket may well be determined by your stance on animal rights and adding carcinogens to the environment rather than by their relative performance based on greenhouse gas emissions alone.

Source: Koerner, Brendan I. (December 4, 2007). “Whether the Leather Be Pleather Or whether the leather be not . . .” Slate.com. Compares the relative environmental impact of real and synthetic leather.

While the information in these artickles may make your decision on whether to put leather seats in your new electric car, I found them useful for stimulating thinking about how to go about evaluating a product's green claims. As usual, being 'green' is a multidimensional state. Cheers.

End of Post.

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Green Grazing: EU to Revise Biofuels Policy, Royal Society Biofuels Report

2008-01-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

European Union to reconsider its biofuels policy: In light of the unexpected side-effects of the biofuels boom (e.g., increasing food prices, rainforest destruction), side-effects driven in part by the EU’s biofuels policy, the EU is planning to revise its biofuels policy to better meet social and environmental criteria. EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas even said it would be better to miss the EU’s target of 10% biofuels composition of roadfuels by 2010 than harm the poor or damage the environment. Meanwhile, the US government has passed a new energy bill that will promote a major increase in corn ethanol production, arguably one of the least effective biofuels for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Source: Harrabin, Roger. (January 14, 2008). “EU rethinks biofuels guidelines”. BBC News website.

New UK science report on biofuels: The Royal Society, the UK’s academy of science, today released a new report on biofuels (“Sustainable biofuels: prospects and challenges”) that warns biofuels may not produce significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions unless the government puts the right policies in place. This is because while both the EU biofuels policy and the UK’s Renewable Transport Obligation policy (the UK’s implementation of the EU biofuels directive) contain biofuels content targets for roadfuels, neither contains greenhouse gas reductions targets. This is a crucial policy component because different biofuels have different potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The current directive does more for economic development and energy security than combating climate change. Amongst its other recommendations, the report calls for, “biofuels to be assessed and certified for the greenhouse gas savings they will deliver, as well as their positive and negative social and environmental impacts . . .,” to avoid creating new social and environmental problems in efforts to combat climate change.

If you’re interested in a little more detail on relative performance of different biofuels, the report contains an informative chapter (Chapter 5) on the evaluating the impacts of biofuels. This analysis uses a comparative tool (life cycle analysis), discusses its limitations and compares biofuels across key environmental issues associated with the production of biofuels (e.g., energy consumption, GHG emissions, land use, water consumption, eutrophication, biodiversity and air quality).

Source: Royal Society press release. (January 14, 2008). “Government needs to drive biofuels in right direction warns Royal Society”.

End of Post.
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Green Grazing: Rising Food Prices, Shrinking Food Supply, Labelling Organic Food

2008-01-03T06:32:00.000-08:00

Wow, a month goes by quickly! Happy New Year and welcome to the inaugural 'What's Your Ecotype ?' post for 2008. I though I'd start with a few Green Grazing digests to clear the backlog of random browsing since my last post. Today's theme - sustainable agriculture and food security.

Rising Food Prices: According to a report released by the International Food Policy Research Institute on December 4 in Beijing, world food prices are expected to increase as both global temperatures and the demand for food in developing countries (e.g.m China and India) increase. The report (‘The World Food Situation: New Driving Forces and Required Actions’) states that increasing global temperatures are expected to reduce agricultural productivity by 16% by 2020 and to reduce the area of land available for growing certain crops. For example, land available for growing wheat in Africa will almost disappear. This could increase hunger and malnutrition and increase dependency on food imports as cereal yields in affected countries decline. Competition with crops used for biofuels is expected to further reduce the amount of food available. In developing countries, the demand for processed food and expensive meat and dairy products will increase food prices, for example as more grains go to feeding cattle.

Source:
CBC News website. (December 4, 2007). “World food prices to rise, report suggests”.

Shrinking Food Supply: In a story closely related to the previous article, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that world food stocks declined significantly in 2007 causing food prices to rise. The UN FAO price index rose by 40% in 2007 compared to only 9% in 2006. The costs of foods imported by the neediest countries rose by 25%. Reserves of cereals are severely depleted and at the lowest levels since 1980 - world wheat stock is down to less than 12 weeks of the world's total consumption while that for corn is down to 8 weeks. Not surprisingly, the price of wheat and oilseed are at record highs. For example, wheat futures broke $10/bushel, which is the agricultural equivalent of the $100 barrel of oil. Several supply and demand factors are at work including the early effects of global warming and a shift from farming for food for people to farming for biofuels and cattle feed. For example, wheat producing regions such as Australia and the Ukraine have been hit with climate change effects like drought and flooding which has reduced their output. High oil prices have also double the cost of shipping food, which again impacts the poorest nations.

Source:
Rosenthal, Elisabeth. (December 17, 2007). “Global food supply is dwindling rapidly, UN agency warns”. International Herald Tribune. Production down, prices up, supplies down too.

What’s in a label? The focus of this story is what does ‘organic’ mean when it comes to food? Apparently the US National Organic Standards Board is considering a proposal to include farmed salmon and cod as organic foods, which understandable has some folks up in arms since organic suggests food that is healthy for people and the environment. Given this assumption, it should be interesting to see how industrial net pen salmon aquaculture is spun as being an organic food given the many issues associated with salmon farming around the world, issues like: stripping other ecosystems of fish for salmon feed, passing parasites to wild salmon, polluting the ocean bottom beneath fish pens, attracting seals and sea lions that are then treated as 'pests', etc. This article raises the thorny issue of the difference between what an organic label implies and what's in the fine print, an issue that Michael Pollan explores in 'The Omnivores Dilemma.'

I'll be posting more on salmon farming in the next few days.

Source:
Barton Seaver and Rick Moonen. (November 29, 2007). “Barton Seaver:A fishy definition of organic”. Sacramento Bee via ENN.

End of Post.

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Green Grazing: Reading science, climate change, recycling, and CCD

2007-12-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

Reading science: virtual vs. vellum

Strauss, Stephen. (Nov. 30, 2007). “What changes when science news goes online?” CBC News website. An interesting column about the differences in our information retention reading patterns between web and print science news stories.

Climate change: offsetting; algae biofuels; geo-sequestration

CBC News website. (December 3, 2007). “UN kicks off global warming conference to build new climate agreement”. 10,000 delegates! That’s a lot of air travel generated CO2! Indonesia is planting a whole bunch of trees to soak up the 50,000 tonnes or so of CO2 expected to be generated by the conference. Now, what about the billions of tonnes of CO2 released each year from cutting down rainforest and draining peat swamps to build palm oil plantations?

Karnowski, Steve. (November 29, 2007). “Lowly algae are fueling a new renewable energy research boom”. CBC News website. Article about algaes’ great potential as a source of biofuel. Algae are believed to be able to provide much higher annual yields than food crops like corn, dont’ require agricultural land, can use sewage water and even sea water. However, there’s still a lot of research and development to be done in order to bring production costs down low enough to make production economically feasible.

BBC News website. (December 3, 2007). “Carbon capture plan for the Forth”. Plan to geo-sequester CO2 from coal plants around the Firth of Forth at the bottom of the Forth.

