Monthly Archives: March 2015

Meat boom propels China’s ecosystems into total collapse Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




China’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cost.

Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world.

This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK.

Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.

You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?

Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.

‘Green revolution’ technologies tip the balance to perdition

Throughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.

But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced.

Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish.

These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore.

These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future. The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.

What can be done?

National policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing. Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely.

The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.

All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies.

The problem is global

But there’s a larger-scale context to this problem that may affect us all. China’s grain production has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth. Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.

The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally. In 2012, China imported more than 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.

Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new. But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.

Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature – through the weekly shopping bill.

 

 

John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton.

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

The Conversation

 




390879

Indigenous Peoples destroyed for misguided ‘conservation’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Wildlife law enforcement almost always has a negative impact on tribal communities. It has a negative impact on their personal safety, their health, their culture, their privacy and their family life.

Above all it has a negative impact on their relationship with the land and on their ability to sustain themselves. Why is this? It’s because the wrong laws are being enforced by the wrong people – against the wrong people.

The laws are wrong because they usually fail to distinguish ‘wildlife crime’ from subsistence hunting, and tribal peoples are criminalised without just cause.

The laws are wrong because, even where they recognise subsistence rights, they often leave too much power in the hands of Government Ministers – who can and do use their power to overturn tribal rights when it suits them to do so.

The law is ‘enforced’ by the wrong people because it is enforced by wildlife scouts or ecoguards who administer justice as they see it, on the spot. There is no due process. Innocence or guilt does not come into it. The more militarised these forces become, the less accountable they are when they overstep the mark.

Indigenous Peoples bear the brunt

Tribal peoples are often at the sharp end of wildlife law enforcement, not because they themselves pose a serious threat to wildlife but because they are a soft option. They are far less able to defend themselves than the well-resourced and well-connected elite who manipulate them.

The results are entirely predictable. Communities do not respect laws which do not respect them. They do not co-operate with authorities which regard them with hostility and suspicion. If they are to be punished whatever they do, some believe they may just as well throw in their lot with the poachers.

The London Declaration does not address these issues. It refers in its Preamble to “the importance of reducing human-wildlife conflict and supporting community efforts to advance their rights”, but says nothing more about these rights.

A properly drawn Declaration would recognise three or four basic principles:

  1. The hunting rights of tribal communities should be fully respected, unless and until they are lawfully extinguished.
  2. The power of the State to manage wildlife does not equal state ownership, and does not of itself extinguish tribal rights
  3. This power may be exercised only to the extent that it is necessary to protect an overriding conservation interest.
  4. The power to ‘manage’ cannot be used to deprive a community of their means of subsistence, which is guaranteed by human rights law; or to coerce tribal peoples into changing their way of life against their will.

Botswana, Cameroon and India illustrate in different ways what happens when wildlife laws are ‘enforced’ in defiance of these principles.

Botswana – paramilitary force deployed against Bushmen

In Botswana, the law allows those who are “principally dependent” on hunting and gathering to apply for ‘special game licenses’. Regulations explicitly refer to “persons who can rightly lay claim to hunting rights in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).”

But no ‘special game licences’ have been issued for the CKGR since 2002, and since 2014 hunting has been banned almost everywhere in Botswana. The ban was renewed for another year only last month. It pays no heed at all to the rights or needs of the Bushmen of the CKGR.

The Minister of Wildlife drew up and signed the ban at his desk, in the exercise of his statutory powers. He did not have to explain his decision to the National Assembly or anyone else. There were no consultations. The Minister acted entirely off his own bat, in the untested belief that ‘illegal off take’ was or might be to blame for a decline in wildlife numbers.

Responsibility for the enforcement of the ban rests with a paramilitary force called the Special Support Group. Its members are heavily armed, and in the CKGR have camped close to Bushmen communities. The Bushmen have been made to feel that they are under constant surveillance. They report that they and their homes are searched at random, and that on occasion they have been beaten or threatened.

Hunting has become more difficult but persists, because the only alternative is starvation. The Bushmen no longer eat during the day, to reduce the risk of detection, and have had to abandon hunt related customs.

Many Bushmen who have a legal right to live in the Reserve are afraid to do so. They worry that if they hunt and are caught, they will be imprisoned or assaulted or both.

They are stranded in resettlement camps outside the Reserve, where alcoholism and HIV/Aids are widespread and there is little or no work. Their previous, largely self-sufficient existence has given way to a dependence on government handouts, and an inevitable decline in their sense of identity and self-worth.

There is no evidence that the Bushmen of the CKGR hunt in any systematic way for sale, or use guns or vehicles, or hunt endangered species, or that their hunting is unsustainable. In the name of conservation they have had to pay a price out of all proportion to any threat that their subsistence hunting might pose.

Cameroon – Baka forest people expelled from their forests

In Cameroon too, many Baka communities have been evicted from their traditional territories to make way for national parks. They are now forced to spend much of their time in roadside villages that skirt the park’s edge.

With minor exceptions they are forbidden to hunt or forage in the parks; and to ensure that they do not, are forbidden even to enter them. They are entitled to hunt elsewhere only if they use so-called ‘traditional’ methods.

Rather than reform the law to recognise the Baka’s dependence on the forest for their food, medicine and incomes, the Government has focussed on the war against poachers, and the Baka have inevitably been caught in the cross-fire.

‘Enforcement’ is left to ecoguards who are employed by the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, but who depend on WWF and other donors for their salaries and logistical support. No or virtually no Baka have been recruited to their ranks.

When they raid Baka villages – in so-called ‘punch operations’ in which huts are searched, property is seized and suspects may be beaten – they are often joined by a military unit called the BIR (the Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide).

