It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Deforestation only 'displaced' under community monitoring schemes
Community-led monitoring of deforestation might not reduce forest use overall, but merely displace it to unmonitored areas, a new study finds.
The peer-reviewed study, by researchers including Dr. Sabrina Eisenbarth from the University of Exeter Business School, measured the impact of community-led forestmonitoringon activities such as tree felling, domestic animal grazing and charcoal production in community managed forest in Uganda.
The year-long research project paid six community members from 60 communities to patrol the communal forest surrounding the village once a month.
The community monitors reported any threats to the forest every month and shared information with the wider community in village meetings, providing an opportunity for discussion around forest use and sustainability.
The research team evaluated the effect of this monitoring activity on forest use in both monitored and unmonitored areas.
They looked at a combination of detailed forest measurement on the ground and satellite data from the 60 communities and compared it to equivalent forest measurement in 50 control communities without systematic community-led monitoring.
The researchers found that community-led forest monitoring did not affect forest use overall. While forest loss decreased slightly in the monitored villages, amounting to 450 m2 of forest per village, forest use in areas adjacent to those villages, where there was no or less monitoring, rose by 300% and 150% respectively—totalling an extra 12,600 m2 of forest loss.
Nearly a third of forests across Africa, Asia and Latin America are now managed by local people and community forest management has been hailed as a powerful policy tool that could reduce deforestation—one of the main drivers of climate change.
Previous research has shown that communities can successfully manage their forests, but only if certain institutional features are in place—one of those features is community-led forest monitoring.
Monitoring helps communities find out how much forest is being cut down, punish those who cut too much and adjust norm and rules on forest use.
The research team had initially hypothesized that community monitoring would decrease forest use, with potential rule-breakers deterred by the fear of being caught and the information provided to community members driving a shift in norms over forest use, leading to a change in the official forest-use rules.
But one of the authors, Dr. Sabrina Eisenbarth, a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Exeter Business School's Land, Environment, Economics and Policy (LEEP) Institute, said the fear of being caught was potentially moving the deforestation to other areas.
"We suspect that the increase in forest loss in unmonitored areas is, at least to some extent, driven by displacement of forest use by members of treatment villages due to fear of sanctions.
"If reductions in forest use are driven by a fear of being caught rather than self-restraint, community members could merely displace forest use outside of the monitored areas and accelerate deforestation in adjacent areas."
The research team say more attention is needed to the design of conservation programs based on community monitoring in order to avoid displacement.
"If displacement is driven by a fear of sanctions, the design of a monitoring intervention might be improved if monitoring was more widespread or if community members could not predict which parts of the forest were unmonitored," said Dr. Eisenbarth.
The researchers said the success of community-monitoring schemes ultimately depends on 'community self-restraint', which might require changes in the norms and rules around forest use. The one-year community monitoring intervention did not lead to such norm-shifts.
More information: Sabrina Eisenbarth et al, Can community monitoring save the commons? Evidence on forest use and displacement, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2015172118
Scientists have been informing people that the frequency and intensity of extreme events will increase in the future with the increased global mean temperature.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) suggested that the increases in the seasonal and annual mean temperature are expected to be more prominent in the tropics and subtropics than in mid-latitudes. It implies that Southeast Asia may suffer more from global warming than other regions of Asia. However, it is not clear how heatwaves in Southeast Asia will change under global warming.
Ph.D. student Dong Zizhen and Prof. Wang Lin from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences gave the answer to the question. Their study was published in Earth's Future.
Based on the bias-corrected model outputs from the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble project, they estimated the changes in Southeast Asian heatwaves under different global warming levels.
According to their study, the projected warmer future tends to be associated with more frequent heatwaves, longer heatwave duration, and higher extreme temperature in Southeast Asia. The changes in heatwave characteristics have distinct regional differences in response to global warming between the Maritime Continent and Indochina Peninsula due to the different heat content of lower atmospheric boundaries.
Wang Lin, the corresponding author of the work, warned, "The extreme heatwave event, such as the heatwave that happens only once-in-50-years and is rare in the current climate, will become more frequent in a warmer future, and may happen once a year in Southeast Asia."