Recycling: cellphones, fridges and incentives

Tomlinson, Nicole. (November 23, 2007). “Cellphones: Mining old handsets for valuable metals”. CBC News website. Article about cellphone recycling by charities. Cellphones are stripped down for parts and materials, or refurbished and resold. Did you know that, " . . . more than 1,450 tonnes of WEEE [ waste electrical and electronic equipment] is generated in Canada from cellphones alone each year." Astounding.

CBC News website. (November 30, 2007). “Cold beers warming the planet, study finds” Recycle your energy guzzling beer fridge.

Green Progress via ENN. (December 3, 2007). “New Jersey Town Doubles Recycling Rates in One Week with the RecycleBank Program”. Points-based recycling reward system; good idea.

Honey Bees: Disappearing bees in Ontario not CCD
CBC News website. (November 22, 2007). “Parasite found in every Ontario bee sample”. The disappearing honey bee phenomenon gets more complicated. This article describes recent research on Ontario bees in which all samples contained the parasite Nosema apis and more than half also contained the more deadly Nosema ceranae, which has been blamed for heavy honey bee losses in Europe. Researchers noted that Ontario bees are already under stress from varroa mites and a wet fall, which limits the pollen collection necessary to produce young bees in the spring. The researchers feel that the bee problems in Ontario and other provinces appear to be separate from colony collapse disorder in the US.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: Plankton, Jellyfish, Tuna, Evolution

2007-11-22T22:48:00.000-08:00

Somebody stop these planktonic fools: I’ve written about their plans before, but now, despite widespread opposition from NGO’s and the US EPA, Planktos Corp. is moving forward with its plans to seed a large area of the Pacific Ocean with iron, a nutrient in short supply in this region of the ocean, to stimulate plankton blooms. Their hypothesis is that these plankton blooms will soak up carbon dioxide, which will be stored in the tiny plankton skeletons when they die and sequestered on the ocean’s bottom. Problem is, existing research does not really support this hypothesis and methane, a more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide may be generated in the process (e.g., methane). There is also little understanding of how such an experiment may impact largely unstudied and poorly understood ocean ecosystems. Carried out as part of an international research program to look for ways to slow climate change, this project might have had some merit, but as part of a secretive and unregulated corporate endeavour to generate carbon credits for sale, it has none. Is Planktos Corp. liable for any environmental catastrophe that might occur? Will their results be available for scrutiny by independent scientist? Not if their lawyers can help it.

The revenge of the jellyfish: Northern Ireland’s only salmon farm has been wiped out by an enormous flotilla of jellyfish. (Another link here). The ‘bloom’ of jellyfish, a species known as the ‘mauve stinger ‘ more commonly found in warmer Mediterranean waters, covered an 10 square miles up to a depth of 35 feet. In just a few hours, the jellyfish jam suffocated 100,000 cage salmon with a combined valued of over one million pounds. Ouch, another example of nature viciously attacking the salmon aquaculture industry. No word yet on whether the jellyfish will be held accountable.

I’m afraid the answer is no . . . bluefin tuna: The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) voted not to decrease tuna quotas at the end of their meeting in Antalya, Turkey, despite a proposal to do so from the US delegation and pressure from non-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. It appears that ICCAT may be abandoning science-driven management for a market-driven management given its acceptance by a ‘weak proposal’ from Japan that tuna fishers meet in Tokyo brainstorm management approaches, “. . . if they want to.” That’s cracking the whip for ya.

The evolution of impact assessment: Scientists report that that commercial fishing doesn’t only scoop too many fish out of the sea, it can also exert evolutionary pressure on exploited fish populations, resulting in smaller fish that mature earlier and produce fewer eggs (fecundity is size related in many species of fish). Such changes may not be quick recovery of fish populations, even after the implementation of sustainable fishing practices. The scientists are calling for ‘evolutionary’ impact assessments of fisheries to determine how fast such changes may occur under commercial fishing practices and what the consequences of such changes might be.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: Valuing Biodiversity

2007-11-16T16:43:00.000-08:00

I came across the announcement below on the MarBEF website (MarBEF is the Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning EU Network of Excellence, the website is rich in interesting and useful information).

The European Union has issued an open call for evidence on the economics of biodiversity loss. This will form part of a study on biodiversity that it hopes will carry similar weight to the influential review of the economics of climate change written by the British economist Sir Nicholas Stern (‘Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change’).

At its March 2007 meeting in Potsdam, the membership of the G8+5 agreed to a German proposal to implement a global study that, “. . . will initiate the process of analysing the global economic benefit of biological diversity, the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the failure to take protective measures versus the costs of effective conservation.”'

The ‘Call for Evidence’ asks interested stakeholders in Europe and worldwide, including government, academic, private sector, scientific, NGO and other experts, to submit review papers, case studies, best practice, guidelines, and methodological papers for review and analysis of the science, economics and policy of biodiversity.

This information will be reviewed and summarized in time to inform the parties attending the Ninth Conference of the Parties (COP9) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to be held in Germany in May 2008.

The deadline for submitting evidence is December 31, 2007. For more information on the “Call”, including the address where evidence can be submitted and study “Terms of Reference”, go here.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: Another Example of Societal Collapse?

2007-11-16T14:49:00.000-08:00

If you enjoyed Jared Diamond’s excellent analysis of what causes societies to collapse, or succeed, you’ll find this story interesting.

It involves the disappearance of the Bronze Age Argaric people, one of Western Europe’s earliest known societies, who lived in south-east Spain - Europe's driest area. They lived there for about 1300 years (from 4,300 to 3,600 years before present) before mysteriously vanishing. Now, new findings have lead scientist to the conclusion that the Argaric people may have brought about their own demise through the unsustainable use of local resources, a cautionary tale for modern populations living in water-stressed regions.

By analysing pollen and other indicators in sediment cores taken from a peat bog, scientists were able reconstruct a record of ancient vegetation patterns and how they changed over time. They found that lots of charcoal suddenly appeared in the record shortly after the emergence of the Argaric civilization, a finding which they interpret as the Argaric people deliberately setting fires to clear forests for mining and grazing.

The charcoal finding was followed in the pollen record by an abrupt (in about 10 years) ecological change from a diverse forest ecosystem to a dry and fire-prone Mediterranean scrub ecosystem. Subsequent degradation of soils could have caused the collapse of agriculture and pastoralism, the foundations of the Argaric economy, which in turn would have led to a massive depopulation of the area; about 300 years after the ecosystem change the civilization disappears.

While climate change also appears to have played a role in ecosystem change, since conditions were becoming progressively more arid from 5,500 years ago onward, the scientists feel that it was the cumulative impact of human actions upon climate that drove conditions beyond a tipping point, triggering the abrupt change.

[How do they know that the abrupt ecosystem change was caused by natural fires that occurred when the climate dried to a point where they would just keep going once they started as one giant fire storm?]

Source:

BBC News website. (November 15, 2007). “Eco-ruin 'felled early society'”.

End of Post

Green Grazing: UN Calls for Sustainable Biofuel Production

2007-11-16T13:08:00.000-08:00

Achim Steiner, the UN environment chief, says that the ongoing biofuel bonanza may crash unless producers can prove that their crops have been grown in a sustainable manner.

