Most people know the story:  In 1973-1974, during the Arab Oil embargo, the Saudi Kingdom began subsidizing wheat production to protect themselves against a reverse boycott by western wheat producers for food security.  Growing wheat in the middle east isn’t as strange as it sounds.  As Saudi Aramco World pointed out in 1978, out, the middle east was an ancient farming center:

“Centuries ago, what is now the Middle East was the granary of the known world.  From fertile, silt-fertilized farmland by the Nile, from ingeniously irrigated fields in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, from the rich soil of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and from other areas in the Fertile Crescent, ancient farmers supplied much of the world with grain, vegetables, and fruit.  Gradually, however, war and encroaching deserts destroyed or reduced the region’s fertility and its output of basic food crops.”

Saudi Arabia is not currently an optimal place to grow wheat.  To do so, the Saudis pay a tremendous cost for this initiative.  The government guaranteed wheat farmers SR3,500 ($ 933.5) for every ton, about 6-8 times the global price.  Even at current prices, which have soared recently for a number of factors, the current price on the April 14^th spot market is $340 per ton, almost 1/3 of the original price guaranteed to Saudi farmers. 

Perhaps the biggest cost of production was of ecosystem services:  Saudi farmers irrigated most of their wheat in Saudi Arabia with the Peninsula’s fossil water reserves, while most of the Saudi populace, nearly 70%, drank desalinized water.  Overall, only an average of about four inches of rain falls annually in a country that is rich in oil, but poor in water. 

Evapotranspiration in Saudi Arabia makes the amount of water necessary to grow wheat in Saudi much higher than elsewhere.  According to one estimate, it takes 3,000 tons of water for every ton of Saudi wheat, about 3 times the world average.  Wheat production diverts fossil water that could be going to cities.  As these cities must now rely on desalinized water, Saudi wheat also incurs an opportunity cost of $6,000-$7,500 per ton (based on the water industry’s estimates of $2-$2.50/ton for desalinated water) or alternatively, $1,800 - $2,550 if we use Chinese estimates (estimated costs for desalination of Beijing’s water are $0.60-$0.85/ton).  This actually raises the cost of subsidized Saudi wheat between 8- 20 times the current world price, if not substantially more.  It’s much cheaper to buy it elsewhere on the global market, even at today’s elevated prices.

According, it wasn’t surprising when earlier this year, the Saudi government announced that it would start phasing out its subsidies for wheat production by decreasing its annual purchases by 12.5 percent annually for 8 years until 2016, when it would buy the entirety of its purchases from the international markets.  The Saudi’s had decided to forgo food security for water security, especially as given climate predictions suggest worsened climatic conditions in Saudi Arabia for wheat production.  In short, the Saudis were adapting to future climate change.

There was much consternation at the recent international climate change meetings in Bangkok regarding the roll of the World Bank in funding climate change adaptation work. While C2Si has not fully evaluated the arguments made, it is clear that developing countries, rightly worried about the impacts they will suffer in coming decades, would like to have greater control over the funds that allow them to adapt their institutions to a changing climate.The World Bank, and by proxy other major donors from rich nations, sees its roll in climate change adaptation as critical to aiding international development in a sustainable matter. Kirk Hamilton, the World Bank’s leading environmental economist, put the argument simply:

‘What is the bank doing in here?’… We’re in the development business and adapting to climate change is going to be about good development.

This debate over who controls development funds echoes many conflicts in the development industry. Developing countries regard too much influence by big donors as hamstringing their ability to use and direct funds as they see fit, and the donors would like to have enough control over their money to ensure it is used according to their best intentions.With regard to climate change adaptation, the best science and best responses will be needed as quickly as possible. And much of this information and scientific expertise may come from rich countries. But the expertise for managing resources and institutions as the environment changes exists primarily in the local areas that are doing the adapting. It is essential that local experts be utilized (and trained if necessary) in countries that receive development funds. But the global nature of the problem requires reliance on expertise and resources where and when they are available. In essence, we need to partner between developed and developing countries and ensure that we build the capacity to adapt to climate change as a part of any effective sustainable development strategy.That is one reason it is so heartening to see how seriously the World Bank is taking climate change adaptation issues. And it appears that the 2008 Global Monitoring Report, just released this week, will make just that point - that climate change is central to both the mission of the World Bank and to the challenge in meeting Millenium Development Goals such as reducing poverty and hunger, combating disease, and using resources wisely.

