Sinking Pacific Islands

Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, Suva, Fiji (Wikipedia)

by Matt Thistlethwaite, Online Opinion: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=16549&page=0

In May this year I met with 19-year-old Apisaloma Tawati from Kiribati and 27-year-old Seimila Filoma from Tuvalu.

These well-spoken ambassadors were visiting Australia on an important mission - to make Australian politicians understand the urgency of taking real action on climate change.

In Australia and most of the developed world we talk of climate change as a looming threat.

But Apisaloma and Seimila's language was different. They spoke of the present danger of global warming.

They outlined how lack of rain and rising sea levels was affecting their local communities and threatened the future of their coral island homes perched precariously in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

For a couple of young people inexperienced in international political advocacy, Apisaloma and Seimila articulated their concerns with clarity and passion.

Lack of rain is affecting water supplies and traditional crops such as coconuts and breadfruit are dying. The rising salt water contaminates freshwater supplies and crops, while warmer sea temperatures bleach coral, threatening fish stocks and a major source of food for the people.

Road infrastructure is regularly becoming flooded and damaged.

To them the issue is as clear as the water that surrounds their atolls, the water that has nourished life in their communities for thousands of years, and that now threatens the future of their people.

It is estimated that a sea level rise of 8–16 inches in the next 100 years could make Kiribati and Tuvalu, which at their highest rise about 6 feet above sea level, uninhabitable.

This week leaders representing 15 Pacific Island nations will travel to Palau in the western Pacific Ocean to participate in the Pacific Islands Forum.

Climate change will feature on the agenda and political leaders will have the opportunity to talk about what their Governments are doing to mitigate the impact of climate change on islands states such as Kiribati and Tuvalu.

Representing the Abbott Government will be Deputy Prime Minister, Warren Truss and Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Brett Mason.

This relatively high profile duo will have their work cut out explaining the Abbott Government's approach to an issue that literally threatens the livelihoods of thousands of the people these Pacific Island leaders represent.

One of the Abbott Government's earliest decisions on climate change was to withdraw its support for a Commonwealth Green Capital Fund, an initiative which would have assisted low lying Pacific Island nations to cope with climate emergencies.

Then in the May budget the Abbott Government announced $7.6 billion in cuts to foreign aid over four years, with $110 million in cuts to the Asia Pacific in the first year alone.

At the last Pacific Islands Forum in September 2013 member nations, Australia included, adopted the Majuro Declaration, committing to our neighbours to take action on climate change. As a nation we committed to support renewable energy generation and technology development, and re-committed to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020.

Now Australia is reviewing its renewable energy target with the real prospect of a reduction in the target.

Then to add insult to injury two weeks ago Australia became the first nation in the world to remove a national price on carbon emissions and move backwards on climate change policy. This has been met with utter disbelief and despair in the Pacific.

In May this year Tony de Brum, the foreign Minister for the Marshall Islands said, "Australia has always been our friend but the change in their government last year has resulted in problems".

In June Kiribati's President, Anote Tong expressed his nation's frustration about Australia's actions when he said, "We're not talking about the growth GDP, we're not talking about what it means in terms of profit and losses of the large corporations, we're talking about our survival".

These are not the musings of commentators. They are the views of leaders of our neighbouring nations about Australian Government action. They are a powerful indictment on Australian government policy.

Many talk of climate change as a future cost. Australia is already assisting our friends and neighbours with the costs if climate change.

In June 2013 then Foreign Minister Bob Carr announced Australia would fund life-saving water and emergency food in response to severe drought in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a $485,000 commitment to match an earlier, similar Labor Government commitment.

As the Pacific Islands Forum kicks off in Palau I hope our Pacific neighbours understand that Warren Truss and Brett Mason do not speak for all Australians when they outline our Government's response to climate change.

Matt Thistlethwaite is the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs and the MHR for Kingsford Smith.

Approval of Australia's Largest Coal Mine Ignores Climate and Water

Galilee Basin coal mine (Lock the Gate Alliance, CC BY)

by James Whitmore, The Conversation

Australia’s biggest coal mine, the Carmichael Coal and Rail Project, yesterday received the go-ahead from the federal government.

Environment minister Greg Hunt approved the mine, proposed by Indian coal company Adani Group, with 36 conditions to reduce the impact on water, wildlife, and threatened ecosystems, including returning 730 megalitres of water to the environment every year.

But experts warned the conditions do not account for the mine’s contribution to climate change, and may not be stringent enough to prevent damage to sensitive groundwater systems.

Hunt said that the mine was subject to the “some of the strictest conditions that have ever been imposed”, and denied the development will directly affect the Great Barrier Reef as claimed by some green groups. He said the Carmichael mine will lead to up to 3,000 jobs during construction, and a further 4,000 permanent positions.

The mine, which will produce up to 60 million tonnes of coal for electricity each year over 60 years, is proposed for the Galilee Basin, one of Australia’s richest coal reserves, in south west Queensland. It will include six open cut mines and up to five underground mines over 200 square kilometres.

The Carmichael mine is the fourth project to be approved in the area, including GVK Hancock’s Alpha Coal Project approved by Labor in 2012. At least a further five coal projects are awaiting approval.

Earlier this year the Queensland Land Court, following a challenge by communities, said the Alpha mine should only proceed if the development meets further conditions on water use.

Professor John Rolfe, a regional development expert at Central Queensland University, said that the environmental impacts are all “significant issues, but potentially addressable”. He said if India was not using Australian coal for electricity, it would find other sources.

He said the mine could offer “very large” economic benefits thanks to its scale and lifetime, but that it would depend on where the workforce was sourced.

“If the workforce flew in-flew out from Brisbane or Sydney … then regional Queensland would receive much smaller economic benefits.”

Australia’s coal reserves, including the vast, untapped areas of the Galilee basin in inland Queensland. Geoscience Australia, CC BY

Global climate impact

Under the environmental assessment process, greenhouse gas emissions from construction and day-to-day mining operations are included, but not emissions from burning the coal for electricity.

Professor Roger Jones, climate expert at Victoria University, said the total emissions from the Carmichael mine (including burning the coal) could account for 4% of global emissions by mid century under a scenario designed to keep warming below 2C, contributing between 0.011-0.027C to warming.