The ecoguards act with total impunity. The Baka do not lodge complaints against them because they are not properly investigated. They have become alienated not only from the forces of law and order but from conservationists like WWF. Many Baka regard the two as indistinguishable.

They personal safety has not been the only casualty of wildlife law enforcement. The health of the Baka has also suffered, because they are no longer able to reach many of the medicinal and other forest plants on which they have traditionally depended. Mothers can no longer retreat into the forest for childbirth. All are at risk of the malaria, HIV/AIDS and other epidemics that affect the roadside villages.

Parents are no longer able to pass their forest skills and values on to their children. Since they cannot now barter meat and other forest produce to buy essentials, many Baka work for others on starvation wages. Some are ‘paid’ with fermented sugar cane, and alcoholism has become endemic.

India – ‘tiger reserves’ used to expel the tigers’ best protectors

In India, efforts to save the tiger from both poachers and habitat loss have seen a rapid expansion of tiger reserves. In the past few years the law has also come to recognise the forest rights of scheduled tribes, but where the two interests clash it is the community that comes off worst.

The law says that tribes people may only be removed from tiger reserves on certain conditions. One is that they are shown to cause “irreversible damage” to the tiger habitat and to “threaten their existence”, and another is that there is no “reasonable option of co-existence.”

These conditions are ignored. The authorities prefer to operate on the basis that tiger habitats may be more easily protected if tribal communities are removed, and this in itself is a sufficient reason to move them.

In order to avoid their statutory duties they offer the community a ‘rehabilitation package’. Usually the offer is refused, because the community has co-existed with tigers for generations and sees no reason it should not continue to do so.

But the authorities do not take ‘no’ for an answer, and eventually wear down the resistance of communities which have no one to speak on their behalf. The legal niceties are trumped by the supposed needs of tiger conservation.

The impact of this process could hardly be more ‘negative’. In one recent example, two tribal communities in the Similipal Tiger Reserve eventually ‘agreed’ a package which involved their removal to a camp outside the Reserve. There they have had to live under polythene sheets which leak when it rains and scorch in the sun.

Child malnutrition is rife. There is no proper immunisation programme and medical help is infrequent. Once again, alcohol abuse is common. Over the coming months, other communities still in the Reserve are like to experience a similar fate.

Whatever effect it may have on the IWT, the new emphasis on law enforcement will undoubtedly require more money, at least some of which will come from the conservation movement.

The conservationists could use the extended influence that this will give them to insist that tribal communities are protected against the worst excesses of the paramilitaries. Policing efforts to control the IWT will gain far more from a positive relationship with the ‘ears and eyes’ of the land than from the current abusive and alienating approach.

The introduction of simple grievance mechanisms would be an obvious first step. If ‘enforcement’ is to be the new creed, ought not the law to protect tribal peoples be enforced with at least as much vigour as the law to protect wildlife?

 

 

Gordon Bennett is a human rights barrister at New Square Chambers.

Dr Jo Woodman is Senior campaigner, Survival International.

Jumanda Gakelebone Gana is a representative of the First People of the Kalahari, Botswana.

Sankar Pani is an environmental lawyer, India.

Dr Jerome Lewis is Co-director, Extreme Citizen Science Research Group, University College London.

This lecture was presented by Gordon Bennett to the ‘Beyond Enforcement: Communities, governance, incentives and sustainable use in combating wildlife crime‘ conference, 26-28th February at Glenburn Lodge, Muldersdrift, South Africa.

The event was organised by IUCN CEESP / SSC Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group (SULi) / International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) / Austrian Ministry of Environment / ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED), University of Queensland / TRAFFIC – the wildlife trade monitoring network.

Music video: Live recording in the Cameroon rainforest by Martin Cradick of Baka Beyond: “Topé malangui bodé, ma’anjo ayé” – “give me one bottle, I’m thirsty.” More info at baka.gbine.com.

 




390899

Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




390917

Meat boom propels China’s ecosystems into total collapse Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




China’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cost.

Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world.

This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK.

Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.

You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?

Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.

‘Green revolution’ technologies tip the balance to perdition

Throughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.

But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced.

Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish.

These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore.

These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future. The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.

What can be done?

National policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing. Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely.

The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.

All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies.

The problem is global

But there’s a larger-scale context to this problem that may affect us all. China’s grain production has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth. Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.

The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally. In 2012, China imported more than 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.

Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new. But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.

Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature – through the weekly shopping bill.

 

 

John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton.

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

The Conversation

 




390879

Indigenous Peoples destroyed for misguided ‘conservation’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Wildlife law enforcement almost always has a negative impact on tribal communities. It has a negative impact on their personal safety, their health, their culture, their privacy and their family life.

Above all it has a negative impact on their relationship with the land and on their ability to sustain themselves. Why is this? It’s because the wrong laws are being enforced by the wrong people – against the wrong people.

The laws are wrong because they usually fail to distinguish ‘wildlife crime’ from subsistence hunting, and tribal peoples are criminalised without just cause.

The laws are wrong because, even where they recognise subsistence rights, they often leave too much power in the hands of Government Ministers – who can and do use their power to overturn tribal rights when it suits them to do so.

The law is ‘enforced’ by the wrong people because it is enforced by wildlife scouts or ecoguards who administer justice as they see it, on the spot. There is no due process. Innocence or guilt does not come into it. The more militarised these forces become, the less accountable they are when they overstep the mark.

Indigenous Peoples bear the brunt

Tribal peoples are often at the sharp end of wildlife law enforcement, not because they themselves pose a serious threat to wildlife but because they are a soft option. They are far less able to defend themselves than the well-resourced and well-connected elite who manipulate them.

