Tomorrow, 1 November 2008, marks the beginning of the second British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) winter assessment of bird population distributions.

Climate change is causing species’ distributions to shift in a northward direction, however information is lacking or incomplete for many shy and illusive species, that could potentially be affected by climate change.

To gain a better picture of how climate change is affecting bird distributions, the BTO invite members of the public to participate in their efforts to map the current distribution of British bird species.

To take part and to see which areas are lacking adequate data, visit: http://www.bto.org/birdatlas/

Recent research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology suggests greater attention ought to be paid to seed predators, especially in the context of natural and agro-ecosystems.

Speaking to the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General introduced proceedings highlighting the important role wetlands have in the fight against climate change.

The Secretary General recognised how wetlands contribute to livelihoods and human well-being. Wetlands also provide ecosystem services, and are an important sink for carbon, hence play a key role in the fight against climate change.

The conservation of wetlands will play an important role in reaching the Millennium Development Goals too, he said.

Ban Ki-Moon spoke of the unsustainable way we are currently using water, and how this use is set to increase in the near future:

“Our unsustainable use of water coupled with growing demand is making it worse… …that is why the Ramsar Convention has never been more important. It enjoys global consensus. It provides technical know-how. It gives rise to guidance and support networks.”

An international study by the WWF, ZSL and partners – the Living Planet Report - reveals that we will need ‘two planets’ by 2030 in order to sustain current rates of consumption. Three quarters of the world’s population are consuming more than can be replaced each year.

The study examined the ‘ecological footprint’ of countries across the world, and the rate at which we are degrading all the necessary life support systems of the planet. Rainforests provide clear air and carbon sequestration, fresh water supplies are being spoilt and marine fisheries are being consistently over harvested.

The reports authors estimate that the financial equivalent of this degradation, dwarfs the losses of the present financial crisis – the ecological debt reaching at least £2.5 trillion every year.

Sir David King, the British government’s former chief scientific adviser, added:

“We all need to agree that there’s a crisis of understanding, that we’re removing the planet’s biodiverse resources at a rate which is as fast if not faster than the world’s last great extinction.”

Read the full report here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Environment/documents/2008/10/28/LPR_2008.pdf

Yesterday, the BES policy team attended the Science Advisory Council Meeting at Westminster, London. The day provided an opportunity to meet with members of Defra, the media, other NGOs, listen to talks from senior scientists and learn about Defra’s present and future plans.

The keynote speech was presented by the Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof. John Beddington. The scope of the speech was global, emphasising the need for a systems approach to tackling all of the biggest challenges mankind faces: an expected surge in demand for water, food, energy and an increasingly erratic climate.

Professor Beddington spoke of the need to be mindful of an increasing world population, coupled with a rise in economic prosperity in India and China in the context of meat demand and climate change, and a rise in demand for fundamental resources.

Climate change featured very highly on the agenda, with particular attention brought to ocean acidification and coastal vulnerability. Professor Beddington noted the startling prediction concerning the world’s major ports; of the 135 major ports around the world, there is a 75% chance that at least one of these will be inundated by the sea over the next five years.

Continuing on the water theme, concerns were raised over the implications of water shortages, brought about by a combination of increased demand, and reduced supply because of climate change. For example, the political tension between India and Pakistan could be exacerbated as these vital resources become more scarce.

Professor Beddington cited South East Asia’s achievement in increasing productivity since 1961 without a concurrent increase in land use, (although he failed to mention any implications for biodiversity). Given SE Asia’s successes, he called for greater ingenuity in feeding a growing world population – a key challenge for the future. Selective plant genomics, (i.e. preferential propagation of plants with favourable traits), will enhance agricultural practices around the world, so long as we can improve our understanding of the plant genome.

Other news:

Tom Meagher gave a brief update on bluetongue disease, which affects ruminants such as cattle, but also affects deer, camels and goats. Its thought to have been spreading North from North Africa by wind-borne Cullicoides flies since the late 90s. There are 25 known serotypes, and in spring this year a vaccine rollout programme began. Currently vaccinations are optional, but not against all serotypes, however this is under review.

Based on the best available scientific evidence and after stakeholder engagement, Hilary Benn has no plans to cull badgers to prevent TB outbreaks in cattle. Plans to vaccinate badgers against TB have been put forward, but the practical and economic implications make this an unfeasible proposal.

