Category: Ecosystem Resilience


'Coral Triangle' 10 Times as Biodiverse as Great Barrier Reef

Filed Under: Building the Green Economy, Ecosystem Resilience
by Joseph Robertson — Leave a comment
July 17, 2010

The great Coral Triangle, a region of coral-dense seas demarcated by Malaysia, Indonesia, Timor L’Este, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Philippines, is said to be 10 times as biodiverse as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. 76% of all known species of coral are found in the Coral Triangle, and warming ocean temperatures are causing advanced coral bleaching and endangering the entire regional ecosystem.

Australia is a key supporter of conservation efforts in the Coral Triangle, through the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI), but at least one scientist says the Australian management system for retaining diversity in the Triangle will not work. Professor Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, a world leader in the field, says “There is no single recipe for how to manage a reef well and the Great Barrier Reef model is not exportable to a poor country”.

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Carl Safina: Biological Effects of BP Spill are Hemispheric (video)

Filed Under: Crisis Policy Forum, Ecosystem Resilience, Renewable Resources, Zero-combustion paradigm
by staff — Leave a comment
July 14, 2010

Carl Safina’s detailed TED talk on the fate of the Gulf of Mexico explores some of the unseen victims and impacts of the BP oil spill. He demonstrates how dispersants have made the spreading oil slick into an unrecoverable mess that is too pervasive and too blended to be cleaned. Fresh from a visit to the Gulf, Safina explains that the ongoing environmental disaster is building in severe biological trauma to the ecosystem of the entire hemisphere.

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Oil Globules Found inside Shells of Blue Crabs

Filed Under: Crisis Policy Forum, Ecosystem Resilience, Food Supply Security, Human Health
by Joseph Robertson — Leave a comment
July 12, 2010

Scientists in Mississippi say they have discovered microscopic globules of hydrocarbons, i.e. petroleum, inside the outer shells of blue crab living along the Gulf coast. This discovery appears to show that oil has now entered the food chain. This process cannot be reversed, though measures may be taken to limit the spread of the oil deeper into the local and regional ecosystem.

According to Harlan Kirgan, of the Mississippi Press:

Oil droplets have been found beneath the shells of tiny post-larval blue crabs drifting into Mississippi coastal marshes from offshore waters.

The finding represents one of the first examples of how oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is moving into the Gulf of Mexico’s food chain. The larval crabs are eaten by all kinds of fish, from speckled trout to whale sharks, as well as by shore birds.

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Albaeco, Stockholm Resilience Centre Join WRI to Host Ecosystem Services Review Training

Filed Under: Building the Green Economy, Ecosystem Resilience
by Joseph Robertson — Leave a comment
May 28, 2009

Albaeco and the Stockholm Resilience Centre joined with the World Resources Institute to host a training session on “Corporate Ecosystem Services Review” (ESR). Suzanne Ozment, from WRI, gave an introduction to the field of ESR, including strategies by which businesses may find ways to reduce the risk of brakes on profit-growth related to deterioration of ecosystem services. Building on the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the World Resources Institute has developed a strategy for corporate ESR, in collaboration with the Meridian Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Ozment also lays out the methodology. First is to select the scope for ESR, which “needs to be manageable”. ESR is most effective for business when it looks at a “specific business unit”. Second is to select 5 to 7 priority ecosystem services upon which the enterprise depends. Third is to analyze the priority services. Fourth is to identify risks and opportunities related to the business’ relationship with ecosystem services. And the fifth step in ESR methodology would be to analyze those risks and opportunities. The ultimate goal of setting up standard methodology for corporate ESR is to help businesses move toward contributing to sustainability by recognizing the value inherent in the natural services evaluated.

Linked video has 55:13 runtime.

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Obama Tasks Interior Dept. with Conservation, Energy Security, Science-based Policy

Filed Under: Building the Green Economy, Ecosystem Resilience, Renewable Resources, Water Scarcity
by staff — Leave a comment
March 3, 2009

Pres. Barack Obama today visited the Interior Dept., noting it was once called in jest “the Department of Everything Else”, a government agency with responsibility for nearly 1/5 of the entire land area of the United States. He professed his intention to task the Interior Dept. with taking major steps to help build green infrastructure for an energy economy based on solar-voltaic and wind-turbine-generated energy.

Obama said his budget plan would devote money to the Interior Dept. to provide clean drinking water for rural areas, and build improved schools with 21st century technology for Native American communities.

