Thursday, July 29, 2021

 

Global warming may lead to more variable hydroclimate


Peer-Reviewed Publication

CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HEADQUARTERS

Global wet regions will not only receive more rainfall, but also experience temporally more varied rainfall events under global warming, according to researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the UK Meteorological (Met) Office.

Their study was published in Science Advances on July 28.

From drinking water to hydroelectric energy, the amount of rainfall we receive, and when we receive it, has a significant impact on society and the environment. Rainfall variability is tightly associated with the occurrence of droughts and floods.

Using the Met Office's state-of-the-art climate model simulations and projections, scientists found that in a future warming world, climatologically wet regions will not only get wetter but also more variable, with greater differences between wet and dry conditions.

The increase in rainfall variability, on the whole, is projected to be larger than the increase in average rainfall, with the global mean increase in rainfall variability more than twice as large as the increase in mean rainfall (in a percentage sense).

"As climate warms, climatologically wet regions will generally get wetter and dry regions get drier. Such a global pattern of mean rainfall change is often described as 'wet-get-wetter'. By analogy, the global pattern of rainfall variability change features a 'wet-get-more variable' paradigm," said ZHOU Tianjun, corresponding author of the study.

ZHOU is a senior scientist at IAP and the CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences of CAS. He is also a professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Physically, while warming-induced atmospheric moistening acts to enhance rainfall variability worldwide, regional patterns of change in rainfall variability are dominated by change in circulation variability. "This highlights the importance of improving our understanding of future circulation changes, which is also an important source of uncertainty in climate change projections," said ZHANG Wenxia, lead author of the study.

"The amplified rainfall variability manifests the fact that global warming is making our climate more uneven--more extreme in both wet and dry conditions, with wider and probably more rapid transitions between them," added ZHANG. The resulting wider swings from one extreme to another will challenge the existing climate resilience of infrastructures, human society and ecosystems.

By simultaneously taking into account changes in the mean state and variability of precipitation, the research provides a new perspective for interpreting future precipitation change regimes. Around two-thirds of land will face a "wetter and more variable" hydroclimate, while the remaining land regions are projected to become "drier but more variable" or "drier and less variable."

"This classification of different precipitation change regimes is valuable for regional adaptation planning," said Kalli Furtado, Expert Scientist at the Met Office and second author of the study. "For most regions, the increasing rainfall variability, which could translate into impacts on crop yields and river flows, makes climate change adaptation more difficult."

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The study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, the International Partnership Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the UK-China Research Innovation Partnership Fund.

 

‘Less than 1% probability’ that Earth’s energy imbalance increase occurred naturally, say Princeton and GFDL scientists

Earth's energy balance sheet is in the red, leading to higher temperatures, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, more powerful blizzards and hurricanes, and deadlier extreme events.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Shiv Priyam Raghuraman 

IMAGE: SHIV PRIYAM RAGHURAMAN, A GRADUATE STUDENT IN ATMOSPHERIC AND OCEANIC SCIENCES AT PRINCETON, REPORTS IN TODAY’S ISSUE OF NATURE COMMUNICATIONS THAT EARTH’S 'ENERGY IMBALANCE' IS GROWING, AND THERE IS LESS THAN 1% PROBABILITY THAT THIS TREND CAN BE EXPLAINED BY NATURAL VARIATIONS IN THE CLIMATE SYSTEM. PUT ANOTHER WAY, THERE'S A GREATER THAN 99% PROBABILITY THAT OUR PLANET'S RISING TEMPERATURES ARE CAUSED BY HUMAN ACTIVITY. view more 

CREDIT: MORGAN KELLY, HIGH MEADOWS ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTE

Sunlight in, reflected and emitted energy out. That’s the fundamental energy balance sheet for our planet. If Earth’s clouds, oceans, ice caps and land surfaces send as much energy back up to space as the sun shines down on us, then our planet maintains equilibrium.

But for decades, that system has been out of balance. Sunlight continues to pour in, and Earth isn’t releasing enough, either as reflected solar radiation or as emitted infrared radiation. The extra heat trapped around our globe — some 90% of which is stored in the ocean — adds energy to worldwide climate systems and manifests in many ways: higher temperatures, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, more powerful blizzards and hurricanes, and deadlier extreme events.