Press Release The Global Monitoring Report: MDGs and the Environment-Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Development stresses the link between environment and development and calls for urgent action on climate change. The report warns that developing countries stand to suffer the most from climate change and the degradation of natural resources. To build on hard-won gains, developing countries need support to address the links between growth, development and environmental sustainability.

Humans will experience the negative effects of climate change in numerous ways - rising sea levels, droughts, floods, famine, and the loss of natural resources. But the most direct impacts on humans will come from how all of these environmental changes threaten the health of vulnerable people and communities.

More and more attention is being paid to the detrimental health effects of climate change, with the result being concern for climate change reaching organizations that traditionally had not thought of such issues. This year’s World Health Day, sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO), focused its entire theme on Protecting Health from Climate Change. And celebrations throughout the world commemorating World Health Day identified the specter or climate change as a particularly large, and especially ill-addressed, concern for public health officials.

In the last couple of days, AllAfrica has published several notable articles based on World Health Day events detailing how developing nations, particularly in Africa, will bear the brunt of the effects of climate change. Take-home message: it is the people in countries whose health and food infrastructure is already weakest where the direct effects of climate change will be felt with the most force. And that force could be millions of deaths from the environmental change brought on or exacerbated by global climate change.

Some highlights from those articles:

Ethiopia: World Health Day Marked With Emphasis on Impact of Climate Change On Health

Due to the low level of development, poverty, lack of education and lack of strong public health infrastructure, developing countries will be the most affected and the least able to cope with the impact of climate change on health, [WHO Ethiopia Representative] Dr. Fatoumata Nafonat pointed out.

Although climate change is a global phenomenon, its consequences will not be evenly distributed. Scientists agree that developing countries and small island nations will be the first and hardest hit.

WHO has identified five major health consequences of climate change which is likely to affect problems that are already huge, largely concentrated in the developing world, and difficult to combat. Fatoumata added that, as the adverse effects of climate change on health are wide ranging, strong collaboration and partnership among the relevant public sectors, donors, NGO’s and civil society organizations was very important.

Congo-Brazzaville: Climate Change Linked to Spread of Disease

“[Climate change] causes a rise in sea levels, accelerates erosion of coastal zones, increases the intensity and frequency of natural disasters and accelerates the extinction of species,” Luis Gomes Sambo, World Health Organization (WHO) regional director for Africa, said. “The impact on human health is even greater.”

Climate change, he added, is thought to directly contribute to changes in the geographic distribution of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and epidemics of meningococcal meningitis, Rift Valley fever and cholera in previously unaffected areas.

“For example, the geographic distribution of meningococcal meningitis appears to be expanding from the usual meningitis belt to the southern African region,” Sambo said on 7 April during the commemoration of World Health Day in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo.

“Waterborne diseases and epidemics of acute diarrhoea are rampant in flood situations,” he added. The continent has seen extensive flooding across eastern, western and southern regions.

Botswana: Health Plans Must Note Climate Change

The acting World Health Organisation (WHO) representative [from Botswana], Dr Owen Kaluwa says that climate change threatens to reverse progress in fighting diseases of poverty and it widens the gaps in health outcomes between the richest and the poorest. Kaluwa said that there is a need for governments to put human health and well being at the heart of climate change policy and renew efforts to protect health through achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

“We need ministries of health to strengthen public health policy and practice to meet the challenges of climate change and protect their populations,” he said. He said that it is important for individuals to make personal choices that will enhance health and reduce climate change.

