Ecological Footprints

“There is no planet B”. This slogan has become widely mentioned recently in relation to COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris. The slogan highlights that the debate about climate change relates to much more than simply a changing climate. The underlying processes have a lot to do with our lifestyles and the related patterns of consumption and waste which cause severe damages to the environment (including the global climate). Carbon emissions are therefore one major trigger of climate change, but are also an effect of our unsustainable ways of life. The ecological footprint shown in the following map is a measure that looks at the impact that humanity has on our planet:

(click for larger version)

Humanity’s demand for goods and services created from our planet’s resources have for a long time exceeded what Earth’s ecosystems are capable of renewing. It is estimated that we exceeded this limit in 1970. According to calculations from the Global Footprint Network, it is now in the first half of August that we go into ecological debt, on a day known as Earth Overshoot Day.

The ecological footprint calculates the amount of land required to sustain a country’s consumption patterns, including “the land required to provide the renewable resources people use (most importantly food and wood products), the area occupied by infrastructure, and the area required to absorb CO2 emissions” (quoted from the Happy Planet Index Report). The measure also takes imports into account, so that the negative environmental impact of products is considered where these are consumed rather than where they are produced. The ecological footprint is expressed in global hectares which represent a hectare of land with average productive biocapacity.
There are various approaches to calculating this measure and to come to conclusions about the impact and implications of this concept. The Global Footprint Network estimates that taking the current global population into account, each person can sustainably use 1.8 global hectares for a one-planet living, while the humanity currently extracts resources much faster than they can be regenerated. At the current levels of consumption (and waste), humankind would need more then 1.5 Earth-like planets to sustain this standard of living.
While not being without criticism, the Ecological Footprint is one of the most comprehensive assessments of the global environmental impact that can be estimated on a global scale for all nations. This gridded cartogram visualises data published in the most recent Happy Planet Index which uses the Ecological Footprint as one of its indicators. The map combines each country’s average per capita ecological footprint with the global population distribution on a gridded basis. Each grid cell therefore is resized according to the total amount of land used by the population in that space according to their demand on nature. An area twice as large as another uses up twice as much global hectares. In addition, a traffic-light colour scheme shows the overall environmental impact of each country turned into numbers of planets that were needed if the world as a whole was to live such a lifestyle.

The considerable differences between the nations become strikingly visible in this image. While much of the wealthy world especially in Europe and North America lives rather unsustainable lives, the still growing populations on the African continent but also in the world’s second largest country of India still live within Earth’s environmental means. What example is the rich world providing these future generations for the future of our planet?

Post scriptum: Checking my very own ecological footprint via WWF’s Online Footprint Calculator I have to plead guilty to contributing my part to this map. Sustainable futures are as much a challenge for society as a whole as they are for each individual populating this fragile planet.

Source: Views of the World 

Researchers train software to help monitor climate change

This is a black and white satellite map of the ocean off the west coast of Africa. The Canary Islands are visible.
Credit: Jose A. Piedra-Fernandez, University of Almeria, Spain



A computer program that automatically analyzes mounds of satellite images and other data could help climate scientists keep track of complex, constantly changing environmental conditions, according to an international team of researchers.


"All of the data and information that is continually collected by satellites and sensors can cause tons of problems for scientists, who simply don't have the time to analyze every pixel of every satellite image," said James Wang, professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State. "Our goal has been to provide a tool that would create useful information or knowledge from this large pool of data.."

The program uses probability to analyze and extract environmental information from satellite images and sensor data about ocean structures like wakes, upwellings and cold and warm eddies, the researchers reported in the current issue of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

Researchers first built a database of ocean structures and then used the knowledge of human experts to train the program to recognize and identify changes in the ocean.

"We're particularly interested in the analysis of mesoscale regional ocean structures in satellite images," said Jose A. Piedra-Fernandez, a visiting professor in information sciences and technology at Penn State during the project and currently an assistant professor at the University of Almeria, Spain.

Researchers tested the technology on satellite images provided by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer of sections of oceans in the Iberian Atlantic, the Mediterranean coast and near the Canary Islands. The tests included 1,000 cases of real ocean features, including 472 upwellings, 119 cloudy upwellings, 180 wakes, 10 anticyclonic eddies, 40 cyclonic eddies and 180 misclassified regions.