While climate scientists have warned for a half-century that this was the inevitable result of adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, so-called climate deniers have continued to suggest that the observed changes might be a fluke — just natural variation.

“Until now, scientists have believed that because of the short observational record, we can’t deduce if the increase in the imbalance is due to humans or climatic ‘noise,’” said Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, a graduate student in atmospheric and oceanic sciences (AOS) at Princeton. “Our study shows that even with the given observational record, it is almost impossible to have such a large increase in the imbalance just by Earth doing its own oscillations and variations.”

He and his co-authors used satellite observations from 2001 to 2020 and found that Earth’s “energy imbalance” is growing. Raghuraman worked with David Paynter of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), a NOAA-funded national laboratory located on Princeton’s Forrestal Campus, and V. “Ram” Ramaswamy, director of GFDL and a lecturer with the rank of professor in geosciences and AOS at Princeton University. Their paper appears today in Nature Communications.

“It is exceptionally unlikely — less than 1% probability — that this trend can be explained by natural variations in the climate system,” said Raghuraman.

So what has caused the growing energy imbalance?

“We always think, ‘Increasing greenhouse gases means trapping more infrared heat’ — the classic greenhouse effect becomes larger,” said Raghuraman. “This is correct, but the flip side is that the resulting warmer planet now also radiates more infrared heat away to space, so the greenhouse gas heating impact is cancelled. Instead, much of the imbalance increase comes from the fact that we are receiving the same amount of sunlight but reflecting back less, because increased greenhouse gases cause cloud cover changes, less aerosols in the air to reflect sunlight — that is, cleaner air over the U.S. and Europe — and sea-ice decreases.” (Bright white sea ice reflects much more sunlight than sea water, so as sea ice melts, Earth is becoming less reflective.)

In addition, the Princeton and GFDL researchers noted that oceans store 90% of this excess heat. Because of this close relationship between the growing energy imbalance and ocean heating, the Earth’s energy imbalance has important connections to marine health, sea-level rise and the warming of the global climate system. The researchers hope that tracking the historical trends in this energy imbalance and understanding its components will improve the models of future climate change that drive policymaking and mitigation efforts.

“The satellite record provides clear evidence of a human-influenced climate system,” they said. “Knowing that human activity is responsible for the acceleration of planetary heat uptake implies the need for significant policy and societal action to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to curb further increases in Earth’s energy imbalance.”

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Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance,” by Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, David Paynter and V. Ramaswamy, appears in the current issue of Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24544-4). The research was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (award 80NSSC19K1372), the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, and the Mary and Randall Hack ’69 Research Fund.

 

Giant friction experiment at Kīlauea volcano

Stanford scientists test friction laws in the collapsing crater of an erupting volcano

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

On April 30, 2018, on the eastern flank of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano, lava suddenly drained from a crater that had been spewing lava for more than three decades. Then the floor of the crater, named Pu’u’ō’ō, dropped out.

Within 48 hours, the lava lake at Kīlauea’s summit 12 miles northwest of Pu’u’ō’ō began to fall as magma drained into the volcano’s plumbing. Soon, new cracks opened 12 miles east of Pu’u’ō’ō and molten lava spurted out, crept over roads, burned trees and torched power poles.

Over three months, Kīlauea spat out enough lava to fill 320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, destroyed more than 700 homes and displaced thousands of people. The summit landscape itself was transformed as its crater collapsed by as much as 1,500 feet throughout the summer in a way that scientists are only beginning to understand.

“In the entire 60 years of modern geophysical instrumentation of volcanoes, we’ve had only half a dozen caldera collapses,” said Stanford University geophysicist Paul Segall, lead author of a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that helps explain how these events unfold and finds evidence confirming the reigning scientific paradigm for how friction works on earthquake faults.

The results may help to inform future hazard assessments and mitigation efforts around volcanic eruptions. “Improving our understanding of the physics governing caldera collapses will help us to better understand the conditions under which collapses are possible and forecast the evolution of a collapse sequence once it begins,” said co-author Kyle Anderson, PhD ’12, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey who was part of the team working on-site at Kīlauea during the 2018 eruption.

