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Amazon rainforest: 'Once it's gone, it's gone forever'

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Billions of leaves in the Amazon rainforest take in CO2 - a gas that contributes to global warming.

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'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute

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An area of Amazon rainforest roughly the size of a football pitch is now being cleared every single minute, according to satellite data.

The rate of losses has accelerated as Brazil's new right-wing president favours development over conservation.

The largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon is a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming.

A senior Brazilian official, speaking anonymously, told us his government was encouraging deforestation.

How is the forest is cleared?

Usually by bulldozers, either pushing against the trunks to force the shallow roots out of the ground, or by a pair of the machines advancing with a chain between them.

In one vast stretch of recently cleared land, we found giant trees lying on their sides, much of the foliage still green and patches of bare earth drying under a fierce sun.

Later, the timber will be cleared and sold or burned, and the land prepared for farming.

In other areas, illegal loggers carve new tracks through the undergrowth to reach particularly valuable hardwood trees which they sell on the black market, often to order.

What does this mean for the forest?

Satellite images show a sharp increase in clearances of trees over the first half of this year, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil, the country that owns most of the Amazon region.

The most recent analysis suggests a staggering scale of losses over the past two months in particular, with about a hectare being cleared every minute on average.

The single biggest reason to fell trees, according to official figures, is to create new pastures for cattle, and during our visit we saw countless herds grazing on land that used to be rainforest.

Over the past decade, previous governments had managed to reduce the clearances with concerted action by federal agencies and a system of fines.

But this approach is being overturned by Mr Bolsonaro and his ministers who have criticised the penalties and overseen a dramatic fall in confiscations of timber and convictions for environmental crimes.

Why does this matter?

The forest holds a vast amount of carbon in its billions of trees, accumulated over hundreds or even thousands of years.

Every year, the leaves also absorb a huge quantity of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be left in the atmosphere adding to the rise in global temperatures.

By one recent estimate, the trees of the Amazon rainforest pulled in carbon dioxide equivalent to the fossil fuel emissions of most of the nine countries that own or border the forest between 1980-2010.

The forest is also the richest home to biodiversity on the planet, a habitat for perhaps one-tenth of all species of plants and animals.

And it is where one million indigenous people live, hunting and gathering amid the trees.

What does Brazil's new policy mean?

According to a senior Brazilian environment official, the impact is so "huge" that he took the risk of giving us an unauthorised interview to bring it to the attention of the world.

We had to meet in secret and disguise his face and voice because Mr Bolsonaro has banned his environment staff from talking to the media.

Over the course of three hours, a startling inside picture emerged of small, under-resourced teams of government experts passionate about saving the forest but seriously undermined by their own political masters.

Mr Bolsonaro swept to power on a populist agenda backed by agricultural businesses and small farmers, many of whom believe that too much of the Amazon region is protected and that environment staff have too much influence.

He has said he wants to weaken the laws protecting the forest and has attacked the civil servants whose job it is to guard the trees.

The result, according to the environment official, is that "it feels like we are the enemies of the Amazon, when in fact we should be seen in a completely different way, as the people trying to protect our ecological heritage for future generations".

"They don't want us to speak because we'll say the truth, that conservation areas are being invaded and destroyed, there are many people marking out areas that should be protected."

So what could happen next?

The official believes the figures for deforestation could be even worse than officially recognised.

"There's a government attempt to show the data is wrong, to show the numbers don't portray the reality," he told me.

Ministers are considering hiring an independent contractor to handle information from satellite images of the region, questioning the work of the current government agency.

Also, the rainy season is only now coming to an end, and because deforestation typically takes place in the drier months of the year, the official fears that the pace of losses could pick up speed.

"In truth, it can be even worse," he said, because many of the areas recently damaged haven't yet been picked up by satellite images.

"People need to know what's happening because we need allies to fight against invasions, to protect areas, and against deforestation."

What does the government say?

We made repeated requests for interviews with the ministers for environment and agriculture but were refused.

Earlier this year, Mr Bolsonaro, who's known as the "Trump of the Tropics", invited the US president to be a partner in exploiting the resources of the Amazon.

Last month, in an interview with BBC Brasil, the environment minister Ricardo Salles, said landowners should be rewarded for preserving forest and that developed nations should foot the bill.

And there's an assertive response when voices in the outside world call for the forest to be saved.

The president's top security adviser, General Augusto Heleno Pereira, told Bloomberg last month that it was "nonsense" that the Amazon was part of the world's heritage.

"The Amazon is Brazilian, the heritage of Brazil and should be dealt with by Brazil for the benefit of Brazil," he said.

What's the view of the farmers?

For decades, farming organisations have argued that the network of protected areas of forest, including reserves for indigenous people, is too restrictive for a developing country that needs to create jobs.

A leading figure in the farmers' union in the city of Santarem, a hub for soya and cattle, told me that other countries had cleared their trees for agriculture but now wanted Brazil not to do the same.

Vanderley Wegner said that the US and Europe, which buy produce from the Amazon region, have far less stringent controls on their forests, and that Europe "has very little forest left" anyway.

"We have to develop the Amazon. More than four million people live here and they need development too, it's a constitutional right of every Brazilian citizen," he said.

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'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute

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An area of Amazon rainforest roughly the size of a football pitch is now being cleared every single minute, according to satellite data. The rate of losses has accelerated as Brazil's new right-wing president favours development over conservation. The largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon is a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming.

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Humans and volcanoes caused nearly all of global heating in past 140 years

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Humans and volcanoes caused nearly all of global heating in past 140 years

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New study confirms natural cycles play little role in global temperature trends and tackles discrepancies in previous models

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The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history? | Environment | The Guardian

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The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?

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The long read: Human activity has transformed the Earth – but scientists are divided about whether this is really a turning point in geological history

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The heat is on over the climate crisis. Only radical measures will work | Environment | The Guardian

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The heat is on over the climate crisis. Only radical measures will work

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Rising global heating will require a drastic shift in the way we live

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Scientists found a tree in North Carolina that’s a jaw-dropping 2,624 years old – BGR

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Humans have a habit of shortening the lifespan of trees. We just love to cut them down, and we do so with startling efficiency, damaging or wiping out forests that have been around for centuries and some for much, much longer.

The United States is no exception, but there are still small pockets of the country that are pretty much the same as they've always been, and researchers recently spent the time to study one such area in North Carolina. What they found were several trees that easily top the 2,000-year mark and at least one that is well over 2,600 years old.

The study, which was published in Environmental Research Communications, examined a total of 110 trees located in a 16,000-acre plot of land owned by the North Carolina Nature Conservancy. The trees, which are Bald Cypress, are located along the Black River.

Researchers, taking tiny core samples that don't risk the life of the trees, knew that many of the specimens in the area were well over 1,000 years old based on previous research. Nevertheless, the scientists were surprised to find multiple trees that passed the 2,000-year threshold and a single tree, designated BLK227, which was at least 2,624 years old.

With numbers that large, it's hard to really put it in perspective. For a bit of context, consider that BLK227 predates the reign of Alexander the Great by over 200 years. By the time the first Pilgrims arrived on the shores of the United States, this one particular tree was already over 2,200 years old. Yeah, it's ancient.

"It is exceedingly unusual to see an old-growth stand of trees along the whole length of a river like this," Professor David Stahle, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "Bald cypress are valuable for timber and they have been heavily logged. Way less than 1 percent of the original virgin bald cypress forests have survived."

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Scientists found a tree in North Carolina that's a jaw-dropping 2,624 years old

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Humans have a habit of shortening the lifespan of trees. We just love to cut them down, and we do so with startling efficiency, damaging or wiping out forests that have been around for centuries and some for much, much longer.

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World's food supply under 'severe threat' from loss of biodiversity

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World's food supply under 'severe threat' from loss of biodiversity

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Plants, insects and organisms crucial to food production in steep decline, says UN

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Climate change: UK carbon capture project begins - BBC News

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The giant Drax power station, near Selby in North Yorkshire, has become the first in Europe to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from wood-burning.

Drax burns seven million tonnes of wood chips each year to drive generators to make electricity.

The firm has now begun a pilot project to capture one tonne a day of CO2 from its wood combustion.

The technology effectively turns climate change into reverse on a tiny scale, but it's controversial.

How does it reverse climate change?

When a forest grows, the trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to make their wood.

If you burn that wood, the process doesn't emit any extra CO2 into the atmosphere - because the trees removed it from the air in the first place. It's called carbon neutral.

If you go one step further by capturing the CO2 from wood burning, you're actually reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere overall.

In an ideal world you'd go one step further by creating useful products from the waste CO2.

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Caution urged over 'carbon unicorns'

Why is it needed?