The results are entirely predictable. Communities do not respect laws which do not respect them. They do not co-operate with authorities which regard them with hostility and suspicion. If they are to be punished whatever they do, some believe they may just as well throw in their lot with the poachers.

The London Declaration does not address these issues. It refers in its Preamble to “the importance of reducing human-wildlife conflict and supporting community efforts to advance their rights”, but says nothing more about these rights.

A properly drawn Declaration would recognise three or four basic principles:

  1. The hunting rights of tribal communities should be fully respected, unless and until they are lawfully extinguished.
  2. The power of the State to manage wildlife does not equal state ownership, and does not of itself extinguish tribal rights
  3. This power may be exercised only to the extent that it is necessary to protect an overriding conservation interest.
  4. The power to ‘manage’ cannot be used to deprive a community of their means of subsistence, which is guaranteed by human rights law; or to coerce tribal peoples into changing their way of life against their will.

Botswana, Cameroon and India illustrate in different ways what happens when wildlife laws are ‘enforced’ in defiance of these principles.

Botswana – paramilitary force deployed against Bushmen

In Botswana, the law allows those who are “principally dependent” on hunting and gathering to apply for ‘special game licenses’. Regulations explicitly refer to “persons who can rightly lay claim to hunting rights in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).”

But no ‘special game licences’ have been issued for the CKGR since 2002, and since 2014 hunting has been banned almost everywhere in Botswana. The ban was renewed for another year only last month. It pays no heed at all to the rights or needs of the Bushmen of the CKGR.

The Minister of Wildlife drew up and signed the ban at his desk, in the exercise of his statutory powers. He did not have to explain his decision to the National Assembly or anyone else. There were no consultations. The Minister acted entirely off his own bat, in the untested belief that ‘illegal off take’ was or might be to blame for a decline in wildlife numbers.

Responsibility for the enforcement of the ban rests with a paramilitary force called the Special Support Group. Its members are heavily armed, and in the CKGR have camped close to Bushmen communities. The Bushmen have been made to feel that they are under constant surveillance. They report that they and their homes are searched at random, and that on occasion they have been beaten or threatened.

Hunting has become more difficult but persists, because the only alternative is starvation. The Bushmen no longer eat during the day, to reduce the risk of detection, and have had to abandon hunt related customs.

Many Bushmen who have a legal right to live in the Reserve are afraid to do so. They worry that if they hunt and are caught, they will be imprisoned or assaulted or both.

They are stranded in resettlement camps outside the Reserve, where alcoholism and HIV/Aids are widespread and there is little or no work. Their previous, largely self-sufficient existence has given way to a dependence on government handouts, and an inevitable decline in their sense of identity and self-worth.

There is no evidence that the Bushmen of the CKGR hunt in any systematic way for sale, or use guns or vehicles, or hunt endangered species, or that their hunting is unsustainable. In the name of conservation they have had to pay a price out of all proportion to any threat that their subsistence hunting might pose.

Cameroon – Baka forest people expelled from their forests

In Cameroon too, many Baka communities have been evicted from their traditional territories to make way for national parks. They are now forced to spend much of their time in roadside villages that skirt the park’s edge.

With minor exceptions they are forbidden to hunt or forage in the parks; and to ensure that they do not, are forbidden even to enter them. They are entitled to hunt elsewhere only if they use so-called ‘traditional’ methods.

Rather than reform the law to recognise the Baka’s dependence on the forest for their food, medicine and incomes, the Government has focussed on the war against poachers, and the Baka have inevitably been caught in the cross-fire.

‘Enforcement’ is left to ecoguards who are employed by the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, but who depend on WWF and other donors for their salaries and logistical support. No or virtually no Baka have been recruited to their ranks.

When they raid Baka villages – in so-called ‘punch operations’ in which huts are searched, property is seized and suspects may be beaten – they are often joined by a military unit called the BIR (the Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide).

The ecoguards act with total impunity. The Baka do not lodge complaints against them because they are not properly investigated. They have become alienated not only from the forces of law and order but from conservationists like WWF. Many Baka regard the two as indistinguishable.

They personal safety has not been the only casualty of wildlife law enforcement. The health of the Baka has also suffered, because they are no longer able to reach many of the medicinal and other forest plants on which they have traditionally depended. Mothers can no longer retreat into the forest for childbirth. All are at risk of the malaria, HIV/AIDS and other epidemics that affect the roadside villages.

Parents are no longer able to pass their forest skills and values on to their children. Since they cannot now barter meat and other forest produce to buy essentials, many Baka work for others on starvation wages. Some are ‘paid’ with fermented sugar cane, and alcoholism has become endemic.

India – ‘tiger reserves’ used to expel the tigers’ best protectors

In India, efforts to save the tiger from both poachers and habitat loss have seen a rapid expansion of tiger reserves. In the past few years the law has also come to recognise the forest rights of scheduled tribes, but where the two interests clash it is the community that comes off worst.

The law says that tribes people may only be removed from tiger reserves on certain conditions. One is that they are shown to cause “irreversible damage” to the tiger habitat and to “threaten their existence”, and another is that there is no “reasonable option of co-existence.”

These conditions are ignored. The authorities prefer to operate on the basis that tiger habitats may be more easily protected if tribal communities are removed, and this in itself is a sufficient reason to move them.

In order to avoid their statutory duties they offer the community a ‘rehabilitation package’. Usually the offer is refused, because the community has co-existed with tigers for generations and sees no reason it should not continue to do so.

But the authorities do not take ‘no’ for an answer, and eventually wear down the resistance of communities which have no one to speak on their behalf. The legal niceties are trumped by the supposed needs of tiger conservation.