Professor Jones, who testified as an expert witness in the Queensland Land Court against the Alpha Coal mine, said if all coal mines under consideration for the Galilee Basin were operating they would exceed 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The mine is inconsistent with a goal to keep global warming below the internationally-agreed guardrail of 2C, Jones said, and was more in line with warming of 4C, which would cause the widespread deaths of coral reefs, collapse of ice sheets, major ocean acidification and disruptions to agricultural systems, among other impacts.

Water concerns

Earlier this year a panel of independent scientific experts raised concerns about groundwater, particularly the ability of Adani Group to model and monitor groundwater flows. In approving the mine, minister Hunt said he had accounted for the concerns.

But groundwater expert Matthew Currell at RMIT University said the timeline of the mine might not allow Adani Group to get the modelling right.

“The Independent Expert Scientific committee pointed out serious flaws in their original groundwater model - they’re not things that can be quickly solved.”

The Carmichael mine, thanks to its sheer size, would have a significant impact on groundwater levels and flow, streamflow dependent on groundwater, and sensitive springs in the Great Artesian Basin, Currell said.

UPDATE: This article was updated July 29 to clarify the carbon emissions from the mine. It was further updated on July 30 to correct the statement that the Carmichael Coal Project is the second coal project to receive federal approval. It is the fourth.

For further reading see: Why the Galilee Basin is worth worrying about


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Only 3,200 Tigers Remain in the Wild; This Map Shows Where

(Photo: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters)

by Todd Woody, Take Part: http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/07/29/map-shows-where-worlds-remaining-3200-tigers-live

Todd Woody is TakePart's senior editor for environment and wildlife. full bio

Today is International Tiger Day, and frankly, there’s not much to celebrate.

Wild tiger populations have plunged 97 percent over the past century, and the big cats have lost 93 percent of their historic habitat in Asia, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

This map shows the location of the estimated 3,200 tigers that remain in the wild.

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How did this happen? It’s the usual suspects: us.

As Asia’s human population has boomed, people have logged the tiger’s forest home, pushing the cat onto ever shrinking patches of habitat. That in turn has ratcheted up human-tiger conflicts as the cats, deprived prey, raid farmers’ livestock.

Poaching is also decimating the tiger. “Every part of the tiger - from whisker to tail - is traded in illegal wildlife markets,” according to the WWF.

“Poaching is the most immediate threat to wild tigers. In relentless demand, their parts are used for traditional medicine, folk remedies, and increasingly as a status symbol among some Asian cultures.”

Climate change is slowly but surely taking a toll as rising sea levels inundate the Sundarbans, a vast mangrove forest that straddles India and Bangladesh and is home to the world’s largest tiger population.

The good news is that countries like India are taking aggressive measures to fight poaching, and international nonprofits are increasingly deploying high-tech technology such as drones to keep track of tigers and find poachers.

Not least, international outcry from ordinary citizens keeps the pressure on governments to prevent the tiger from slipping into oblivion.

Public Transport Has Been Let Down by Our Reluctance to Pay For It

Syntagma Metro Station Archaeological Collection (Wikipedia)

by Chris Hale, University of Melbourne

Public transport has a problem with money.

Campaigners often argue that mass transit is a public good in its own right, and hence should be very cheap or even free.

Mainstream media and even many self-proclaimed supporters of public transport run emotional stories about fare increases, while governments offer “giveaway” fare policies that severely restrict transport revenue.

Trains and buses are widely derided as “lower-class” forms of transport, despite being one of society’s most important enablers for economic development and social engagement.

Together, these lines of thinking add up to a severe lack of funding for transport in Australian cities - both in terms of infrastructure investment and operating revenues.

Spending on public transport is routinely delayed, while urban roads are given priority. Meanwhile, the fluster over fares means that operators aren’t receiving the funds they need to deliver a good service.

Until we face up to these issues, the struggle to provide better public transport will be an uphill battle.

Baltimore, like many US cities, is realising that buses aren’t just for poor people. Chris Hale

Learn from the successes

What do the world’s best mass transit networks have in common? They have fare structures that let them recover a large proportion (typically 75% or more) of their operating costs.

Designing a smart transport policy means accepting that there are limits to what governments can provide. So it’s best to use any available subsidy wisely. We should increasingly look to passengers to cover much of the cost of the transit services that benefit them directly.

We tend to think about fares in an illogical way. Australian media reports bemoaning expensive fares routinely cite the cost per trip, when they should quote the cost per kilometre.

For example, the much-maligned trip from the Gold Coast to Brisbane covers up to 80 km and costs A$14. Contrast that with the UK, where travelling the 71 km from London to Milton Keynes will cost you at least £18.50 (A$33.50).

I would suggest that Britain’s fares demonstrate a more realistic understanding of the limited resources available for funding rail travel.

Huge subsidies

In Australia, residents of outer suburban areas receive large subsidies for trips that would be rightly regarded as regional journeys overseas. Meanwhile, most passengers in Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne who travel short hops of just a few kilometres get little or no subsidy.

This unbalanced approach distorts our ability to provide better services. There is little relationship between the price of tickets and the cost per kilometre of transporting those passengers.

At this point the argument becomes tangled. Self-proclaimed supporters of transit bang the table and shout that outer suburban travellers need to be given perks to stop them defecting to their cars.

But why should someone living in Broadmeadows, 16 km north of central Melbourne, receive less subsidy than someone from Frankston, 41 km southeast of the CBD? Distance from the CBD is not a proxy for disadvantage, nor for deservedness of subsidy.

Disadvantage should primarily be addressed through concession fare offerings and workable transit access, not by a crude system of frittering public resources on cheaper fares for long distances.

Washington DC’s Metro is fast, efficient, and largely funded by fares. Chris Hale

The real picture

It would be much better to attempt to devise a fare structure based on equality of subsidy, which reflects the reality of how much it costs to provide these services.

These are complex questions. Successful transport networks overseas treat them as such, but our state politicians continue to play immature games with ticket prices.

Recent examples include the move towards “free” CBD travel in Melbourne, where it is far from clear that a majority of users want free travel anyway.

The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal has recommended that Sydney’s train network should be paid for by passengers - largely white-collar workers who want good service rather than cheaper fares - instead of by the wider public.