Kaluwa said that if the current warming trends are uncontrolled, humanity will face more injury, disease and death related to natural disasters and heat waves. He said they will face higher rates of food-borne, water-borne and vector-borne illnesses and more premature deaths and disease related to air pollution.

 The interactions between anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate are not new, nor are such interactions straightforward.  Like much of the evolution of life on this planet, such interactions depend on the constraints of history and the context of the present.Recent studies in the Amazon rainforest have suggested that atmospheric carbon dioxide coupled with other factors such as temperature and drought frequency are favoring fast growing species over climax species, and suggest increasing productivity and biomass of the forest.  However, a paper published in PLoS Biology on March 4^th, indicates that this is not true of other forests.  The study of ten large plots, totally 400 hectares populated by 2 million trees over a 20-year period indicated that at half the plots, climax species increased in dominance over fast growing plants.  What is going on?

According to one of the authors, Helene Muller-Landau, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, this is due to a combination of local influences, coupled with past and current anthropogenic influences on the forests that have affected resource availability.  It is difficult for us to predict now how humans have already affected the environment, and in what ways species are interacting because of environmental degradation versus global climatic disruption.

This interaction between human and a changing climate may have led to the demise of one species, the Woolly Mammoth.  One hypothesis is that the retreating glaciers at the end of the Pleistocene changed the habitat for the Woolly Mammoth, from favorable environment that could support Mammoths to one that could not.  Another hypothesis is that primitive human bands migrating north from southern Eurasia hunted the mammoths to extinction.  Most studies until last week were inferential - they failed to use the scientific method in an explicit test of data to validate either hypothesis. 

A new data-driven study suggests that both factors could have played a part in the mammoth’s demise (see the review, and original article in PLoS Biology).  Using climate models, and historical distributions of mammoths from fossil evidence, the scientists in the study calculated the mammoth’s preferred habitat (its climate envelope), how that habitat would change with the end of continental glaciation at the end of the Pleistocene and other time periods (126 ky Before Present, 42 ky BP, 30 ky BP, 21 ky BP, and 6 ky BP),  and an explicit treatment of woolly mammoth-human interactions. 

The authors found that the mammoths faced a catastrophic loss of habitat - nearly 90% of the mammoth’s former habitat disappeared, and more importantly, was highly fragmented isolated tracts spotted across Eurasia and squeezed against the arctic ocean (where much like mountain tops, as habitats are squeezed against an impermeable barrier, they go extinct).  These seem like the likely culprit since stochastic events could be sufficient to wipe out the species.  However, the mammoth had survived previous warming periods.  The difference in the Holocene glacier retreat was the presence of primitive humans, and the new access they had to those remaining habitats of the mammoth. 

The population model indicated that it wouldn’t take very much to knock off the weakened mammoth.  Under high densities of mammoths and rapid reproduction rates, the study finds that only

“one woolly mammoth killed every three years by each human being inhabiting its distribution range would be sufficient to lead the species to extinction. With a low density (0.1 individuals/km²) and suboptimal woolly mammoth population, the HI value drops down to 0.0049 woolly mammoths killed per person per year; this is roughly one mammoth killed by each person every 200 years.”

There are similar events going on today, where environmental degradation (such as deforestation or overfishing) coupled with global climatic changes are affecting species persistence.  Much like separating out the component of a noise created by a drum versus a drum stick, the truth in many cases will vary considerably along a continuum that will vary individually by species.

 Concurrent with the melting of the arctic ice cap, the world’s glaciers are also melting.  There are examples of glaciers melting in many of the world’s mountain chains, including in three of the world’s great mountain chains, the Andes, The Himalayan glaciers, and the Rockies. 