The nature of friction

A key factor controlling the collapse of volcanic calderas – and the rupture of earthquake faults around the world – is friction. It’s ubiquitous in nature and our everyday lives, coming into play any time two surfaces move relative to each other. But interactions between surfaces are so complex that, despite centuries of study, scientists still don’t completely understand how friction behaves in different situations. “It’s not something that we can entirely predict using only equations. We also need data from experiments,” Segall said.

Scientists seeking to understand the role of friction in earthquakes usually run these experiments in labs using rock slabs barely larger than a door and often closer to the size of a deck of cards. “One of the big challenges in earthquake science has been to take these friction laws and the values that were found in the laboratory, and apply them to, say, the San Andreas Fault, because it’s such an enormous jump in scale,” said Segall, the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Professor of Geophysics at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

In the new study, published July 23, Segall and Anderson examine the slipping and sticking of Kīlauea volcano’s collapse block – a chunk of crust five miles around and half a mile deep – to characterize friction at a much larger scale. “We set out to develop a mathematical model of that collapse, highly simplified, but using modern understanding of friction,” Segall said.

Kīlauea’s collapse

Kīlauea’s caldera collapsed not in one smooth descent, but rather like a sticky piston. Roughly every day and a half, the collapse block dropped by nearly eight feet in a matter of seconds, then stopped. That’s because as magma in the chamber below the caldera surged out to fissures in Kīlauea’s lower eastern flank, it took away support for the overlying rock. “Eventually, the pressure becomes low enough that the floor falls in and it starts collapsing, like a sinkhole,” Segall said.

By the time the 2018 Kīlauea eruption ended, the volcano’s piston-like collapse events repeated 62 times – with each one triggering an earthquake and every move tracked down to the millimeter every five seconds by an array of 20 global positioning system (GPS) instruments. During the first few dozen collapse events, the geometry of the rock surfaces changed, but they held stable for the final 30 halting descents.

The new research shows that for this type of eruption, when the eruptive vent is at a lower elevation, it leads to a bigger drop in pressure below the caldera block – which then makes it more likely that a collapse event will start. Once collapse initiates, the weight of the massive caldera block maintains pressure on the magma, forcing it to the eruption site. “If not for the collapse, the eruption would have undoubtedly ended much sooner,” Segall said.

Evolving friction

Segall and Anderson’s analysis of the trove of data from Kīlauea’s caldera collapse confirms that, even at the vast scale of this volcano, the ways different rock surfaces slip and slide past one another or stick at different speeds and pressures over time are very similar to what scientists have found in small-scale laboratory experiments.

Specifically, the new results provide an upper bound for an important factor in earthquake mechanics known as slip-weakening distance, which geophysicists use to calculate how faults become unstuck. This is the distance over which the frictional strength of a fault weakens before rupturing – something that’s central to accurate modeling of the stability and buildup of energy on earthquake faults. Laboratory experiments have suggested this distance could be as short as tens of microns – equivalent to the width of a hair spliced into a few dozen slivers – while estimates from real earthquakes indicate it could be as long as 20 centimeters.

The new modeling now shows this evolution occurs over no more than 10 millimeters, and possibly much less. “The uncertainties are bigger than they are in the lab, but the friction properties are completely consistent with what’s measured in the laboratory, and that’s very confirming,” Segall said. “It tells us that we’re okay taking those measurements from really small samples and applying them to big tectonic faults because they held true in the behavior we observed in Kīlauea’s collapse.”

The new work also adds realistic complexity to a mathematical piston model, proposed a decade ago by Japanese volcanologist Hiroyuki Kumagai and colleagues, to explain a large caldera collapse on Miyake Island, Japan. While the widely embraced Kumagai model assumed the volcano’s rock surfaces changed as if by flipping a switch from being stationary relative to each other to slipping past one another, the new modeling recognizes that the transition between “static” and “dynamic” friction is more complex and gradual. “Nothing in nature occurs instantaneously,” Segall said.