But still the policy discussion focuses exclusively on “affordability”, while state governments bemoan their inability to fund transport upgrades. This shows a pretty poor grasp of basic infrastructure economics.

Melbourne should ditch the general fare subsidies and offer concessions to students and other low-income groups. Chris Hale

If we took a better approach to transport funding, we could deliver new projects much faster and more affordably. Analysis shows that asking the beneficiaries to pay for new services (“value capture”, to use the policy jargon) can cover 25-50% of project costs

Rather than throw A$9-11 billion at a single rail project in Melbourne, why not use value capture to deliver an entire suite of generational rail upgrades?

This approach has worked in mega-suites such as London’s Crossrail. In Los Angeles' “30-10” initiative, what was previously seen as 30 years' worth of transport infrastructure will be delivered in around a decade.

Melbourne could do a “30-12” and deliver Metro One, the airport link, and the Rowville and Doncaster rail projects in a 10-12 year program, from that same A$10 billion consolidated revenue base - with the help of alternative funding approaches.

Los Angeles is on a fast track to 30 years' worth of new transport projects in a decade. Chris Hale

But this can only happen if we adopt the attitude to funding seen in many places overseas, and crucially, only if there is a genuine interest to see these rails programs realised.

This is where the real difficulty starts. As a specialist observer of transit projects and their funding, I believe that institutional roadblocks are our biggest problem in Australia.

If our leaders among government, the public service, and the transport industry didn’t actually want better mass transit, then fudging around on fare structures and capital funding options would be a really effective way to delay progress.

Conversely, if better transit is the biggest game in town, it’s time we got serious about it. To fix and expand our rail systems we need to get fares right and we need to diversify the funding mix - because there’s just no other way to get where we want to go.


Chris Hale operates his own consulting business and this article is his last as an academic at the University of Melbourne. He has recently contracted to Melbourne City Council on the issue of transit funding, and in years past also contracted to the Cross River Rail and Sydney Metro projects on the same topic. 

He currently receives no research funding on this topic, but between 2009 and 2011 was the recipient of grants for research into mass transit funding from the Australian CRC for Rail Innovation. Chris has been the recipient of substantial in-kind support (such as access to data and availability of senior staff time) over many years on this topic from MTR of Hong Kong.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

New Zealand’s Southern Alps Have Lost a Third of Their Ice

by Jim Salinger, University of Auckland; Blair Fitzharris, University of Otago, and Trevor Chinn, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

A third of the permanent snow and ice of New Zealand’s Southern Alps has now disappeared, according to our new research based on National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research aerial surveys.

A NASA satellite photo of the Southern Alps, stretching along New Zealand’s South Island, shown here capped with snow in 2002. Jacques Descloitres/NASA/Wikimedia Commons

Since 1977, the Southern Alps' ice volume has shrunk by 18.4 km³ or 34%, and those ice losses have been accelerating rapidly in the past 15 years.

The story of the Southern Alps’s disappearing ice has been very dramatic - and when lined up with rapid glacier retreats in many parts of the world, raises serious questions about future sea level rise and coastal climate impacts.

The Southern Alps’ total ice volume (solid line) and annual gains or losses (bars) from 1976 to 2014 in km3 of water equivalent, as calculated from the end-of-summer-snowline monitoring programme. “ zoomable= Authors, CC BY

Glaciers are large-scale, highly sensitive climate instruments, which in an ideal world we would pick up and weigh once a year, because their fluctuations provide one of the clearest signals of climate change.

A glacier is simply the surplus ice that collects above the permanent snowline where the losses to summer melting are less than the gains from winter accumulation. A glacier flows downhill and crosses the permanent snowline from the area of snow gain to the zone of ice loss.

The altitude of this permanent snowline is the equilibrium line: it marks the altitude at which snow gain (accumulation) is exactly balanced by melt (ablation) and is represented by the end-of-summer snowline.

Tasman Lake, photographed in March 2011. Trevor Chinn, CC BY-NC-SA

In 1977, one of us (Trevor Chinn) commenced aerial photography to measure the annual end-of-summer snowline for 50 index glaciers throughout the Southern Alps.

These annual end-of-summer surveys have been continued by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). We then use the NIWA results to calculate the annual glacier mass balance and hence volume changes of small to medium sized glaciers in the Southern Alps.

Small to medium glaciers respond quickly to annual variability of weather and climate, and are in balance with the current climate.

Not so the twelve largest glaciers: the Tasman, Godley, Murchison, Classen, Mueller, Hooker, Ramsay, Volta/Therma, La Perouse, Balfour, Grey, and Maud glaciers.

These have a thick layer of insulating rocks on top of the ice lower down the glaciers trunk. Their response to new snow at the top is subdued, and take many decades to respond.

Up until the 1970s, their surfaces lowered like sinking lids maintaining their original areas. Thereafter, glacial lakes have formed and they have undergone rapid retreat and ice loss.

The Rolleston index glacier in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, showing the accumulation area where fresh clean snow gain occurs above the end-of-summer snowline, and the area of melting ice below. Here, a negative balance year in 2009 shows a higher end-of-summer snowline revealing underlying old snow. Trevor Chinn, CC BY

To come up with our calculations, we have used the snowline survey data plus earlier topographic maps and a GPS survey of the ice levels of the largest glaciers to calculate total ice-volume changes for the Southern Alps up until 2014.

Over that time, ice volume had decreased 34%, from 54.5 km³ to 36.1 km³ in water equivalents. Of that reduction, 40% was from the 12 largest glaciers, and 60% from the small- to medium-sized glaciers.

These New Zealand results mirror trends from mountain glaciers globally. From 1961 to 2005, the thickness of “small” glaciers worldwide decreased approximately 12 metres, the equivalent of more than 9,000 km³ of water.

Global Glacier Thickness Change: This shows average annual and cumulative glacier thickness change of mountain glaciers of the world, measured in vertical metres, for the period 1961 to 2005. Mark Dyurgerov, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, CC BY

Martin Hoelzle and associates at the World Glacier Monitoring Service have estimated estimate the 1890s extent of ice volume in New Zealand’s Southern Alps was 170 km³, compared to 36.1 km³ now. That disappearance of 75-80% of Southern Alps ice is graphic evidence of the local effects of global warming.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013, CC BY

Further large losses of ice in the Southern Alps have been projected by glaciologists Valentina Radic and Regine Hock, suggesting that only 7-12 km³ will remain by the end of the 21st century.