This technology is known as Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

Many scientists believe it will be needed because they don't trust politicians to curb the CO2 emissions that are over-heating the planet.

They say that unless carbon emissions start falling dramatically, we will overshoot the recommended safety limit of a 1.5C rise in global temperature.

Carbon capture sounds smart - why is it controversial?

There are two main reasons for controversy.

First is the impact on the plants and animals living on the huge amount of land needed to grow the trees and plants needed to generate power on a wide scale.

Second is the amount of additional energy needed to capture and store the carbon.

Let's just take the example of Drax.

The power station generates 6% of the UK's electricity whilst burning seven million tonnes of wood a year - that's more wood than is harvested in the whole of Britain. The majority of the supply comes from the US, where forests are expanding as small-scale farmers allow unprofitable land to go back to nature.

Drax says most of its fuel is residue from forest industries - that's offcuts and unsuitable trees for timber.

A previous BBC investigation found that some of the wood almost certainly also comes from species-rich swamp forests in the southern US.

What if the world wants to generate carbon neutral energy by burning wood?

This is where the numbers get a bit mind-boggling.

One estimate suggests that a staggering amount of land would be required to make BECCS feasible under the Paris climate agreement - perhaps as much as three times the area of India.

Harvard University professor David Keith warned: "We must be cautious of technologies that aim to remediate the carbon problem while greatly expanding our impact on the land."

That impact will depend on many variables, such as whether the wood is so-called "waste"; whether it comes from plantation forests or natural forests; how its removal from the forest reduces the amount of material that will lock up carbon in the soil; how it's transported - and more.

How does the carbon capture work?

Drax is trialling a new system devised at Leeds university. Most existing carbon capture technologies use a chemical in the amine group.

It is drizzled down through a flue gas chimney, where it absorbs the CO2. A further process separates the CO2 from the amine, which can be re-used.

The Drax experiment is working with a tech spin-off called C-Capture. It uses an organic solvent which it says is less toxic than amine and uses less energy.

It's one of several products on the market as chemists strive to find new ways of taking CO2 out of the air.

What do people say about the Drax experiment?

Andy Koss, CEO of Drax Power, admits that its carbon capture pilot is tiny - but says it's an important step towards getting the whole plant capturing its CO2 - and finding a market to use it.

"This is a really important technology," he told us. "We are definitely going to need it if we want to keep within the 1.5C temperature limit proposed by scientists. "

Almuth Ernsting from the pressure group Biofuelwatch takes the opposite view. "Burning biomass is absolutely the wrong option for so many reasons," she said. "Forests are vital for the health of the climate so we need to keep them not burn them.

"The Drax experiment is so ridiculously tiny it's hard to believe it's not 'greenwash'."

Follow Roger on Twitter.

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The giant Drax power station, near Selby in North Yorkshire, has become the first in Europe to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from wood-burning. Drax burns seven million tonnes of wood chips each year to drive generators to make electricity. The firm has now begun a pilot project to capture one tonne a day of CO2 from its wood combustion.

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Greenland has gone through an "unprecedented" period of ice loss within the last two decades.

The Grace satellites revealed a four-fold increase in mass being lost from Greenland's ice sheet from 2003-2013.

The study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that ice loss subsequently stalled for 12-18 months.

The research reveals how different areas of Greenland might contribute to sea-level rise in future.

What did the study look at?

Scientists concerned about sea levels have long focused on Greenland's south-east and north-west regions, where glaciers continually force large chunks of ice into the Atlantic Ocean.

But the largest sustained acceleration in ice loss from early 2003 to mid-2013 occurred in south-west Greenland, which is largely devoid of these large glaciers.

"Whatever this was, it couldn't be explained by glaciers, because there aren't many there," said the study's lead author Michael Bevis, from The Ohio State University.

"It had to be the surface mass - the ice was melting inland from the coastline."

What were the melt drivers?

The ice melt accelerations in this region tracked a weather phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

When in a particular ("negative") phase, the NAO enhances summertime warming and the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface, while reducing snowfall - especially in western Greenland.

The researchers believe the melting in south-west Greenland is a combination of climate change and conditions brought on by the NAO.

"These oscillations have been happening forever... so why only now are they causing this massive melt? It's because the atmosphere is, at its baseline, warmer. The transient warming driven by the North Atlantic Oscillation was riding on top of more sustained global warming," said Prof Bevis.

What do the results mean?

The consequence of this finding is that south-west Greenland, which had not been considered a serious threat, now looks as if it will become a major future contributor to sea-level rise.

"We knew we had one big problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet glaciers," said Prof Bevis.

"But now we recognise a second serious problem: Increasingly, large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea."

GPS systems in place now monitor Greenland's ice around most of its margin, but the network is sparse in the south-west.

Because the Grace satellites stopped taking data in 2016, it remains unclear whether the pause in melting - which began in 2013 - has now stopped or is still ongoing.

Andrew Shepherd, professor of Earth observation at the University of Leeds, UK, who was not involved with the latest study, told BBC News: "This study goes a long way towards explaining why Greenland's ice sheet stopped melting in 2013, but unfortunately the Grace satellite died in 2016 just when things started to get interesting.

"So I think we will have to look elsewhere to understand whether the pause has ended and whether it affected the ice flow."

The paper in PNAS also suggests the pause is linked to a change in the phase of the NAO - from negative to positive.

What of future (and past!) science?

Grace (the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) consisted of two Earth-orbiting satellites which took detailed measurements of gravity-field anomalies.

A joint mission between Nasa and the German Aerospace Center, they were launched in March 2002. A replacement pair were put up last year, but have yet to be brought fully online.

Last month, researchers reported that the Greenland melt was unprecedented in 350 years.

A US research team examined ice cores from western Greenland that record the behaviour of the ice sheet dating back to 1650.

The group's analysis indicated that an uptick in melting began soon after the onset of industrial-era Arctic warming in the mid-1800s, and that the decade 2004-2013 experienced more sustained and intense melting than any other 10-year period in the 350-year record.

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Greenland has gone through an "unprecedented" period of ice loss within the last two decades. The Grace satellites revealed a four-fold increase in mass being lost from Greenland's ice sheet from 2003-2013. The study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that ice loss subsequently stalled for 12-18 months.

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Jair Bolsonaro, the president-elect of Brazil, might be the biggest single-person threat the Amazon rainforest has seen in a generation. He has likened indigenous reserves in the Amazon to "chickenpox" on the land, and promised that "there won't be a square centimeter demarcated as an indigenous reserve" under his leadership.

Tropical rainforests are critical storage sites for carbon dioxide, keeping the greenhouse gas locked away in soils and trees. The Amazon is the world's largest tropical rainforest, making its protection critical to preventing runaway climate change.

It is also home to hundreds of indigenous tribes that have lived there for thousands of years, and, in many cases, already struggle to defend their land from invasion by illegal loggers and miners. Without strong governmental support to help defend against invasion, and in light of recent major funding cuts to the Brazilian indigenous affairs agency, the reserve system is already vulnerable.

But despite flaws, indigenous reserves are often the only bulwark against deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Research has shown that indigenous management practices are the best approach to maintaining the health of tropical rainforests globally. And in the video below, satellite imagery confirms the research-from 1984 to 2018, deforestation crept all the way up to and against the exact contours of the Xingu Indigenous Park in Brazil:

Where others see crucial ecosystems, Bolsonaro sees potential for economic gain by opening those reserves to industry. "Where there is indigenous land," he has said, "there is wealth underneath it."

The current deforestation rate in Brazil is roughly 2,700 sq miles (7,000 sq km) a year. To comply with its Paris Accord obligations, the country would need to cut that by two thirds, according to National Geographic.

Rondônia, a state in western Brazil on the Bolivian border, has become one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon over the last 30 years. Protected areas haven't been completely spared, but the pace of deforestation is dramatically reduced within them:

The Amazon is dotted with 462 indigenous reserves, but very few-just 8% of that count-have been formally demarcated. Just last month, the Brazilian government recognized an 8,000 sq mile (2.1 million hectare) reserve called the Kaxuyana-Tunayana, on the border of Pará and Amazonas state, for demarcation. At least 18 different indigenous groups live within that plot, Mongabay reports. With its demarcation in limbo, it stands to reason that the Kaxuyana-Tunayana and others like it may be among the lands at risk from the Bolsonaro presidency.

Bolsonaro has said he plans to do away with the Brazilian environment ministry, fusing it with the country's agricultural ministry. He has also proposed a 541 mile (870 km) paved highway through protected forest, according to Scientific American.

