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22 June 2009

Climate Change & Wildlife Ecology 101

By Stacy L. Small, Ph.D. - Environmental Defense Fund Conservation Scientist

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported in 2007 that global air and ocean temperatures over the past 50 years are higher than any other 50 year period in the last 500 years; likely the highest they've been in the past 1300 years.

Furthermore, global temperatures will continue to rise over time as a result of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions – like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide – that human activities have released into the atmosphere in the past half century.

This will have profound effects on virtually all of the physical phenomena of the world.

Change is Afoot

Human-induced global warming is already changing the world in many observable ways: altering wind patterns that influence tropical storms and drive ocean currents; increasing precipitation in some regions, drought in others; melting snowpack, glaciers, ice caps, and polar sea ice; and changing the timing and intensity of spring snowmelt runoff and floods.

Sea levels are rising because of thermal expansion of ocean waters and melting ice. In fact, some scientists believe that even the more dire predictions of sea level rise in the IPCC report appear to be conservative, when glacial melt is factored in.

These changes will visibly impact our most fragile, living ecosystems within our lifetimes and alter many current wildlife habitats beyond recognition. This could have fatal consequences for some of our most beloved and vulnerable species, especially those that have already become endangered from other human impacts.

Species at Risk

The IPCC predicts that up to 30% of all species are at risk of extinction at a global temperature increase of 1.5-2.5 degrees C. The IUCN has named three groups -- birds, amphibians, and warm-water reef-building corals -- as the most threatened species globally.

The North American ecosystems most immediately vulnerable to these radical environmental changes include coastal and marine zones and cold climates at high altitudes and northern latitudes, as well as arid western regions that depend upon snowmelt runoff for water.

However, all habitats and species on the planet will eventually be affected in one way or another by global warming, either directly or indirectly, in combination with other impacts, like development and pollution.

In addition, the timing of plant and animal life cycles ("phenology") is changing and in some cases, interdependent species are falling out of synch with one another. This is a special risk to migratory species that have evolved intricate migration behaviors timed with seasonal events across multiple locations.

Such precise migratory strategies enable these species to survive the winter elements, breed, and feed themselves and their young in synchrony with seasonal light, temperatures, weather patterns, and the life cycles of plants, insects and other animals.

Dire predictions are emerging daily for species that depend upon our most climate change-vulnerable habitats: especially those adapted to cold climates and coastal life and those that are highly specialized. Time is of the essence for all of these species; without action, we could lose many of them within our lifetimes.

Sources

15 June 2009

Agriculture Holds the Key to Solving Global Warming


By Barbara Kessler from Green Right Now ABC7, June 2, 2009

Agriculture, so often cited as a factor in global decline - for claiming natural grasslands that store carbon, soil erosion and pesticide runoff - could become a big part of the solution to global warming, according to a hopeful report by Worldwatch Institute released today.

Innovations in food production and land use that are ready to be put to work could reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to roughly 25 percent of global fossil fuel emissions and be managed to reduce carbon already in the atmosphere as well, according to WWI and Ecoagriculture Partners.

Carbon capture technology remains unproven and will take a decade at least to put into operation. By contrast, agricultural and land use management practices that are ready today could be employed to sequester carbon through photosynthesis by growing and sustaining more plants.

To understand how and why the agricultural approach to climate change must be a part of the solution, the public first needs to recognize that the world must "go negative" with carbon emissions - producing fewer than it churns out to reach the necessary reductions by 2050, said Sara Scherr, co-author with Sajal Sthapit of the report, Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use.

Policymakers must go beyond improving energy efficiency and scaling up renewables and add ways to pull down emissions from forestry and agriculture operations.

More than 30 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gases are linked to agriculture and land use, notes the report, which rivals the combined emissions of the transportation and industry sectors.

The report outlines five ways to reduce and sequester carbon using farming strategies:

* Enriching soil carbon. Soil, the third largest carbon pool on Earth's surface, can be managed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by minimizing tillage, cutting use of nitrogen fertilizers, and preventing erosion. Soils can store a vast amount of additional carbon by building up organic matter and by burying carbon in the form of biochar (biomass burned in a low-oxygen environment).