This is based on regional warming projections of 1.5°C to 2.5°C. This represents a likely decimation of ice cover of the Southern Alps over two centuries because of global warming.

And where does all this melted glacier ice go? Into the oceans, thus making an important contribution to sea level rise, which poses a serious risk to low-lying islands in the Pacific, and low-lying coastal cities from Miami in the US to Christchurch in NZ.

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated mountain glacier melt has contributed about 6 to 7 centimetres of sea level rise since 1900, and project a further 10 to 20 cm from this source by 2100.

IPCC Science explained, 2013

The disappearing ice story calls for robust effective climate policy to moderate effects on our landscape and coasts, otherwise future generations will have little of New Zealand/Aotearoa’s “long white cloud” alpine ice left to enjoy.


Blair Fitzharris has received funding from the New Zealand government and its research agencies.

Jim Salinger and Trevor Chinn do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why We Have to Save Wildlife to Save Ourselves

Three young Tasmanian Devils. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Richard Conniff, Take Part.com: http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/07/23/why-we-have-save-wildlife-save-ourselves

Richard Conniff is the author of The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth and other books. full bio.

Midway through the new special issue of Science, about the global loss of wildlife, my heart caught on this idea: we now live with a steady, imperceptible loss “in people’s expectations of what the natural world around them should look like,” and “each generation grows up within a slightly more impoverished natural biodiversity.”

It’s not just about elephants, rhinos, and other iconic species disappearing. It’s about the decline of everything.

When children go outdoors today - to the extent that they go outdoors at all - they see 35% fewer individual butterflies and moths than their parents would have seen 40 years ago, and 28% fewer individual vertebrates - meaning birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and fish.

It’s not quite a silent spring, just one that is becoming quieter with each passing year, insidiously, so we hardly notice. The Science authors dub this phenomenon “defaunation.” I prefer to think of it as “the great vanishing,” but either way it’s bad news. 

Why don’t we do something about it? Wildlife conservation suffers under a misguided notion that it is a boutique issue.

“Animals do matter to people,” according to one article in the Science special issue, “but on balance, they matter less than food, jobs, energy, money, and development. As long as we continue to view animals in ecosystems as irrelevant to these basic demands, animals will lose.”

That need not be as hopeless as it sounds, because the authors go on to remind us in alarming detail just how utterly our economic and political well-being depend on keeping wildlife populations healthy.

Insect pollinator populations, for instance, are now in free-fall. But they are essential for 75% of the world’s food crops. Somewhat less obviously, native predators - mainly insects, birds, and bats - also provide natural pest control, worth an estimated $4.5 billion annually in the United States.

Half our pharmaceuticals come from the natural world, many of them from wildlife. The fer-de-lance snake, for instance, gave us ACE inhibitors, our most effective medicine for heart disease. A deadly cone snail gave us a painkiller, called Prialt, that’s more potent than morphine and yet not addictive.

Much more directly, a billion of the world’s poorest people also depend on wildlife as their main source of animal protein, and 2.6 billion rely on seafood protein. Failure to manage these resources so they will be available next year, and the year after, is a recipe for starvation, civil unrest, terrorism, and the collapse of economies, if not of civilization itself.

We may roll our eyes about ethical shoppers armed with their Monterey Bay Aquarium sustainable seafood guidelines. But illegal and unmanaged fisheries are anything but a niche issue.

On the contrary, when a weak government allowed foreign vessels to decimate the fisheries on the coast of Somalia, it turned former fishermen into pirates. That scenario is now being replayed in the West African nations of Benin, Senegal, and Nigeria.

In Thailand, failure to manage the fisheries now forces boats to “travel farther, endure harsher conditions, search deeper, and fish for longer to obtain the types of harvests more readily available a generation ago,” according to the Science writers.

Men - and children - who are essentially slaves “may remain at sea for several years without pay, forced to work 18- or 20-hour days. Starvation, physical abuse, and murder are common on these vessels.”

The Science authors outline some of the steps we can take to stop or even reverse this catastrophic pattern of decline.

They say President Obama’s interagency task force on wildlife trafficking and the European and Asian “war on poachers” aren’t enough. That approach takes on crime and terrorism funded by wildlife trafficking, but it misses the basic conservation ecology.

Among better solutions, the Science authors say, we should advocate giving fishermen and hunters exclusive rights to harvest grounds, so they will become invested in protecting long-term productivity. That’s worked with fisheries in Fiji and with community conservancies covering almost half the land area in the southeast African nation of Namibia.

The authors also propose more radical forms of species translocations. Conservationists in Australia and Asia have introduced populations of the kakapo, or owl parrot, to remote islands, to protect them from introduced mammalian predators on the mainland.

Likewise, a population of disease-free Tasmanian devils is living outside its native range. In some cases where important species have gone extinct, it may help to introduce a substitute species that performs a similar ecological function.

Aldabra giant tortoises, for instance, have now replaced an extinct Mauritian tortoise to restore grazing functions and seed dispersal of native large-seeded plants on that island.

Finally, the authors argue for “a new model of coexistence between predators and humans over large spatial scales,” and they cite as a model the recovery, in densely populated Europe, of golden jackals, gray wolves, Eurasian lynx, Iberian lynx, and wolverines.

One hitch may be that we don’t know which species we depend on, and we may not even recognize when some nematode, or beetle, or bat that is functionally more important than, say, the rhino, is disappearing.

Reading this special issue, I keep thinking of prochlorococcus, an ocean microbe, which wasn’t even discovered by scientists until the 1980s. It produces 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe - one of every five breaths.

That suggests why the authors believe that “the cryptic nature of defaunation has strong potential to soon become very non-cryptic, rivaling the impact of many other forms of global change” - think earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, even meteorites crashing down from space - “in terms of loss of ecosystem services essential for human well-being.”

In other words, it’s not just about saving wildlife. It’s about saving our world. It’s about saving ourselves.