As Wired notes, to fulfill his aspirations, Bolsonaro would need to amend Brazil's Forest Code, a national law that states that private landowners can only deforest 20% of the land they own in the Amazon, and must leave the remaining 80% covered by native vegetation.

But whatever the eventual outcome of Bolsonaro's efforts to maneuver through the legal process required to make these changes, his electoral victory has reportedly emboldened loggers, miners, and poachers to encroach on indigenous lands, leaving indigenous communities vulnerable to attack and their land vulnerable to exploitation.

"Many brothers tell us there are invasions, people entering the territories with no regard for the rules and no fear of the authorities," Beto Marubo, a native leader from the Javari Valley Indigenous Land in Brazil's far-western borderlands, told National Geographic.

And as for what happens to unprotected land under Bolsonaro's vision of Brazil? The precedent is clear:

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We already know what Jair Bolsonaro's vision for the Amazon would look like

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Jair Bolsonaro, the president-elect of Brazil, might be the biggest single-person threat the Amazon rainforest has seen in a generation. He has likened indigenous reserves in the Amazon to "chickenpox" on the land, and promised that "there won't be a square centimeter demarcated as an indigenous reserve" under his leadership.

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The UK government announces it is axing a £1bn grant for developing new carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

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0 0 1 19 108 collège champittet 1 1 126 14.0 Normal 0 21 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tableau Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-language:JA;} Explain the functioning and management of artesian basins and aquifers, distinguishing between natural and artificial recharge

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International Institute for Environment and Development

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Deforestation is a global issue. Beyond its destructive impacts on biodiversity and the livelihoods of forest-dependent people, it is a major driver of climate change and accounts for roughly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. The bulk of carbon dioxide emissions come from deforestation in just seven tropical countries, including Brazil and Indonesia.

REDD - 'reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation' - could offer a way forward, as IIED's growing body of REDD research and reports reflects.

What is REDD?

Put very simply, REDD involves some kind of incentive for changing the way forest resources are used. As such, it offers a new way of curbing CO2 emissions through paying for actions that prevent forest loss or degradation. These transfer mechanisms can include carbon trading, or paying for forest management.

There is as yet no formal mechanism for REDD with international recognition under the Kyoto Protocol, but voluntary REDD projects are starting round the world. It is becoming clear that to be effective, payment needs to be tailored to address specific national and local drivers of deforestation over time.

How does REDD work?

As a concept, REDD is simple. Funding rewards good forest management in developing countries and makes poor forest management, such as indiscriminate unenforced logging, less profitable than the sustainable alternative.

REDD, as currently conceived, involves payments to developing countries that will prevent deforestation or degradation that would otherwise have taken place. The source of this funding can be from carbon trading, where actors in industrialised countries offset their own emissions by transferring funds as carbon credits to developing countries. Or it can be some other mechanism such as a trust fund, which does not depend on offsets.

The payments then, in principle, go towards actions that enable developing countries to conserve or sustainably use their forests (say, through more appropriate harvesting of wood and other forest products), when they might otherwise not have been able to do so.

This points to one of REDD's potential advantages, particularly at a time of volatile global economics: it can be cheap in comparison to other mitigation activities, such as carbon capture or renewable energy. Although the point is arguable, leaving forests more or less alone can bring benefits for very little cost.

Tropical rainforests are, next to ocean reefs, the richest ecosystems on Earth. Worldwide, forests are also home - or a treasurehouse of resources - to some 70 million people, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. Managing forests sustainably so they serve the people dependent on them, continue to house an extraordinary range of wild plants and animals, and meet the global imperative to sequester carbon, is now a matter for urgent action.

What are the challenges of REDD?

A range of political and technical challenges stood in the way of REDD's recognition by the Kyoto Protocol. But the Coalition for Rainforest Nations ensured REDD re-emerged as an issue at the 2005 Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Montreal.

At the 2007 COP in Bali, REDD became a key element in the Bali Roadmap, the action plan for negotiating a new climate regime by the end of 2009. By 2008, at the most recent COP in Poznan, Poland, REDD had become the centre of heated debate.

Those promoting REDD see it as a means of supporting forest conservation and a low-cost mechanism for reducing carbon emissions. Critics argue that industrialised countries must not be absolved of their domestic responsibilities to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

There are concerns, too, about the negative impacts REDD payments might have on forest-dependent communities, primarily through further weakening of their land and resource rights. There are also potential and complex links with agriculture. Limiting the expansion of agriculture could have impacts on the supply of food and other agricultural products.

To be effective as mitigation, REDD projects have to meet a number of stringent criteria. They must avoid 'leakage', for instance - where conservation in one area simply shifts deforestation to another. REDD projects and programmes also need to be 'additional' - that is, they must lead directly to reductions in deforestation and degradation that would not have happened simply as a result of wider changes in the economy. A project baseline needs to be established to measure progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Land tenure and forest governance are also key factors that will determine the success or failure of any REDD initiative, and the mechanisms by which payments and benefits are shared will be critical.

So what appears to be a relatively straightforward solution to climate change - paying to keep forests standing - is much more complex than it appears at first glance. Because REDD is inseparable from the highly complex social, economic and biological realities of forests today, it remains controversial.

Current action on REDD

REDD initiatives are proliferating. Here are a couple of examples.

In 2008, the UN set up the UN-REDD programme, a collaboration between the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and including a multidonor trust fund.

Norway has contributed substantially to the programme, and a raft of developing countries - Bolivia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Tanzania and Vietnam - have joined the first phase. Officials hope it will be agreed formally at the 15th COP in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009.

REDD is happening here and there across the globe, with varying levels of success.

The Juma Sustainable Development Reserve Project in Amazonas, Brazil's biggest state, has got off to a promising start as the Amazon's first REDD project that has been independently validated. The Juma project is part of the wider Bolsa Floresta programme - now making payments to more than 6000 families in 14 threatened conservation areas, covering over 10 million hectares.

Bolsa Floresta has four main ways of making payments - one dispersed through a purpose-designed debit card system run by a mainstream bank - which create a balance of incentives that make a pledge towards zero deforestation economically palatable at family and community level.

REDD: key terms

REDD The acronym stands for 'reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation'. This issue was first placed on the agenda of the 2005 international climate change negotiations. At that point the agenda item was called 'reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries and approaches to stimulate action'. As a result, this is the name of the decision on REDD agreed at the 2007 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bali, Indonesia (decision 2/CP.13). Decision 2/CP.13 acknowledges that forest degradation also leads to emissions and needs to be addressed when reducing emissions from deforestation. The 'DD' in REDD now stands for degradation and deforestation.

REDD + Along with the separate decision on REDD (see above), REDD is included in the Bali Action Plan (decision 1/CP.13) as a component of enhanced action on mitigation (curbing emissions). Parties to the UNFCCC have agreed to consider policy approaches and positive incentives on issues relating to REDD in developing countries and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries. It is this last clause on the role of conservation and sustainable management that has added the '+' to the REDD discussion.

REDD baseline An expected, or business-as-usual, emission of carbon dioxide from deforestation and forest degradation in the absence of additional efforts to curb such emissions - used as a benchmark against which emissions reductions can be measured.

REDD conditions To deliver real reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, REDD must satisfy the following conditions.

Additionality: Proof that any reduction in emissions from a REDD project is genuinely additional to reductions that would occur if that project were not in place.

No leakage: Leakage is a reduction in carbon emissions in one area that results in increased emissions in another. A classic example is where curbing clearfelling in one region of forest drives farmers to clearfell in another.

Permanence: The long-term viability of reduced emissions from a REDD project. This is heavily dependent on the forested area's vulnerability to deforestation and/or degradation.

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REDD: Protecting climate, forests and livelihoods

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Deforestation is a global issue. Beyond its destructive impacts on biodiversity and the livelihoods of forest-dependent people, it is a major driver of climate change and accounts for roughly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. REDD - 'reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation' - could offer a way forward, as IIED's growing body of REDD research and reports reflects.

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https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140605-brazil-deforestation-carbon-emissions-environment/

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Researchers studying plants, ants, birds, dung beetles and orchid bees in the Brazilian Amazon have found clear evidence that deforestation causes drastic loss of tropical forest biodiversity.

Publishing this week in Ecology Letters, researchers highlighted how remaining areas of undisturbed and recovering forest provided the last refuge for many species unable to withstand the impact of human activity.

As one of the most comprehensive surveys of the impacts of disturbance on tropical forest biodiversity ever conducted, the international team, including Lancaster University, conducted a detailed analysis of nearly 2,000 species of plants, birds, beetles, ants and bees that were found across more than 300 diverse sites in the Brazilian Amazon.

They found, where forests had been cleared for cattle ranching and agriculture, plant and animal life was impoverished and remaining species invariably consisted of the same subset of the original flora and fauna.