Disastrous storms, like one in 1775 in the Netherlands, were documented by engravers and other artists. Credit: Noach van der Meer II, after Hendrik Kobell
In recent weeks, catastrophic floods overwhelmed towns in Germany and the Netherlands, inundated subway tunnels in China, swept through northwestern Africa and triggered deadly landslides in India and Japan. Heat and drought fanned wildfires in the North American West and Siberia, contributed to water shortages in Iran, and worsened famines in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.
Extremes like these are increasingly caused or worsened by human activities heating up Earth's climate. For thousands of years, Earth's climate has not changedanywhere near as quicklyor profoundly as it's changing today.
Yet on a smaller scale, humans have seen waves of extreme weather events coincide with temperature changes before. It happened during what's known as the Little Ice Age, a period between the 14th and 19th centuries that was marked by large volcanic eruptions and bitter cold spells in parts of the world.
The global average temperature is believed to have cooled by less than a half-degree Celsius (less than 0.9 F) during even the chilliest decades of the Little Ice Age, but locally, extremes were common.
In diaries and letters from that period, people wrote about "years without a summer," when wintry weather persisted long after spring. In one such summer, in 1816, cold that followed a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia ruined crops across parts of Europe and North America. Less well known are the unusually cold European summers of 1587, 1628 and 1675, when unseasonal frost provoked fear and, in some places, hunger.
"It is horribly cold," author Marie de Rabutin-Chantal wrote from Paris during the last of these years; "the behavior of the sun and of the seasons has changed."
Winters could be equally terrifying. People reported 17th-century blizzards as far south as Florida and the Chinese province of Fujian. Sea ice trapped ships, repeatedly enclosed the Chesapeake Bay and froze over rivers from the Bosporus to the Meuse. In early 1658, ice so completely covered the Baltic Sea that a Swedish army marched across the water separating Sweden and Denmark to besiege Copenhagen. Poems and songs suggest people simply froze to death while huddling in their homes.
These were cold snaps, not heat waves, but the overall story should seem familiar: A small global change in climate dramatically altered the likelihood of extreme local weather. Scholars who study the history of climate and society, like me, identify these changes in the past and find out how human populations responded.
Temperatures fell well below normal in parts of Europe in 1816. Credit: Dagomar Degroot, CC BY-ND
What's behind the extremes
We know about the Little Ice Age because the natural world is full of things like trees, stalagmites and ice sheets that respond to weather while growing or accumulating gradually over time. Specialists can use past fluctuations in their growth or chemistry as indicators of fluctuations in climate and thereby create graphs or maps—reconstructions—that show historical climate changes.
These reconstructions reveal that waves of cooling swept across much of the world. They also suggest likely causes—including a series of explosive volcaniceruptions that abruptly released sunlight-scattering dust into the stratosphere; and slow, internal variability in regional patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation.
These causes could only cool the Earth by a few tenths of a degree Celsius during the chilliest waves of the Little Ice Age, however. And the cooling was not nearly as consistent as present-day warming.
Small global trends can mask far bigger local changes. Studies have suggested that modest cooling created by volcanic eruptions can reduce the usual contrast between temperatures over land and sea, because land heats and cools faster than oceans. Since that contrast powers the monsoons, the African and East Asian summer monsoons can weaken after big eruptions. That likely disturbed atmospheric circulation all the way into the North Atlantic, reducing the flow of warm air into Europe. This is why parts of Western Europe, for example, may have cooled by more than 3 C (5.4 F) even as the rest of the world cooled far less during the 1816 year without a summer.
Feedback loops also amplified and sustained regional cooling, similar to how they amplify regional warming today. In the Arctic, for example, cooler temperatures can mean more, longer-lasting sea ice. Ice reflects more sunlight back into space than water does, and that feedback loop leads to more cooling, more ice and so on. As a result, the comparatively modest climate changes of the Little Ice Age likely had profound local impacts.
Changing patterns of atmospheric circulation and pressure also led in many regions to remarkably wet, dry or stormy weather.
