ApocaDocuments (4) for the "Resource Depletion" scenario from this week
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Fri, Aug 6, 2010
from SciDev.net:
Chinese soil experts warn of massive threat to food security
If China's current rate of soil loss continues, a layer the size of Puerto Rico will be washed away in the next 50 years -- resulting in a 40 per cent decrease in food production, according to a study led by the country's Ministry of Water Resources, and science and engineering academies.... Scientists found that the total area of soil erosion has reached 1.61 million square kilometres nearly 17 per cent of total land cover. According to the study, many parts of the black soil in northeastern China -- the country's breadbasket -- have disappeared already, a trend that, if it continues, could put at risk food security for one million people.... "The most serious soil erosion exists in the slope land, especially in farmland," Lu Zongfan, a researcher at China's Institute of Soil and Water Conservation and consultant for the expedition, told SciDev.Net. ...
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How hard can it be to simply clear more land?
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Thu, Aug 5, 2010
from Guardian:
UN incineration plans rejected by world's rubbish-dump workers
The waste-pickers who scour the world's rubbish dumps and daily recycle thousands of tonnes of metal, paper and plastics are up in arms against the UN, which they claim is forcing them out of work and increasing climate change emissions.
Their complaint, heard yesterday in Bonn where UN global climate change talks have resumed, is that the clean development mechanism (CDM), an ambitious climate finance scheme designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries, has led to dozens of giant waste-to-energy incinerators being built to burn municipal rubbish, as well as hundreds of new landfill schemes designed to collect methane gas.
"Waste-pickers, who are some of the poorest people on earth, recover recyclable materials. They are invisible entrepreneurs on the frontline of climate change, earning a living from recovery and recycling, reducing demand for natural resources," says Neil Tangri, director of Gaia, an alliance of 500 anti-incinerator groups in 80 countries.
"But they are being undermined by CDM projects, which deny them entry to dumps. This is leading to further stress and hardship for some of the poorest people in the world and is increasing emissions," he said.... Nearly 60 percent of all Delhi's waste, for example, is recycled by an army of tens of thousands of pickers who scavenge for recyclable materials on the city's dumps.... But she said that the CDM would welcome groups of waste-pickers who wanted to apply for UN climate credits. "If they can show, with the correct methodology, that they are saving emissions, they would be eligible, too," she said. ...
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Apply for UN climate credits, you wastepickers climbing through garbage piles.
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Tue, Aug 3, 2010
from AP, via CBC:
Dead zone in Gulf one of largest ever
Scientists say this year that the "dead zone" area that forms every summer in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest ever measured.
The large area of low oxygen that chokes marine life comes in addition to the massive BP oil spill....
They say the dead zone is at least 7,722 square miles (20,000 square kilometres). The largest ever measured was just over 8,000 square miles (20,700 square kilometres) in 2001.
Pollution, such as runoff from farms along the Mississippi River, cause regions of low oxygen content or hypoxia in the Gulf through the introduction of nitrogen and phosphorus into the water system.
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Is this a year for records, or what?
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Mon, Aug 2, 2010
from The Economist:
Cod, phytoplankton, and shifting baselines
As another biologist, Ted Ames, subsequently established, the memories of fishermen in their 80s and 90s weren't just tall tales: 100 years ago, cod thrived close to New England's shores in sizes and numbers that beggar the imagination of today's commercial and sport fishermen. Mr Pauly's insight was that the memory of this abundance has disappeared generation by generation. "This is not nostalgia on the part of the old or lack of empathy on the part of the young," Mr Greenberg writes. "It is almost a willful forgetting--the means by which our species, generation by generation, finds reasonableness amid the destruction of the greatest natural food system on earth."... Just as the global economy would probably largely adjust to global warming, abandoning desertified or flooded zones like Arizona and Florida, giving up on snow-skiing in favor of water-skiing, and so forth, future populations would probably adjust psychologically to the extinction of bluefin tuna, coral, killer whales, sea turtles, and hundreds of other species, and would be reasonably happy on a seafood diet of catfish and mussels. You don't miss what you never had. ...
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That's even sadder than "you don't know what you got till it's gone."
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