Researchers say this is "irrefutable" evidence that biodiversity is declining across the tropics.

But some hope still remains. The researchers also found species loss could be offset by maintaining areas of forest that contain distinctly different populations of plants and animals that, while different, complement and help sustain each other.

Other findings were:

· Deforestation through logging, fire and farming had a major effect on species loss and simplification across large areas.

· Natural differences between pristine forests and variation in forms of disturbance to the forests -- such as logging and fire -- across large landscapes means that simplification of species is not playing out equally everywhere.

· To preserve maximum species diversity, reserves should not be concentrated in one part of a region, but as a widespread network of forest reserves. These should include secondary forests where no primary forests remain.

Dr. Ricardo Solar, lead author of the study and a research fellow at Brazil´s Universidade Federal de Viçosa, said: "Pre-existing differences in the undisturbed forests plus the way in which they had been altered by human activity had an impact on which species survived.

"Some of the disturbed forests were able to maintain up to 80per cent of the species found in pristine forests -- this gives us hope. It is vitally important that reserves should not be concentrated in a single part of a region, but as a widespread network of forest reserves."

Co-author Professor Jos Barlow, Lancaster University, said: "The lower species diversity in degraded forests also indicates that many species are restricted to undisturbed forests. This demonstrates the importance of controlling selective logging and preventing wildfires in all forests, including those on private lands that have already been disturbed."

Fellow co-author Dr Toby Gardner, researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, said: "There remains a widespread assumption that concentrating conservation efforts on the protection of isolated reserves is the best way we can safeguard biodiversity. But our work shows that in areas of private land that have already been disturbed -- which dominate much of the tropics -- we need to maintain and protect a wide network of forest areas. Without such a landscape-scale approach we can expect many species to go regionally extinct."

Dr Joice Ferreira, a co-author from the Brazilian Agricultural Research Center, said: "These findings are timely as Brazil recently revised its environmental laws regulating forests, allowing a trading system for private reserves and designing plans for environmental restoration.

"For example, the high variation in biodiversity found in secondary forests indicates the role these ecosystems play in regional conservation. For many areas of the Amazon, conserving existing secondary forests may be much cheaper and even more efficient than planting trees."

Journal Reference:

Ricardo Ribeiro de Castro Solar, Jos Barlow, Joice Ferreira, Erika Berenguer, Alexander C. Lees, James R. Thomson, Júlio Louzada, Márcia Maués, Nárgila G. Moura, Victor H. F. Oliveira, Júlio C. M. Chaul, José Henrique Schoereder, Ima Célia Guimarães Vieira, Ralph Mac Nally, Toby A. Gardner. How pervasive is biotic homogenization in human-modified tropical forest landscapes? Ecology Letters, 2015; DOI: 10.1111/ele.12494

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nature; ecology research; extinction; new species; forest; rainforests; ecology; biodiversity

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Evidence of species loss in Amazon caused by deforestation

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Researchers studying plants, ants, birds, dung beetles and orchid bees in the Brazilian Amazon have found clear evidence that deforestation causes drastic loss of tropical forest biodiversity. Publishing this week in Ecology Letters, researchers highlighted how remaining areas of undisturbed and recovering forest provided the last refuge for many species unable to withstand the impact of human activity.

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from research organizations

Sprawling mining operations in Brazil are destroying much more of the iconic Amazon forest than previously thought, says the first comprehensive study of mining deforestation in the world's largest tropical rainforest.

The research, published in Nature Communications, finds that mining-related forest loss caused roughly 10 percent of all Amazon deforestation between 2005 and 2015, much higher than previous estimates.

Surprisingly, roughly 90 percent of deforestation related to mining occurred outside the mining leases granted by Brazil's government, the University of Vermont-led study finds. Mining-induced deforestation was 12 times greater outside the mine lease areas than within them, extending as far 43.5 miles (70 km) beyond mine borders.

"These results show that mining now ranks as a substantial cause of Amazon forest loss," says Laura Sonter of UVM's Gund Institute for Environment. "Previous estimates assumed mining caused maybe one or two percent of deforestation. Hitting the 10 percent threshold is alarming and warrants action."

Mining infrastructure is a key form of off-lease deforestation, researchers say. This includes worker housing and new transportation routes -- roads, railways and airports. Built by mining companies or developers, these routes also enable other forms of deforestation, including agriculture, which remains the leading cause of Amazon forest loss.

"Our findings show that Amazon deforestation associated with mining extends remarkable distances from the point of mineral extraction," says Gillian Galford of UVM's Gund Institute and Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

The findings come as Brazil's government considers legislation that would further ease environmental regulations and lift restrictions on mining in protected and indigenous areas. Currently, when companies apply for mining leases, they do not need to account for any damage their operations may cause offsite, researchers say.

For the study, researchers tracked landscape changes around the Amazon's 50 largest active mines, analyzing 10 years of deforestation data from Brazil's Space Agency (INPE).

"We hope these findings help government, industry and scientists to work together to address this issue," says Sonter, who led the study as a UVM postdoctoral researcher, before joining the University of Queensland (Australia).

Rainforests provide many benefits, including helping to regulate the planet's climate, housing rich plant and animal biodiversity, and soaking up carbon dioxide, researchers say. They note that global efforts have successfully helped to curb other causes of Amazon loss, such as agriculture and cattle.

Key minerals targeted by mining companies in the Amazon include iron ore for steelmaking and bauxite to produce aluminum.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Vermont. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Laura J. Sonter, Diego Herrera, Damian J. Barrett, Gillian L. Galford, Chris J. Moran, Britaldo S. Soares-Filho. Mining drives extensive deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Nature Communications, 2017; 8 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00557-w

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ecology research; nature; extinction; mining; environmental science; rainforests; surveillance; land management; retail and services

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New Amazon threat? Deforestation from mining: Surprising amount of rainforest loss occurs on -- and off -- mining leases

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Sprawling mining operations in Brazil have caused roughly 10 percent of all Amazon rainforest deforestation between 2005 and 2015 -- much higher than previous estimates -- says the first comprehensive study of mining deforestation in the iconic tropical rainforest. Surprisingly, the majority of mining deforestation (a full 90%) occurred outside the mining leases granted by Brazil's government, the new study finds.

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https://news.mongabay.com/2015/03/endangered-forests-shrink-as-demand-for-soy-rises/

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Soybean Farming and Deforestation in the Amazon

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Soybean Farming and Deforestation in the Amazon

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https://news.mongabay.com/2015/05/62m-ha-of-latin-american-forests-cleared-for-agriculture-since-2001/

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140522104856.htm

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Nested in the snow-covered mountains of western Iceland, a maze of turbines and pipes belches thick billows of steam. This mammoth structure is responsible for providing power to a country where 100% of the electricity comes from renewable sources.

The Hellisheidi power station, 25km (15 miles) outside Reykjavik, is Iceland's main geothermal plant, and is one of the largest in the world.

"Do you feel the vibrations beneath us?", says Edda Sif Aradottir, the plant's manager, splashing snow as she stomps her boot on the ground. "It's the steam coming into the turbines".

"This is a volcanic area. We harness the volcano's internal heat to generate electricity and provide hot water for the city's heating system, our swimming pools and showers. We Icelanders like our showers really hot!"

Hellisheidi is not just an accomplished provider of green energy. It is also the site for a scientific breakthrough; an experiment to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) and turn it into stone - forever.

Thus keeping this greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and putting a dent in global warming.

"Mankind has been burning fossil fuels since the industrial revolution and we have already reached the tipping point for CO2 levels", says Dr Aradottir. "This is one of the solutions that can be applied to reverse that".

Called CarbFix, the project is pioneered by an international consortium led by Reykjavík Energy, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the University of Iceland and Columbia University.

Since experiments began in 2014, it's been scaled up from a pilot project to a permanent solution, cleaning up a third of the plant's carbon emissions.

"More importantly, we are a testing ground for a method that can be applied elsewhere, be that a power plant, heavy industries or any other CO2 emitting source", says Dr Aradottir.

Making soda

With rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2, scientists have been testing "carbon capture and storage" (CCS) solutions since the 1970s.

CarbFix, however, stands out among CCS experiments because the capture of carbon is said to be permanent - and fast.

The process starts with the capture of waste CO2 from the steam, which is then dissolved into large volumes of water.

"We use a giant soda-machine", says Dr Aradottir as she points to the gas separation station, an industrial shed that stands behind the roaring turbines.

"Essentially, what happens here is similar to the process in your kitchen, when you are making yourself some sparkling water: we add fizz to the water".