He noted there is an urgent need for standards to protect rainforests, citing the massive and rapid destruction of Indonesia’s peat swamps to plant palm oil plantations as an example of the type of short sighted and greedy nonsense going on in the biofuel industry today, adding that because of its inability to police its land use, biofuels from Indonesia may never be deemed sustainable.

Recent reports by OXFAM and Greenpeace highlight the social and environmental impacts of the exploding Indonesian palm oil industry, including increased social conflict as villagers are forced from their traditional lands and the environmental havoc cause by draining the peat swamps – not only is there a loss in biodiversity, but billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere.

He also warned that unless the current biofuel problems are dealt with swiftly there may be a consumer backlash, which could harm the development of more sustainable second and third generation biofuels that could more equitably improve Third World economies.

Steiner was responding in part to the plea of a group of scientists who believe that comments made by the IPCC with respect to biofuels are naive and cannot be substantiated. These comments were: 1) that biofuels are an effective solution to carbon emissions in a number of countries, and 2) that biofuels in the transport sector would generally have beneficial social and environmental effects.

One of the group said that the planet cannot afford to grow biofuels because it’s going to run out of water, land, and environmental resources and because the rush to biofuels is going to release more carbon into the atmosphere than will ever be recouped by their later use.

Steiner noted that United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) currently has a ‘high-level’ task force studying the life-cycle implications of all biofuels. The task force is is expected to publish its findings next year.

Given the rapid pace of land conversion in Indonesia, this may be too late for the peat swamps, indegenous peoples and tropical forests of that country.

Sources:

Greenpeace report . (November 2007). ‘How the palm oil industry is cooking the climate’

Harrabin, Roger . (November 16, 2007). “Biofuels bonanza facing 'crash'”. BBC News website.

Oxfam report: (November 2007). “Bio-fueling poverty: why the EU renewable-fuel target may be disastrous for poor people.”.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: US Calls for Tuna Fishing Moratorium

2007-11-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

The US, with the support of the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) is proposing a 3-5 year ban on bluefin tuna fishing in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), which is currently meeting in Turkey. The US proposal arises from concerns that the stock may collapse from overfishing without a concerted international effort to save them. The European Commission has already closed its tuna fisheries for this year after exceeding its quotas.

The WWF is proposing an immediate 3-year ban saying that there have been unprecedented illegal fishing and overfishing of quotas this season, calling the recovery plan that ICCAT adopted last year a ‘collapse plan’, and saying that even ICCAT’s own scientists hold this opinion.

The degree of support for the US proposal is not know yet, there are also alternate proposals that have been put forward by Turkey (lowering current quotas by 5000 tonnes) and Japan (establish a group of traders and farmers working in parallel to ICCAT ). The ICCAT’s 45 member nations will be voting on these proposals this week; the results will be announced this Sunday.

Source:

Lever, Anna-Marie. (November 17, 2007). “US wants freeze on tuna fishing”. BBC News website.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: Climate Change Sceptics Suffer From Solar Wind

2007-11-14T20:20:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since I posted anything about the science of global warming, so here’s a summary (with links) of two interesting articles by Richard Black, Environment correspondent for the BBC News website.

Suspicious about Scientists? You’ve probably heard the frequent claim of bias by climate change sceptics - those who either don’t believe climate change is happening, or don’t accept the weight of evidence supporting the hypothesis that it’s driven by human greenhouse gas emissions. They claim that the scientific community is stifling them, suppressing research into valid alternative hypotheses about the causes of global warming, that it’s protecting grants and job security by ensuring no evidence contrary to the current consensus on global warming emerges. Perhaps you even have your own suspicions that this might be the case. If so, you’ll want to read Black’s article, “Climate Science: Sceptical about bias” (November 14, 2007). (Then again maybe you won’t).

In the article, Black writes about the results of his own test of the sceptics’ battle cry of “bias!” He challenged to his readers to send in their evidence and claims of bias against climate change sceptics in the scientific community, offering to follow up on each claim with in-depth research and investigation.

Having heard the sceptics’ frequent claims of bias, Black fully expected to be deluged with thousands of pages of evidence, examples and requests to follow up on. In fact he only received about 100 emails. Of these, there was only one valid direct claim of bias, which Black was unable to substantiate, and one indirect case referred to Black in which the scientist whose work was in question didn’t himself think it was a case of bias. Besides, Black notes, there is ongoing research into hypotheses (see next story below) that counter the current human-caused warming hypothesis. And anyway, one respondent wrote, what scientist wouldn’t want to be the one to discover evidence counter commonly-held belief, that’s what scientists thrive on.

Thus, sadly for climate change sceptics, there appears to be little evidence from Black’s research to support their claims of bias and suppression of research. (It was actually the other way round for a long time).

Looking for Alternatives? Has the growing scientific consensus about the human cause of global warming left you listless and uninspired. Are you looking for alternative theories that can help reduce your greenhouse guilt? If so, read, Black’s article “Sun and Global Warming: A Cosmic Connection?” (November 14, 2007). Here, Black writes about a recently published alternative’ theory’ that global warming is driven by variation in the strength of cosmic rays reaching earth’s atmosphere caused in turn by variation in our sun’s protective solar wind.

The theory goes that “hugely energetic galactic cosmic rays” continuously crash into the top of earth’s atmosphere, knocking into the atoms and molecules up there and creating, eventually, charged particles (ions) in the lower atmosphere. These ions aid the formation of tiny aerosol particles around which water vapour can condense, leading to the formation of clouds.

At the same time, the sun emits a constant stream of charged particles called the ‘solar wind’, visible to us as the Northern Lights when it interacts with the earth’s magnetic field. Since the solar wind provides the earth some protection from cosmic rays, their strength varies with its strength: when it weakens more galactic rays hit the top of the atmosphere, creating more ions, more cloud in the lower atmosphere, and a cooler earth; when it strengthens, fewer cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, leading to less ion-induced cloud formation, and a warmer earth.

Sounds good, but do the researchers have any evidence to support their theory? Well, apparently yes. According to the researchers backing the theory, the sun has been increasing in activity over the last century and has been at a peak of activity over the same period that the highest recorded global temperatures ever recorded have occurred, which is the overall effect their hypothesis predicts. They’ve also found laboratory evidence that an increase in ions does increase the particulates around with clouds can form, which provides supports for a key link in the pathway leading from when cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere to when the atmosphere gets warmer.

Okay, but how does the cosmic ray theory hold up under independent scientific scrutiny? Not so well, it turns out. Two independent studies found only a possible very small effect and no effect, respectively. Needless to say, the theory’s backers disagree and have struck up a vigorous defence through postings on their website, which one scientist considers poor scientific practice; arguments and counter-arguments, especially when contentious, should be published in the peer reviewed scientific literature.

Anyway, the larger conclusion within the scientific community to date is that global warming has nothing to do with solar changes, which is backed up by the IPCC, which concluded earlier this year that, “. . . since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse .