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  Solar power and desalination to be efficiently linked for first time in new project


Meeting Announcement

CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY

Cranfield University will join 19 research partners spread through 12 countries to develop a first-of-a-kind plant which couples concentrated solar power (CSP) and desalination techniques.

The 10M€ European Union’s Horizon 2020 funded research and innovation programme will last 4 years. Innovative technologies related to both CSP and desalination will be designed to improve the efficiency of existing concepts. Improvements will be made on the independent systems but also on their coupling, taking advantage from the mutual interaction and potential.

Cranfield University is the only UK partner, and they are building on a long-standing reputation in CSP, the grant is worth 799k€ to them over 4 years. 

Chris Sansom, Cranfield’s Professor of CSP and Head of Centre for Renewable Energy Systems, said: “Generating environmentally-safe and sustainable sources of both power and fresh water is a challenge for many countries. The final demonstration system will be a 2 MWel power plant built in Saudi Arabia bringing together two promising technologies associated for the first time to reach unprecedented efficiencies. For Cranfield, it is further recognition of our research capabilities in both CSP and Water Sciences.”  

The DESOLINATION project focuses on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region to test and deploy its technology. A first prototype will be built on the premises of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 

With high solar resources and high demand for desalinated water, it is expected that the prototype will provide low-cost renewable electricity (<90€/MWh) and low-cost fresh water (<0.9€/m3), matching the countries’ requirements for efficient and accessible production of water. 

Carbon dioxide blends will be the core of the innovation in the concentrated solar process, leading to more efficient and less expensive power cycle. With water, forward osmosis will be developed and linked to membrane distillation using the wasted heat from the power cycle to generate freshwater. Finally, a unique combination of the power and water cycles will allow the disruptive coupled system to work at high waste-heat-to-freshwater conversion efficiency.

The final system will also benefit from a substantial reduction of CO2 emissions compared to traditional desalination systems.

UCF researchers develop new nanomaterial to derive clean fuel from the sea


The material offers the high performance and stability needed for industrial-scale electrolysis, which could produce a clean energy fuel from seawater

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA

ORLANDO, July 28, 2021 – Hydrogen fuel derived from the sea could be an abundant and sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, but the potential power source has been limited by technical challenges, including how to practically harvest it.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida have designed for the first time a nanoscale material that can efficiently split seawater into oxygen and a clean energy fuel — hydrogen. The process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is known as electrolysis and effectively doing it has been a challenge until now.

The stable, and long-lasting nanoscale material to catalyze the reaction, which the UCF team developed, is explained this month in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This development will open a new window for efficiently producing clean hydrogen fuel from seawater,” says Yang Yang, an associate professor in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and study co-author.

Hydrogen is a form of renewable energy that—if made cheaper and easier to produce—can have a major role in combating climate change, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Hydrogen could be converted into electricity to use in fuel cell technology that generates water as product and makes an overall sustainable energy cycle, Yang says.

How It Works

The researchers developed a thin-film material with nanostructures on the surface made of nickel selenide with added, or “doped,” iron and phosphor. This combination offers the high performance and stability that are needed for industrial-scale electrolysis but that has been difficult to achieve because of issues, such as competing reactions, within the system that threaten efficiency.

The new material balances the competing reactions in a way that is low-cost and high-performance, Yang says.

Using their design, the researchers achieved high efficiency and long-term stability for more than 200 hours.

“The seawater electrolysis performance achieved by the dual-doped film far surpasses those of the most recently reported, state-of-the-art electrolysis catalysts and meets the demanding requirements needed for practical application in the industries,” Yang says.

The researcher says the team will work to continue to improve the electrical efficiency of the materials they’ve developed. They are also looking for opportunities and funding to accelerate and help commercialize the work.

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More About the Team

Co-authors included Jinfa Chang, a postdoctoral scholar, and Guanzhi Wang, a doctoral student in materials science engineering, both with UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center; and Ruslan Kuliiev ’20MS, a graduate of UCF’s Master’s in Aerospace Engineering program, and Nina Orlovskaya, an associate professor with UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation Cluster.