The fizzy liquid is then piped to the injection site - otherworldly, geometric igloo-shaped structure 2km away. There it is pumped 1,000m (3,200ft) beneath the surface.

In a matter of months, chemical reactions will solidify the CO2 into rock - thus preventing it from escaping back into the atmosphere for millions of years.

In this seemingly magic feat, local geology plays a key part.

Porous rock

The breath-taking Icelandic landscape - with its hot springs, geysers and black beaches - is mainly made of basalt, a dark-grey porous rock formed from cooling of lava.

And basalt is "carbon's best friend", because it contains high amounts of calcium, magnesium and iron, which bind with the pumped CO2 to help it solidify into a mineral.

Sandra Snaebjornsdottir, a geologist working for CarbFix, has the evidence in her hands: a cylindrical sample drilled out from the site shows a smattering of chalky crystals encrusted in the basalt.

"These white bits are carbonates, or mineralised CO2", she says. "Fresh basalts are like sponges, with plenty of cavities that are filled with the CO2.

"Iceland is particularly favourable for this type of CCS simply because of the amount of basalt it's got".

Last year, 10,000 tonnes of CO2 were "digested" by CarbFix.

Yet this is tiny fraction - less than the yearly emissions of 650 Brits or 2,200 American cars.

And it becomes even more insignificant against the 30-40 gigatonnes of CO2 (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes) that modern humans pour into the atmosphere annually.

Despite its relatively small scale, experts anticipate CarbFix could be easy to repeat - thanks to the ubiquity of basalt around the world.

"Basalt is actually the most common rock type on Earth, it covers most of the oceanic floors and around 10% of the continents. Wherever there's basalt and water, this model would work", says Sandra Snaebjornsdottir.

Large basaltic areas are found in Siberia, Western India, Saudi Arabia and the Pacific Northwest.

And scientists are now looking at testing the model on the oceans to take advantage of the large areas of submarine basalt formations.

Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."

Very thirsty

At the University of Iceland, research around CarbFix has been continuing since its pilot phase.

A desk-size replica of the pipes and pumps in Hellisheidi in a state-of-the-art lab allows Prof Sigurdur Gislason to scrutinize the process.

"Before the injection started in CarbFix, the consensus within the scientific community was that it would take decades to thousands of years for the injected CO2 to mineralise", says Prof Gislason explains.

"Then we found out that it was already mineralised after 400 days".

Reactions were a lot faster than anticipated partly because of the large amounts of water used to dissolve the CO2.

This however points to one of the project's Achilles heels - it is very water intensive.

"It needs over 25 tonnes of water per tonne of CO2," says Prof Gislason. "In Iceland we are blessed with lots of rain, but if you are doing this on the basaltic areas in India... their water is very precious".

Some critics warn high-tech fixes such as this one pose a bigger risk - that of distracting researchers and the public from the pressing need drastically to reduce greenhouse gases levels.

In a recent report, the European Academies Science Advisory Council warned that such technologies have "limited realistic potential" if emissions are not reduced.

"CarbFix is not a silver bullet. We have to cut emissions and develop renewable energies, and we have to do CCS too," says Prof Gislason.

We have to change the way we live, which has proved very hard for people to understand."

Part of our series Taking the Temperature, which focuses on the battle against climate change and the people and ideas making a difference.
This BBC series was produced with funding from the Skoll Foundation Illustrations by Jilla Dastmalchi

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Turning carbon dioxide into rock - forever

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Nested in the snow-covered mountains of western Iceland, a maze of turbines and pipes belches thick billows of steam. This mammoth structure is responsible for providing power to a country where 100% of the electricity comes from renewable sources.

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Methane emissions from lakes in the northern hemisphere could almost double over the next 50 years because of a novel "feedback loop" say scientists.

Climate change is boosting the proportion of cattail plants growing in and around freshwater lakes they say.

But when debris from these reed beds falls in the water it triggers a major increase in the amount of methane produced.

The gas is at least 25 times more warming than CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Freshwater lakes play an important but relatively unrecognised role in the global carbon cycle, contributing around 16% of the Earth's natural emissions of methane - compared to just 1% from all the world's oceans.

The gas is produced by microbes in the sediment at the bottom of lakes who consume organic matter that falls into the water from plants and trees that live close to the shore.

The amount of methane generated according to this study, varies considerably depending on what enters the lake.

The research team carried out tests in the laboratory that compared the impact of coniferous and deciduous trees with debris from cattails (often known in the UK as bulrushes).

Incubated in the lab for 150 days the scientists found that cattails produced over 400 times the level of methane compared to conifers. The researchers believe that chemicals in both coniferous and deciduous trees restrict the ability of the microbes to produce the gas.

"The cattails don't have the same chemicals and so they are no longer inhibiting the microbes from producing methane," senior author Dr Andrew Tanentzap, from the University of Cambridge, told BBC News,

"By now comparing what's happening in the reed beds to what's might happening beneath a forest - wow, it's a massive difference!"

The researchers believe they have discovered a new mechanism that has the potential to cause substantially more greenhouse gases to be produced by freshwater lakes. They say the warming climate that promotes the growth of aquatic plants has the potential to trigger a damaging feedback loop in natural ecosystems.

To assess this impact the team looked at species distribution models that predict how plants are going to change their ranges under different climate scenarios.

"This forecasts a whole range of these different aquatic plants moving northwards with warmer temperatures into a part of the world that's dominated with lakes so there is going to be more habitat available to them," said Dr Tanentzap.

Their calculations show that the number of northern lakes colonised by cattails could double between 2041 and 2070 and that this could elevate methane production by at least 73% during the growing season.

"It would offset what plants and soils do in terms of buffering the greenhouse effect," Dr Tanentzap added.

Other researchers in the field acknowledged that the new study was a step forward.

"Methane production is currently underestimated in global climate models," said Dr Sapna Sharma, an expert in climate change impacts on lakes from York University, Toronto.

"This study was able to elucidate a mechanism by which lakes may produce even more methane that previously thought. Uncovering another potential source of methane production from boreal lakes is useful to further understanding global carbon cycles and ultimately improve climate projections."

The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Methane emissions from lakes in the northern hemisphere could almost double over the next 50 years because of a novel "feedback loop" say scientists. Climate change is boosting the proportion of cattail plants growing in and around freshwater lakes they say.

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Anne Davies, Mike Bowers, Andy Ball, and Nick Evershed

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Five years after the implementation of the Murray-Darling basin plan, our great river system is under stress

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Carbon Release from Permafrost Erosion Along the Yukon Coast - Eos

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Carbon Release from Permafrost Erosion Along the Yukon Coast - Eos

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Carbon Release from Permafrost Erosion Along the Yukon Coast - Eos

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New findings highlight the need to account for large amounts of ground ice contained in frozen soil when assessing Arctic carbon cycling.

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Linking carbon and water cycles with forests

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Linking carbon and water cycles with forests

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Linking carbon and water cycles with forests

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Shifting Ground by Climate Adaptation UNDP - Exposure

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Shifting Ground by Climate Adaptation UNDP - Exposure

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Shifting Ground by Climate Adaptation UNDP on Exposure

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Much of the news about climate change is terrifying or tragic: rising sea levels drowning island nations, infectious disease outbreaks, crop failures and famine. But just as stories of crisis alarm us, stories of adaptation and action illuminate what's possible. In Eastern Europe and Russia, rural villages are taking on the challenges of climate change head on.

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São Paulo could face more devastating water shortages if farmers continue to clear the Amazon forest, warns the utility chief who recently steered the biggest city in the Americas from the edge of drought catastrophe.

Jerson Kelman, president of water company Sabesp, told Guardian Cities he felt a duty to speak out because he was a citizen as well as the head of a company who had seen firsthand how close this metropolis of 21 million people had come to a breakdown.

"We should not transform the Amazon into pastureland," he said in an interview. "The Amazon creates a movement of water. If you could follow a molecule of water you would see that most of the clouds that are over São Paulo have passed across the Amazon. If the forest is cut, we'll be in trouble."

As one of the foremost authorities on water supply and hydropower in Brazil, Kelman's comments are likely to reignite a debate - resisted by the country's powerful agriculture lobby - about the link between the world's biggest forest, climate change and a possible recurrence of the 2014-15 drought.

If things went wrong, we didn't know what might happen. There could have been riots in the street.

Jerson Kelman

The mayor of São Paulo, João Doria, appears to have been persuaded. In an interview with the Guardian he said recognised the importance of the link between the Amazon and the city's water supply.

"We need to preserve the rainforest to preserve the cycle of rain in central and southeast Brazil," he said, also stressing the need to reduce demand and promote recycling. His government, however, has made little progress in putting these words into action.