The best combination of filter and classification method developed by the researchers accurately identified the ocean features more than 89 percent of the time.

"In almost all cases, the proposed methodology improves the accuracy rate and reduces the number of features necessary to get a good ocean structures classification," Piedra-Fernandez said.

The researchers think that data on these oceanic features could offer clues on subtle changes in the temperature of the oceans and global climate conditions.

The system involves several steps, including adjusting for possible earth- and solar-based interference sources, separating ocean regions from land regions and extracting and identifying features from specific regions of ocean. In the feature selection process, the system filters the regions of the images by ranking strong and weak--or, relevant and irrelevant--relationships between the features, said Piedra-Fernandez. After the filtering process, the system can better identify and classify the upwellings, wakes and eddies.

Bayesian networks, which use probability to make decisions, are the preferred technology for classifying the features because they are easy to design and evaluate, said Piedra-Fernandez. Just as the presence of sniffles and a cough increases the probability that a doctor will diagnose that a patient is suffering from a cold, a Bayesian network can determine that the color or shading of certain pixels in an image indicates an upwelling, or other oceanic features studied by the researchers.

Because the design of the Bayesian system requires less data for learning than other probability-based decision systems, such as Markov networks, the Bayesian networks reduce the computational cost of the system, another key goal for the system's design.

The team next plans to add more features, such as salinity and chlorophyll concentrations, and improve the accuracy of the image classification system.

Wang and Piedra-Fernandez worked with Manuel Canton-Garbin, professor of computing and artificial intelligence, University of Almeria, Spain.

This project was partially supported by Spain's Ministry of Education and Science. Their ongoing research is funded by the National Science Foundation's cyber-enabled discovery program.



Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Penn State. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Article source: Science Daily

To Take Earth’s Pulse, You Have to Fly High

Ecologist Greg Asner and his team at the Carnegie Institution for Science can measure the biomass of a forest from the air. In this false-color video of Amazon rain forest in Peru, the biggest, heaviest trees are red, while yellow, green, and blue trees are progressively lighter. Carnegie's research aircraft is equipped with a scanning lidar—a laser ranging device that works like radar—and imaging spectrometers.




Story by Peter Miller
THE VIEW OUT THE WINDOW WAS BAD ENOUGH. As his research plane flew over groves of California’s giant sequoias, some of the world’s tallest trees, Greg Asner could see the toll the state’s four-year drought had taken. “It looked wicked dry down there,” he said. But when he turned from the window to the video display in his flying lab, the view was even more alarming. In places, the forest was bright red. “It was showing shocking levels of stress,” he said.

The digital images were coming from a new 3-D scanning system that Asner, an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution for Science, had just installed in his turboprop aircraft. The scanner’s twin lasers pinged the trees, picking out individual branches from 7,000 feet up. Its twin imaging spectrometers, one built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), recorded hundreds of wavelengths of reflected sunlight, from the visible to the infrared, revealing detailed chemical signatures that identified each tree by species and even showed how much water it had absorbed—a key indicator of health. “It was like getting a blood test of the whole forest,” Asner said. The way he had chosen the display colors that day, trees starved of water were bright red.


As California's historic drought continues, scientists are turning to remote sensing from the skies. Orbiting satellites measure groundwater depletion, and aircraft monitor the snowpack and the tree canopy's chemical composition, bringing crucial information to those working to alleviate the drought—and to the people who depend on them.

Disturbing as the images were, they represented a powerful new way of looking at the planet. “The system produces maps that tell us more about an ecosystem in a single airborne overpass,” Asner wrote later, “than what might be achieved in a lifetime of work on the ground.” And his Carnegie Airborne Observatory is just the leading edge of a broader trend.

At a time when human impacts on the planet are unprecedented, technology offers a chance to truly understand them.

A half century after the first weather satellite sent back fuzzy pictures of cloudsswirling over the North Atlantic, advanced sensors are doing for scientists what medical scanners have done for doctors—giving them ever improving tools to track Earth’s vital signs. In 2014 and early 2015 NASA launched five major Earth-observing missions (including two new instruments on the space station), bringing its total to 19. Space agencies from Brazil, China, Europe, and elsewhere have joined in. “There’s no question we’re in a golden age for remote sensing,” said Michael Freilich, NASA’s earth science director.