The 'Pre-Holocene' Climate is Returning – And it Won't be Fun

Sahara Desert from space (Wikipedia)

by Peter Fisher, RMIT University

A string of events earlier this year provided a sobering snapshot of a global climate system out of whack.

Europe suffered devastating floods, Britain’s coastline was mauled, and the polar vortex cast a US$5 billion economic chill over America.

Meanwhile, an abnormally mild winter in Scandinavia disrupted bears' hibernation; while Australia was ravaged by fires and record-breaking heat.

These happenings give us an idea of what life must have been like in the lead-up to the Holocene Epoch, living on the brink of seismic change, amid a series of abrupt climate shifts.

As the archaeologist Steven Mithen wrote in his book After the Ice:

People were thin on the ground and struggling with a deteriorating climate … massive ice sheets had expanded across much of North America, Northern Europe and Asia. The planet was inundated by drought, sea level had fallen to expose vast and often barren coastal plains. Human communities survived the harshest conditions by retreating to refugia where firewood and foodstuffs could still be found.

Since then, we have been lulled into a false sense of security by the ensuing 10,000-odd years of peaceful, stable climate during the Holocene itself. This has allowed us to tame crops and livestock, and to come together to form communities, villages and, ultimately, cities.

But the calm and tranquil Holocene has now been replaced by the Anthropocene - heralding a return to a volatile and destructive climate. Truly, we have woken an angry beast from its slumber.

From ice age to rapid warming

When the last ice age began to teeter 14,700 years ago, meltwater began to pour into the oceans, raising levels by up to half a metre per decade. The sea moved inland like a slow tsunami.

But after a hesitant couple of millennia of warmer conditions, the cold was back with a vengeance, turning western Asia and Europe into ice empires.

This event, dubbed the Younger Dryas, derived from the collapse of the ice walls on Lake Agassiz in North America, sending freshwater flooding into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. As a result it cut back the Gulf Stream, returning the planet to cool and dry conditions in a matter of decades, with the average Northern Hemisphere temperature plummeting by 7C.

These cold conditions lasted for about 1400 years. Then, just as rapidly, the warm and wet conditions returned, marking the beginning of the Holocene about 11,700 years ago.

Extent of the glacial Lake Agassiz roughly 7900 years ago. Several millennia earlier it dumped freshwater into the oceans, causing widespread cooling. Chris Light/Wikimedia Commons (derived from USGS data), CC BY-SA

Stable era

Since then, the world’s climate has remained remarkably stable - boring, even. The relatively static shorelines have made farming, fishing, towns and cities possible.

Humans have got used to thinking that this is a natural state of affairs. But, as James Hansen has declared, “it’s our relatively static experience of climate that is actually exceptional”.

Of course, there have been divergences from the norm, although these have thankfully been few and far between. One was 5000 years ago, when the Sahara went from a land of hippos and giraffes to desert in a mere 100-200 years.

In geological terms, the Sahara became a desert overnight. GaetanP123/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

That event was caused by gradual changes to the Earth’s orientation towards the Sun. It shows us that even when the forces are gradual, the climate may not always respond gradually but instead can move in juddering, unpredictable shifts.

At about the same time, seismic change was happening in our own midst, with the eruption of Mount Gambier sending an ash plume up to 10 km high - an event that would have partially obscured the Sun.

Eruptions like this were the main cause of climate variability in the Holocene, causing cooler, drier episodes such as the “Mediaeval little ice age“.

Things are different now

Now, however, carbon dioxide has reached levels not seen for at least 3 million years, and fossil fuel emissions have become the dominant driver of the changes to our climate.

In a world potentially several degrees warmer than the one that spawned our civilization, we had better ready ourselves for some surprises.

This isn’t alarmism; it’s just sensible risk management. Retired US Navy Rear Admiral David Titley, now head of Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, pointed out that governments still spend money on defence, despite the declining number of people killed worldwide in war.

He told the US Congress that “we rightly invest in our security and defence as one component of hedging against unknown or unlikely security risks”. Inaction on climate change violates that same fundamental risk-management principle.

What’s nature ever done for us?

Of course, nature will carry on regardless, albeit savaged. As the MIT physicist and humanities professor Alan Lightman has noted, “tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants”.

Yet if we turn our backs on nature, while at the same time climbing the population hill to nine billion, we will create a horrid future for humanity’s survivors, with ongoing wild species extinctions and a world polluted by human-invented chemicals.

Some have predicted that, within just two or three centuries, we could be alone except for pets, chickens, livestock, and an unknown suite of microbes and freeloaders such as mice and cockroaches.

For a sneak preview of this “biosimplification”, look no further than the swathes of European countryside where there has been a crash in bird populations - no songs, no glimpses of plumage, just an eerie silence - as a result of the wholesale ripping up of hedgerows, draining of wetlands and ploughing over of meadows robbing farmland birds of their homes and sustenance in order to boost farming production.

That would leave us living in a drab, crummy landscape where surviving native plants cower in small niches away from the weeds; zoos exhibit a lost fauna; and biophilia is reduced to watching carp.

It’s surely a trajectory that’s worth getting off.


Peter Fisher does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Will 2015 be the Year the World Agrees How to Live Sustainably?

The Eight (MDGs) of the UN - Target date 2015 (Wikipedia)

by John Thwaites, Monash University; David Griggs, Monash University, and Tahl Kestin, Monash University

Next year will be critical in environmental diplomacy.

World governments will be negotiating important global agreements in two areas that will have a major impact on our well-being in coming decades, including the legal framework for climate action beyond 2020.

The second, far less well-known - but potentially just as important - agreement is about setting global Sustainable Development Goals, to follow on from the poverty-focused Millennium Development Goals that will end in 2015.

After a year and a half of negotiations, a picture is emerging of what those goals are likely to be: tackling poverty, hunger, inequality and environmental damage, not just in the developing world but throughout the globe.

Setting the goals

This week, an Open Working Group of the United Nations General Assembly released a set of proposed Sustainable Development Goals and targets. This proposal will form the basis of negotiation between countries about the goals over the next year, leading to a final decision at the United Nations in September 2015.

The Sustainable Development Goals are one of the main outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also called the “Rio+20” summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012.