The 2014-15 drought was no ordinary dry period. Over a 12-month period, rainfall was half that of the previous worst year on records stretching back to the early 20th century. By January 2015, the volume of water at the main Cantareira reservoir system was down to 5% - barely a month's supply.

Dozens of municipalities on the periphery of São Paulo declared "states of calamity", which allowed for military intervention and emergency funds from the federal government.

At Itu - the worst affected city - there was fighting, theft and the looting of emergency water trucks. Many communities' taps flowed for only a few hours every four days. In some condominiums, residents took buckets from swimming pools to flush toilets, argued over scarce communal supplies and denounced neighbours who washed their cars.

The dystopia even reached the city's main commercial district around Avenida Paulista, where the swanky Bossano restaurant served guests with plastic plates and cutlery because there was insufficient water supply for dishwashers, and Starbucks only offered bottled beer and cans of Coke because there was not enough water for coffee.

With elections due the following year, the São Paulo state and city governments refused to declare an emergency. But Guardian Cities has learned from multiple sources that the authorities were far more worried than they admitted to the public at the time.

Today there is a mood of calm at the control centre of Sabesp (the Basic Sanitation Company of the State of São Paulo), the water utility that is 50.1% owned by the government. Real-time data displayed on giant screens and a dozen individual monitors show reservoirs are almost back to pre-crisis levels. Automated pumping stations - where water pressure to 220 neighbourhoods can be adjusted at the click of a mouse - are functioning normally.

But asked to recall how different it felt at the height of the crisis, Silvana Franco, a senior official in the control centre, loudly sucks in a breath and shakes her head.

"We were desperate. The reservoir level was just going down and down. We knew that when people don't have water, they go crazy. We had seen the protests in smaller cities where people were breaking into property to steal water. We imagined what they would be like here with 21 million people. We thought about the hospitals unable to treat patients and children having to stay home from school. It would be chaos."

She said her boss was so worried his hair turned white.

At the nadir, she said, the military came to check whether the gates and perimeter were secure. This had never happened before, and added to the staff's fears of being on the edge of an apocalypse.

"There were about five of them in uniform with guns," she recalls. "They wanted to see how resilient this centre could be because we control the water."

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A resident walks his dog across the dry bottom of the Paraibuna dam, part of São Paulo's Cantareira water system. Photograph: Roosevelt Cassio/Reuters

There are limits to what Kelman is able or willing to do about the city's water crisis. Sabesp, he says, has planted 45,000 hectares of trees on its land and seen the benefits in terms of climate regulation. But it has no authority over Amazon conservation and - because it is a business that must generate profits - there is no incentive to scale back demand (and sales).

In small cities people were breaking into property to steal water. We imagined what would happen with 21 million people

Silvana Franco

Sabesp has already dropped the measure that was most effective during the crisis: a financial reward for households that reduced water use. Eighty percent of customers received these incentives, which eased the pressure on the supply system more than other emergency measures such as tapping "dead water" from the reservoirs and interlinking networks. The benefits of these behavioural changes are still evident today as consumption remains more than 10% below pre-crisis levels even though the taps are flowing freely.

On the corporate side of its business, however, Sabesp offers discounts to companies who are heavy consumers. Highlighting the negative impact of market pressures, this controversial policy was introduced to dissuade major clients from digging their own wells or seeking rival suppliers.

Longer term, Sapesb has strengthened drought resilience by focusing on expensive, supply-side engineering works that expand the water footprint of the city.

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An engineer works on a giant pipe at the Jaguari dam, which will create an 11-mile link to the Cantareira system. Photograph: Flavio Forner

At Jaguari reservoir - about two hours drive from the city centre - engineers are putting the finishing touches on a series of giant pumps, pipes and tunnels that will create an 11-mile link to the Cantareira system.

It is one of three mega-projects that will together cost close to R$3bn (£695m) - a huge chunk of Sapesb's budget - but should provide enough extra back-up capacity to withstand a drought as bad as the one that hit two years ago.

"I know that in three of four years, some politicians will complain we are wasting money on infrastructure that sits idle. People forget easily," said Kelman. "But now nature has shown us what she can do, the least the population can expect is that decision-makers prepare for rare events ... If something worse comes, then we have a problem."

There is already criticism. Business groups want more of a priority on profitability so a bigger share of Sabesp's stock can be privatised. Environmental groups are unhappy that more spending on infrastructure means less for sewage treatment and reforestation of areas near water sources that are currently occupied by shanty towns. If these problems could be solved, the city could once again tap its two most central reservoirs - Billings and Guarapiranga - and the river Tiete, all of which are currently too contaminated for use.

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Illegally built housing on the edge of São Paulo's Billings reservoir. Is it currently too contaminated for use. Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/Reuters

"It's possible to improve by investing in forests and water treatment, but that's not happening," said Malu Ribeiro of the conservation movement, SOS Mata Atlantica. "So of course this [kind of drought] will happen again. The city is still growing. There is more deforestation. More people are living next to water sources. We have learned little or nothing from the crisis."

Alexis Morgan of the WWF agreed the government's response has been piecemeal. "A good crisis has gone to waste in terms of the public level response," he said. "Businesses have learned that demand-side solutions are cheaper and easier. That should be the place to start. But engineers invariably want to put more supply in the system. They fail to recognise that green assets [forests] appreciate over time unlike grey assets [concrete dams]. The government should be looking at both."

Water crisis - megacities

The challenge of building climate resilience is increasingly important and not just in Brazil. According to a new WWF study, São Paulo ranks only eighth in the list of the world's most drought-vulnerable megacities (population above 10 million). In terms of all cities, the No 1 is Cape Town, which is currently in the midst of its worst ever water shortages and now facing many of the difficult decisions that Kelman and others had to grapple with two years ago.

In São Paulo, a full meltdown was avoided. The most extreme contingency plans were not needed. But it was close. If it had not been for a little rain and some drastic measures, Sabesp could have faced the fury of 21 million thirsty customers.

There is more deforestation. More people live next to water sources. We have learned little or nothing from the crisis

Malu Ribeiro

For Kelman, the lessons are fourfold: good supply-side engineering, sensible demand-management through pricing mechanisms, transparency so that the public are on the side of the government in saving water, and accepting that past data was no longer a reliable guide as a result of climate change and land-use change. "The São Paulo experience shows us we can not rely on past assumptions. We need to hope for the best and prepare for the worst."

He is also looking at the causes. Global climate change and regional deforestation are top of the list.

Kelman says the loss of the Amazon is raising climate risks for São Paulo because the forest helps to circulate water down from the tropics in a process known as evapotranspiration. "Now I enter a minefield," he says, reflecting the sensitivity of the topic.

There are no statistical models for this yet and the science remains controversial due to the implications for the powerful agricultural lobby, which clears trees for farms, and the hydropower industry, which floods forest for dams.

The best-known exponent is Antonio Nobre, a climatologist at the Space Research Institute who calls the Amazon a "biotic pump" that provides the energy for "rivers in the sky" to flow thousands of miles to São Paulo. Without this booster, he warns, the southeast of Brazil would likely be a desert like many other regions at the same latitude.

Fears of water riots in a country that boasts 12% of the world's rivers and lakes would once have seemed outlandish, but they are a real and growing concern due to increased consumption and climate disruption on a global and regional level. Kelman believes there are lessons here for the Brazil government and cities across the world.

Among the most important is that past records are no longer a reliable guide to future risks. This came as a shock to Kelman, who wrote his doctoral paper on a historical data analysis - technically known as the stationary series statistical method - which is used to set the parameters for the climate resilience of water and hydropower supply systems.

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A resident of São Paulo's Brasilandia neighbourhood prepares rainwater to use in the bathroom and to clean the floor of her house. Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters

Based on these old statistics, he calculated the chance of a drought like that of 2014-15 as 0.4%, or once in 250 years. It was twice as severe as the planner's worst forecasts, forcing him into a period of philosophical self-reflection.

"We had excellent data - 83 years worth - and we were prepared for the worst on record," he says. "But nature showed us that we cannot rely on stationary series statistics as we did in the past. We should prepare for the unknown."

Another Sabesp official who asked not to be named described the situation as "completely out of control." A senior government adviser, who also asked for anonymity, concurred. "The risks we discussed in private were far greater than those discussed in public at the time."

Due to fears of a mob invasion, the authorities established a back-up control centre in a different location. They also installed special pipes to circumvent the main distribution system and ensure water could be directly provided to the 500 most important buildings in the city, including large hospitals, dialysis centres and prisons, even if the rest of the city ran dry. Everyone else, they imagined, would have to take buckets and kettles to city squares where they would have to line up for supplies from water trucks. "It would have been like sub-Saharan Africa," said one senior official.