The impact of this process could hardly be more ‘negative’. In one recent example, two tribal communities in the Similipal Tiger Reserve eventually ‘agreed’ a package which involved their removal to a camp outside the Reserve. There they have had to live under polythene sheets which leak when it rains and scorch in the sun.

Child malnutrition is rife. There is no proper immunisation programme and medical help is infrequent. Once again, alcohol abuse is common. Over the coming months, other communities still in the Reserve are like to experience a similar fate.

Whatever effect it may have on the IWT, the new emphasis on law enforcement will undoubtedly require more money, at least some of which will come from the conservation movement.

The conservationists could use the extended influence that this will give them to insist that tribal communities are protected against the worst excesses of the paramilitaries. Policing efforts to control the IWT will gain far more from a positive relationship with the ‘ears and eyes’ of the land than from the current abusive and alienating approach.

The introduction of simple grievance mechanisms would be an obvious first step. If ‘enforcement’ is to be the new creed, ought not the law to protect tribal peoples be enforced with at least as much vigour as the law to protect wildlife?

 

 

Gordon Bennett is a human rights barrister at New Square Chambers.

Dr Jo Woodman is Senior campaigner, Survival International.

Jumanda Gakelebone Gana is a representative of the First People of the Kalahari, Botswana.

Sankar Pani is an environmental lawyer, India.

Dr Jerome Lewis is Co-director, Extreme Citizen Science Research Group, University College London.

This lecture was presented by Gordon Bennett to the ‘Beyond Enforcement: Communities, governance, incentives and sustainable use in combating wildlife crime‘ conference, 26-28th February at Glenburn Lodge, Muldersdrift, South Africa.

The event was organised by IUCN CEESP / SSC Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group (SULi) / International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) / Austrian Ministry of Environment / ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED), University of Queensland / TRAFFIC – the wildlife trade monitoring network.

Music video: Live recording in the Cameroon rainforest by Martin Cradick of Baka Beyond: “Topé malangui bodé, ma’anjo ayé” – “give me one bottle, I’m thirsty.” More info at baka.gbine.com.

 




390899

Meat boom propels China’s ecosystems into total collapse Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




China’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cost.

Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world.

This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK.

Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.

You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?

Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.

‘Green revolution’ technologies tip the balance to perdition

Throughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.

But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced.

Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish.

These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore.

These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future. The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.

What can be done?

National policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing. Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely.

The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.

All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies.

The problem is global

But there’s a larger-scale context to this problem that may affect us all. China’s grain production has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth. Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.

The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally. In 2012, China imported more than 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.

Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new. But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.

Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature – through the weekly shopping bill.

 

 

John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton.

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

The Conversation

 




390879

No-dig farming to sustain nutrition in soils, crops, and us Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Ever heard of the Good Gardeners’ Association? It’s a small charity formed in 1966 to promote no-dig, plenty of compost method of growing food – and for over 10 years (2000 – 2011) I used to run it.

Instead of practising conventional ploughing or digging, turning soil upside down on its head each year, it’s all about leaving the soil well alone.

Yes – it’s possible to grow the same things you already do, by leaving the soil undisturbed. Amazing!

One of the perceived benefits of growing food using the no-dig method is that it will be more nutritious. In 2003 I began to investigate how different methods of soil cultivation affect the transfer of essential nutrients, known to effect human health, from soil to crop.

I found partners who shared a similar interest to help. Together we set up GREEN (Gardens for Research Education and Nutrition) as a collaboration between three national charities based in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Eight years of soil and nutrition data on 23 nutrients

At the heart of this project is a theory that we should respect the integrity of the soil and the complex microbial communities they embody: soil is ‘alive’ and has evolved over billions of years of our planet’s existence to maintain and enrich the nutrient cycles of the ecosystems it supports.

As such, the theory goes, minimal soil disturbance is key to the increase and balance of essential nutrients from soil to crop. To investigate this idea we grew the same food in an organically certified garden, but under three different methods of cultivation.

Each method represents different levels of soil disturbance: no-dig, single-dig and the most extreme ‘double-dig’. To understand the effect of soil disturbance we measured the microbial life in the soil each year and tracked 23 naturally occurring minerals known to effect health, in the soil and in the crop. Samples were sent to professional laboratories and Universities for testing.

We went on to gather eight years of soil and crop data. And the tragedy is, that data is about all that’s left. I no longer work for the charity; the garden project came to an end in 2014; and the charity itself is in the process of closing itself down due to a lack of resources to pursue its work.

But that data – which I still have today – could just be incredibly valuable at this time when the food we eat is increasingly sparse in mineral and other nutrients essential for our health.

So I decided that instead of letting this work die in a filing cabinet I will use crowdfunding to raise money. I can then afford to pay myself to: analyse and write up what was found; get it out into the public domain for feedback comments; talk about the wider context of what this work could mean; and – depending on the findings – go on to promote the nutritional benefits of ‘no dig’ cultivation!

Soil – a rich and complex symbiosis that nourishes us

Life in the soil is a story of symbiosis – a brilliant example of cooperation in nature. Microbes such as bacteria and fungi are the experts at sourcing nutrients from the soil, rocks air and water – for example, nitrogen, copper, zinc, magnesium, calcium and selenium – and passing these on to plants in a form they can use. In return plants produce and supply food for the microbes (carbohydrate). Everything involved benefits.

“A loss of trace elements have been linked to obesity, insulin resistance, heart disease and mental illness” according to nutritionist David Thomas. In 2003 he wrote a report, using government data from 1940 to 1991, which suggests we have lost over 40% of key minerals from the food we eat.

More reports along this line are beginning to gather. Dr Julia Wright recently wrote an article for The Ecologist suggesting it could be as much as an 80% loss of vitamin and mineral content.

