- You can monitor carbon dioxide from fossil fuels by analyzing wine (and maize leaves for that matter).
- Yes, we have no acorns.
- “Salt is sort of a diversified farming system.”
- “There’s a lot to learn from the past and how Native cultures have gardened“
- The end of the mustang?
- Urbanization and biodiversity conservation.
- Convicts conserve cows.
- Freezing technique opens door to commercialization of Canarium odontophyllum in Sarawak.
- Zero Mile Diet Seed Kit.
Adaptation for tropical forests, tropical forests for adaptation
“Climate change could have a devastating effect on the world’s forests and the nearly 1 billion people who depend on them for their livelihoods” 1 says the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in a press release about a new report.
Unless immediate action is taken.
CIFOR proposes helping forests adapt by taking measures such as improving fire management; using plantation species that can cope with future climate; and helping forests evolve with changing climate rather than resist it. Forests can help us adapt — reduce the vulnerability of society to climate change — by assuring the flow of ecosystem services.
There should be help for the people who are managing, living in or conserving forests to adapt to future changes:
“The people living in forests are highly dependent on forest goods and services and are often very vulnerable socioeconomically,†says Bruno Locatelli, a CIFOR scientist and lead author of the report. “They usually have a much more intimate understanding of their forests than anyone else, but the unprecedented rates of climate change will almost certainly jeopardise their ability to adapt to new conditions. They will need help.â€
Helping the people who know best seems an interesting contradiction and I wondered how they were proposing to go about that. Participatory approaches, it seems. I could not find that much about it in the report, which focuses on process and policy. Take this excerpt from Box 11 on “The role of science in coordinating and supporting adaptive processes in West Africa” (by Houria Djoudi, Hermann Kambire and Maria Brockhaus).
A workshop on local governance, forests and adaptive capacities in a municipality in southwest Burkina Faso, with actors from different scales, established a platform for shared knowledge and learning on forests and adaptation to climate change. Efforts to contribute to vertical coordination of adaptation, as well as support for local governance and horizontal coordination in decision making processes related to climate change adaptation and forests, are ongoing.
CIFOR also has an interesting little report on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).
The need for diverse street trees
City planners take note:
Tree diversity helps prevent pests from gaining a foothold, said Mike Bohne, forest health group leader for the United States Forest Service. It also makes it so that a community does not lose its entire urban canopy if there is an infestation.
Too late for Worcester, Massachusetts (USA), where 80% of the street trees are maples. Most of them are infested by the Asian long-horned beetle and need to be removed. Property values may plummet further.
The beetle was introduced to the USA with wood packing material from China. Eradication efforts are intense as much larger economic damage is looming. Worcester is in New England and the invasive beetle might now spread to the famed maple forests that produce large quantities of syrup, wood, and leaf-peeping tourists.
Nibbles: Earthworms, Statistics, Bison, Urban, Cork
- Boffins find lots of cryptic genetic diversity in earthworms.
- China produces half the world’s vegetables?
- Know your bison.
- Flouting Zimbabwe’s laws on urban agriculture to stay alive.
- Cork certification.
The Lost Cities of the Amazon
That’s the cheesy title of what should be a fascinating National Geographic documentary on a subject that we’ve covered here a number of times: the idea that the Amazon was once thickly settled. If anyone sees it, do let us know what it’s like.