There’s also interesting stuff in this article about the kind of information required to provide support for the theory, as well as some interesting upcoming experiments that may address it further. But, in this case at least, it doesn’t appear that the cosmic ray theory is going to ease anyone’s greenhouse guilt anytime soon. Cheers.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: The Tunas' Travails

2007-11-06T07:54:00.000-08:00

Here’s a link to an interesting article about the status of the Blue Fin tuna, an evolutionary marvel coveted for its firm red flesh. Despite its continual decline in numbers, the blue fin still experiences massive international fishing pressure, driven by the skyrocketing prices it brings at the fish markets – supply and demand in action. So, why can’t someone do something about it? Well, the International Commission for the Conservation of Tuna (ICCAT) is charged with this task, but as the article deftly outlines, it faces multiple challenges managing the international tuna fishery. These challenges include the profit demands of businesses, the dependence of fishermen on tuna for income, persistent illegal unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) (in some years adding up to 50% to the legal take), the difficulty of tracking catches to evaluate whether overfishing had occurred, and doing the necessary research to understand the likelihood and consequence of potential ecosystem changes cause by overfishing a predator that sits near the top of the marine food chain (e.g., why the Canadian Atlantic cod fishery hasn’t recovered).

I’ve posted on this subject a few times now, a review of Stephen Sloan’s book ‘Ocean Bankruptcy’, that delves into the politics of international fisheries, and a number of Green Grazing posts that include low tuna catches in the Indian Ocean, the proposal by COFI to tackle IUU, using satellite tagging of tuna to determine their natural range, and a proposal by West African nations to combat illegal fishing in their territorial waters using satellite surveillance. However, this is a subject that can’t be covered too often – functional and effective international resource management is a key component in any sustainable solution that will keep our planet’s marine biodiversity intact, and by extension, us too.

On a positive note, the European Commission shut down the blue fin tuna fishery in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean in mid-September for the rest of the year. The European Union fleet had already reached it 2007 quota. The ban affected Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Portugal and Spain. France and Italy had already closed their blue fin tuna fisheries. Now the squabbling can begin as the European Fish Commission tallies who caught how much and how that relates to their quota. Countries that didn’t reach their allocation at the time of the ban can seek future compensation under European Union legislation. France appears to be okay though, with the World Wildlife Fund reporting that the French fleet caught most of the European Union quota and over caught their national limit. And so the international dance continues. As Joe Borg, the European Union Fisheries Commissioner says, “Clearly there are problems both over-fishing a stock already threatened with collapse and of equity between the member states concerned.” Hopefully the EU won’t ‘equity’ the tuna to extinction. Cheers.

Sources:
Richard Black (October 17, 2007). Last rites for a marine marvel? BCC News website.

BBC News website (September 19, 2007). Europe bans bluefin tuna fishing.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: BBC Sustainability Survey

2007-11-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

What would you be willing to do to achieve sustainability? Well, according to a recent BBC poll, most of us think it will require significant lifestyle changes and higher green taxes. For example, though the results vary considerably across nations, the poll conducted on behalf of BBC World Service (read the poll here) found that the majority of those surveyed worldwide supported higher energy taxes and that this support increased with assurances that the taxes collected were used to increase energy efficiency. Interestingly, Russia and Italy did not support higher energy taxes, probably, the pollsters surmise, because their energy costs are already amongst the highest of the nations surveyed.

Here’s the results for Canada:

“Will individuals need to change lifestyle and behaviour to reduce the amount of climate changing gases produce?”

63% Definitely necessary; 28% Probably necessary.

“Will the cost of energy need to increase so individuals/industry use less?”

39% Definitely necessary; 33% Probably necessary.

“Support for higher taxes (on the most harmful types of energy so that individuals/industry use less)”

57% in favour without use of tax revenue specified; 23% additional support if use of revenue specified.

“Support for higher energy taxes (on the most harmful types of energy so that individuals/industry use less)”

57% in favour without use of tax revenue specified; 24% additional support if other taxes reduced so that total tax burden remains the same.

Sources:
BBC News website. (November 5, 2007). “Most ready for ‘green sacrifices’”.

Globescan International, The Program on International Policy Attitudes, the BBC World Service. (November 2, 2007). “BBC World Service Sustainability Poll”.

End of Post.

Green Grazing: Climate Change - Greenland Veggies, Western Water Woes

2007-10-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

Hi, it's been a busy couple of weeks, but today I managed to squeeze out a 'Green Grazing' post. Enjoy.

Iceberg Lettuce In a recent post on the impacts of climate change to wine production, I noted that some British Columbia vintners may turn out to be global warming winners as a changing climate improves conditions for growing grapes and producing fine wine. Well, it appears that in Greenland, things are already changing. This New York Times story reports that due to rising temperatures, farmers in Greenland’s subarctic south are experimenting with new crops they’ve never been able to grow before like cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, and potatoes. The longer and milder growing season is also producing fatter sheep, more lamps and bringing cod back to local waters.

If you’re interested in the challenges of agriculture in the subarctic, take a look at Jared Diamond’s book ‘Collapse’. He provides an excellent description of another period of climate change in Greenland, a cooling trend in that case, wiped out the Viking settlement established there in the 10th century. It’s a riveting example of the consequences a culture faces when it fails to adapt to changing environmental conditions. See Chapter 7 “Norse Greenland’s Flowering” and Chapter 8 “Norse Greenland’s End”.

Water, Water. . . Everywhere? Adapting to the new constraints global warming is going to bring to many parts of the world is serious business, especially when it comes to water. For example, increasing temperatures have improved south Greenland’s agricultural productivity and potential, but it’s likely to come at a loss for many other parts of the world. The same warm temperatures are melting the Greenland ice cap, which is expected to cause a rise in sea levels which will affect agriculture in other areas. For example, where I live rising sea levels will probably reduce agricultural productivity by raising the salt table beneath the fertile soils that lie along the foreshore of the Fraser River delta.

However, while global warming may bring too much salt water to some areas, perhaps a more serious problem is that it will bring too little freshwater to others. For example, the IPPC’s climate models predict that the arid American southwest can expect decreased precipitation, which will reduce the snow packs that feed the rivers and reservoirs of the region over dry summer periods. This has huge implications for both agriculture and people; at some point a choice may have to be made about whether the available water goes to people, or agriculture.

Jon Gerter provides an informative but sobering overview of this issue in his lengthy and in-depth article published in The New York Times Magazine. He explores the challenges of adapting the water management systems of the American Southwest to a drier climate, using the example of the cities and states that rely on water from the Colorado River.

It's a serious problem. While ‘every available gallon of the Colorado River' has already been allocated to the region's farmers, industries and municipalities, its population keeps on growing. Even if the current water supply does not decrease (though it will), it's not likely to increase, so allocation has become the biggest challenge for water managers who must deliver the water to meet the needs of the growing populations while satisfying recreational and environmental demands, such as keeping enough water in rivers to benefit fish and wildlife, rafters and kayakers.

Gerter notes that the region’s current water woes arise from the historical over-allocation of the region’s water resources. First, water engineers misjudged South Platte’s average flows in the 1920 by measuring it during a series of wetter than average years. So, water sharing agreement ending up dividing a larger than average pie among different water users. Second, engineers also misjudged the worst case drought scenario, thinking the drought of the 1950’s was baseline. However, subsequent tree ring analysis has shown the droughts can be much worse, such as a drought in the 1150’s that is believed to have driven the Anasazi Indians out of the area*. Tree rings show drought periods of less than average precipitation that lasted up to 60 years; if that happened today it would mean having to make a choice between people and agriculture.