* Farming with perennials. Two-thirds of all arable land is used to grow annual grains, but there is large potential to substitute these with perennial trees, shrubs, palms, and grasses that produce food, livestock feed, and fuel. These perennials maintain and develop their roots and branches over many years, storing carbon in the vegetation and soil.

* Climate-friendly livestock production. Livestock accounts for nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land use. Innovations such as rotational grazing, manure management, methane capture for biogas production, and improved feeds and feed additives can reduce livestock-related emissions.

* Protecting natural habitat. Deforestation, land clearing, and forest and grassland fires are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Incentives are needed to encourage farmers, ranchers, and foresters to maintain natural forest and grassland habitats through product certification, payments for climate services, securing tenure rights, and community fire control.

* Restoring degraded watersheds and range lands. Restoring vegetation on vast areas of degraded land can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while making land productive again, protecting critical watersheds, and alleviating rural poverty.

10 June 2009

With green home venture, Sierra Club mixes profits with passion

By Todd Woody from Grist

It’s not unusual these days for big green groups to get in bed with business, but one of the oldest and most-respected environmental organizations—the Sierra Club—is going them one better by getting into business itself.

The San Francisco-based Sierra Club has launched a for-profit online venture called Sierra Club Green Home as a one-stop shop for information and services to green up your lifestyle and decarbonize your abode.

Sierra Club Green Home is a joint venture between the 117-year-old institution and a group of individual investors—or “donors” as they like to call themselves. “It’s the social entrepreneurship model,” says Gordon Wangers, the company’s marketing chief and one of the donor/investors. “A non-profit finds some enterprising business types who are committed to a cause but bring business savvy to a venture and have the skills and wherewithal to run it.”

Wangers thinks it’s a model for other green groups as the economic collapse zaps the fortunes of their well-heeled donors.

He says the Sierra Club holds a “very significant equity stake” in the San Diego-based startup (he wouldn’t reveal the how much) and will reap most of any profits that are generated through advertising, corporate sponsorships and a green business database.

Sierra Club Green Home was born of Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope’s frustration at trying to green his own home. Some high net-worth Sierra Club donors had a similar experience and were commiserating with Pope when Gary Rappeport, CEO of Chicago-based automotive leasing company Donlen Corp., suggested the solution was to start a business that could tap the Sierra Club’s century-old green brand. Wangers, who served on Donlen’s board and had sold his automotive marketing agency to advertising conglomerate Omnicom, subsequently joined the venture

“To duplicate the recognition and integrity of the Sierra Club brand would take many years and cost many millions of dollars in marketing,” he says. “To start right out of the gate with the Sierra Club brand is a huge advantage.” The company also starts out with a potential customer base among the Sierra Club’s 1.3 million members.

But this isn’t a licensing deal. Sierra Club experts have created an extensive library of information—on everything from “eco-friendly furniture” to geothermal heat pumps—in a smartly designed package of articles, interactive widgets and video.

For instance, start with the “Home CO2 Calculator” to get a handle on how many pounds of greenhouse gases your residence emits a year and compare your ranking to other Sierra Club Green Homers

I’m not doing too bad; my circa-1928 Berkeley house is responsible for an estimated 10,014 pounds of CO2 a year, producing 43 percent fewer emissions than the average Sierra Club Green Home user and 21 percent less carbon than houses of a similar size. But I need to do some energy efficiency retrofit work. If the numbers are accurate, my home is cranking out 23 percent more emissions than the average home of the California Sierra Club Green Home owner. (Clearly, McMansion owners have not been flocking to the site.)

The carbon calculator pinpoints weatherization as one way to cut my home’s carbon footprint. Click on the related link and up pops a page of six how-to videos as well as a plethora of information about weatherizing and tips on hiring a contractor. Punch in your zip code into the site’s Green Pages and list of local energy efficiency businesses appears. Slick.

Sierra Club Green HomeSierra Club Green Home’s homepageAt the Solar Center, enter your zip code, electricity usage and local utility and a widget estimates the cost of a solar array after any applicable rebates. (Though it’s unclear if the 30 percent federal tax credit available for such systems is included in the calculation.) You then can review a list of solar installers in your area, including those vetted by a Sierra Club partner, and click on a button to request a price quote on a solar system.