Four years of drought have taken a harsh toll on California's farms and forests. Last spring Greg Asner and his team flew over the Sierra Nevada, home to sequoias and other giant trees. With the new instruments on their airplane, the researchers completed in days a damage survey that would have taken a lifetime from the ground.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GREGORY ASNER, CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE

Climate Change Is Here

Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future

The news from all these eyes in the sky, it has to be said, is mostly not good. They bear witness to a world in the midst of rapid changes, from melting glaciers and shrinkingrain forests to rising seas and more. But at a time when human impacts on Earth are unprecedented, the latest sensors offer an unprecedented possibility to monitor and understand the impacts—not a cure for what ails the planet, but at least a better diagnosis. That in itself is a hopeful thing.

WHAT THIS IS It’s a map of atmospheric carbon dioxide over land last summer, made by NASA’s OCO-2 satellite. Red areas have a bit more CO₂, green areas a bit less, than the global average of 400 parts per million.

WHAT THIS TELLS US Forests and oceans have slowed global warming by soaking up some of the CO₂ we emit. OCO-2 will shed light on where exactly it’s going—and on how fast the planet could warm in the future.MAP BY NGM STAFF: SOURCE NASA/JPL

WATER IS EARTH’S LIFEBLOOD, and for the first time, high-flying sensors are giving scientists a way to follow it as it moves through every stage of its natural cycle: falling as rain or snow, running into rivers, being pumped from aquifers, or evaporating back into the atmosphere. Researchers are using what they’ve learned to predict droughts, warn of floods, protect drinking water, and improve crops.

Forest

WHAT THIS IS The Carnegie Airborne Observatory made this image of rain forest in Panama with its scanning lidar, which probes the trees’ size and shape, and a spectrometer that charts their chemical composition.

WHAT THIS TELLS US The technique allows Asner's team, flying at 7,000 feet, to identify individual trees from their chemical signatures—and even to say how healthy they are. The reddish trees here (the colors are arbitrary) are growing the fastest and absorbing the most CO₂.PHOTOGRAPH BY GREGORY ASNER, CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE

In California the water crisis has turned the state into something of a laboratory for remote-sensing projects. For the past three years a NASA team led by Tom Painter has been flying an instrument-packed aircraft over Yosemite National Park to measure the snowpack that feeds the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the primary source of water for San Francisco.
Until now, reservoir managers have estimated the amount of snow on surrounding peaks the old-fashioned way, using a few gauges and taking surveys on foot. They fed these data into a statistical model that forecast spring runoff based on historical experience. But lately, so little snow had fallen in the Sierra Nevada that history could offer no analogues. So Chris Graham, a water operations analyst at Hetch Hetchy, accepted the NASA scientists’ offer to measure the snowpack from the sky.

Water

WHAT THIS IS It’s an image of the Tambopata River in eastern Peru made by the scanning lidar aboard the Carnegie observatory.

WHAT THIS TELLS US The area in this image is actually covered with rain forest. Some lidar pulses penetrate the forest and reflect off the ground, revealing the subtle topography—red is a few feet higher than blue—and faint, abandoned river channels that have shaped the forest and helped create its rich biodiversity.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GREGORY ASNER, CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE
Painter’s Twin Otter aircraft, called the Airborne Snow Observatory, was equipped with a package of sensors similar to those in Greg Asner’s plane: a scanning lidar to measure the snow’s depth and an imaging spectrometer to analyze its properties. Lidar works like radar but with laser light, determining the plane’s distance to the snow from the time it takes the light to bounce back. By comparing snow-covered terrain with the same topography scanned on a snow-free summer day, Painter and his team could repeatedly measure exactly how much snow there was in the entire 460-square-mile watershed. Meanwhile the imaging spectrometer was revealing how big the snow grains were and how much dust was on the surface—both of which affect how quickly the snow will melt in the spring sun and produce runoff. “That’s data we’ve never had before,” Graham said.

Land

WHAT THIS IS NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these visible-light images of California and Nevada on March 27, 2010 (left), the most recent year with normal snowfall, and on March 29, 2015 (right).