Ironically, she goes on to say, we can now produce enough protein and carbohydrate to feed 14 billion people but despite this global malnutrition continues to increase. In other words the foods we eat are no longer providing proper nourishment.

I am delighted that this year 2015 has been designated by the UN as the International Year of Soils. Twelve years ago, when I started the project, I had no idea this would happen. It seems an opportunity to good to miss that I am now at a point where I could contribute with this work.

How I got here

I came to run the Good Gardeners’ Association after completing a degree in ‘Environmental Quality and Resource Management’ at the University of the West of England. I was asked to take on this charity and decided to accept as my way of engaging with the world as an Environmental Manager. Parts of my degree included a module on ecology and another on environmental politics and philosophy – both of which I loved.

I’m intrigued by a fundamental question that environmental philosophers talk about. The way we think / understand how the world works, which deeply influences what we do and how we live, can be classed in two ways: either we believe we are a part of nature; or we believe we stand outside of nature.

The practical outcome of these two philosophies is as follows. If we believe we are a part of nature, then we must logically believe that to harm nature is to harm ourselves. On the other hand if we stand outside of nature, then it’s okay to control it, dominate it, destroy it, and subdue it to our will.

In the short term controlling nature has given us the ‘green revolution’, increased security by having more food, extended life and a whole host of other great things that are frankly pretty damn good. But we are beginning to pay dearly.

Climate change, degradation of soils, pollution of rivers and sea, the loss of wildlife habitats can be seen as the consequence of our collective actions. Related to this there appears to be a rise in chronic degenerative disease. Physical and mental health is deteriorating which is reducing the quality of our newly extended life span.

The majority view at present – at least in the powerful industrialised countries – is that we stand outside of nature. But my belief is that we need radically shift our consciousness and  recognise our own symbiosis with the wider natural world. As the leading organic farmer John Seymour once said:

“For all our technology, we humans are as much creatures of the soil as earthworms – and we can no more live without it than they can. Our survival depends entirely on the top few inches of the earth we walk on – and we forget that at the peril of our own extinction!”

My hope is that by pursuing my analysis into the eight years of data from the GREEN experiment, I may be able to bring that understanding to more people, and show how we can build a richer and healthier relationship with the earth that feeds and sustains us all.

 

 

Support: If you would like to support and learn with me please visit my crowdfunding page where you can make a donation! Thank you.

Closing date: tomorrow Wednesday 4th March, 11.00am.

Matt Adams is developing a small craft cider making business. A former Chief Executive of the Good Gardeners’ Association, he has a B.Sc. in Environmental Quality and Resource Management as well as practical skills and a background in mechanical engineering, and a long held interest in Deep Ecology.

Editor’s note: The trustees of the GGA, in support of Matt’s efforts, have voted to grant him any residual sum that remains in the charity’s account following the charity’s winding up.

 

 




390875

Meat boom propels China’s ecosystems into total collapse Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




China’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cost.

Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world.

This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK.

Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.

You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?

Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.

‘Green revolution’ technologies tip the balance to perdition

Throughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.

But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced.

Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish.

These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore.

These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future. The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.

What can be done?

National policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing. Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely.

The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.

All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies.

The problem is global

But there’s a larger-scale context to this problem that may affect us all. China’s grain production has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth. Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.

The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally. In 2012, China imported more than 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.

Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new. But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.

Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature – through the weekly shopping bill.

 

 

John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton.

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

The Conversation

 




390879

Meat boom propels China’s ecosystems into total collapse Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




China’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cost.

Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world.

This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK.

Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.

You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?

Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.

‘Green revolution’ technologies tip the balance to perdition

Throughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.

But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced.

Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish.

These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore.

These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future. The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.

What can be done?

National policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing. Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely.

The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.

All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies.

The problem is global

But there’s a larger-scale context to this problem that may affect us all. China’s grain production has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth. Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.

The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally. In 2012, China imported more than 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.

Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new. But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.

Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature – through the weekly shopping bill.

 

 

John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton.

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

The Conversation

 




390879

Without its rainforest, the Amazon will turn to desert Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




Imagine being in one of the wettest rainforests in the world with three outstanding physicists concerned with the thorny question as to how is it conceivably possible for the rainfall to be as high, if not higher, thousands of kilometres inland than it is at the coast.

Indeed, Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon, on the border with Brazil and Peru, some 4 degrees south of the equator and 3,000 kilometres inland from the Brazilian equatorial coastline, gets more rain during the course of the year than the island of Fernando Noronha stuck out in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean and right in the path of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and the Atlantic Trade Winds.

How can that possibly be when the coast has been left far behind and rainfall, in the progression of the air mass from East to West, is constantly depleting the air of moisture, such that there should be an exponential decline of air moisture as one traverses inland? On that count, Leticia should be more a desert than a place of luxuriant biodiverse forest.

Well, I was lucky to have the answer straight from the very scientists who, as theoretical physicists, had conjured up an intuitively sound and logical explanation, however much it went against the grain of the thinking behind the generation of the best known climate models.

Finally – a theory that holds water

Indeed, I was with Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva, both from the Institute of Nuclear Physics in St Petersburg, and with Germán Poveda of the Medellín campus of the National University of Colombia.

We were scrambling our way over the intertwining foot-holding roots of the Chocó rainforest, straddled along Colombia’s Pacific coastline, in pursuit of those exquisitely-coloured poison arrow frogs which get their name from the blowpipe darts used by the Embera-Katío Indians of the region.

We weren’t there to capture the frogs, just to see them in their glory, intense spots of colour against the drab brownish colouration of the humus bedded on the forest floor or perched conspicuously on the dark bark of a tree.