Yang holds joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, which is part of the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of UCF’s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation (REACT) Cluster. He also holds a secondary joint-appointment in UCF’s Department of Chemistry. Before joining UCF in 2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He received his doctorate in materials science from Tsinghua University in China.

CONTACT: Robert H. Wells, Office of Research, robert.wells@ucf.edu

 

A group’s moral values may help determine the likelihood of hate-motivated harmful acts


USC Dornsife researchers use geospatial modeling and psychological experimentation to predict “extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice” — malicious acts motivated by hate or bigotry


Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

From attacks on synagogues and mosques to the COVID-era spike in anti-Asian sentiment, the past couple of years, unfortunately, have seen no shortage of acts of hatred.

But because of the statistical rarity of hate crimes, developing computational models to predict where they might occur has been a scientific challenge.

But a study led by scientists at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences does just that.

Published July 28 in the scientific journal Nature Communicationsthe research suggests that, within a given county, the moral values oriented around group preservation can help determine the prevalence of hate groups and so-called “extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice” (EBEPs) — that is, harmful acts motivated by hate or bigotry.

“The most striking aspect of our study is our use of geospatial modeling, which showed that the prevalence of hate groups at the county level can be predicted based on the psychological makeup of that county — specifically, the moral concerns,” said corresponding author Morteza Dehghani, associate professor of psychology and computer science, and a researcher at USC Dornsife’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

The study suggests that the prevalence of specific moral concerns is predictive of the number of hate groups per capita in that county, added Dehghani, five of whose students — from USC Dornsife’s Department of Psychology and the Department of Computer Science at USC Viterbi School of Engineering — also worked on the research.

“Our work is built on prior work linking violence and morality. In this research, we advance the understanding of extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice by proposing the Moralized Threat Hypothesis, which suggests that acts of hate are often motivated by the belief that somebody outside your own group has done something morally wrong and they should be excluded or punished for that wrong-doing” said Mohammad Atari, Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at USC’s Department of Psychology.

Extreme forms of morality and their societal consequences

Dehghani has been studying hate crimes since 2016, such as probing how moral rhetoric on Twitter may signal whether a protest will turn violent.

“I’ve always been interested in extreme forms of morality and their consequences,” he said. “Most forms of genocide or killings are explained through morality — ‘it was for the greater good. Someone has done something morally wrong, therefore it’s OK to do what we did to them.’”

Dehghani’s latest paper on EBEPs, he said, is the first to use geospatial modeling paired with behavioral experimentation to predict acts of violence against marginalized groups.

In the study, Dehghani and his student colleagues focused on extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice that were aligned with far right-wing ideologies. People who endorse the ideological right tend to strongly care about so-called “binding” values, such as loyalty to peers and respect for leaders, as much as moral concerns focused on individuals’ rights and well-being, he explained. People who are more left leaning, however, tend to only prioritize the latter set of values.

A key finding in the paper was the relationship between the county-level rate of hate groups and county-level endorsement of binding values. Since the study finds a strong association between the two, local governments could perhaps take steps to target resources to dampen any potential acts of hate, Dehghani said.

“Also,” he added, “we have an immigration crisis. Where are the best locations to place the immigrants? We could look at counties where binding values are not highly prioritized.”

Two actual groups, two fictional groups part of study

In addition to the geospatial analysis of more than 3,100 U.S. counties, the researchers collected data from U.S. adults via surveys and asked questions about anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim acts of hate. The researchers also asked questions about fictional groups to probe the relationship between people’s moral values and the degree to which they justify extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice even when such group does not exist in the real world.

They focused on four distinct EBEPs in their social psychological experiments: posting hate speech on Facebook, sharing hate speech on flyers, verbally assaulting a member of a marginalized group, and physically assaulting a member of a marginalized group.

Results of the social psychological experiments on more than 2,200 participants showed a strong link between their binding values and the degree to which they perceived EBEPs against certain groups, such as Muslims, to be justified.

“Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that acts of hate are morally motivated behaviors,” Dehghani said. “And research suggests that, at least in the United States, binding values are held more strongly among people who report right-wing political ideology.”

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In addition to Dehghani and Atari, other USC authors on the study include Joe Hoover, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman and Leigh Yeh.