Countries agreed at Rio+20 that, with the period of the Millennium Development Goals drawing to an end in 2015, new goals are needed to continue the fight against poverty. But they decided these goals should be broadened to tackle inequality and global environmental degradation.

Unlike the millennium goals, which were aimed at developing countries, the sustainability goals will apply to the whole world. They will be a benchmark against which nations' performance on economic growth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability will be measured.

World Leaders at the Rio+20 summit agreed the world needs new targets to follow on from the Millennium Development Goals. Blog do Planalto/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

What are the targets?

The working group’s proposal includes 17 goals and more than 160 targets. The proposed goals and targets continue the focus on ending poverty and hunger, but also include goals for social inclusion, health, education, economic growth and jobs, and reducing inequality.

Importantly, the proposal also includes goals for water, energy, sustainable consumption and production, ecosystems and tackling climate change. The proposal also suggests goals and targets for sustainable cities, infrastructure and governance.

Despite contention, there is a proposed goal on promoting peaceful and inclusive societies and access to justice and targets on sexual and reproductive health rights.

There are probably too many suggested goals and targets, and the list needs to be consolidated. However, there has been remarkable agreement among the representatives of 70 countries who have put together the proposal.

Australia’s role

It is easy to see that many of the goals are as relevant to Australia as they are to the rest of the world. Australia faces challenges of increasing inequality, high greenhouse gas emissions, and threats to biodiversity. The Sustainable Development Goals can help to guide Australia’s response to these problems.

Cynics might scoff at the United Nations' efforts and argue that the goals are bureaucratic and meaningless. But these critics ignore the real, positive impact that concrete goals and targets can have on governments, businesses and communities.

Neither the Millennium Development Goals nor the proposed Sustainable Development Goals are legally enforceable. Yet the millennium goals provided both a spur and a guide to action, and a benchmark against which governments and communities could assess their performance.

Many developing countries have included achievement of the millennium goals in their national development plans, and used them to reduce poverty and target better health and education.

The Millennium Development Goals delivered some successes, notably in improving access to safe water. Richard Webb/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Over the past 20 years, global poverty rates have halved and about 700 million fewer people now live in extreme poverty. More than 2 billion people have gained access to improved water sources and the target of halving the number of people without safe water has been met ahead of schedule.

More people around the world can read and write, more go to school, and more women are getting an education - a key factor in reducing population growth and improving child survival.

The Millennium Development Goals are not the sole reason for these improvements, but they have certainly contributed.

However, in two critical respects the millennium goals have not been successful. Despite the improvement in economic and social indicators since 2000, inequality within most countries (including Australia) has worsened. At the same time, the scale of humans' impact on the planet has reached dangerous levels. The environment is in peril.

Secrets of success

Why have some of the Millennium Development Goals been more successful than others?

One of the answers lies in the trade-offs between different goals or objectives which make solutions much more complex to find. It is relatively easy to grasp the issue of providing more safe water.

It is much more complex and challenging to balance the trade-offs inherent in achieving energy sufficiency without excessive carbon emissions; in achieving food security without damaging biodiversity; and in becoming economically competitive without increasing inequality.

This is why, in developing and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals, the ability to solve problems from many different points of view will be critical.

There are sweet spots between economic development, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. But finding them will require collaboration between governments, business, and people with skills in many disciplines.

In Australia, for example, in the last decade we significantly reduced water use in agriculture while increasing agricultural value through a combination of the water market, business strategies and better technologies.

But we still have a long way to go in achieving environmental sustainability, and have much to learn from other countries about achieving social inclusion at the same time as economic growth.

It is early days, but the Sustainable Development Goals may help us get there.


John Thwaites works for the Monash Sustainability Institute, which is conducting workshops and research on the Sustainable Development Goals. Some funding for this work is received by the Harold Mitchell Foundation.

David Griggs works for the Monash Sustainability Institute, which is conducting workshops and research on the Sustainable Development Goals. Some funding for this work is received by the Harold Mitchell Foundation.

Tahl Kestin works for the Monash Sustainability Institute, which is conducting workshops and research on the Sustainable Development Goals. Some funding for this work is received by the Harold Mitchell Foundation.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Shorten Urges Climate Issues To Be a Priority at G20

Bill Shorten (AAP/Lukas Coch)

by Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

Opposition leader Bill Shorten has taken his battle with prime minister Tony Abbott over climate policy to an international stage, saying the issue should be a priority for the G20 leaders' meeting in Brisbane.

Addressing the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, Shorten said Australia had gained “regrettable” worldwide attention for moving backwards on climate change, in a reference to this month’s carbon tax repeal by the Coalition.

Reaffirming that Labor remained committed to “effective action” on climate change through policies like an emissions trading scheme, he said opting for inaction was environmentally and economically reckless. It was “another form of false economic protection – a damaging economic isolationism”.

Shorten said that President Barack Obama had made his preference for an ETS clear, but the political dynamic in Congress meant the United States would focus its national efforts through heavy regulation and intervention.

“As the world moves to take action, it will not be long before a lack of climate policy is an obstacle to finalising trade deals,” he said. “In fact, it is entirely possible that trade negotiations will mandate an effective price on carbon to ensure a level trading field.”

Shorten announced Labor would remain committed to an ETS immediately after the Parliament repealed the carbon tax last week, ensuring that carbon pricing will be a central issue for the 2016 election. It is not yet clear whether the government will be able to strike a deal to get an amended form of its direct action policy through the Senate.

His speech highlighted a touchy issue in relation to the G20 - the government is anxious to have minimal attention on climate change in that forum.

Shorten said that because climate change was an economic, environmental and security issue it belonged on the G20 agenda.

“Just as global growth, global free trade and multinational tax avoidance require international consensus, climate change is a global problem that demands a global solution,” he said. “Just as the 2015 Paris Climate summit will give world leaders a chance to formulate their emissions targets, the G20 offers the opportunity for stronger, deeper economic links in the emissions market.”

The benefit of emissions trading was that it created economy-wide incentives for clean energy and more efficient use of energy.

“Effective action on climate change provides a strong price signal to diversify the national and global energy mix. Reliable renewable energy acts as a shock absorber for the unforeseen natural disasters and sudden geopolitical shifts that can imperil conventional energy supplies".