WHAT THIS TELLS US After four years of drought, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada—a crucial water reservoir for California—is just 5 percent of the historical average. Snow has virtually vanished from Nevada. And west of the Sierra, in the Central Valley, much of the fertile farmland is fallow and brown.

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY NASA
Painter also has been tracking shrinking snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains, which supply water to millions of people across the Southwest. Soon he plans to bring his technology to other mountainous regions around the world where snow-fed water supplies are at risk, such as the Himalayan watersheds of the Indus and Ganges Rivers. “By the end of the decade, nearly two billion people will be affected by changes in snowpacks,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest stories of climate change.”



WITH LESS WATER FLOWING into California’s rivers and reservoirs, officials have cut back on the amount of water supplied to the state’s farmers, who typically produce about half the fruits, nuts, and vegetables grown in the U.S. In response, growers have been pumping more water from wells to irrigate fields, causing water tables to fall. State officials normally monitor underground water supplies by lowering sensors into wells. But a team of scientists led by Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine, and at JPL, has been working with a pair of satellites called GRACE(for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) to “weigh” California’s groundwater from space.
Planet Probes
Earth's vital signs are monitored by NASA's 19 Earth-observing missions. Ten of the most critical, shown here, circle the globe up to 16 times a day, collecting data on climate, weather, and natural disasters.

MONICA SERRANO, NGM STAFF; TONY SCHICK
SOURCE: STEVEN E. PLATNICK AND CLAIRE L. PARKINSON, NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

The satellites do this by detecting how changes in the pull of Earth’s gravity alter the height of the satellites and the distance between them. “Say we’re flying over the Central Valley,” Famiglietti said, holding a cell phone in each hand and moving them overhead like one satellite trailing the other. “There’s a certain amount of water down there, which is heavy, and it pulls the first satellite away from the other.”

The GRACE satellites can measure that to within 1/25,000 of an inch. And a year later, after farmers have pumped more water out of the ground, and the pull on the first satellite has been ever so slightly diminished, the GRACE satellites will be able to detect that change too.

Depletion of the world’s aquifers, which supply at least one-third of humanity’s water, has become a serious danger, Famiglietti said. GRACE data show that more than half the world’s largest aquifers are being drained faster than they can refill, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, India, Pakistan, and North Africa.

Since California’s drought began in 2011, the state has been losing about four trillion gallons a year (more than three and a half cubic miles) from the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Basins, Famiglietti said. That’s more than the annual consumption of the state’s cities and towns. About two-thirds of the lost water has come from aquifers in the Central Valley, where pumping has caused another problem: Parts of the valley are sinking.

This concrete wellhead on Allan Clark’s almond farm at Chowchilla, east of Los Banos in California’s Central Valley, used to be flush with the ground. But groundwater pumping accelerated by drought has caused the land to sink—in some places, according to satellite measurements, by around a foot a year. Two of Clark’s irrigation wells have run dry; he’s on a waiting list to have one deepened.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK THIESSEN, NGM STAFF

The spectrometer view would be like “Star Trek technology”: We’d be able to see and name individual trees from space.

Tom Farr, a geologist at JPL, has been mapping this subsidence with radar data from a Canadian satellite orbiting some 500 miles up. The technique he used, originally developed to study earthquakes, can detect land deformations as small as an inch or two. Farr’s maps have shown that in places, the Central Valley has been sinking by around a foot a year.

One of those places was a small dam near the city of Los Banos that diverts water to farms in the area. “We knew there was a problem with the dam, because water was starting to flow up over its sides,” said Cannon Michael, president of Bowles Farming Company. “It wasn’t until we got the satellite data that we saw how huge the problem was.” Two sunken bowls had formed across a total of 3,600 square miles of farmland, threatening dams, bridges, canals, pipelines, and floodways—millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. In late 2014 California governor Jerry Brown signed the state’s first law phasing in restrictions on groundwater removal.

AS EVIDENCE HAS MOUNTED about Earth’s maladies—from rising temperatures and ocean acidification to deforestation and extreme weather—NASA has given priority to missions aimed at coping with the impacts. One of its newest satellites, a $916 million observatory called SMAP (for Soil Moisture Active Passive), was launched in January. It was designed to measure soil moisture both by bouncing a radar beam off the surface and by recording radiation emitted by the soil itself. In July the active radar stopped transmitting, but the passive radiometer is still doing its job. Its maps will help scientists forecast droughts, floods, crop yields, and famines.