Work on the study was supported by National Science Foundation grant BCS-1846531.

 

 

Climate experts share insights in new report from Argonne’s America Resilient Conference

Grant and Award Announcement

DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

America Resilient Climate Conference 

IMAGE: AMERICA RESILIENT CLIMATE CONFERENCE view more 

CREDIT: (IMAGE BY ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY.)

Combating climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. To discuss this challenge, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory convened the America Resilient virtual climate conference on April 14, 2021. The conference report is now available for free download on the America Resilient website.

Everyone is feeling the increasing effects of climate change across the United States, from the record-breaking 2020 wildfire season to the Southern freeze of February 2021, which caused the electrical grid in Texas to collapse. Participants at Argonne’s conference focused on ways to mitigate likely human suffering, loss of biodiversity, and disruptions to critical societal systems and functions. Three key themes emerged: prioritizing environmental justice; addressing the need for high-accuracy, high-resolution climate models; and equipping decision-makers to plan for adaptation and resilience.

“While it’s critical that we decarbonize our economy as quickly as possible, the emissions we’ve produced have already baked in weather patterns that will unfold over years to come,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. “These once-in-a-century storms are going to keep coming, but not all of them need to be crises.”

Currently, some communities encounter greater risks from climate change due to their location, demographics and access to resources and healthcare. “There are inequities that are baked into the energy system, and when you are trying to make your energy system more resilient, you need to make sure you’re not doing it in a way that’s going to further entrench these inequalities,” said Shalanda Baker, DOE Deputy Director for Energy Justice and the Secretary of Energy’s Advisor on Equity.

To build resilient communities, leaders and community members need science-based information about the impacts climate change will have. “While it’s critical that we decarbonize our economy as quickly as possible, the emissions we’ve produced have already baked in weather patterns that will unfold over years to come,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. “These once-in-a-century storms are going to keep coming, but not all of them need to be crises.”

High-accuracy, high-resolution climate models can help us avoid crises by projecting climate impacts down to regional and local scales and taking action to mitigate their effects.

These localized models allow communities to more effectively assess immediate and future climate-related risks.

At the conference, experts sought to increase climate-change-related education and training and to democratize access to climate data to support informed decision-making.

The America Resilient Climate Conference report summarizes key discussions from the panels and keynote speakers. This resource is available to coordinate research, industry, government and community efforts to enhance climate resilience in the United States, and potentially around the world.

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Video: American Resilient Climate Conference

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

 

Measuring conservation in a way that counts

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CORAL REEF STUDIES

Measuring conservation in a way that counts 

IMAGE: THE FUTURE OF NATURE CONSERVATION LIES IN IDENTIFYING WHERE SCIENCE AND POLICY CAN SAVE THE MOST ECOSYSTEMS AND SPECIES. view more 

CREDIT: ROBERT STREIT

new study raises questions on whether current conservation science and policy for protected areas could be saving more biodiversity—with political and economic expediency often having taken precedence in the past.

Lead author Professor Bob Pressey, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University (JCU), said the term ‘save’ in conservation needs to be better defined.

“Across the world, protected areas are established where they least interfere with commercial activities, even though those activities can cause decline and extinction,” Prof Pressey said.

“But ‘saving’ means intervening in a way that prevents the loss of ecosystems and species,” he said.

“There lies the problem. Business as usual means expanding protected areas where they make little difference while threatened biodiversity continues to disappear.”

Prof Pressey said measures other than saving are used to assess conservation progress, and these are often politically convenient: money invested, km2 protected areas established and the number of species contained in national parks. These measures can hide a lack of progress in real conservation.

“What do these measures actually tell us about saving?” he said. “Not much. Real progress in saving biodiversity is measured by how much loss we have avoided.”

While political, institutional and communication barriers are difficult to overcome, conservation measures need to be redefined. As an example, the study suggests the Aichi global Target 11 to increase protected areas to 17% of land and 10% of oceans hampers conservation. The target has instead motivated a race to increase coverage in the most expedient ways, both politically and economically.

Prof Pressey said there is a real risk that post-2020 targets will do the same unless they focus on avoiding loss.