*(Jared Diamond also provides an in-depth discussion of how drought cycles affected the Anasazi culture. See Chapter 4 “The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and their Neighbors” in his book ‘Collapse’).

Water managers are adapting to the current and future conditions by searching for new sources of water (e.g., new dams, wells, buying farmers water rights). For example, the city of Aurora, Colorado, persuaded local farmers to fallow their fields so the city could use their water rights.
Water managers are also seeking ways to use water more efficiently (e.g., sprinkling restrictions, recycling waste water). Aurora is developing a closed-loop system – basically recycling the treated waste water they put back into the South Platte river by withdrawing water from wells adjacent to the river about 30 plus miles downstream of the city. Again, these wells are on land where the city has purchased the water rights from farmers.

Other possibilities discussed in the article include exploring the possibility of more efficient water trading markets, or building desalinization plants. For example, Las Vega has considered building a desalinization plant on the coast of California and giving that water to California and Mexico in exchange for their share of the Colorado River water from the Lake Mead reservoir.

However, by far the biggest challenge the regional water managers face is changing lifestyle expectations; getting the people who live in these arid regions to live desert ‘lifestyle ecotypes’ (e.g. recycle gray water, gravel lawns). This could be done by using low-flow home appliances, using more efficient irrigation methods, or making water more expensive. Basically, people have to learn to think as much about their “water footprint” as their energy-related carbon footprint, two problems, Gerter notes, that are intimately connected:

“It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.” (Jon Gerter, “The Future is Drying Up”)

Gerter’s article provides a sobering read, but one thing that stood out from it for me is that while the problems it discusses are serious and challenging, they are not insurmountable - yet. The people who live in the region watered by the Colorado River can choose to use their water resources more efficiently and adapt their lifestyles not only to the coming climate changes, but also to the desert climate. Live, Learn and Prosper, Cheers.

Sources:
Lyall, Sarah. (October 28, 2007). “Warming Revives Flora and Fauna in Greenland”. The New York Times.

Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail of Succeed. Viking.

Gertner, Jon. (October 21, 2007). “The Future Is Drying Up”. The New York Times. And here is the rest of it.

Sustainable Agriculture Reading Day 1

2007-10-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

Today is Sustainable Agriculture Reading day. After deciding to actively educate myself on the concept of ‘sustainable agriculture’ several months ago, I’ve been doing lots of reading and talking to folks. I also serve on my community’s Agriculture Committee as a residential representative where we review issues of importance to the agricultural community and ways to increase understanding between residents and farmers. As far as reading goes, my growing pile of literature on agriculture and agricultural related issues requires the discipline of setting aside at least part of one day each week aside to read.

What’s my main finding to date? The more I learn, the more difficult it is to say exactly what ‘sustainable’ means when applied to agricultural systems. If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I probably would have mumbled something about organic, locally grown and seasonal produce being sold in farmers’ markets. I still believe that’s an important component of a sustainable agricultural system because it provides a living for smaller farmers, which keeps agricultural land near cities in production and educates non-famers about where their food comes from. Plus it’s healthier. But, after a year’s worth of reading and talking to farmers, I’ve learned there are lots of other facets and challenges to sustainable agriculture (e.g., economies of scale, biodiversity, biofuels, agri-food systems, etc.). I’ll talk more about these issues in future posts, but today’s topic is my morning’s reading: Michael Pollan’s fabulous book, ‘The Omnivores Dilemma.’

In brief, ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ covers the natural history of four meals, following their components from seed to table and tracing the diverse pathways they travel in-between, in whole or in part. This morning I’ve been working my way through the book’s first section about corn and its pervasive presence in North America’s food system. It’s truly an eye opener, and especially topical for me after my recent posts on the potential problems with growing corn for ethanol production. Among other things, I’ve pondered whether it’s ethical to use food crops to produce fuel when people are starving around the world, but as Pollan points out, corn has already been feeding into all sorts of non-food products such as adhesives and plastics for a long time.

Pollan provides a brief history of corn from its discovery and use by Native Americans through its adoption by western settlers to its present dominant presence in the agriculture of the American mid-west. Then he follows the path of the corn from the farm to its varied destinations, noting at the beginning of each chapter what proportion of a bushel of corn goes to that particular destination. For example, at the beginning of the chapter titled, ‘The Feedlot’, he notes that 54,000 kernels of a typical 90,000 kernel bushel goes to ‘making meat.’

One story thread that really stood out for me in this particular chapter is the connection between corn and the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria. On the feedlots, young cattle are switched from their natural grass diet to feed based on cheap, subsidized corn. This new diet makes them sick since among other things it increases the acidity of their stomach juices, which changes the micro-flora in their stomachs and eventually leads to the need for antibiotics, large doses of which are regularly administered in their feed. The antibiotics create antibiotic resistant of common bacteria that are often lethal to humans, such as the strains of E. Coli that prompt massive recalls of supermarket hamburger meat.

I knew about antibiotics creating resistant bacteria in the cattle industry (among other agricultural industries), what I wasn’t clear on was the pathway the bacteria travel from the cows to people. The bacteria get into the meat because the cattle basically live standing in manure during their feedlot residence. When slaughter time arrives, the sheer number of cattle going into the slaughter house guarantees that sooner or later some bacteria- filled manure is going to escape the cleaning process and end up in your ground beef. Yum. Apparently there is a way to reduce the risk of infection, by changing the feed of cattle back to grass or straw for a couple of weeks prior to slaughter. This reduces the risk of transfer by 80%. However, the industry feels that this approach is too expensive to be cost-effectively implemented on feedlots, and relies on irradiation instead.

The corn-disease connection is but one of several informative strings in ‘The Feedlot’ chapter, but perhaps the most important overall theme is the deep deep integration of cheap corn into the industrialized factory-feedlot system. Now I have a better understanding of why corn ethanol will drive meat prices up and the economic and regulatory challenges of making agriculture sustainable. Cheers.

End of Post.
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Green Grazing: Whose Sustainability?

2007-10-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

The current rush to meet green goals has created such a confusion of competing and overlapping sustainability standards that in some economic sectors it’s difficult to decide whose version of sustainability to follow. Well, according to this article, in the US at least, overarching national standards for sustainable agriculture may finally be set by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS).

SCS, an independent third party ‘certification agency’, has prepared a draft set of national standards for sustainable agriculture that have been accepted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). ANSI is a private non-profit organization that administers and coordinates US voluntary standardization and conformity assessment system as the official US representative to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It engages in accrediting programs that assess conformance to standards such as the ISO 9000 (quality) and ISO 14000 (environmental) management systems. (ANSI's Canadian counterpart is the Standards Council of Canada).

Why did SCS develop its own sustainable agriculture standards? According to SCS executive vice president Linda Brown, "With so many new sustainable agriculture initiatives now underway, the time has come to establish a non-proprietary national benchmark against which these initiatives can be assessed."