A couple of other widgets caught my eye: The Low Carbon Diet Calculator widget—from Palo Alto-based sustainable food service company Bon Appétit Management—converts your meals into “CO2 Points” to represent their carbon content. (Hint: Go for the steel-cut oats to save the planet.) Another widget, from Earth911.com, tells you the nearest place to recycle everything from batteries to motor oil.

Wangers says Sierra Club Green Home will make money primarily from the $25 monthly fee it will start charging businesses to be listed in the site’s green service provider database. Sustainability director Jennifer Schwab screens businesses to ensure they meet the site’s standards for green businesses.

While the Sierra Club Green Home execs regularly shuttle from San Diego to San Francisco to meet with their non-profit majority owners, who must approve major decisions, Schwab notes that the site is “being run as a business.”

But the B-word seems to unnerve the Sierra Club. When I ask if this is the organization’s first adventure in capitalism, I received this reply via email: “The Sierra Club is a non-profit organization and all the revenue that we bring in goes to our non-profit work, so this is not a for-profit venture for us.”

Huh? Semantics aside, that may explain why, on a site chock-a-block with data, Sierra Club Green Home’s for-profit status is one piece of information that’s hard to find.

Read past Green State columns by Todd Woody.

01 June 2009

Ecological Intelligence

By Brian Walsh from Time, 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now

When it comes to going green, intention can be easier than action. Case in point: you decide to buy a T shirt made from 100% organic cotton, because everyone knows that organic is better for Earth. And in some ways it is; in conventional cotton-farming, pesticides strip the soil of life. But that green label doesn't tell the whole story — like the fact that even organic cotton requires more than 2,640 gal. (10,000 L) of water to grow enough fiber for one T shirt. Or the possibility that the T shirt may have been dyed using harsh industrial chemicals, which can pollute local groundwater. If you knew all that, would you still consider the T shirt green? Would you still buy it?

It's a question that most of us are ill equipped to answer, even as the debate over what is and isn't green becomes all-important in a hot and crowded world. That's because as the global economy has grown, our ability to make complex products with complex supply chains has outpaced our ability to comprehend the consequences — for ourselves and the planet. We evolved to respond to threats that were clear and present. That's why, when we eat spoiled food, we get nauseated and when we see a bright light, we shut our eyes. But nothing in evolution has prepared us to understand the cumulative impact that imperceptible amounts of industrial chemicals may have on our children's health or the slow-moving, long-term danger of climate change. Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose — and probably couldn't make sense of the information even if we had it.

But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That's what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision — and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That's thinking ecologically — understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices. "We can know the causes of what we're doing, and we can know the impact of what we're doing," says Goleman, who wrote the 1995 best seller Emotional Intelligence. "It's going to have a radical impact on the way we do business."

Over the past couple of decades, industrial ecologists have been using a method called life-cycle assessment (LCA) to break down that web of connection. The concept of the carbon footprint comes from LCA, but a deep analysis looks at far more. The manufacture and sale of a simple glass bottle requires input from dozens of suppliers; for high-tech items, it can include many times more.

The good news is that industrial ecologists can now crunch those data, and smart companies like Coca-Cola are using the information to clean up their corporate ecology. Working with the World Wildlife Fund, Coke analyzed its globe-spanning supply chain—the company uses 5% of the world's total sugar crop—to see where it could minimize its impact; today Coke is on target to improve its water efficiency 20% by 2012.

Below the megacorporate level, start-ups like the website Good Guide are sifting through rivers of data for ordinary consumers, providing easy-to-understand ratings you can use to instantly gauge the full environmental and health impact of that T shirt. Even better, they'll get the information to you when you need it: Good Guide has an iPhone app that can deliver verdicts on tens of thousands of products. Good Guide and services like it "let us align our dollars with our values easily," says Goleman.

But ecological intelligence is ultimately about more than what we buy. It's also about our ability to accept that we live in an infinitely connected world with finite resources. Goleman highlights the Tibetan community of Sher, where for millenniums, villagers have survived harsh conditions by carefully conserving every resource available to them. The Tibetans think ecologically because they have no other choice. Neither do we. "We once had the luxury to ignore our impacts," says Goleman. "Not anymore."

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