“The future of nature conservation lies in identifying where science and policy can make the most difference—and then measuring, year by year, the difference made,” he said.

The study brought together a team of scientific and policy experts from across Australia, Austria, and the USA. Their results will contribute to ongoing global discussions about the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

“Better science is needed to demonstrate that we can predict where, when, and how we can most effectively save biodiversity,” Prof Pressey said.

“And global policy makers need to revise their expectations and targets to address conservation impact, or avoided loss.”

He said saving biodiversity means developing global guidance for all jurisdictions to implement local interventions.

“With this, we can achieve smarter and more meaningful conservation targets that go beyond the extent of the area being protected.”

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PAPER

Pressey R, Visconti P, McKinnon M, Gurney G, Barnes M, Glew L, Maron M. (2021). ‘The mismeasure of conservation’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2021.06.008

 

Warning over start of commercial-scale deep-sea mining


Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Deep-sea mining in international waters could begin in two years – but researchers say this is unnecessary and could cause irreversible damage to marine ecosystems.

Writing in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers from the University of Exeter, Greenpeace Research Laboratories and Globelaw challenge the need for deep seabed mining and highlight the risks to ecosystems and biodiversity that would arise from commercial mining activities.

No commercial-scale deep seabed mining is currently allowed to take place outside the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of coastal nations.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is drafting regulations that would allow such extraction of deep-sea minerals to begin.

Last month, the so-called "two-year rule" was triggered by the Pacific island of Nauru, which is working with The Metals Company, a minerals mining and processing firm headquartered in Canada, for approval to begin mining.

The ISA now has two years to finalise regulations or face an application for mining without agreed rules in place.

"Seabed mining is sometimes presented as an unavoidable consequence of ever-growing demand for minerals, especially to supply certain metals for the green technology transition," said Dr Kirsten Thompson, of the University of Exeter.

"This narrative is put forward by mining companies, who also present deep-sea mining as the ‘lesser of two evils’ in comparison to land-based mining, but it’s impossible to compare the inherent value of land and deep-sea ecosystems. 

“If you're asking 'which destructive industry is better?' then you're asking the wrong question."  

The researchers argue that there are alternatives to opening up the deep seabed for mining, including better design and sustainability of technology to enable far better use of the minerals that humanity has already extracted from the Earth.

"It's vital to bust the myth that we have no choice but to permit commercial mining in the deep sea," said Dr Thompson.

Taking the example of electric vehicles, the researchers highlight three studies that estimate the minerals that will be needed by the electric vehicle industry – and the estimates vary widely, depending on their underlying models and assumptions.

"Current estimates of mineral requirements for renewable technology don't fully account for important factors such as technological advances in battery technology, better public transport and behaviour changes such as people taking fewer journeys by car,” said Dr Kevin Brigden, metals chemist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories.

Kathryn Miller, of Greenpeace Research Laboratories, said: "Deep-sea ecosystems cover vast areas of our planet but we know very little about them.

"What we do know is that the deep sea is home to a variety of highly specialised, slow-growing species, and that the seabed plays an important part in storing carbon.

"We don't fully understand the carbon-burial process, so disturbing the seabed is a risk both to biodiversity and in terms of climate change mitigation."

The paper also says that exploitation of deep-sea minerals would probably benefit "a handful of corporations in the world’s richest countries", rather than the wider global community and future generations.

It proposes a "Rights of Nature" management framework, where a group including scientists, communities and other interested parties would be created to oversee guardianship of the ocean.

The study concludes: "Once started, deep-sea mining is likely to be impossible to stop. Once lost, biodiversity will be impossible to restore."

Dr Thompson added: "We mine our oceans at our peril."

The new article is entitled: "Challenging the need for deep seabed mining from the perspective of metal demand, biodiversity, ecosystems services and benefit sharing."

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The research team has published previous papers warning that deep-sea mining could destroy ecosystems, and that a “gold rush” of seabed mining could lead to unprecedented damage.

  • The University of Exeter has launched a ‘Green Futures’ campaign and website to drive action on the environment and climate emergency. To find out more please visit https://greenfutures.exeter.ac.uk.