"For G20 governments, energy security depends on creating an environment of regulatory certainty and encouraging innovation and investment in renewable technologies.”



Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Report: Climate Change Skeptics Could Reach Catastrophic Levels By 2020

by The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-climate-change-skeptics-could-reach-catastr,36521/

Scientists say it may be too late to effectively combat climate change deniers and that humanity may simply have to learn to live with their negative effects.

In a worrying development that could have dire implications for the health of the planet, a report published Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that the number of climate change skeptics could reach catastrophic levels by the year 2020.

According to the agency’s findings, the rising quantity and concentration of individuals who willfully deny or downplay the ruinous impact of the ongoing climate crisis will no longer be manageable by the end of the decade, leading to disastrous consequences for global ecosystems that may well prove irreversible.

“In recent decades, we have observed an alarming increase in people who refuse to acknowledge the reality of global warming, which has exceeded even our worst-case projections,” said EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, confirming a worldwide spike in the number of deniers who are actively seeking to discredit the scientific consensus that human activity is responsible for climate change.

“If this trend continues at its current rate, we will pass a critical threshold of unfounded skepticism within the next six years that will have devastating repercussions on every continent and in every ocean, threatening the entire global population.”

“For the continued survival of Earth’s plant, animal, and, indeed, human life, that kind of runaway ignorance is a frightening prospect and one that we can no longer afford to discount,” she continued. “If we don’t contain climate change skeptics soon, we’re putting the very planet at risk.”

Since the latter half of the 20th century, the EPA noted that more and more regions, biomes, and even human commercial and industrial activities have suffered the harmful effects of individuals who refuse to accept that the ongoing rise in global surface temperatures is due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Specifically, the report revealed an alarming upsurge in the number of authors of discredited scientific studies questioning the reality of climate change, adversarial cable news show guests who scoff at the notion that humans can affect Earth’s weather patterns, and politicians whose opinions are controlled by fossil fuel company lobbying groups, all of whose increased presence in the world jeopardizes the planet’s vulnerable biosphere.

Additionally, the report noted a shocking jump in the number of uninformed citizens among the public at large, whose widespread dissemination of misleading data, half-truths, and outright lies regarding climate trends has already facilitated the destruction of numerous natural resources and hundreds of species, while putting still others at imminent risk.

“The fact that the very existence of global warming somehow remains a topic of contention demonstrates that the density of these skeptics has spiraled out of control,” McCarthy said, citing data from the report showing that the concentration of the most ardent deniers recently reached a previously unheard-of 1,500 people per million.

“While the U.S. remains the planet’s largest producer of climate change skeptics, countries halfway around the world are suffering environmental destruction from the actions of these people who refuse to acknowledge the threat of extreme weather conditions and rising sea levels. The effects of these outspoken deniers are truly global in scope.”

While the EPA report recognized that past efforts to reverse the proliferation of climate change deniers failed to stem the spread of their erroneous beliefs, it suggested that renewed education initiatives and well-informed public debate could at least limit the emergence of the most destructive and stubborn individuals who continue to dispute a conclusion supported by 97 percent of scientists.

However, with the rise of such individuals having only accelerated over time, the report’s authors conceded that it may no longer be possible to eliminate this devastating man-made phenomenon.

“The profusion of these skeptics was something that we as a nation should have made a better effort to get a handle on in the past,” said report co-author Gena Orlofsky, noting that the increase in private sector groups actively seeking to cast doubt on the reality of declining biodiversity and the melting of the polar ice caps was observable as early as the 1990s.

“At this point, so much pseudoscience and misinformation have been released into the world that we simply have to accept that those who refuse to ‘believe’ in objective scientific fact aren’t going away. All we can do is attempt to minimize their impact on our planet.”

“It’s a terrible shame. There was a time when I hoped we would be able to reverse this trend and return our understanding of the consequences of our actions to normal levels,” she continued. “But frankly, it appears to be far too late now.”

Surging Chinese Demand for Rosewood is Ruining Forests Across Southern Asia

Stump and log of illegally cut rosewood (Wikipedia)

by Zuzana Burivalova, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

We are inclined to think that trees are a renewable natural resource.

Yet precious hardwood trees have already been almost completely logged out from many countries across the tropics.

Myanmar is the latest country to experience the insatiable demand for its precious rosewood.

Rosewood, also known as bois de rose, is an umbrella term for a whole group of tropical timber species, mostly from the genus Dalbergia, Pterocarpus, Diospyros, and Milletia, which all have a dark red hue and high quality timber in common.

The vast majority of rosewood is imported to China where it’s fashioned into luxurious, highly-priced ornamental furniture in the Ming and Quing dynasty style.

Myanmar, one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in Asia, has also several species of rosewood highly prized by the Chinese furniture trade.

Even though Myanmar’s forest and hardwood stocks have been diminishing for several decades already (less than 10% of the land is now forested, the rosewood logging and smuggling has increased to an unprecedented level in the last three years.

In 2013 alone, Myanmar exported 237,000m³ of rosewood to China, triple the volume of the previous year. This amounts to one thirteenth of the estimated remaining rosewood stock of Myanmar - at current logging rates, Myanmar’s forests will have been stripped of rosewood in just 13 years.

As Chinese hunger for the luxuriant, dark red timber grows and spreads across the greater Mekong region, rosewood species might face not only commercial extinction, but also final, biological extinction.

It is hardly just the loss of a few species that is at stake. Forest overexploited for timber is likely to lose many species of animals, its ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere deteriorates, and it is more likely to experience fires. Logging also brings about more hunting and increases the chances of complete deforestation.

In Myanmar illegal logging also brings with it a raft of socioeconomic problems. Loggers undertake long and dangerous scouting expeditions into the forest, or take the risk of timber smuggling in conflict-ridden border regions, such as Kachin at the border with Yunnan province, China - one of the main rosewood smuggling routes. Not every logger returns from these expeditions.

Besides the fact that logging in the tropics is rated as one of the most dangerous jobs, there is in Myanmar an added danger of being shot in a timber-related conflict. Moreover, loggers are often rewarded by various stimulating drugs.

So why isn’t Myanmar establishing commercial rosewood plantations? Some tropical timber can indeed be mass-produced in plantations, especially faster growing species such as rubberwood, eucalyptus, or teak.