And, after some four hours of energetic clambering up and sliding down the slithery slopes on which the forest is rooted, we did indeed come across half a dozen or so of the tiny creatures. Seeing the frogs there in full display and with no attempt to hide made us realize that we were in a healthy rainforest.

The frogs get the precursors to their deadly heart-stopping poison from insects which themselves have fed on toxic leaves and, for the frogs to have their chemical protection from predators, the forest has to have its biodiversity intact.

No question, the Colombian Chocó with its plethora of species is one of the most terrestrial biodiverse regions in the world and how beautifully it is situated with the Pacific Ocean just a stone’s throw away.

We were there, without electricity, without internet, without a host of tourists; we were in a sanctuary which gave us peaceful hours to reflect, to observe and to feel the omnipresence of the natural world.

Germán Poveda, a member of the IPCC and full professor in the Geosciences Faculty of the Universidad Nacional, had invited the two Russians to Medellín to give a three-day course on their biotic pump theory.

He also presented some of the latest evidence that the theory not only holds water but provides a better explanation than any other in accounting for climate processes involving convection by which air flows upwards, against gravity, and so sucks in air flowing over the surface to replace it (see Figure 1, above right).

It is hydrology that drives circulation!

In essence, Gorshkov and Makarieva claim both from their theory and from world-wide observations that the condensation of water vapour at cloud-forming altitudes brings about a sharp reduction in local atmospheric pressure such as to generate an implosion of sufficient strength as to suck up air from the surface.

That upwards-directed flow necessarily leads to air moving horizontally over the surface to fill the partial vacuum, and hence the idea that the trade winds, skimming over the surface of the Atlantic Ocean on their way from Africa to equatorial South America, are sucked in as a result of cloud formation over the Amazon’s rainforests.

Above, where the clouds form, the easterly jet stream, associated with the Earth’s spin Coriolis Force, adds its own suction to the process, such that the implosion of air as the water vapour condenses in cloud-forming can better suck upwards rather than downwards so generating the convection which we so readily see from satellite imagery.

That process, according to the biotic pump theory, explains large-scale convection. And even if heresy to say it, the theory dictates that it is not – as described in climatological models such as the GCMs, the General Circulation Models – the mass circulation of air which drives the hydrological cycle, but the hydrological cycle which drives the mass circulation of air.

If we accept the theory, the great tropical Hadley Cell Air Mass Circulation is therefore driven by the processes of convection which take place over the 6 million square kilometre Amazon Basin, the ‘fuel’ for that convection being contingent on the high rate of water vapour pumping from the closed-canopy vegetation.

Without the forest doing its work, we would have the Amazon Desert

And, were the forest to disappear, then according to the theory, moisture would no longer be sucked in and, given the natural fall-out rate of rainfall, some 600 kilometres from evaporation to precipitation, the land would dry out and in all likelihood turn to desert.

Were that the case it would be a disaster of momentous proportions, not just dwarfing the likely changes resulting from global warming but indeed compounding them.

As it happens, during the past 30 years of growing concern over the consequences of human-induced climate change, we have tended to ignore the hydrological role of rainforests and instead have focussed on the potential release of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane into the lower atmosphere when a forest is razed and burnt.

Certainly, when deforestation was at its worst during the latter part of the 20th century as much as one quarter or more of the total of greenhouse gases released from all human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels, came from forest destruction across the tropical belt, from the Americas, across to Africa and on to South-East Asia.

We cannot deny that an increase in greenhouse gases must lead to more solar radiation in the form of heat being trapped at the Earth’s surface where the density of gases is highest.

But while deforestation has always been of considerable concern, not least among biologists and ecologists, climatologists have been adamant that the surface winds will keep blowing with the same general patterns prior to any deforestation and that rain will still get deposited in the deep interior of continents such as South America or Africa, especially along the equatorial tropics.

Not quite ‘business-as-usual’, but the contention is that equatorial countries, such as Colombia, to the West of the Amazon Basin, will still get a substantial part of their rains derived from the tropical Atlantic Ocean, some 3,000 kilometres away, courtesy of the Trade Winds and the Walker Circulation which blows along the seasonally moving equator in what is known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ICTZ).

A reassuring prediction – no great change

That somewhat reassuring conclusion is predicted as a result of various theoretical studies, including those from the UK’s prestigious Hadley Centre, which state that the consequences of widespread deforestation of the Amazon Basin, in all some six million square kilometres, combined with human-induced climate change, could cause a reduction in rainfall of around 12% to 15% in the Central and Western reaches of the Amazon.

No-one doubts that the recycling of precipitated water through vegetative evapo-transpiration will reduce significantly, by a half or more, when the forest has gone, yet, the general belief is that the surface prevailing winds, as exemplified by the Trade Winds and Walker Circulation, would continue to blow and carry the ocean-derived moisture with them.

Under such circumstances the rainforest would transform to savannah, much like that naturally found in Brazil’s Mato Grosso, but not to the extent of becoming desert. For the great majority of climatologists, such an extreme consequence of deforestation is unthinkable, for the very fact that it does not fit their models.

But those models do not include the biotic pump theory of convection and therefore could possibly be dangerously deficient in their analytical predictions of the impacts both of global warming and in particular of deforestation.

Not that the accepted circulation models predict a benign consequence of Amazon deforestation: even a 15% reduction in rainfall constitutes a staggering amount, much more in fact, than would be needed to water the entire British Isles many times over.

But what if the hydrologists and climatologists are wrong?

What if the loss of rainforest were to have a devastating impact on the flow of surface winds such that they would no longer blow across the continental interior? What would happen to the rains then?

The biotic pump theory, based on standard physics, purports to show that surface winds are sucked in from regions where the condensation of atmospheric water vapour is relatively low to those regions where it is substantially higher.