Heavy sea ice in the Greenland Sea may have diverted the North Atlantic storm track south, funneling severe gales toward the dikes and dams of what are today the Netherlands and Belgium. Thousands of people succumbed in the 1570 All Saints' Day Flood along the German and Dutch coast, and again in the Christmas Flood of 1717. Heavy precipitation and water pooling behind dams of melting ice repeatedly overwhelmed inadequate flood defenses and inundated central and Western Europe. "Who would not take pity on the city?" one chronicler lamented after seeing his town under water and then on fire in 1602. "One storm, one flood, one fire destroyed it all."
Visualizing temperature anomalies over 2,000 years, with colder temperatures in darker blues and hotter temperatures in darker reds, shows the chilly periods of the Little Ice Age and the extreme warming of today. Credit: Ed Hawkins
Owing perhaps to the modest cooling of volcanic dust veils, disrupted patterns of atmospheric circulation led in the 16th century to severe droughts that contributed to food shortages across the Ottoman Empire. In 1640, the grand canal that supplied Beijing with food simply dried up, and a short but profound drought in 1666 primed the wooden infrastructure of European cities for a wave of catastrophic urban fires.
How does it apply to today?
Today, the temperature shift is going in the other direction—with global temperatures already 1 C (1.8 F) higher than before the industrial era, and local, sometimes devastating, extremes occurring around the world.
These serve as a warning to governments to redouble their efforts to limit warming to 1.5 C (2.7 F), relative to the 20th-century average, while also investing in the development and deployment of technologies that filter greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
People who lived through the Little Ice Age lacked perhaps the most important resource available today: the ability to learn from the long global history of human responses to climate change.
S.Africa's port terminals still disrupted days after cyber-attack
Durban is the biggest cargo port in sub-Saharan Africa.
South Africa's state-owned logistics firm said Tuesday it was working to restore systems following a major cyber-attack last week that hit the country's key port terminals.
The attack began on July 22 but continued, forcing Transnet to switch to manual systems, it said.
In a letter to its customers dated Monday, the company declared a force majeure—a clause that prevents a party from fulfilling a contract because of external and unforeseen circumstances.
It said it had "experienced an act of cyber-attack, security intrusion and sabotage, which resulted in the disruption of... normal processes and functions."
The attack has affected ports in Durban—the busiest in sub-Saharan Africa—as well as Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Ngqura, Transnet said in the "confidential" notice seen by AFP on Tuesday.
In a statement later on Tuesday, the firm said it expected to lift the force majeure "soon" following "significant progress in restoring" its systems.
"It is expected that some applications may continue to run slowly over the next few days," it said.
The outage came on the heels of civil unrest sparked by the jailing of ex-president Jacob Zuma that halted operations for several days.
"The last few days have been the nail in the coffin," said Dave Watts, a consultant to the South African Association of Freight Forwarders.
"Up to this morning nothing is moving out of the ports, zero, since Thursday," he told AFP.
"It's a nightmare. It's just a catastrophe, frankly," he said, noting that the disruption had occurred at the peak of the citrus export season, when South African farmers were rushing to get their produce to foreign markets. "It's a perfect storm".
Credit: Chart: The Conversation US, CC-BY-ND Source: Nick Merrill, the Internet Atlas Project
You try to use your credit card, but it doesn't work. In fact, no one's credit card works. You try to go to some news sites to find out why, but you can't access any of those, either. Neither can anyone else. Panic-buying ensues. People empty ATMs of cash.
This kind of catastrophic pan-internetmeltdown is more likely than most people realize.
I direct the Internet Atlas Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Our goal is to shine a light on long-term risks to the internet. We produce indicators of weak points and bottlenecks that threaten the internet's stability.
Another example is content delivery networks, which websites use to make their content readily available to large numbers of internet users. An outage at the content delivery network Fastly on June 8, 2021, briefly severed access to the websites of Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Reddit, Spotify, The New York Times and the U.K. government.