Or, as the draft itself states: “The purpose of the Standard is to establish a comprehensive framework and common set of environmental, social, and quality requirements by which to demonstrate that an agricultural product has been produced and handled in a sustainable manner, from soil preparation and seed planting through production, harvest, post-harvest handling, and distribution for sale. In addition, the Standard is intended to establish guidelines for making public claims with respect to sustainably grown food and fiber crops, consistent with international guidance for Type I environmental labeling” (pg 1, Scientific Certification Systems 2007). (You'll have to go to the draft report to find out what 'Type I environmental labelling' is).

The draft standard also addresses such topics as the phase-out of dangerous agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, the establishment of a path for transition to organic practices, as well as targets for energy efficiency, greenhouse gas emission reductions and soil carbon storage.
While the standard is meant to apply to the entire supply chain, including producers, distributors, brokers, and retailers and to be applicable to all agricultural crops marketed in the US, it is a voluntary standard, and not intended to replace any countries legal or regulatory requirements for the production, handling, or sale of agricultural products.

What’s the next step? An ANSI-accredited ‘standards development organization’ (SDO), The Leonardo Academy, an ANSI-accredited standards development organization (SDO), will facilitate the ANSI stakeholder standard-setting process, starting late this October. A wide selection of stakeholders, including industry representatives, trade associations, government regulators, environmental and labour NGOs, and academicians have been invited and encouraged to participate.

It’s admirable that SCS has gone ahead and developed an overarching set of standards for sustainable agriculture, but given that the standards will be voluntary, without legal or regulatory clout and that there are already many competing sustainability standards in existence it will be interesting to see how smoothly the public consultation phase of the process proceeds.

Sources:
Sustainable Food News (Sept 28 2007). “National Sustainable Agriculture Standards Set To Launch This Fall” (Accessed Oct 4 2007 on the Environmental News Network).

Scientific Certification Systems. 2007. Sustainable Agriculture Practice Standard For Food, Fiber and Biofuel Crop Producers and Agricultural Product Handlers and Processors. Draft National Standard for Trial Use. April 2007 And here is the rest of it.

Ocean Pipe Dreams: Can We Geo-engineer Our Climate Change Troubles Away?

2007-10-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

Climate geo-engineering refers to proposals for mitigating global warming using technology-based approaches capable of perturbing the planet at the ecosystem scale. Large-scale problems, proponents of such approaches argue, require large-scale solutions. Two high profile examples are capturing carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of coal powered generating stations for storage underground (i.e. geological carbon sequestration) and fertilising oceans with iron particles to stimulate the uptake and storage of carbon dioxide by plankton (biological carbon sequestration).

Now, a new proposal has emerged. James Lovelock (author of the Gaia theory) and co-author Chris Rapley recently published a letter in the journal Nature outlining a proposal to place giant pipes in the ocean that use wave action to pump nutrients from the ocean depths to nutrient poor surface waters. As with iron fertilisation schemes, the idea is that the nutrients would stimulating plankton blooms which would take up carbon dioxide and release dimehthyl sulphide to the atmosphere; the carbon would be stored as plankton take it up during growth, die and then sink back to the depths (e.g., here), the dimethyl sulphide would form seed particles for clouds that will reflect the sun’s radiation and thus cool the earth (e.g., here).

It’s heady, audacious ‘Big Idea’ stuff, though the only new aspect of their ‘nutrient driven carbon sequestration’ idea is the use of giant pipes, natural nutrients and the ocean’s own wave action (its pulse) for energy rather than artificial fertilisation; it is, as they put it, “. . . helping the planet heal itself”. In fact, even that idea does is not that original, since as the Nature article notes, a company called Atmocean is already developing wave driven ocean pump technology. Nevertheless, such ideas are intriguing and stimulate new thinking as those in favour and those opposed debate the details, but do we really know enough about the natural world to geo-engineer our climate change troubles away?

The answer to this question, given the long debate over geo-engineering in the climate change community, is “not yet”. See for example, Oliver Morton’s excellent article, “Climate change: Is this what it takes to save the world?” (new@nature.com 2006), in which he provides a concise overview of the scientific debate over proposals to combat climate change using “radiation management”. Radiation management includes ideas like injecting sulphur dioxide particles (aerosols) into the upper atmosphere to mimic the sun-reflecting and earth cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, and the rather more technology-intensive and expensive proposal to install gigantic sunshades in space (at a cost of only 5 trillion dollars).

Proponents of such schemes argue that even with immediate and drastic cuts to global carbon emissions, it would still take decades for atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to drop, thus radiation management using sulphur dioxide could offer an immediate short term solution if climate change really starts to get out of hand.

Critics counter that we simply don’t know enough about the details of how climate works to begin tinkering with it at the global level and that a global scientific effort is required to examine the risks and benefits of various geo-engineering proposals, something on the scale of the work done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to understand natural climate. After all, it’s one thing to screw up the planet through ignorance, but quite another to plunge ahead and do it deliberately. And this applies to all forms of geo-engineering, not just the deliberate release of sulphur dioxide

Some exploratory work on the effect of aerosols for combating warmer caused by climate change has been done using Global Climate Models (GCM), the same types of models used for the IPCC reports, and this work seems to show some potential for aerosols to offset the warming effect of greenhouse gases. However, critics warn that while useful tools, GCMs don’t provide a perfect understanding of the climate system and even though the set of models used by the IPCC agree the world will warm and climate will change as carbon dioxide levels rise, they don't agree on how much it will warm or how much climate will change. In the words of one expert, "How can you engineer a system whose behaviour you don't understand?" (Ronald Prinn, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge as quoted by Oliver Morton).

Now, let's return to Lovelock and Rapley’s ‘ocean pipe’ proposal. It’s important to propose such ‘Big Ideas’; climate change is a big problem that requires big solutions. However, before they’re implemented it’s also important for scientists with the proper expertise to identify, debate, and rigorously explore the important questions and uncertainties associated with them, especially the risks and benefits of implementing them at a global scale. Policy experts need to participate to ascertain the international implications of such projects as well. Who, for example, who would be responsible for regulating the operation of giant networks of ocean pipes operated by private companies and how would they do it?

Unfortunately, these days when ‘Big Ideas’ like ocean carbon sequestration trickle out of the scientific community they seem to get snapped up by businesses who use them as scientific validation for sometimes dubious carbon offset schemes. Fortunately, Lovelock and Rapley published their short (300 word) proposal in Nature, a prestigious and widely read science journal, where it’s likely to stimulate a lively debate on ocean pipes in subsequent issues. Let’s hope that an open debate ensues on the ‘ocean pipe’ proposal that elicits both its pros and cons and precludes corporate opportunism. Only when all information is out for both sides of the argument can we properly evaluate whether the ‘ocean pipe’ dream should become a large-scale reality. Cheers.

Sources:

Lovelock, James E. and Chris G. Rapley. (Sept. 26, 2007). “Ocean pipes could help the Earth to cure itself”. Nature 449 pg 403.

Morton, Oliver. (May 9 2006). Climate change: Is this what it takes to save the world? News@Nature.com.

Mufson, Steven. (July 20, 2007). “Iron to Plankton To Carbon Credits” WashingtonPost.com.