In the Andes, one estimate is that the glaciers have shrunk by 25% in the last 30 years.  The effects are not the same across the Andes.  At the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru, the largest glacier, Qori Kalis, is retreating at a rate 44 times as fast today as it was from 1963 to 1978.  Glaciers in Venezuela are nearly extinct, and in Bolivia the mass of glaciers and snowcaps has shrunk by 60 percent since 1978.  Bolivia was long known for having the world’s highest ski resort, Chacaltaya, at 17,388 feet, may lose that distinction in the next few decades, if not the next few years.  The glacier that the ski resort is on, estimated at 17,000 years old, may have lost 80% of its volume in the last 20 years.

In North America, glaciers are also receding.  Glacier National Park may soon be devoid of the very characteristic for which it was named.  An animation by the United States Geological Service demonstrates this here.  This link also connects to a paper in Bioscience by   Myrna H. P. Hall and Daniel B. Fagre in 2003.  When the park was created in 1910, it had 150 glaciers.  Now it has 30 glaciers, many significantly reduced in size.  One of the most famous glaciers is the Grinnell Glacier, which has undergone dramatic reduction in size. 

There are similar trends in Africa, most notably snows of Kilimanjaro may be no more.  Kilimanjaro’s ice fields have lost 82 percent of their ice since 1912. 

If current conditions continue, this 12,000 year old glacier could disappear by 2020.  Interestingly, the dramatic disappearance of the Kilimanjaro glacier may be reflecting another trend - the reduction in air moisture in tropical regions that may be actually accelerating the Kilimanjaro glacier’s loss.  Tropics have less variability in climate with the exception of moisture - accordingly, changes in glaciers may be especially susceptible to temperature changes and moisture changes, which an international team from the University of Innsbruck, University of Massachusetts, and the Tanzania Meteorological Agency seems to suggest.  For the original paper, click here.  There is a question whether the drying is a result of climate change or other processes.  Drying has an impact by decreasing cloud cover, and increasing the amount of solar radiation that hits a glacier, and also by reducing the amount of moisture available for deposition as snow on a glacier.

Finally, the Himalayan glaciers have also undergone change, although the signal is not even.  A September 2006 study in the Journal of Climatology by Henry Fowler and D.R. Archer has found that some glaciers in the western Himalaya are growing even as glaciers in the Western Himalaya are shrinking.  According to the IPCC, the Himalayan glaciers in total could be gone by 2035 and are receding quicly.  The Gangotri Glacier in the Himalaya mountain range has shrunk between 1780 and 2001, with rates of change rapidly increasing.  This is significant because it is a source of the Ganges river.  Unlike Europe, the Himalayan glaciers take up a considerable amount of mountain area - 17 percent versus 2 percent in the Alps.

The effects of glacier loss across the world is important for two reasons.  As temperatures warm up, endemic species adapted to colder temperatures will shift their elevation ranges upward (some species may have increased behavioral flexibility to withstand a greater range of temperatures; lower elevation species may expand their ranges to take over the range of the other species that have disappeared).  For those species that are adapted to a colder environment, they may run out of habitat.  Second, for humans, glaciers provide a constant supply of water to humans living downstream.  As the ability of the glaciers to withhold water disappears with the glaciers, water is less evenly distributed through the year, increasing potential periods of drought and flooding.

Guest Blog by Maria Witz 

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Tourism, Climate Change and Security - what do they have in common? All have an impact on the economy of a country, all have an impact on the social threading of a society, and all are inter-linked.

Tourism, if not properly managed, can disrupt a society in several ways: travelers disrespect local culture; local economies are forced away from traditional dependable markets in an effort to accommodate incoming tourists; and the exploitation of the natural resources of a region to cater to the tourists is occurring. But if managed properly, tourism can build awareness among peoples, can bring in funds for positive community development initiatives, and can work to support environmental conservation.

In relation to climate change, tourism can add to one’s carbon footprint - tourism normally involves travel by various means of transport such as planes, cars, and boats, which all release significant amounts of carbon emissions. Furthermore, tourists tend to stay at hotels and hotels use appliances, such as air conditioners and heaters - all contribute to a release of carbon emissions.