Summary

Overall, Defra will seek to forge greater cross-sectoral links within government and urges research councils to facilitate multidisciplinary research. This will enable better evaluation of ecosystem services, and the broader implications of climate change. Greater links with the social sciences must also be sought to better evaluate the non-economic aspects of ecosystem services, for example historically significant sites and their place within the broader landscape.

The broad issues of food security, water, energy and climate change are all interlinked, and therefore should be considered holistically. Efforts to share information and expertise between government departments and research groups in order to face the challenges ahead is essential.

Blog readers are invited to comment

After years of hard campaigning by many environmental organisations, the public and non-government organisations, the government has pledged to include shipping and aviation in the forthcoming Climate Change Bill. The bill aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) to 80% of 1990s levels by 2050.

The next step for Britain will be to somehow calculate which shipping lanes, and flights Britain will be held accountable for in terms of emissions.

The announcement coincides with plans by the Transport Minister, Geoff Hoon, for much greater investment in green transport for local councils. He will also unveil plans to kit out Britain with charging points for electric cars, in anticipation of growth in this sector in the near future.

A high citation index is an interpretation of the effectiveness of science communication between scientists, not to mention the importance and relevance of the research, within that particular field. But is a highly cited paper an indication of effective communication to the public and policy makers?

Writing in NERC’s Planet Earth publication, Alan Grainger recalled that research by Oliver Phillips in the late nineties illustrated just how tropical forests, not only store, but sequester carbon, set about a chain of events that resulted in the creation of RAINFOR, a multinational scientific network.

RAINFOR has published and continues to publish an extensive body of research in highly ranked journals. The research has reached policy makers in two distinct ways; indirectly through the IPCC and directly through a report by the British Government that used a synthesis of RAINFOR research at a UN convention on climate change.

Because the results of RAINFOR’s work has been effectively communicated to policy-makers, initiatives such as carbon-offset schemes that involve planting forests have been operationalised. However international policy has yet to fully take on board the full implications of their research, such as conserving existing natural forests. If effectively valued and incorporated into the carbon offset markets, forests are worth orders of magnitude more standing then cleared.

Publishing in leading journals such as Science and Nature often results in a level of exposure to the media that would not otherwise be received in the ’smaller’ journals. The BES journals (Journal of Ecology, Functional Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology and Journal of Applied Ecology) are ranked some of the highest within ecology; all but one ranked inside the top twenty ecology journals. Concurrently, extensive media coverage highlights scientific developments to policy-makers. This can be particularly effective when the paper clearly has policy relevance, such as Professor Bill Sutherland’s paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology in 2006: The identification of 100 questions of high policy-relevance in the UK.

When Alan Grainier reported that UN estimates of forest loss could be overinflated due to their statistical modeling techniques, and possibly underestimating the influence of natural forest regrowth, he stressed the importance of errors when making forest estimates. So that the message wasn’t misinterpreted in his research, he emphasised the need for a better monitoring system. After exposure from the BBC, and subsequently across the globe, it is hoped that carbon credits trading under REDD, (Reducing GHG Emissions through Deforestation and forest Degradation), will consider Alan’s idea of creating a World Forest Observatory.

Finally, interacting directly with ministers is an effective means of translating science into policy. Meetings and conferences attended by ministers, are a great opportunity for scientists to interact with politicians and present their ideas and findings.

Scientists must always be mindful that, in order to get the message across, they should be clear, non-technical and succinct, so as not to alienate their subject.

New research published in PNAS indicates that although policy is successful in designating areas to protect biodiversity, these areas rarely environ ecosystem services. The lack of congruence is such that, in terms of protecting ecosystem services, these areas could be considered to have been selected completely at random.

The authors call for much more research into elucidating the mechanisms that underpin how ecosystems confer well-being to humans. Although the EU has a strong policy initiative to conserve biodiversity (Nature 2000 Network, 2008), policy to incorporate ecosystem services within this framework remains in its infancy.

Currently the way that ecosystem services are valued remains fairly crude, based on a seminal paper written years ago (Constanza et al., 1997), and yet most research in this area continues to use these crude methods, rather than adapting methods used to identify conservation effort. Creating maps that identify how ecosystem services are globally distributed would be a start, identifying what benefits they provide to local people and what threats they face is an essential next step to make.