Parnell, Ian. (Aug. 29, 2007). “Green Grazing: Ocean Theme - Seabirds in trouble, Low Tuna Catches, Plankton to the Rescue (again)”. What’s Your Ecotype?

Parnell, Ian. (July 10, 2007). “Green Technology and the Deep Blue Sea” What’s Your Ecotype?

Schiermeier, Quirin.. (Sept. 26, 2007). “Mixing the oceans proposed to reduce global warming” News@Nature.com.

End of Post.

Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) III: The Power of the Press Release

2007-09-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

I've been following the press on the recent research reported for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and now that the media buzz has died down a bit, I want to pass along some personal thoughts on the relationshop between the press and science.

CCD refers to the mysterious dissapearance of billions of honey bees from hives across the United States and other countries. It fascinates me because of its mystery, the scientific detective work going into solving it, and the way its appearance has highlighted the many connections between ecological and human social and economic systems, a favourite theme of mine.

However, something about this particular story bothered me and at first I didn't know why. Then I realized what it was. I've been following the CCD case since it broke in the news last spring and have a pretty good overview of what research has been done and reported on. In this case, while the new research is compelling I found the amount of press around it surprisingly disproportionate to the relative importance of the results. This bugged me because I think the press has a responsibility to place information in context, but in this case it appears to have been led by the pan pipes of a high-powered press campaign. I'll go into this in more detail in a moment, but first, here's a bit of background on the story.

I first learned of the new CCD story in an early September BBC news article (Virus implicated in bee decline, BBC News website, Sep 6 2007). It described the identification of a new and promising suspect in the CCD case, the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), a virus first discovered, not too surprisingly given it name, in Israeli honey bees.

Using a nifty and cutting edge 'genomic sequencing' technique (pyrosequencing if you must know), US researchers sifted through genetic material taken from CCD bees and separated out the DNA of the pathogens and parasites inside them. IAPV was found in virtually all of the CCD bees. Based on this result alone, IAPV certainly appears to be a promising lead in the CCD mystery, but information about the timing of the first appearance of CCD and its pathway of entry into the US lends further weight to the hypothesis that IAPV plays an important role in causing CCD.

The first cases of disappearing bee colonies consisent with CCD were reported in the US in 2004 (two years earlier than in the reports I read earlier this year). This coincided with the time of virus's arrival; researchers believe that IAPV arrived in US in imported Australian bees in 2004. There is a sad irony to this since Australia is the source a lot of US beekeepers are using to replace the colonies they lost to CCD over the fall and winter of 2006.

Given the IAPV research results and these two latter pieces of information, the IAPV hypothesis seems pretty solid. Answers, however, are rarely simple in science and CCD is no exception, for there are a couple of observations that don't fit with the hypothesis.

First, the symptoms expressed in the US CCD cases are different from those observed in either Israeli or Australian bees infected with IAPV. IAPV infected bees in Israel first showed shivering wings, became paralysed and then died just outside the hive. No dead bees are found outside of CCD hives, at least not in numbers near that of the hive's missing bee population.

Second, the researchers also found IAPV in non-CCD hives, so the prescence of IAPV does not guarantee CCD will occur. This, the researchers believe, may be because such hives are infected with a less dangerous mutation of IAPV, or that IAPV acts in concert with other factors, such as chemical contaminants or parasites. The latter supposition is consistent with the original multiple factor hypothesis researchers posited when CCD first erupted in the press last spring.

Researchers concluded that while the prescence of IAPV appears to be a marker of significant risk of CCD for a hive, further research is required to determine whether IAPV alone can cause CCD on its own, or works in conjunction with other factors.

So, that's the rundown on the latest CCD suspect, an interesting, promising and remarkably fast result, considering that the actual research took place late last spring, not long after researchers first began looking closely at CCD and its causes.

But back to what really caught my attention about this story, and the point of today's post: the explosion of news articles about this research and their widely varying levels of hyperbole as information was filtered up from the researchers to the public.

You can track this dilution by following the titles of the original paper, the press releases, and subsequent news articles. The original paper has a typically bland and obscure scientific title, "A Metagenomic Survey of Microbes in Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder ". Unless you were in the thick of the research, you wouldn't know it reported an exciting scientific breakthrough.

The press releases took up the job of eliciting more general interest and communicating the importance of the results, and because this project was a collaborative effort involving several agencies and universities there several of them. Their titles were more clear, but still but still properly cautious, reflecting the researchers' caveats, for example, "Virus named as possible factor in honey bee disorder ", or "Connection between virus and Colony Collapse Disorder in bees".

The more responsible journalists then wrote in-depth articles reflecting the cautiously caveated press releases with balanced headlines like "Virus implicated in bee decline" and "Virus Is Seen as Suspect in Death of Honeybees".

However, at the frothy interface between balanced in-depth journalism and tabloid journalism appeared articles that in my opinion were irresponsible because they implied more than was concluded by the researchers. For example, this article:"Mysterious die-off of honeybees explained (by Martin Mittelstaedt, Globe and Mail, Sept 7, 2007). It overstated the strength of the link between IAPV and CCD and only mentioned the researchers’ caveats at the very end of the article, probably long after the eyes of most readers would have departed for the next story.

That's my gripe now here's my question: why did the IAPV story generate so much buzz when stories about other CCD related research, which appears to have at least as much support as IAPV as a causitive factor in CCD, simply sputter out?

In a recent "Green Grazing" post, I linked to a Planet Ark article (July 19, 2007)which reported that a Spanish research team has linked a honey bee parasite called nosema ceranae to mass dissapearances of honey bees in many countries after analysing thousands of samples.

They began their research in 2000 with the hypothesis that the disappearances were pesticide related, but ruled this out when they only found pesticide in a tiny proportion of their samples, and many disappearances occured in colonies miles from cultivated land. The also ruled out the varroa mite, since it was easy to see, and thus would have been noticed, and anyway, it was not present in most of the affected hives they examined.

Then they discovered the tiny parasite nosema ceranae, which they now think has infected at least 50% of Spanish honey bee hives. Since that discovery, they've also found the parasite in honey bees in Europe, Argentina and Canada, but have yet to test US bees for this parasite. In a research paper published in the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology in March 2007, they describe an lab experiment in which infection with this organism wiped infected colonies within eight days.

Then, going back through my notes, I found a news article about US researchers who followed up on the Spanish results and found nosema ceranae in honey bee colonies in California (UCSF scientist tracks down suspect in honeybee deaths, Sabin Russel, San Francisco Chronicle, April 25 2007). However, at that time government bee scientists dismissed their results, saying they didn't believe that nosoma ceranae was responsible for CCD since it had been present in the US since the mid-1990's and was present in large amounts in both healthy and CCD afflicted colonies. However, they noted it was possible that a new and more dangerous strain could have evolved. These caveats sound awfully similar to those given for the IAPV research. There too IAPV was found in both healthy and CCD colonies and there too researches positied some sort of mutation to account for this.

Now, the nosoma cerenae story sounds like important research to me, especially since the Spanish research team has been investigating mass bee disappearances since 2000, seven years before CCD emerged in the popular press! But astoundingly, I've seen no more discussion of this research in the press since I read the Planet Ark article. True, I haven't done an in-depth search for recent articles on nosema ceranae, but I didn't have to for the IAPV story, it just kept popping up in print and web headlines. Why the difference in press for these two stories? Since they both appear on the surface to be about important results, I can only attribute the difference to the press's susceptibility to the high powered IAPV press campaign.