The inference is that heavy cloud formation is more likely to occur over regions where water vapour generation is high, such as exemplified, par excellence, by the tropical rainforest which, through evapotranspiration from its leaves, pumps up more than double the quantity of water vapour per surface area when compared to the same latitude ocean.

On that basis, the high rate of condensation at cloud level, from some 2.5 kilometres altitude to 5 kilometres, brings about a sharp, well defined pressure change as the water vapour transforms into liquid water and ice.

The very notion that the surface convection of humid air is largely the result of the pressure change resulting from condensation is not one to be readily countenanced by hydrologists and consequently climatologists.

For them, it would mean they had left an important mechanism out of their models. Moreover they insist that, even though theoretically the pressure change is a reality, it would be substantially secondary in its effect on the lower atmosphere to the release of heat – latent heat – when water vapour changes from being a gas to become liquid or even solid.

Certainly the latent heat release, some 600 calories per gram of water vapour when it transforms to liquid and 80 calories more per gram when ice is formed, makes the air lighter and less dense where that transformation occurs.

That less dense, slightly warmer air will rise and thereby slow the temperature reduction caused by the chilling of air as it expands (the environmental lapse rate) and will push cloud formation and water vapour condensation higher.

Hydrologists and meteorologists also take it as read that, following any perturbance including condensation and latent heat release, the lower atmosphere will settle into a state of hydrostatic equilibrium.

In short, the vast majority of such scientists – I suspect many without properly studying the physics – repudiate what has become known as the ‘biotic pump theory’ and more or less assign it to the rubbish heap of conceptually flawed theories.

Without the Amazon forest, Leticia would be as dry as the Negev

However, Gorshkov and Makarieva have stuck to their guns, invoking fundamental physics as related to gases in the lower atmosphere and making reference to the differences between intra-continental rainfall when a river basin is well-forested compared to those with negligible forest cover.

Firstly they point out that the lower atmosphere cannot be in hydrostatic equilibrium when the surface atmosphere contains sufficient water vapour for condensation to occur, that being a destabilising process given the composition and pressure change as water vapour in its ascending reaches saturation at the dew point.

Secondly, they show that when forests are absent rainfall levels decline exponentially as one proceeds from the coast into the continental interior. That is in sharp contrast to intra-continental regions where forests cover the land, even as much as 3,000 kilometres from the ocean; there rainfall levels remain as high, if not higher than measured at the coast.

Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon is a case in point: it is some 2,500 kilometres from the coast and the prevailing winds and yet its annual rainfall is higher at 2,500 mm than that at Belem, near the Brazilian coast.

In taking that idea to its logical conclusion, Makarieva and Gorshkov refer to the dire consequences of widespread deforestation inland of the coast. If Colombia’s neighbouring country, Brazil, were to deforest the swathe of native trees and vegetation all the way back to the Atlantic, Leticia would receive annually some 20 mm of rain, no more than can be expected in the Negev Desert in Israel (see Figure 2, above right).

That contention, disturbingly extreme, goes hard against the grain of climate model predictions. Not surprisingly, the rejection of the biotic pump theory has become a matter of creed, the claim being that it does not fit the facts and is based on a faulty interpretation of atmospheric dynamics.

The biotic pump is pulling the trade winds backwards over Colombia

So, what evidence do we have in the real world that the biotic pump theory is not just a misguided application of standard physics relating to gases, but better represents actual phenomena?

One telling example relates to the wettest equatorial rainforest in the world – the Chocó rainforest along Colombia’s Pacific Coast. The puzzle is: how can the Chocó get as much as 12 metres of rain a year when the prevailing winds, therefore the Pacific Trade Winds, essentially move in the opposite direction, away from South America and towards Indonesia?

Our host and companion in our Chocó adventure, Germán Poveda, points to an extraordinary phenomenon: a portion of the Pacific Trade Winds, from both hemispheres, suddenly reverses direction and flows back over the Chocó to the Magdalena Valley in the central part of Colombia, where it clashes with the flow of air from the Amazon Basin that has passed over the Eastern Andes.

Colombia’s rainfall patterns and turbulent weather in that region are determined by that encounter between the two streams of air.

Poveda, recognised internationally for his contribution to hydrology, has few doubts that the sudden, sharp reversal of the streams of air over the Pacific Ocean is primarily a consequence of the biotic pump in action with the rainforest pumping more water vapour into the surface atmosphere than anywhere else.

According to theory, that evapo-transpired water vapour provides the fuel for cloud formation and in consequence the sharp pressure change which follows the condensation of water vapour. It is that condensation which sucks back a portion of the westerly Trade Winds.

Nonetheless, the actual physical proof that condensation leads to surface airflow needs to be shown: that the physics underlying the biotic pump theory is not just correct, but that it is the force majeure driving atmospheric processes over contiguous rainforests, such as in the Chocó, the Congo, the Amazon Basin and seasonally, once temperatures rise and the sun shines, over the great boreal forests of Russia and the far North.

The solution: laboratory experiment

To seek answers and in the face of much scepticism, I therefore devised a way to experiment. The results show that the general physics used by Makarieva and Gorshkov to underpin the biotic pump theory is absolutely correct and that, in general terms, a corresponding surface airflow is induced when a sufficiently high rate of condensation is achieved.

The experimental set-up consists of two 5 metre high columns connected at the top and base such as to form a doughnut-like structure. The central ‘hole’ is used as a laboratory. The area throughout is 1 metre squared (see Figure 3, above right).

A double layer of copper condensing coils have been wound around the perimeter of the right hand column, just below the connection with the upper connecting ‘tunnel’. The ‘condensing coils’ cover a surface area of some 1.6 square metres and are connected to an ‘outside industrial refrigeration compressor with its own operating switch in the laboratory, some 4 metres away from the columns.