Four ecosystem services were the focus of the research: carbon sequestration, water provision, grassland production of livestock and carbon storage. They found very limited congruence between these services and their measures of conservation effort, (which included biodiversity ‘hotspots‘, and ecoregions – as defined by the WWF. There are many different kinds of ecosystem services in addition to those chosen by the authors, (provision of fuel, clean air, food, well being, medicinal, psychological to name but a few). However they were only able to use the aforementioned, therefore much greater interdisciplinarity work is urgently needed in order to quantify and map the bare minimum ecosystem services.

The authors recognise the limitations of their study; many ecosystem services are limited to the local level, therefore such a coarse global-scale study misses the nuances occurring at smaller spatial scales.

In order to fully assess who benefits from ecosystem services and how, work between sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and ecologists is required. Payments for ecosystems services (PES) are a potential policy option to take the ecosystems approach forward. PES enables stakeholders at the local level to not only benefit financially from the true value of the surroundings they inhabit, but incentivizes them to conserve their surroundings. PES presents the opportunity to simultaneously protect ecosystem services and biodiversity.

Source: Naidoo, R., Balmford, A., Costanza, R., et al. (2008). Global mapping of ecosystem services and conservation priorities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105: 9495-9500.

References:

Costanza R, et al. (1997) The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital.
Nature 387:253–260.

Nature 2000 Network, (2008) http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/natura2000/index_en.htm, Accessed 24 October 2008

Speaking on the Today Programme, Professor Dick Godwin spoke of the overemphasis on environmental issues in farming, rather than growing food for the people. The Royal Agricultural Society of England released a report today warning that England’s soils are being overworked.

Professor Dick Godwin said: “I think the major concern of the Royal Agricultural Society of England in commissioning this report was really in ‘Where do farmers get their advice from, where do they get new applied research?’.” Professor Godwin called for more research into how soil will adapt to a changing climate.

The society cite a combination of intensive agricultural techniques, dry summers and shifting growing seasons as causing a decline in soil quality. Certainly intensive agriculture has been at the heart of many of the problems that farmland specialist species have faced.

However in the report, Professor Godwin stressed the aim is to provide farmers with relevant up to date information, in order to secure Britain’s food supplies for the future.

A scheme similar to Professor Bill Sutherland’s Conservation Evidence may be the way forward in terms of effectively disseminating information. The success of the Conservation Evidence scheme so far, with the help of the British Ecological Society, has been highlighted in a recent interview with NERC in their Planet Earth publication.

Access the NERC interview here: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/publications/planetearth/2008/autumn/aut08-conserving.pdf

Check out the Conservation Evidence website here.

The Carbon Trust, a government funded agency, is to unveil plans that will set the agenda for algal biofuels becoming a significant alternative to fossil fuels by 2020. £26m has been allocated to research and development of infrastructure that will make algal biofuels a commercial reality, facilitating their use for UK road transport.

Given that transport contributes 25 per cent of Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions, finding a ‘carbon neutral’ alternative to fossil fuels is essential. Algae do not replicate the problems associated with crop-type biofuels, which have contributed to a massive rise in food prices as well as widespread natural habitat loss.

John Loughhead, executive director of the UK Energy Research Council, said:

“Algae are potentially attractive means to harvest solar energy: they reproduce themselves, so there’s no manufacturing cost for the solar converter, they can live in areas not useful for food or similar productive use, they don’t need clean or even fresh water so don’t add to global water stress, and can give oils, biomass, or even hydrogen as a product. Perhaps they’ll be the stem cells of the energy world.”

The Carbon Trust believes that by 2030, 12% of aviation fuel and 6% of road transport fuel could be replaced by algal biofuels, resulting in a net reduction in 160million tonnes of carbon.

Recent hikes in oil prices mean that interest could has been renewed in algal biofuels. Initial efforts in the 80s appeared promising, but commercial viability was always one step away because these fuels simply couldn’t compete with the cheap oil of that era.

Transport Minister Andrew Adonis supports the move towards sustainable biofuels: “This project demonstrates our commitment to ensuring that second generation biofuels are truly sustainable — and will further our understanding of the potential for microalgae to be refined for use in renewable transport fuel development, to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions.”

The Wellcome Trust is backing a company developing some of the most advanced genetically modified algal biofuels, Sapphire Energy.

Previous hysterical reports in the media have made blanket references to biofuels, overlooking the disparity between the unsustainable fuels such as palm oil grown in south east Asia, with promising options such as algae. It is encouraging therefore that the mass media and ministers are now making a clear distinction between these, and looking closer at viable alternatives to fossil fuels.