Now, it's important that researchers should publicize their research results, especially for something as important as CCD, and it only makes sense that such publicity will greater for large, well-funded collaborative research teams like the one working on IAPV. But I think the press has some responsibility to weight the power of a full-on press release by properly carrying forward the researchers' caveats and looking at related research iniatives to place results in the context of their actual importance. To not do so wipes the complex nuances of science from the public eye, the small steps forward that generate some answers, but sometimes even more questions and the puzzling inconsistencies that drive creative thinking.

To me, the IAPV and nosoma ceranae stories are complimentary; in the US, IAPV has a strong association with CCD, but seems not to be its only cause, while in Spain, nosoma ceranea is associated with mass bee disappearances, but has not been explored in the US as yet. I'm curious to know if nosoma ceranea is the missing factor from the multiple factor hypothesis -perhaps it's time to bring these two lines of inquiry together.

Cheers.

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Ebola Threatens to Eradicate African Apes

2007-09-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

A recent outbreak of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo has health officials scrambling to contain this highly contagious and incurable disease. At least 166 people have died from it in the area of the outbreak and the World Health Organization has now called in international help, including Canadian scientists, to help diagnose and treat the unfortunate victims. Ebola hemorrhagic fever’s high mortality rate, gruesome symptoms like massive internal bleeding and the mysterious origins of the virus itself make Ebola an irresistible news subject.

When Ebola makes the news it’s usually the horrendous human suffering that’s reported. Yet there is another side to Ebola you aren’t likely to hear about - this deadly virus is helping drive Africa’s western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) towards extinction.

In fact, with Ebola’s help lowland gorilla populations have declined by about 60% over the last 25 years, a downward trend so alarming that the World Conservation Union (IUCN) has downgraded the gorillas’ conservation status from ‘endangered’ to ‘critically endangered’ in its 2007 Red List of Threatened Species. The IUCN lists ‘commercial hunting’ (i.e. poaching) and Ebola as the two primary short-term threats to the survival of the gorilla population; longer-term threats include ongoing habitat loss and climate change.

Some might argue that while the impact of Ebola on gorillas represents a tragic loss of biodiversity, the impact of Ebola on humans is should be the real and paramount concern. However, this is a short sighted argument that overlooks the ecological connections between Ebola, gorillas and people. In particular, the periodic eruption of Ebola in human populations is linked to its presence in wild gorilla populations: people get the Ebola virus by eating contaminated bush meat, which often unfortunately includes gorillas. Thus Ebola presents another example of how human social and economic activities can interact with ecology to harm both biodiversity and human health. Here’s how it works.

The western lowland gorilla is native to a region covered by in whole or part by the West African countries of Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. Although habitat loss has always been a concern at the fringes of the gorillas’ range, until the early 1980’s its interior still had large areas of untouched and difficult to reach forest that supported lots of gorillas.

Then, a number of social and economic changes took place that opened these remote forest areas to commercial hunting. New roads allowed hunters to get into remote areas, reduced oil reserves increased unemployment and thus reliance on bush meat. But perhaps the most important change was that timber depletion in other tropical areas made logging in the remote areas of the gorilla’s habitat economically attractive, triggering an explosion in mechanized logging. Loggers built new roads into the previously remote areas, allowing hunters more access as well as easy access to markets. Logging also compounded the impact of commercial hunting since the loggers themselves ate a lot of bush meat and logging concessions often bordered protected areas.

Gorillas are protected under law in all countries in the region where their habitat is found, but hunters will take gorillas if they encounter them and gorillas also get caught in snares and traps set for other wildlife species. Even low levels of hunting have a serious impact on gorilla populations because they are a long live species with very low birth rates.

Then, in the early 1990’s, the Ebola virus began to spread across the gorillas’ range; in some areas it has wiped out 90% of the wild gorilla population. Its spread is somewhat mysterious because although Ebola is part of the natural ecosystem, its ecology is not well understood; its natural host has not yet been conclusively identified (fruit bats are the main suspect), and it’s not known how the virus jumps from its natural host to gorillas. However, it is known that the virus jumps from infected gorillas killed for meat to people.

Thus, as human populations expand further into the gorilla’s habitat and the Ebola epidemic continues to spread within the gorilla population, it seems inevitable that humans will come into more frequent contact with the virus, increasing the risk of new Ebola outbreaks. What can be done to reduce this risk?

Well, protecting the gorilla population from Ebola will also protect people from Ebola. Additionally, protecting the gorillas from people will also protect people Ebola. Both these measure have the added result of helping spare the gorillas from extinction. To me this sounds like a win-win situation for biodiversity and human health.

How can this be done? In the short-term it will require aggressive investment in the enforcement of existing laws against killing gorillas, improved education and protected area management, and Ebola prevention through the development of a vaccine and research in to how natural barriers (e.g. rivers) may impede its spread. Longer-term solutions involve better management of forestry operations and establishment of new protected areas. The “Regional Action Plan for the Conservation of Chimpanzees and Gorillas in Western Equatorial Africa” estimates the costs of these measures at about $30 million over the next five years. Considering the social and economic costs of Ebola outbreaks in terms of human misery and medical resources, this seems a small price to pay. Cheers.

Sources:

Black, R. (Sept 12, 2007) “Gorillas head race to extinction”. BBC News website.

CBC news website (Sept. 17, 2007) “Winnipeg scientists called on to assist with Congo's Ebola outbreak”.

Morgan, D. and Sanz, C. 2007. Best Practice Guidelines for Reducing the Impact of Commercial Logging on Great Apes in Western Equatorial Africa. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group (PSG). 32 pp.

Tutin, C., et al. 2005. Regional Action Plan for the Conservation of Chimpanzees and Gorillas in Western Equatorial Africa. Conservation International. Washington, DC.

Walsh, P.D., Tutin, C.E.G., Baillie, J.E.M., Maisels, F., Stokes, E.J. & Gatti, S. 2007. Gorilla gorilla ssp. gorilla. In: IUCN 2007. 2007 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. (www.iucnredlist.org). Accessed on 17 September 2007.

Walsh, PD; Abernethy, KA; Bermejo, M; Beyers, R; Wachter, PD; Akou, ME; Huijbregts, B; Mambounga, DI; Toham, AK; Kilbourn, AM; Lahm,SA; Latour, S; Maisels, F; Mbina, C; Mihindou, Y; Obiang, SN; Effa, EN; Starkey, MP; Telfer, P; Thibault, M; Tutin, CEG; White, LJT; Wilkie, DS. 2003. Catastrophic ape decline in western equatorial Africa. Nature 422 (6932): 611-614.

Wikipedia, the free encylopedia. Ebola. Accessed on Sept. 17, 2007.

Editorial Notes

2007-09-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

Hello, just a housekeeping note to say I've just made some fairly significant edits to 'Tiger Mosquitoes Tour Italia' and some minor edits to 'Climate Hot, Wine . . . Not?' cheers.

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