The biggest risks to the global internet
We take measurements at various layers of the internet's technological stack, from cables to content delivery networks. With those measurements, we identify weak points in the global internet. And from those weak points, we build theories that help us understand what parts of the internet are at risk of disruption, whom those disruptions will affect and how severely, and predict what would make the internet more resilient.
Currently, the internet is facing twin dangers. On one side, there's the threat of total consolidation. Power over the internet has been increasingly concentrated primarily in the hands of a few, U.S.-based organizations. On the other side, there's fragmentation. Attempts to challenge the status quo, particularly by Russia and China, threaten to destabilize the internet globally.
While there's no single best path for the internet, our indicators can help policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, activists and others understand if their interventions are having their intended effect. For whom is the internet becoming more reliable, and for whom is is it becoming more unstable? These are the critical questions. About 3.4 billion people are just now getting online in countries including Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu. What kind of internet will they inherit?
A US-controlled internet
Since at least 2015, the core services that power the internet have become increasingly centralized in the hands of U.S. corporations. We estimate that U.S. corporations, nonprofits and government agencies could block a cumulative 96% of content on the global internet in some capacity.
The U.S. Department of Justice has long used court orders aimed at tech providers to block global access to content that's illegal in the U.S., such as copyright infringements. But lately, the U.S. federal government has been leveraging its jurisdiction more aggressively. In June, the DOJ used a court order to briefly seize an Iranian news site because the department said it was spreading disinformation.
Due to interlocking dependencies on the web, such as content delivery networks, one misstep in applying this technique could take down a key piece of internet infrastructure, making a widespread outage more likely.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based technology companies also risk wreaking havoc. Consider Australia's recent spat with Facebook over paying news outlets for their content. At one point, Facebook blocked all news on its platform in Australia. One consequence was that many people in Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu temporarily lost a key news source because they rely on prepaid cellphone plans that feature discounted access to Facebook. As these skirmishes increase in frequency, countries worldwide are likely to suffer disruptions to their internet access.
It also increases the risk of cyberattacks on core internet infrastructure. In a global internet, attacks on infrastructure hurt everyone, but walled-off national internets would change that calculus. For example, Russia has the capacity to disconnect itself from the rest of the world's internet while maintaining service domestically. With that capacity, it could attack core global internet infrastructure with less risk of upsetting its domestic population. A sophisticated attack against a U.S. company could trigger a large-scale internet outage.
The future of the internet
For much of its history, the internet has been imperfectly, but largely, open. Content could be accessed anywhere, across borders. Perhaps this openness is because, rather than in spite, of the U.S."s dominance over the internet.
Whether or not that theory holds, the U.S."s dominance over the internet is unlikely to persist. The status quo faces challenges from the U.S."s adversaries, its historical allies and its own domestic tech companies. Absent action, the world will be left with some mixture of unchecked U.S. power and ad-hoc, decentralized skirmishes.
In this environment, building a stable and transnational internet for future generations is a challenge. It requires delicacy and precision. That's where work like ours comes into play. To make the internet more stable globally, people need measurements to understand its chokepoints and vulnerabilities. Just as central banks watch measures of inflation and employment when they decide how to set rates, internet governance, too, should rely on indicators, however imperfect.
Google parent Alphabet reported a sharp rise in profits amid growth in digitaladvertising.
Google parent Alphabet on Tuesday reported quarterly profit that had nearly tripled, as money poured in from ads on its search engine and YouTube video platform.
"There was a rising tide of online activity in many parts of the world, and we're proud that our services helped so many consumers and businesses," Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said of the quarter.
The internet titan reported that profit nearly tripled from last year to $18.5 billion on revenue that rose sharply to $61.9 billion.
Google is among the tech companies that saw use soar as the pandemic accelerated a trend toward working, shopping, socializing and more online.
Alphabet shares that ended the formal trading day down slightly rose more than three percent after release of the earnings figures, which beat market expectations.
Pichai credited long-term investments in artificial intelligence and cloud computing as powering the internet giant's performance.
The strong quarter also reflected "elevated consumer online activity and broad-based strength in advertiser spend," as the global economy strives to recover from damage done by the pandemic, according to chief financial officer Ruth Porat.