“Today I signed a memorandum that will help restore the scientific process to its proper place at the heart of the endangered species act”, Obama said, noting that the role of science in protecting endangered species and conserving natural resources had been diminished by those who sought to profit from exploiting natural resources.

Obama said that “smart, sustainable” policy was the best way to carry out the stewardship required of the Interior Dept., so that natural resources found on that land, including sometimes fragile ecosystems that provide real natural services, can be protected and preserved for optimal use, far into the future.

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Sustainable Development Update: Resilience Thinking

Filed Under: Building the Green Economy, Ecosystem Resilience, Food Supply Security, Water Scarcity
by staff — Leave a comment
December 12, 2008

Feature excerpted from Sustainable Development Update, Issue 5, 2008, by kind permission of Albaeco : Stockholm, Sweden

Fredrik Moberg, Albaeco :: Earlier this year UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank teamed up with World Resources Institute to publish a report focusing on the concept of resilience “for cushioning the impacts of climate change and delivering continuing benefits to the poor”. Recently, the Volvo Environment Prize was given to the “father of resilience theory”, C.S. Holling. But what is this resilience-thing really all about? We thought it was about time to try to sort this concept out once and for all.


Building economic, social, and environmental resilience that cushions the impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly important. Photo by Annette Löf/azote.se: thunderstorm approaching over Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Resilience has become one of the new buzzwords of sustainability. This is not only due to the fact that the father of resilience theory, Canadian ecologist Crawford “Buzz” Holling, recently won the Volvo Environment Prize, it all started much earlier. The concept of resilience was introduced by Holling already back in 1973 as: “a measure of the ability of systems to absorb change… and still persist”. In an ecological context, resilience is generally described as the long-term capacity of an ecosystem to cope with and adapt to change and perturbation, such as storms, fire and pollution. Hence, it is both the capacity of a system to withstand pressures and to rebuild and renew itself if degraded.

– Resilience is the answer to the question: how can things change and persist at the same time, explains Steve Carpenter, Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Loss of resilience tends to lead to more vulnerable systems, and possible ecosystem shifts to undesired states that provide fewer ecosystem goods (like fish and crops) and services (like flood control and water purification). Clear lakes can suddenly turn into murky, oxygen-depleted pools, grasslands into shrub-deserts, and coral reefs into algae-covered rubble. It is often caused by gradual loss of biodiversity making the ecosystem progressively more susceptible to disturbances like hurricanes or pollution.

Resilience is the capacity of a system to deal with change and continue to develop. It is both about withstanding shocks or disturbances and regaining functions afterwards. In human systems, this is closely linked to the ability to adapt to changing conditions through learning and innovation or even transformation.

International development cooperation
The report, World Resources 2008: Roots of Resilience: Growing the Wealth of the Poor, which we highlighted in SDU 4/08, is a clear sign that resilience thinking is becoming increasingly mainstreamed in the international development community. It is a joint effort produced by the World Resources Institute, UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank, which argues that properly designed ecosystem-based enterprises can create economic, social, and environmental resilience that cushion the impacts of climate change, and deliver continuing benefits to the poor.

– Economic and social progress rests on a healthy environment, from local ecosystems to the biosphere as a whole. Maintaining the resilience of ecosystems is not only a question of saving the environment. It is about securing human development, explains Carl Folke of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

A perspective – not a measure
In recent times, many resilience scholars have started to put much more emphasis on the social side of the resilience theory and also focused more on the adaptability and renewal of coupled systems of humans and nature – so-called social-ecological systems (SES).

Following this, the resilience concept has developed more into a perspective than a measure, a perspective recently defined to encompass the three aspects: (1) Persistence: the capacity of a system to maintain structure and function when faced with shocks and change (e.g. for a forest to withstand a storm); (2) Adaptability: the collective capacity of people in SES to adapt to changing conditions in order to stay within a desired state (e.g. the ability to safeguard current food production systems under climate change); and (3) Transformability: the capacity of people in SES to learn, innovate and transform in periods of crisis in order to create a new system when ecological, social or economic conditions make the existing system untenable (e.g. turning the current financial crisis into an opportunity to transform the global economy).

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The Age of Hyper-exploitation & its Aftermath

Filed Under: Building the Green Economy, Ecosystem Resilience, Quipu Economic Forum, Renewable Resources
by Joseph Robertson — Leave a comment
November 25, 2008

As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted from a misguided atomized over-exploitation of arable land. Ancient Sumerian civilization collapsed entirely because excesses of irrigation coupled with poor planning raised soil salinity to levels toxic to agriculture. At the end of the 20th century, global industrial activity had come to far outstrip the available resources feeding into it, and our global economy had come to depend on increasing demand and increasing output to feed unsustainable rates of increasing growth, across the planet.