But the extremely slow growing, high density rosewood trees take many decades to grow to a commercially viable size, requiring several generations of tree planters to wait for the profit.

Such long-term investment is commendable, but unlikely in a conflict-ridden, poor country like Myanmar, with unstable land tenure and an explosive political climate.

Act now or lose it

It is in Myanmar’s interest to completely stop the illegal logging and export of rosewood to China. As almost all processing of Burmese rosewood is done in China, no value is added in Myanmar.

Worse still, almost no tax is generated: Myanmar lost an estimated US$6 billion through illegal logging between 2013 and 2014. Instead of the desperately needed cash for healthcare, education, and environmental protection, laundered rosewood money goes to corrupt officials and government cronies.

If Myanmar wants to escape its rosewood crisis with at least some viable rosewood populations left, it should take lessons from other countries that have already undergone the “rosewood massacre”.

On April 1 this year, the Myanmar government put in place a ban on raw timber export, but without enforcement this cannot be effective. Myanmar has to show its dedication to a permanent, non-negotiable, exception-free rosewood export ban.

In Madagascar, we have an example of how temporary and unclear bans only lead to a more dynamic and thriving rosewood black market. During periods of temporary bans, illegal rosewood logging continues, and traders simply accumulate rosewood stockpiles. Meanwhile, rosewood prices go up, stimulating even bigger bouts of logging when the ban is lifted.

However, even an effective national ban on rosewood export might not be enough to stop the rosewood crisis in Myanmar. In some cases, a national export ban caused China’s rosewood appetite to shift to a new country.

In other cases, for example Vietnam, China simply grabbed the opportunity of cheaper labour and moved its basic rosewood processing to Vietnam, effectively circumventing the raw timber export ban. This may bring some economic benefit to Vietnam, but does nothing to alleviate the pressure on the forests.

Of the 33 species that pass China’s strict hongmu quality standards for rosewood, more than a third is already deemed vulnerable by the IUCN Red List of Threatened species and six are listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The convention binds signatory countries to regulate or stop trade in the listed species, depending on the degree of protection.

Whereas China offers high levels of support to protect its growing rosewood industry, for customers and businesses, it appears to have a complete lack of interest in regulating the industry’s environmental impact or improving its sustainability.

Europe, the US and Australia all tightened their regulations regarding rosewood import in recent years. But with Chinese domestic demand growing significantly since 2011, only stricter regulations in China can save Myanmar’s rosewood forests.


Zuzana Burivalova does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The True Cost of Cattle is Much, Much Higher Than you Imagine

Feedlot in the Texas Panhandle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Gidon Eshel, Bard College

That eating beef is environmentally costly is by now widely appreciated.

But little has been done to curtail the amount of cattle farmed for meat consumption.

To try and address this, my colleagues and I decided to calculate just how costly beef production is for the environment, and how it stacks up against pork, poultry, dairy and eggs.

Our hope is that better knowledge of the environmental costs of raising animals for food will help improve both the dietary choices people make and agricultural policies.

Our research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, found that raising beef cattle is far more environmentally costly than poultry, pork, dairy or eggs.

Per calorie, cattle requires on average 28 times more land and 11 times more water to farm. Farming cattle releases five times more greenhouse gases and uses six times as much nitrogen as the average of other animal products.

When compared with staple plant foods, these ratios roughly double. So, a beef calorie requires about 50 times more land than a wheat calorie.

By comparison, pork, poultry and eggs are all roughly on the same level of environmental cost. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, water use and the levels of nitrogen discharge from fertiliser run-off, dairy is comparable to pork, poultry and eggs.

While it’s long been clear that vegetarian diets produce lower environmental costs than ones involving produce from animals, people are still intent on eating food derived from animals - and with ever-increasing gusto.

Taking note of this, we sought to identify the types of animal-based food that are least environmentally harmful.

Environmental costs of animal foods in (l to r) land, water, greenhouse gas, and nitrogen, compared to common plant foods such as wheat, rice and potato (green text). Eshel/Shepon/Makov/Milo, Author provided

The (environmental) cost of food

Though numerous studies have addressed elements of this issue, they have mostly used data from individual farms, typically one or at most a handful. But farms differ markedly geographically, from season to season and year to year, and are thus not necessarily representative of the big picture.

By contrast, we used the reverse, top-down approach by analysing national level data. While previous studies mostly addressed one environmental burden at a time (typically greenhouse gas emissions, but also water or land use), we simultaneously addressed each of them in order to offer a multi-dimensional view of the environmental performance of the livestock industry in the US.

We measured greenhouse gas emissions, water and land use, and reactive nitrogen discharge levels from manure or fertiliser.

Reactive nitrogen is environmentally important because it is the most common cause of degradation in freshwater ponds, streams and lakes, and around coastlines where fertiliser run-off washed into rivers reaches the sea.

We address the five main animal based products in the American diet: dairy, beef, poultry, pork and eggs, calculating the environmental costs per nutritional unit, calorie or gram protein. Our key challenge was devising accurate values of how much land, water, and reactive nitrogen livestock required, and the amount of greenhouse gasses they emit.

Working out these estimates required navigating numerous subtleties. For example, grazing cattle in the arid to semi-arid western US uses an enormous amount of land, but little or no irrigation.

Grain-fed feedlot cattle, by contrast, use much less land, but require cultivated grains that depend strongly on nitrogen fertiliser. We needed to fairly account for these differences across the country, while determining figures that reflect, approximately, the true environmental costs.

Making better decisions

These findings have a number of implications. First, this research can inform environmentally minded individuals so they can make environmentally better dietary choices. Perhaps more importantly, the paper can also help inform agricultural policy, in the US and worldwide.

In a companion paper in the Journal of Agricultural Science (forthcoming) we have laid down a foundation for analysing the environmental costs of any diet, including plant-based diets and those of other nations.

Perhaps our key contribution is to highlight areas in which improvement is most likely, and where a focused effort is likely to yield the most desirable change. Applying these methods to global diets can help improve long term global food security in light of the effects of climate change, water and land shortage, and rising population.


Gidon Eshel is the principal of environmentalCalculations.com

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.