Pichai opened an earnings call by urging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Google is on track to generate $130 billion in overall ad revenue this year, an increase of some 25 percent from a year earlier, according to eMarketer.
That would give the California-based tech colossus 28.6 percent of the worldwide digital ad market, with Facebook in second place with just shy of 24 percent, the market tracker projected.
"YouTube was the fastest-growing segment during the quarter and points to the continued strength of video advertising for both direct response and brand goals," said eMarketer principal analyst Nicole Perrin.
Revenue at the global video sharing platform topped $7 billion, a leap from the $3.8 billion brought in during the same period a year earlier, according to Alphabet.
Meanwhile, daily views at the YouTube Shorts service that competes with sensation TikTok surged past 15 billion in the quarter, according to Pichai.
Bright cloud
Google's cloud computing business, which competes with powerhouses Amazon and Microsoft, is positioned to attract more business given its strengths in analyzing data for companies and defending against threats such as ransomware, Pichai said.
"Companies have really started thinking deeply about their vulnerabilities," he told financial analysts on an earnings call.
"It is definitely an area where we are seeing a lot of conversations, a lot of interest."
Demand is also growing for tools that enable employees to get jobs done remotely as companies explore "hybrid" approaches that combine working from home and the office.
"Google Workspace continues to show strong growth, particularly in the enterprise space, because we have designed the product to meet the challenges of hybrid work," Pichai said.
Google recently reopened its campuses to workers who want to return voluntarily to California offices abandoned early in the pandemic.
"I was excited to see so many people in person," Pichai said.
"We're giving employees more flexibility in how and where they work, and will continue to invest in our site in the US and elsewhere."
When was the last time you watched a DVD? If you're like most people, your DVD collection has been gathering dust as you stream movies and TV from a variety of on-demand services. But have you ever considered the impact of streaming video on the environment?
School for the Contemporary Arts professor Laura Marks and engineering professor Stephen Makonin, with engineering student Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva and media scholar Radek Przedpełski, worked together for over a year to investigate the carbon footprint of streaming media supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
"Stephen and Alejandro were there to give us a reality check and to increase our engineering literacy, and Radek and I brought the critical reading to it," says Marks. "It was really a beautiful meeting of critical media studies and engineering."
After combing through studies on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and making their own calculations, they confirmed that streaming media (including video on demand, YouTube, video embedded in social media and websites, video conferences, video calls and games) is responsible for more than one per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. And this number is only projected to rise as video conferencing and streaming proliferate.
"One per cent doesn't sound like a lot, but it's significant if you think that the airline industry is estimated to be 1.9 per cent," says Marks. "ICT's carbon footprint is growing fast, and I'm concerned that because we're all turning our energy to other obvious carbon polluters, like fossil fuels, cars, the airline industry, people are not going to pay attention to this silent, invisible carbon polluter."
One thing that Marks found surprising during their research is how politicized this topic is.
Their full report includes a section detailing the International Energy Association's attack on French think tank The Shift Project after they published a report on streaming media's carbon footprint in 2019. They found that some ICT engineers state that the carbon footprint of streaming is not a concern because data centers and networks are very efficient, while others say the fast-rising footprint is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Their report includes comparisons of the divergent figures in engineering studies in order to get a better understanding of the scope of this problem.
The top thing Marks and Makonin recommend to reduce streaming's carbon footprint is to ensure that our electricity comes from renewable sources. At an individual level, they offer a list of recommendations to reduce energy consumption and demand for new ICT infrastructure including: stream less, watch physical media including DVDs, decrease video resolution, use audio-only mode when possible, and keep your devices longer—since production of devices is very carbon-intensive.
Promoting small files and low resolution, Marks founded the Small File Media Festival, which will present its second annual program of 5-megabyte films Aug. 10 - 20. As the organizers say, movies don't have to be big to be binge-worthy.