Not only can tourism affect climate change, but climate change is negatively impacting the tourism industry: snows arriving late for popular ski resorts; an increase in natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tsunamis, in popular summer resort regions; and coral bleaching causing a negative impact to the scuba diving industry and so on.

Security has an obvious impact on tourism. Just to name one example, according to a February 2007 article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, “The US has suffered a sharp drop in tourism since 9/11, mainly because of concerns over tighter passport and customs controls, according to the travel industry. It estimates that there has been a 17% drop in the US share of tourism, costing the country an estimated $1bn (£508m) in lost revenue over the past five years and almost 200,000 jobs”

If we can agree that climate change impacts security and tourism impacts climate change, then can we ask, can tourism be used as a TOOL to combat climate change, thus improving security concerns in certain regions?

Climate Change leads to a population being vulnerable — their natural resource base is threatened, their livelihood is threatened, their shelter is threatened. Tensions rise and conflict occurs when populations are vulnerable and threatened. A stronger economy can reduce such tensions. Tourism, properly managed or rather sustainable tourism, can increase the economy of a country. Tourism has been proven to add 16 or more percent to a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  Moreover, it can build awareness politically and socially, which works to avoid conflict. Tourism can also work against climate change.

At the second international conference on Tourism and Climate Change in October, 2007, sponsored by the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), with the support of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Swiss Government, the Davos Declaration was developed. The Davos Declaration outlines actions that can be carried out by the international community.

The Davos Declaration provides guidance for the international community, but what practically can one person do while travelling?

1. Use fuel efficient cars while travelling,

• 2. Avoid too many flights,
• 3. Walk,
• 4. Stay in an energy efficient lodge.

But what if I do not have the ability to control my choice of transport and/or lodging?

CARBON OFFSETTING

Carbon Offsetting is the act of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Scales have been developed which assign a monetary value to the amount of emissions resulting from your trip. This amount of money can be donated and will go toward such conservation initiatives as planting trees (only good if tropical forests) and developing energy efficient alternatives.

Let’s use a personal example - I work in Afghanistan, therefore travel there quite often. Moreover, I sometimes travel as a tourist within the country. Let’s take a closer look at my travels and the impact on climate change….

A round-trip flight from Washington, DC, USA to Kabul, Afghanistan

=5,375 t of Carbon Emissions = $217 (MyClimate.org)

Now, I am going to travel from Kabul to Band-e-Amir, approximately 250Km

= .226 t of Carbon Emissions $10 (MyClimate.org)

Band-e-Amir is an amazing place and I highly recommend anyone to visit the region. I could use a compact fuel efficient car, but security is a slight concern; therefore I travel in an oversized, over-armored SUV.  My one option of using a more fuel efficient way of travelling is not an option, so how can I reduce my impact on global warming - well, I could just stay in Kabul and not go to Band-e-Amir, but that is no fun, so what to do….

Carbon Offsetting - I can measure my estimated amount of carbon releases as a result of my trip and make an appropriate donation, but is this really having an impact? Let’s look at what is happening at the larger scale of Carbon Trading:

According an article in the Herald Tribune, Carbon Trading, Where Greed is Green, “Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall,” said Redshaw, the head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital.   Furthermore, he states that a slice of the carbon trading market is now worth about $30 billion, but this can grow to $1 trillion within a decade.  (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/20/business/money.php)

The article goes on to say, “The European Union has recently established its own emissions trading scheme, and other regions and nations are actively considering emissions trading approaches.  Creating a market for greenhouse gas emissions and emissions reductions has the potential to provide flexible and low cost abatement options while accelerating the adoption of existing and new technologies”.

So there does seem to be a bit of evidence that carbon offsetting, whether at the large corporate scale or smaller individual scale, is having a positive impact on reducing global warming. But again why should I bother?