No one gets a better look at how we’ve transformed Earth—and conquered night—than astronauts on the space station. The view here is to the north over Portugal and Spain. The green band is the aurora.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NASA
“If we’d had SMAP data in 2012, we easily could have forecast the big Midwest drought that took so many people by surprise,” said Narendra N. Das, a research scientist at JPL. Few people expected the region to lose about $30 billion worth of crops that summer from a “flash drought”—a sudden heat wave combined with unusually low humidity. “SMAP data could have shown early on that the region’s soil moisture was already depleted and that if rains didn’t come, then crops were going to fail,” Das said. Farmers might not have bet so heavily on a bumper crop.

Climate change also is increasing the incidence of extreme rains—and SMAP helps with that risk too. It can tell officials when the ground has become so saturated that a landslide or a downstream flood is imminent. But too little water is a more pervasive and lasting threat. Without moisture in the soil, a healthy environment breaks down, as it has in California, leading to heat waves, drought, and wildfires. “Soil moisture is like human sweat,” Das said. “When it evaporates, it has a cooling effect. But when the soil is devoid of moisture, Earth’s surface heats up, like us getting heatstroke.”

DESPITE ALL THE CHALLENGES to Earth’s well-being, the planet so far has proved remarkably resilient. Of the 37 billion metric tons or so of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere each year by human activities, oceans, forests, and grasslands continue to soak up about half. No one knows yet, however, at what point such sinks might become saturated. Until recently, researchers didn’t have a good way to measure the flow of carbon in and out of them.

That changed in July 2014, when NASA launched a spacecraft called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Designed to “watch the Earth breathe,” as managers put it, OCO-2 can measure with precision—down to one molecule per million—the amount of CO₂ being released or absorbed by any region of the world. The first global maps using OCO-2 data showed plumes of CO₂ coming from northern Australia, southern Africa, and eastern Brazil, where forests were being burned for agriculture. Future maps will seek to identify regions doing the opposite—removing CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Greg Asner and his team also have tackled the mystery of where all the carbon goes. Prior to flying over California’s woodlands, they spent years scanning 278,000 square miles of tropical forests in Peru to calculate the forests’ carbon content.

At the time, Peru was in discussions with international partners about ways to protect its rain forests. Asner was able to show that forest areas under the most pressure from logging, farming, or oil and gas development also were holding the most carbon—roughly seven billion tons. Preserving those areas would keep that carbon locked up, Asner said, and protect countless species. In late 2014 the government of Norway pledged up to $300 million to prevent deforestation in Peru.

Within the next few years NASA plans to launch five new missions to study the water cycle, hurricanes, and climate change, including a follow-up to GRACE. Smaller Earth-observing instruments, called CubeSats—some tiny enough to fit into the palm of a hand—will hitch rides into space on other missions. For scientists like Asner, the urgency is clear. “The world is in a state of rapid change,” he said. “Things are shifting in ways we don’t yet have the science for.”

Within the next decade or so the first imaging spectrometer, similar to the ones used by Asner and Painter, could be put into Earth orbit. It would be like “Star Trektechnology” compared with what’s up there now, Painter said. “We’ve orbited Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars with imaging spectrometers, but we haven’t had a committed program yet for our own planet,” he said. The view from such a device would be amazing: We’d be able to see and name individual trees from space. And we’d be reminded of the larger forest: We humans and our technology are the only hope for curing what we’ve caused.

Source: National Geographic Magazine

Online atlas shows climate change impact on forest distribution patterns in Iberian Peninsula

Forecast for the distribution of beech forest suitability areas for the 2050-2080 period
Credit: Image courtesy of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona


Researchers from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and CREAF have developed the Suitability Atlas of Woody Plants of the Iberian Peninsula, a series of digital maps available online which for the first time reveal the present and future degree of adaptation to climate conditions of the main plant species found in the forests throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Data shows the tendency of forests to move higher in altitude and migrate towards the north.