Something had to give. The mathematics of the whole big picture had come to rest on the assumption that already over-stressed basic resources could expand along with economic expansion. They could not. We may now be seeing just the beginning of this realignment of economic expectations, forced by circumstance.

As major resource scarcity spreads, with China losing ever more arable land to encroaching northwestern deserts and road building in the industrial east, as China’s exploding demand for petroleum, steel, copper, water, meat and grains, put pressure on world markets and pushes the cost of basic goods like food staples ever higher across the world, as the unsustainable demand for fuel moves the US corn belt to shift to cropping for ethanol —as much as 40% of world corn exports are from Iowa, which now devotes 18% of harvest to bio-ethanol—, we are experiencing the natural results of an economy that hinges on hyper-exploitation of resources. The correction, when fully upon us, may yet be far more severe than the 2008 credit-freeze crisis.

Hyper-exploitation is a doctrine: it underpins public policy, government spending, security policy and the philosophical arguments for and against deregulation and the trickle-down theory of economic growth as related to tax policy. It requires that we believe in unstated, unproven modes of natural replenishment; it is a proposition that all things can be tapped, moved, transformed and spent, infinitely, because somehow, the market will set all the right limits and excesses will never be so severe as to ignore the laws of nature.

It is, for this reason, dangerous, because it not only is a doctrine that requires us to use more of the vital resources we require than can be replaced at sustainable levels, it moves us deeper into the vice of living on borrowed time. The result is that we must periodically learn the lesson that borrowed time cannot be financed, that we must pay the full price when it comes due, and our unprecedented resource depletion will leave us, quite simply, without the level of supply required to sustain our standard of living.

Already, wealthy governments are moving to take over cropland in poor countries in order to shore up their own food supplies, as the food security crisis spreads throughout the world, affecting even the wealthiest economies. The fear is that this over-consumption now extending to land use in poor foreign states may lead to a wave of mass starvation throughout the developing world, sparking conflicts and threatening the integrity of the international system as such.

According to the Guardian’s Julian Borger:

“In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented,” Atkin said. “We’re used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much.”

At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.

India and Bangladesh are constantly disputing river water resources that both countries depend on for basic sustenance for tens of millions of people. Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are gripped by a struggle over control of the Nile’s water, with the river running dry at the Nile delta on the Mediterranean during some seasons. The Colorado River in the US has failed to reach the sea and is seeing its flow through the Grand Canyon significantly reduced, as states in the Colorado River Basin dispute claims on the river’s water.

Hyper-exploitation even extends to the use of natural resources like water as dumping grounds. The level of toxic chemicals and plastic polymer byproducts now found in ocean water the world over has reached alarming levels, threatening vast ecosystems and undermining the health of human beings and wildlife in most of the world. Drinking water across the US was found to be contaminated by high levels of pharmaceuticals earlier this year, raising the specter of as yet unknown potential harm to public health, over the long term.

High levels of contaminant emissions or toxic dumping are an abusive use of natural resources we often overlook —like air, land, water and forest cover— in our quest for combustible fuels, industrial-scale production and economies of scale we hope will reduce costs, even if they also increase the risk to our long-term economic and physical health and wellbeing. We are now facing a structural economic crisis, which requires us to reformulate and rebuild our economic model, at the most basic levels, a process which will be more or less painful, depending on how seriously we commit to getting it done and done right.

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Reforestation, Ecosystem Resilience & Paper Technologies

Filed Under: Building the Green Economy, Ecosystem Resilience, Quipu Economic Forum
by Joseph Robertson — 4 Comments
May 30, 2008

Reforestation is a necessary part of the process of any ecologically responsible development strategy. Forest cover is not only a potent natural resource feeding the overall resilience of an ecosystem, but the hydrological and soil-quality stability, along with the biodensity it can generate, mean it is now more clear than ever that natural levels of forest cover have a very high economic value over the long term.

Chinese government studies have revealed that the value —in ecosystem ‘services’— of a standing tree far outstrips the market value of a felled tree. Such revelations are leading to a wholesale reconsideration of what sort of land-use policies should be applied by governments to industries that —of necessity or otherwise— reduce a region’s overall forest cover.

Three of the main driving forces for deforestation, globally are: 1. fuel use in low-income, forested areas; 2. the paper industry —which has expanded vastly with the advent of desktop printing—; 3. clear-cutting for transfer of land to agricultural use. Each of these practices can be modified or reversed, depending on the region, with more precise economic metrics and more adroit economic policies.