This priority list was kept secret. Kelman, the founder of the Brazilian Association of Water Resources, who was drafted in as drought buster in January 2015, said transparency was generally desirable, but in this case the authorities had no choice.

"It was like wartime. We couldn't tell anyone which buildings were on the list because the supply might have been disrupted," said Kelman. "If things went wrong, we didn't know what might happen. There could have been riots in the street."

The theory has been attacked. Benedito Braga, the head of the sanitation and water resource secretariat in the São Paulo state government dismissed any link between the drought and the Amazon. "If deforestation was causing this impact then how do you explain the floods that we saw in 2016," he told The Guardian. "I would say they are both signs of natural variability. 2014-15 was an outlier, not a sign of a trend."

There is more acceptance among meteorologists who believe the Amazon serves as a link between two key corridors of humidity - the Intertropical Convergence Zone along the equator and the South Atlantic Convergence Zone that stretches down to the southeast of Brazil. The latter is crucial to water supply and the hydropower industry because it brings consistent rainfall for several days which fill the reservoirs far more effectively than occasional drizzles.

"Before 2013, there would be three or four convergence rainfalls in São Paulo every years. But in 2015, there was only one. Last year there was only one and this year there has so far been only one. That means we are still using more water than is naturally replaced," said Camila Ramos of Climatempo, a private forecasting agency. "If the Amazon forest disappears it would be plausible to assume that the rainfall volumes would drop in Sao Paulo as the the humidity supply towards the southeast might decrease."
Guardian Cities is in São Paulo for a special series of in-depth reporting and live events. Share your experiences of the city in the comments below, on and using #GuardianSaoPaulo, or by email to saopaulo.week@theguardian.com

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The Amazon effect: how deforestation is starving São Paulo of water

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São Paulo could face more devastating water shortages if farmers continue to clear the Amazon forest, warns the utility chief who recently steered the biggest city in the Americas from the edge of drought catastrophe.

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The great thaw of the Arctic is happening far faster than once expected https://t.co/6e8RRgxw0x

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The great thaw of the Arctic is happening far faster than once expected https://t.co/6e8RRgxw0x

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Cape Town, home to Table Mountain, African penguins, sunshine and sea, is a world-renowned tourist destination. But it could also become famous for being the first major city in the world to run out of water.

Most recent projections suggest that its water could run out as early as March. The crisis has been caused by three years of very low rainfall, coupled with increasing consumption by a growing population.

The local government is racing to address the situation, with desalination plants to make sea water drinkable, groundwater collection projects, and water recycling programmes.

Meanwhile Cape Town's four million residents are being urged to conserve water and use no more than 87 litres (19 gallons) a day. Car washing and filling up swimming pools has been banned. And the visiting Indian cricket team were told to limit their post-match showers to two minutes.

Such water-related problems are not confined to Cape Town, of course.

Nearly 850 million people globally lack access to safe drinking water, says the World Health Organization, and droughts are increasing.

So it seems incredible that we still waste so much of this essential natural resource. In developing and emerging countries, up to 80% of water is lost through leakages, according to German environmental consultancy GIZ. Even in some areas of the US, up to 50% of water trickles away due to ageing infrastructure.

A growing number of technology companies are focusing their work on water management - applying "smart" solutions to water challenges.

More Technology of Business

For example, French company CityTaps is on a mission to streamline water access in urban homes with its smart water meters linked to an internet-based management system.

The company is first targeting poor homes in urban areas and its system, CTSuite, is currently being trialled in Niger.

Users buy "water credits" via their mobile phones and a smart meter dispenses only as much water as has been paid for. Users receive alerts when their credit balance gets low, and if they don't top up the account, the meter automatically switches off the flow.

The utility can track water usage remotely in near real-time via the internet. A sudden spike in water outflow and a change in pressure, measured by "internet of things" sensors, can then help identify leaks across the network.

Water companies are also using drones and satellites to help spot leaks, and in some circumstances even divining rods - despite scientific doubts, some firms say they do work.

"The internet of things offers new avenues for technological innovation in the water field, mostly by providing real-time data that - we hope - can be used to help utilities become ever more efficient and high-performing," says Gregoire Landel, chief executive of CityTaps.

Better water management also helps save on the electricity and chemicals required to produce drinkable water.

Meanwhile, other companies are using technology to harvest water from new sources.

US-based WaterSeer, for example, is developing a device capable of collecting water from the air.

An internal fan draws air into an underground collection chamber where the vapour condenses, making use of the earth's cooler temperatures. Solar or electricity grid-powered coolers also help the condensation process.

The company says water can be produced with "less than a 100 watts" of electricity - the power requirement of an old-fashioned light bulb.

"Individuals and businesses will pave the way for innovative solutions, as they will be able to move and adopt a series of them quicker than large utilities that are sometimes mired in regulatory constraints and rigid decision-making cultures," says Nancy Curtis, a founding partner of WaterSeer.

"However, utilities offer the opportunity to make large-scale impacts on replenishing depleting water supplies."

A number of water-restricted municipalities in the US are exploring how WaterSeer devices could be used to improve water security, the company says. But the device is still being tested in the field, so these are early days.

"A community of 500 would save 40 million US gallons (150m litres; 33m gallons) of water or more each year, reducing stress on traditional surface and underground sources," argues Ms Curtis.

Technology may have its place in helping us use water more efficiently, but it is unlikely to have much impact on those without any access to water in the first place, says Alexandros Makarigakis of Unesco's international hydrological programme (IHP).

"Smart water systems cannot be expected to have much impact regarding provision of access for the unconnected. [They] are more effective in the urban context," he says.

This is echoed by Vincent Casey, senior manager at the charity WaterAid.

"The technology to connect people to a water supply has been around since ancient Egypt. It's not a technical problem," he says.

More important is how water supplies are organised, he argues, which is an issue primarily for governments, with support from the private sector.

"The priority is mobilising resources and paying sufficient attention to the management arrangement to keep people connected," says Mr Casey.

That's not to say WaterAid eschews tech completely. It has successfully used mobile app mWater to monitor water access and existing networks.

For those with no direct-to-home supply, services like Grundfos' "water ATM", which enables people to access water from a local dispenser using a pre-paid card, are also proving useful.

But there is a sense that much of this technology is merely tinkering at the edges. The overarching issue is the potentially devastating effect of global warming on water availability and how we, collectively, endeavour to tackle it.

Follow Technology of Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter and Facebook

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Will Cape Town be the first city to run out of water?

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Cape Town, home to Table Mountain, African penguins, sunshine and sea, is a world-renowned tourist destination. But it could also become famous for being the first major city in the world to run out of water. Most recent projections suggest that its water could run out as early as March.

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In the small towns and villages of the Himalayas across India and Nepal, communities depend on surface water from glacier-fed rivers, springs, ponds and lakes for domestic use and for agriculture.

Yet this is a region at the forefront of global climate change. Glaciers are shrinking quickly, particularly in the eastern and central Himalayas, which is likely to significantly reduce flows of water downstream. Intensive land uses such as logging and stone quarrying, combined with urbanisation and a rise in tourism, are all putting immense pressure on the region's water supply.

Left, steel pipelines lie stockpiled in a farmer's field, in Kushadevi, Nepal, with a stone quarry visible behind it; right, a quarry near Dhulikhel

In Dhulikhel, water demands are increasing as the town expands. A 14km pipeline now brings water into the Nepalese community, but the laying of new pipes has been disruptive for the settlements and farms through which they pass, triggering protests.

The upstream communities have their own changing needs as patterns of agriculture shift away from cereals towards more water-demanding cash crops, such as fruit and vegetables.

Stone quarrying is leaving visible scars on the landscape, as well as seriously threatening water quality in these rural areas.

Young boys escape the summer heat by playing in a canal downstream from a small dam, in Panauti, Nepal. Designed to direct water into a small hydroelectric scheme, the system flouts environmental regulations by leaving almost zero flow in the stream bed.

Water is revered in India and Nepal, and moving water, especially rivers, are considered sacred, life-affirming and purifying. Here, a family plays precariously in the spillway of a hydroelectric dam in the Nepalese town of Bidur. The canal above the dam provides both electricity and water for the town.

Mussoorie

Over the past century, tourism has driven urbanisation and growth in the mountains. In recent years the domestic markets have picked up apace, as the growing Indian and Nepalese middle classes escape the heat of the plains during the school holidays and festive seasons.

Mussoorie in Uttarakhand, India, is a thriving example of the former colonial hill station towns so popular with local tourists. Old photographs reveal how the area has changed.