The airflow data is obtained using a 2-D ultrasonic Gill anemometer, placed in the top connecting tunnel where it meets the right column. The anemometer is 25 cm away from the top of the condensing coils.

In addition, three rotronics humidity sensors are deployed, one within 5 cm from the top condensing coil; one 1 metre from the base of the right hand column and the third, 1 metre from the base of the left hand column.

Two barometric sensors are used, one close to the top of the condensing coils and the other 1 metre from the base of the left-hand column. Thermocouples are deployed at various strategic points in both columns and the connecting tunnels. The sensors are either connected directed via USB ports (with serial / USB connector cables when necessary) and through using a Novus (Brazil) data logger.

The physics used to determine the results are standard. From the temperature (Kelvin), barometric pressure and relative humidity we can employ the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to determine the partial pressure of water vapour in the enclosed atmosphere at any moment during the experimental process.

Hence, knowing that water boils at 373 K when the atmospheric pressure is 1013.25 hPa (hectopascals and millibars) and, knowing the relative humidity and the temperature at any one moment from the logged sensor data, we can determine the partial pressure of water vapour (in hectopascals) as it changes at the point of condensation during the course of an experiment.

We can then relate our findings and compare them, at least in the form they take, with the measurements of airflow as determined by the anemometer.

It must be emphasised that the anemometer measurements, which include the directionality as well as velocity of airflow, are totally independent of the measurements of temperature, relative humidity and barometric pressure which together provide the necessary data to calculate the partial pressure of water vapour and the changes undergone.

The theoretical velocity of air at any one moment can be obtained from the partial pressure and air density changes, using Newton’s kinetic energy equation.

Experimental results: the biotic pump is confirmed

The results are unequivocal: the calculations of partial pressure change and of airflow velocity match extraordinarily well the actual airflow as measured with the anemometer. Moreover, the directionality once condensation gets under way is always in a clockwise direction.

Critics of the conclusion that it is the rate of condensation of the water vapour which drives the airflow circulation during any one experiment follow the inherent belief that the airflow is actually driven by changes in air density.

Their reasoning goes that the cooling of the air when passing over the cooling coils makes the air more dense, which it undoubtedly does, and that the cool, denser air sinks and so forces the clockwise flow that we see measured by the anemometer.

Fortunately, straightforward basic physics enables the experimenter to calculate not just the partial pressure change at the point of cooling, but also the air density change at that point in comparison to the air density further down the column.

What we find is that the kinetic energy of the partial pressure change as water vapour condenses is at least 3,000 times greater for the same volume of air compared to the kinetic energy from the air become cooler and denser (see Figure 4, above right).

Without exception, all the experiments, with different initial temperatures and humidity, show that the airflow results practically 100% from the condensing of water vapour and minimally from the air density change.

Those results, currently from some hundred different experiments, indicate that the biotic pump theory has to be correct. Those concerned with scaling issues must realise that the macro physics involved in the experimental set-up is precisely the same as needs to be employed in the grander scale of the lower atmosphere.

Finally, at the end of each experiment we can gather the rain which falls from the condenser coils, as they warm, and compare the amount with that calculated theoretically from the total change in the partial pressure of water vapour.

The actual and theoretical coincide within a few grams: a nice proof that the physical theory behind the biotic pump theory accords well with reality (see Figure 5, above right).

In effect, a high rate of condensation of water vapour in the enclosed atmosphere of the experiment results in a process of convection which is surely comparable, although on a vastly different scale, to the mechanism which sucks in the surface air from over the ocean as a consequence of the high rate of evapotranspiration from the rainforest.

Coincidentally, the rate of condensation achieved in the experimental set up is of the same order of magnitude per unit area as that calculated to occur over the Amazon Basin – hence some 20 hectopascals drop in water vapour pressure.

I would suggest that scale is not an issue and what we obtain in the laboratory reflects reasonably well what we can expect in the lower atmosphere when there is a good covering of closed-canopy vegetation to pump up water vapour through its evapotranspiration.

Large scale deforestation is a global catastrophe in the making

The striking conclusion is that a simple experimental set-up has given us the proof that the general physics underlying the biotic pump theory of Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov is essentially correct.

As such we can confirm that the consequences of wholescale deforestation, by whatever means, are likely to be far more severe in terms of intra-continental rain patterns than are currently predicted in climate models.

The hydrological consequences of deforestation are therefore far more important than greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the same deforestation.

Climate modellers, who, to date have studiously ignored the biotic pump theory when forming their complex circulation models, should indeed be worried that they have got the fundamentals wrong and that it is hydrology which drives the major air mass circulation rather than the other way round.

We destroy the world’s rainforests at our peril for it is those very ecosystems which give us climate stability and enable our civilizations to flourish.

I have offered to host any physicist, including climatologists, who would like to use my experimental set-up to see for themselves the biotic pump principle in action.

As of now no-one has taken up my offer, not even from the nearby Met Office. I am waiting.

 

 

Also on The Ecologist:


Peter Bunyard is a founding editor of The Ecologist and has since continued to write for it and more recently for Resurgence & Ecologist. He has written books on Nuclear Power and on Climate Change. One such book, ‘Climate Chaos’ was published in Spanish in Colombia in 2011. Recently, the University of Sergio Arboleda in Bogotá, Colombia, where he is currently carrying out research for the Institute of Environmental Studies and Services, has published in English his treatise on the Biotic Pump. He is giving a course this month at the University of the North in Baranquilla, Colombia on ‘Climate Change and the Hydrological Cycle’. He is married and lives in Cornwall with his wife, Jimena, daughter and step-daughter.

 




390854