Both the Philippines and Haiti have experienced radical levels of deforestation due to logging, in many cases unlicensed logging driven by foreign enterprise. In both cases, the trend has been rooted in the needs of those living in the deforested areas, seeking to take advantage of the income potential of illegal or questionable timber sourcing.

Both nations have seen natural disasters exacerbated by the high levels of deforestation. Lack of forest cover in upslope areas has destabilized soil and led to massive, deadly landslides when heavy rains, common in both countries during certain seasons, push entire mountain slopes down toward valleys previously protected by dense forest cover and corresponding root structures.

Advances in data-security and digital document storage have made it possible to reduce the regulatory paper-use burden of many businesses, who may be required to keep records, but who can now take advantage of such advanced document storage systems, approved by law. Further advances in the portability, flexibility, storage capacity, interconnectivity and retail cost of electronic paper devices, will likely spur a move away from print-to-paper as the default in-office document preparation method.

In the United States, both in the Pacific Northwest and in the rich New England timber industry, logging firms and paper producers have learned not only to take advantage of the cost-benefits of recycling, but also to view the long-term stability and regenerative capacity of forests as real economic assets that make their own long-term prospects more promising. Reforestation, through planting and forest-management policies, is the positive outcome of this shift in consciousness.

New England’s forests have been replaced and expanded over the last several decades, as part of a regional effort to ensure the natural resources not be depleted by industry or by irresponsible development. But the confluence of new technologies, political will, political intelligence, and industry collaboration, is necessary if we are to see a future in which global forest cover is not severely reduced and irrecoverable.

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Ecosystem Services-Based Farming in Ethiopia Increases Crop Yields & Empowers Women

Filed Under: Building the Green Economy, Ecosystem Resilience, Food Supply Security, Quipu Economic Forum, Water Scarcity, Zero-combustion paradigm
by admin — Leave a comment
April 21, 2008

FEATURE FROM SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT UPDATE, ISSUE 6, VOLUME 7, 2007

Fredrik Moberg/Jakob Lundberg, Albaeco :: The Tigray Project in northern Ethiopia sounds too good to be true. It is said to demonstrate how sustainable agriculture can lead to increased crop yields, raised water tables, improved soil fertility, increased incomes and empowering of women. The government has now adopted the project’s approach for combating land degradation and poverty in the whole country. SDU went there to check out if the project is as good as rumour has it.

Dr. Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, “The godfather of the Tigray Project” Photo: J. Lundberg

Tigray, with the state capital Mekelle town, is the Northernmost of Ethiopia’s federal states. Here something unique is said to have taken place, a project called The Tigray Project — an experiment in sustainable development and ecological land management.

It all started when some people in the region started to ask the question whether industrial agriculture could continue feeding the world for the coming 10,000 years and more.

This question emerged from a growing realisation that the green revolution might not have been so green after all. A large proportion of the world’s agricultural landscapes has become steadily degraded through the pressure of intensive, pesticide- and chemical fertiliser based monocultures that produce agricultural commodities and industrial livestock for global markets.

On the other hand, the question of whether organic agriculture can produce as much food as industrial agriculture is also legitimate. Visionary environmentalist Dr. Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, “the godfather of the Tigray Project”, says it can:

— Organic farming, I am sure, will feed the world. I am also sure that unless organic farming re-expands, the human component of the world will eventually shrink.

Interestingly, the Tigray project has taken place in the place where a “biblical famine” occurred only a generation ago. This is one of the poorest regions of the country with depressing figures for child mortality, education, access to healthcare and life expectancy. In the midst of all this a group of people in 1995, lead by Dr. Tewolde, started to design the unique project in order to improve the productivity of the land and rehabilitate the environments of poor farmers in marginal areas. For his work to promote sustainable agriculture, Dr. Tewolde has been awarded many prestigious prizes, like the United Nations’ Champion of the Earth Award and the Right Livelihood Award.

Eight positive outcomes reported from the Tigray Project

  1. Increased yields and productivity of crops
  2. Decreased vulnerability to droughts/pests
  3. Decreased dependence on fossil fuel input
  4. Raised water tables
  5. Improved soil fertility
  6. Rehabilitation of degraded land
  7. Increased incomes
  8. Empowerment of women

Promising for poor farmers

Today the project is run by the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD), the Bureau of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BoANR), the Mekelle University, the local communities and the local administration. As Tewolde himself expresses it, the project’s intention is to “bolster rather than shunt the natural cycles that improve the functioning of the ecosystem as a whole, including those parts of it that are not cultivated”.