Today, territory and species conservation managers need to rely on data and empirical methods on which to base their protection policies. Within the context of Global Change, the maps offered can be useful to evaluate possible changes in the distribution of forests in the future, which could lead to an in depth study of mitigation and/or adaptation tools needed to face these changes.

Until now, a few maps had been drawn for specific woody plants or for partial areas of the peninsula. The Suitability Atlas of Woody Plants however offers a global view of the Iberian Peninsula. The series of maps were created to determine the degree of suitability to climate and/or topographic conditions of the forests' main woody plants. With the help of these maps one can verify, in an area of 200 metres, the topo-climatic suitability of the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, these values can be consulted for the current climatic scenario (1950-1998) and for future projections proposed by one of the foremost research centres dedicated to climate change, the Hadley Centre, located in Exeter, UK.

The Atlas combines advanced methodologies and technologies such as Geographic Information Systems, multivariate statistics and interoperable geoportals to offer both rigorous cartographic standards and information that can be consulted by the general public.

The Atlas was developed by a group of researchers from the UAB Department of Animal Biology, Plant Biology and Ecology, in collaboration with the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF), under the framework of the R&D&I National Plan.

Main features of the Atlas

• Completeness: covering almost all woody species found in forests
• Quality initial data: both the Digital Climate Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula (ACDPI) and the third National Forest Inventory are cartography databases with high spatial resolution and with proven data quality.
• Detailed resolution: 200 m spatial resolution
• Objectivity: numerical quality (known level of error) calculated and documented for each map.
• Interoperability: format in which maps can be viewed allows users to contrast information with other map databases
• Accessibility: maps can be consulted online in GIS format without the need of additional installations.

First results

Researchers have already obtained the first scientific results with the help of Atlas data. They were able to verify that many species could be affected by the reduction in suitability in the regions they currently inhabit. They detected a tendency in forests to migrate towards higher altitudes and more northern latitudes. In this sense, mountain ranges such as the Pyrenees are seen as important protection areas of biodiversity within the context of Climate Change.

Nevertheless, not all species react the same when suffering the consequences of climate change. Species such as aleppo pine, stone pine, or holm oak are more resistant and may even occupy larger areas in the future. In contrast, species such as scots pine or beech are more affected by rising temperatures and longer dry periods and therefore the space they occupy may begin to decrease.

At these moments researchers are studying the total forest surface which could be lost or substituted by scrubs, as well as interactions between forest species when their area of distribution is modified. The fact that forest surfaces are decreasing is of great relevance, since this represents a reduction in CO2 consumption, an increase in the risk of land erosion and modifications in water cycles.

The Atlas is available online at:http://www.opengis.uab.cat/IdoneitatPI/index.html



Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Article source: Science daily

Climate Time Machine`

Interested in Climate change? 

Do you want to get information on sea levesl, carbon dioxide emissions, global temperature and sea ice from first hand?

Now, all the information you're eager to learn are available from NASA's Global Climate change website, where these four categories are explained through time series and analytical mapping, to give you the big picture of what's been going on throughout the world from the late 19th century, until today.

Don't miss the chance to visit NASA's website and get your hands to these one of a kind charts!

Follow the link here for the website!

Four Ways GIS is Being Used to Help Populations Vulnerable to Long Term Climate Change

BY DEVON REESER

GIS is a critical tool in helping the world’s most vulnerable to climate change adapt and potentially even benefit. The world’s tropics and ocean lying populations are the most at risk to long term climate change – the gradual issues that are resulting from greenhouse gas pollution, such as increased extreme droughts and storms, or wildlife shifts and crop losses. According to Standard & Poor’s global analysis, the top 20 countries at risk to climate change are in the southern hemisphere, and most are among the world’s poorest.

The vulnerable need to adapt, and they need to do so with limited funding and resources. GIS is filling that gap – with simple knowledge transfer, complex layering analyses, or just saving time and money by pinpointing the best places to invest resources. Here are four examples of how GIS is helping the most vulnerable adapt and cope with climate change.
Rainwater Runoff Harvesting in Africa

A comprehensive study of best adaptation strategies for West African farmers vulnerable to increased drought and changing rain patterns creatively used GIS to map areas most prone to surface area runoff collection of rain water.[i] Those areas are now being developed in partnership with international NGOs to serve as natural rain water collectors for small farmer irrigation.