The model used in the study simulates past and future wildfires in California’s drought-prone Sierra Nevada region, using the actual landscape of the Big Creek watershed outside Fresno, California. The model simulates soil moisture, plant growth and wildfires for past conditions and in 60-year projections of future climate, with the dial at the upper left showing rising temperatures. Results show a decade-long burst of severe wildfires, followed by recurring wildfires that gradually get smaller. Credit: Ethan Turpin & David Gordon/UC Santa Barbara
In recent years, wildfires on the West Coast have become larger and more damaging. A combination of almost a century of fire suppression and hotter and drier conditions has created a tinderbox ready to ignite, destroying homes and polluting the air over large areas.
New research led by the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Barbara, looks at the longer-term future of wildfires under scenarios of increased temperature and drought, using a model that focuses on the eastern California forests of the Sierra Nevada. The study, published July 26 in the journalEcosphere, finds that there will be an initial roughly decade-long burst ofwildfireactivity, followed by recurring fires of decreasing area.
"That first burst of wildfire is consistent with what we're seeing right now in the West. The buildup of fuels, in conjunction with the increasingly hot and dry conditions, leads to these very large, catastrophic fire events," said lead author Maureen Kennedy, assistant professor at the University of Washington Tacoma. "But our simulations show that if you allow fire to continue in an area, then the fire could become self-limiting, where each subsequent fire is smaller than the previous one."
How climate change, tree growth and wildfires will interact over coming decades is only beginning to be explored, Kennedy said, through experiments and simulations. Existing models of vegetation often assume wildfires will strike at set intervals, like every 10 years, or based on past patterns of wildfire risk for that ecosystem. But those previous patterns may not be the best guide to the future.
"The big question is: What's going to happen with climate change? The relationships that we've seen between climate and wildfire over the past 30 years, is that going to continue? Or is there going to be a feedback? Because if we keep burning up these fuels, and with extreme drought that limits new growth, there will eventually be less fuel for wildfires," Kennedy said.
The new study used a model that includes those feedbacks among climate, vegetation growth, water flows and wildfire risk to simulate the Big Creek watershed outside Fresno, California, near the site of the September 2020 Creek Fire. Climate models suggest that here, as in other parts of the West, conditions will likely continue to get hotter and drier.
Results of the 60-year simulations show that under increased drought and rising temperatures, the large wildfires will continue for about a decade, followed by recurring wildfires that occur in warm and dry conditions, but are smaller over time. Even without wildfire the trees in the forest declined in number and size over time because they were less productive and more stressed in the hot and dry conditions. These findings would likely apply to other forests that experience drought, said Kennedy, who's now using the model on other regions.
What happens with wildfires over the longer term matters now for planning. Current understanding is that communities will have to coexist with wildfire rather than exclude it entirely, Kennedy said. A combination of prescribed burns and forest thinning will likely be the future of managing forests as they contend with both wildfires and climate change.
"With such high density in the forest, the trees are pulling a lot of water out of the soil," Kennedy said. "There is growing evidence that you can relieve drought stress and make more drought-resilient forests if you thin the forests, which should also help with, for example, reducing the impact of that initial pulse of wildfire."
After thinning out smaller trees, managers could then do controlled burns to remove kindling and smaller material on the forest floor. But knowing how to manage forests in this way requires understanding how local weather conditions, plant growth and wildfire risk will play out in future decades.
"It's important to include climate change so we have an idea of the range of variability of potential outcomes in the future," Kennedy said. "For example, how often do you need to repeat the fuels treatment? Is that going to be different under climate change?"
Kennedy was also a co-author of another recent study that uses the same model to tease apart how much climate change and fire suppression increase wildfire risk in different parts of Idaho.
"Our 'new normal' is not static," said Christina (Naomi) Tague, a professor at UC Santa Barbara who is a co-author on both studies and developed the RHESSys-FIRE model that was used in the research. "Not only is our climate continuing to change, but vegetation—the fuel of fire—is responding to changing conditions. Our work helps understand what these trajectories of fire, forest productivity and growth may look like
More information: Maureen C. Kennedy et al, Does hot and dry equal more wildfire? Contrasting short‐ and long‐term climate effects on fire in the Sierra Nevada, CA, Ecosphere (2021). DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.3657