We can all give excuses:

• Too expensive,
• Too much hassle, no time to look up and worry about this,
• No fun - smaller cars, no fun without air trips or boat rides,
• Not really comfortable - SUV with TV - much more comfy,
• No alternative options, lack of access to alternative energy, fuel, technologies,
• Lack of political support,
• Emissions will keep increasing so does it really help?

But we can also all just walk out into traffic and get hit by a car and die — we have control of our lives and our world, as well we have a responsibility…

Human activities create about 38 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year; therefore, in the least, I hope this brief write-up encourages people to begin to recognize the links among such issues as climate change, security and tourism, to begin a dialogue, and to accept responsibility as a custodian of this earth ….

 National Geographic’s April 2008 issue reports on last year’s summer melt in the Artic Ocean (see also Andrew Revkin’s excellent article in the NYT in October 2007).  According to the piece, by September, the ice covered had declined from its previous low, in 2005, by an area larger than Texas and California combined.  The September ice cover was 2.78 million square miles in 2005, while in 2007 it was 1.65 million, a reduction of ice cover of almost 41% in two years.   

According to an earlier National Geographic article, based on a study published by Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Geophysical Letters, also the author of the 2007 study, the Arctic had lost between 2004- 2005 what had then been an unprecedented 14 percent of its perennial sea ice - some 280,000 square miles, or an area the size of Texas.  Moreover, each of the four proceeding years (2003-1999) was a record-breaking year.  The concern at the time was that additional ice loss would trigger a feedback loop that further accelerated the melting process.  The 2007 study seems to support this prediction; the loss of arctic ice is accelerating faster than would be expected merely by a rise in temperature.  This suggests that there are other factors in the environment that encourages further loss in perennial ice cover as that melt continues.  This suggests that a feedback loop exists. 

This is visible in an excellent animation of month by month sea ice changes between September 1979 and October 2007 created by Ignatius G. Rigor at the University of Washington, Seattle Applied Physics Lab (another similar and also fun interactive graphic is found on the NYT website).  On the animation, darker colors constitute thin ice, with the darkest colors constituting open water.  The white on the animation constitutes the oldest and thickest ice.  The red dots are buoys used to estimate to age of the sea ice.  This constitutes bad news for those species that live on the ice such as polar bears (for more on polar bear conservation, check out Polar Bears International).

How does this happen?  According to Ngheim, the rapid decline in winter perennial ice over the past two years is also caused by unusual wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream, and sped its flow out of the Arctic.  This data was obtained in part through the NASA’s QuikSCAT satellite, which measures near-surface winds over the oceans.  As some of the remaining thicker older ice moves towards warmer latitudes, it melts.  Further, the more free water is opened up, the warmer the arctic itself becomes since the water is darker than the ice, and more likely to absorb heat.  The currents themselves in open water may accelerate the breaking up and weakening of other parts of the perennial ice pack, increasing the surface area of ice that is exposed to temperature and salinity differences.  There are a number of other factors as well, including the heat capacity of water vapors in the air and clouds. 

One other factor seems particularly ominous.  Prior to 1989, the clockwise polar winds - which created the Beaufort gyre current - helped keep the older and thicker icepack within the arctic, allow it to harden and solidify.  Also, because of the circular rotation of ice in the Beaufort Sea as a result of the gyre, ice floes frequently bump into each other, leading to thicker and more ridged ice compared to other regions.  In 1989, there was a change in atmospheric conditions that limited this gyre to a small region, and the other major Arctic current - the Transpolar drift stream - predominated pushing more of the older, thicker ice into warmer waters through the Fram Strait, a narrow passage between Greenland to the west and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard to the east.  One international study estimates that the arctic could be ice free by 2013.

For more about sea ice circulation, check out the National Snow and Ice Data Center; for the strangest website I have found on the arctic, including an extraordinarily long-list of cold jokes, check out Anthropolis.