USING GIS TO MONITOR RAINFALL IN NIGER USING RAINWATCH. SOURCE: ICT FOR DEVELOPMENT.

Specifically, in Kenya, a government secretariat is working with the NGO Kenya Rainwater Project(KRP) to water proof best identified sites from GIS mapping to ensure both farmer and domestic household water security in areas vulnerable to changing rainy seasons.
Pinpointing Best Dam Locations in Flood Zones with Projection Modeling

More than a billion people live in low lying coastal regions that will eventually flood either partially or entirely without intervention due to rising sea levels.[ii] GIS is helping, however, pin point the exact locations of where to build dams to mitigate flooding.

Bangladesh is considered the most at risk with a huge, poor population living directly within ocean flood zones. By 2050, 17% of the country will be inundated.[iii] While many people will have to move, risks can be mitigated and migration efforts saved with careful dam placing. Md. Abu Zafer Siddik and Mursheda Rahman used GIS data layering analysis to track exactly where to put a dam in one of the worst flood zones – Sirajganj. They tracked layers of river tributary levels, geological analysis, and ocean levels over time and with predictive modelling to scientifically forecast with mapping where a dam would be most helpful in 50 years.

Dengue Fever Tracked and Stomped
Slight increases in temperature can reduce entire cold seasons for tropical countries. While good news for beach goers, a decrease in cold means an increase in insects – and all of their pesky diseases. Dengue is one of the worst, and it is exacerbated not only by a decrease in cold temperature, but also by an increase in urban migration already seen and expected to intensify in coming years as rural farmers adapt to climate change and global economic pressures.

Scientists are able to successfully predict dengue outbreak areas now with GIS spatial analysis, as demonstrated in a Malaysian case study.[iv] Remote sensing satellite data can provide data on environmental factors such as land cover, land surface temperature, and topography, which then can be correlated with rainfall, air temperature, humidity, and population density to analyze and predict conditions prime for dengue. The data can help inform where and when to spray for mosquitoes and inform residents in those areas to take precautions.

INCIDENTS OF DENGUE OVERLAID ON TOP OF LAND SURFACE TEMPERATURES FROM LANDSAT TM. SOURCE: NAZRI ET AL, 2009. 

Participatory Mapping Overlaid with Satellite GIS in Amazonian Indigenous Tribes

Indigenous groups that still rely on the land and its resources for their basic economies are some of the most vulnerable to climate change. Mapping has proven an instrumental tool to help change their economic systems in concert with dwindling natural resources, however.

Richard Chase Smith took participatory maps created by 14 indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon dependent on hunting and gathering and overlaid them with GIS satellite imagery of deforestation and resource changes. The result of this work in the 1990s is that the communities themselves are now applying GIS to their own resource management plans – tracking animal populations, vegetation cover, land use, and soil types among other factors.[v]

Since the world’s poorest are also the most vulnerable to climate change risks – including to their health, their basic needs, and their livelihoods – a simple, low cost tool like GIS is instrumental in helping mitigate risks and adapt to tremendous challenges in our altering world.

References
[i] Ngigi, Stephen N. 2009. Climate Change Adaptation Strategies: Water Resources Management Options for Smallholder Farming Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Earth Institute at Columbia University. http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/uploads/files/9eacd477-e2ef-4b72-9207-5a18135dceb3.pdf

[ii]World Ocean Review. 2014. http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/coasts/living-in-coastal-areas/

[iii] Harris, Gardiner. 28 Mar. 2014. Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land. The New York Times.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world/asia/facing-rising-seas-bangladesh-confronts-the-consequences-of-climate-change.html?_r=0

[iv] Nazri, CD, I Rodziah, and A. Hashim. 2009. Distribution pattern of a dengue fever outbreak using GIS. Journal of Environmental Health Research 9:2.http://www.cieh.org/uploadedFiles/Furniture/JEHR/JEHR_Vol09_2.pdf.



[v] Smith, Richard Chase. 1994. GIS and Long Range Economic Planning for Indigenous Territories. Cultural Survival 18:4. http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/gis-and-long-range-economic-planning-indigenous-territories.

Source