This is because wild species in and around fields provide ecosystem services like pollination of crops, control of pests and cycling of water and nutrients.

When people ask Tewolde if this can really be done, he simply answers: “Previous farming communities have been doing it for thousands of years. With our increased knowledge, we should do better than they had done”.

The poor farmers in the project have obtained very promising results by applying a number of sustainable farming techniques, including composting, crop diversification and rainwater harvesting. Among the positive outcomes are increased yields, raised water tables and empowerment of women (see box).

These management changes would not have been possible without reviving the local community organisation, says Sue Edwards, the current Director of the ISD in the capital city Addis Ababa:


Mama Yuannisu with her fruit garden is one of the women who have benefited from the Project. Photo: J. Lundberg

— Removing small-holder farmers from the production system is not the way to go. If you are going to go organical small-holders are much more sophisticated than the large-scale systems.

Sue Edwards is a taxonomic botanist, teacher and science editor by profession, and one of the key stewards of the project today.

She often emphasises another key aspect to understand the success of the Tigray project: the role of women. The region has an unproportionally large number of women-headed families as a consequence of the many years of civil war. As women are traditionally not allowed to plough their own fields and have to wait for a male neighbour or relative to handle the plough oxen they often suffer from delayed sowing and shorter growing periods. The project has therefore worked to empower women and has in particular encouraged them to raise seedlings of long season crops (finger millet, sorghum, maize) to be planted out when the rains start, rather than sowing seeds in the field that require a longer growing season. This is also beneficial from another perspective: to meet the challenge of a steadily more unpredictable rainy season due to climate change.

Use of compost key aspect

The use of compost is, however, by many seen as the most crucial aspect behind the success of the project. The yields from compost have been shown to be comparable or higher than those from chemical fertilizers. The ISD staff have identified a number of other positive effects of using compost, including: increased biodiversity; reduced weed loads; decreased vulnerability to droughts; increased resistance to pest and lower costs for farmers than buying chemical fertilizers. Altogether, the Tigray Project clearly shows that organic farming can indeed give better yields than chemically based farming, even in a degraded mountainous environment.

More at:
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/end/ed04.htm
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/TTP.php

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Food Supply Restoration & Security: Africa

Filed Under: Crisis Policy Forum, Ecosystem Resilience, Food Supply Security, Human Health, Water Scarcity
by admin — Leave a comment
March 23, 2008


As part of the Crisis Policy Forum, the HotSpring collaborative innovation initiative is now planning an effort to tackle the problem of food supply management and chronic food and water scarcity in Africa. The lessons from this experiment in collaborative research will be applicable in many cases to other situations around the world, and we are open to spurring dialogue in those areas as outgrowths of this ongoing discussion.

Among the basic problems we now face, as a species, is the confluence of difficulties in providing reliable clean drinking water reserves, a viable and sustainable food web, by way of an integrated agricultural and distribution ecosystem, economic stability and cohesive political engagement within a defensible political framework.

Ethnic rivalries, resource-focused regional proxy wars, like the massive decade-long tragedy in DR Congo (in which as many as 14 states played a role), and political manipulations and their fallout, as we have seen in Kenya this winter, threaten to further undermine production and distribution systems.

Add to such conflicts the tens of millions of fatal cases of HIV infection, and we have a crisis of historic proportions where mass peril will drive political structures, borders and aspirations on an unprecedented scale. Small-scale logical enhancements to political and economic stability, democratization and integrated decentralization of administrative resources, are needed to reduce risk of mass starvation and heal mounting tensions.

Discussion is now open: please comment below. We would like to focus on practical solutions to:

  1. Problems related to infusing food supply with enough to feed all those in need;
  2. Environmental degradation: i.e. resilience services, ecological measures, ecosystem management;
  3. Land use deficiencies: how to improve;
  4. Animal and timber poaching;
  5. Economic corrosion and instability;
  6. Corruption and funding shortfalls;
  7. Cooperative measures for extending food supply to conflict-afflicted areas;
  8. Overcoming limits of transportation infrastructure;
  9. Contagious disease: treatment, education, socio-economic impact;
  10. Communications gaps: get relevant anecdotal and researched data to those who can use it.

The goal will be to actually craft calibrated solutions to the seemingly intractable problems related to food security across the diverse regions of the African continent. We hope to use collaborative research, and evolving online commentary to develop innovative practices, including funding options, which local stakeholders can implement in a variety of combinations.

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