Archive photos: Unknown/Courtesy of Centre for South Asian Studies; Lilian Rust/Courtesy of Centre for South Asian Studies

The influx of visitors places the town's resources and infrastructures under significant strain, with government departments and agencies unable to check unauthorised building activity and urban sprawl.

Left, water carriers in Mussoorie around 1880; right, a motorbike mechanic in the town's Landour Bazaar

Over the past decade, Mussoorie grown at a rate of more than 15%. It sources its water from more than 20 separate springs, but high season demand far outstrips supply. The government is considering alternatives, which include a scheme to supply water pumped up the mountain via a multi-stage lift from the Yamuna river. Others suggest that improved capture and storage of precipitation in the Mussoorie ridge and a revival of the springs and other surface water sources might be a cheaper and more sustainable option.

Nainital

Nainital is another popular Uttarakhand hill town that has grown at pace since the 19th century. Its history is a reminder of how precarious life in the mountains can be, particularly as construction on steep slopes is usually at the expense of trees that hold the hillside together by preventing erosion. In 1880, the built-up northern ridge around Lake Naini collapsed after heavy rain, killing more than 150 people. As urban pressures have increased, the vulnerable hillside has gradually been built up for residential and tourist housing.

Archive photo by Samuel Bourne/Courtesy of Cambridge University Library

The risk of landslides in the Himalayas remains high, especially during the monsoon months, with many of the town's poorest residents building homes on the most eroded and unstable slopes.

Water shortages and scarcity are typically at their peak in the pre-monsoon summer season, and many springs slow to a trickle or disappear. Local families have to rely on bottled water as well as making use of alternative sources further away. Hotels pay 10,000-litre tankers to deliver supplies to their doors, so that guests can access running water through the day.

Archive photo by Samuel Bourne/Courtesy of Cambridge University Library

During the summer months, the floating population of tourists and seasonal workers can add up to double the number of permanent residents, putting huge pressure on the towns' resources.

Unregulated hotels and guesthouses bring with them waste and sewerage problems, with the benefits and opportunities of tourism afforded only to the few.

The government does not consider the side effects [of tourism], such as trash and damage to our environment

Local teacher Rabeen Vasudev

In Mussoorie, local teacher Rabeen Vasudev complains that local government only considers the profits of getting the maximum number of visitors. "They do not take the time to consider the side effects, such as trash and damage to our environment."

The lure of tourism can be disruptive in other ways. Jaipal Rana, from Mussoorie, says: "I have met many young boys who flunk school at eight years old. Why would they persist in education or take the tough life of farming when they think that owning a taxi or chai shop can bring fast cash?"

Nainital town and its growing economy depend on the health of its beautiful lake. Yet levels are declining, thanks to a combination of factors, including reduced rainfall, the concreting of porous areas that previously filtered water into the basin and the town's growing water demands.

Seasonal water shortages are a problem across the Himalayas, as peak scarcity coincides with the period of highest demand, in the dry summer months. For the second year in a row, Nainital's water levels declined to record low levels last summer, revealing its significant waste and pollution problems.

In the last five years the picturesque Kempty Falls, 13km from Mussoorie, have seen an explosion in domestic tourists, development and unregulated construction - fuelled by sustained promotion of the destination by Uttarakhand state tourism department.

The surrounding villages are growing at an unsustainable rate, with incomers keen to capitalise on the Falls' popularity. Domestic construction has stretched water supplies and sanitation past breaking point.

In the peak summer months, four-hour traffic jams clog the narrow road from Kempty to Mussoorie.

More alarming is the rash of poorly constructed hotels, restaurants and gift shops jostling for tourist trade along Kempty road. The precipitous terrain has meant that they are stacked precariously on skinny concrete stilts or carved into the hillside.

In an area prone to seismic shift, extreme rainfall and landslip events - this could be a disaster in the making.

The Tehri Dam, on the Bhagirathi river, in Uttarakhand. It is the highest such construction in India

Governments and donor programmes have responded to the growing demands on water supply by building pumping stations, dams and hydropower projects, designed to move vast amounts of water across greater distances. These interventions are high in capital investment and energy intensive, and result in enormous changes to the landscapes and livelihoods around them.

Left: Dams on the Bhagirathi river, Uttarakhand. Right: The dam reduces the river's speed, which means that sand is deposited on the inside track of river bends

Recent state investments that have brought pipelines and taps directly into homes are rapidly changing the aspirations of families, as many can see the convenience of piped water being available directly in their homes. But such water is generally evaluated as being of poor quality, particularly during the monsoon, and is only available for a couple of hours a day. This uncertainty means that families still depend significantly on their local springs.

Poorer households are less likely to be able to afford the costs associated with formal connection charges, pipes and meters, and depend entirely on springs.

The Dhobighat community downstream of Mussoorie provides laundering services to the upstream town's schools, hotels and government institutions. Washing is done along a natural stream that flows through the settlement, first inhabited by the dhobi (washing) community more than 80 years ago. Their livelihood depends on clean, fast-running water. In recent times, they have been asked by local government to "share" their stream with other nearby settlements, meaning there is less to go round. With young people leaving to seek work elsewhere and the advent of mechanised washing machines, the demand for washing services is declining, so these livelihoods look increasingly vulnerable.

Creating and running water management systems that do not adversely impact the poorest people in Himalayan society is vitally important.

Voting in Dulikhel's local council elections

During May 2017, Nepal held its first local council elections in almost 20 years. At Dhulikhel, water provision to all areas of the town is a highly political topic, with candidates campaigning and competing on this issue to secure the votes of their constituents. Water politics did influence the outcome - a new mayor was elected who is committed to locally sourcing affordable water for town residents.
This research was partly funded with support from the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme. Further details and analysis can be found on the project website, www.panipahar.com

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Sacred, life-affirming and fast disappearing: waters of the Himalayas - in pictures

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In the small towns and villages of the Himalayas across India and Nepal, communities depend on surface water from glacier-fed rivers, springs, ponds and lakes for domestic use and for agriculture. Yet this is a region at the forefront of global climate change.

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UK enjoyed 'greenest year for electricity ever' in 2017

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UK enjoyed 'greenest year for electricity ever' in 2017

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The UK has achieved its greenest year ever in terms of how the nation's electricity is generated, National Grid figures reveal.

The rise of renewable energy helped break 13 clean energy records in 2017.

In June, for the first time, wind, nuclear and solar power generated more UK power than gas and coal combined.

Britain has halved carbon emissions in the electricity sector since 2012 to provide the fourth cleanest power system in Europe and seventh worldwide.

In April, the UK had its first 24-hour period without using any coal power since the Industrial Revolution.

The government is committed to phasing out unabated coal by 2025 as part of efforts to cut the UK's greenhouse gas emissions in line with legal obligations.

Separate findings from power research group MyGridGB show that renewable energy sources provided more power than coal for 90% of 2017, figures up to 12 December show.

British wind farms produced more electricity than coal plants on more than 75% of days this year.

This changing landscape saw the cost of offshore wind power fall below the price of nuclear for the first time.

'Dangerously exposed'

But despite the successes, groups warned the UK must now tackle its reliance on gas if it is to meet its emission targets.

The daily output of gas was outstripped by wind on just two days of the year.

Renewables overall - including wind, solar, biomass and hydropower - beat fossil fuels for only 23 days of the year.

Dr Andrew Crossland from MyGridGB and the Durham Energy Institute said: "The government has focused on reducing coal use which now supplies less than 7% of our electricity.

"However, if we continue to use gas at the rate that we do, then Britain will miss carbon targets and be dangerously exposed to supply and price risks in the international gas markets."

He added that "refreshed government support for low carbon alternatives" is now needed to "avoid price and supply shocks for our heat and electricity supplies".

Emma Pinchbeck, executive director of Industry body RenewableUK, called for "more boldness" from the government.

She urged onshore wind to be developed across the UK in an "ambitious sector deal with the off shore wind industry" that could help secure a "golden age for renewables" in 2018.

An Energy Department spokesman said the UK was reducing emissions faster than any other G7 country - which includes the US, Japan, Germany, Italy, France and Canada.

He said the government plans to reduce carbon emissions throughout the 2020s, while supporting the creation of well-paid jobs in the low carbon sector.

"The UK is a world leader in clean growth," he said.

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The UK has achieved its greenest year ever in terms of how the nation's electricity is generated, National Grid figures reveal. The rise of renewable energy helped break 13 clean energy records in 2017. In June, for the first time, wind, nuclear and solar power generated more UK power than gas and coal combined.

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Yr 13 - Really good for water & the carbon cycle - https://t.co/XQoHgukK8j #geographyteacher

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Yr 13 - Really good for water & the carbon cycle - https://t.co/XQoHgukK8j #geographyteacher

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They blame over-fishing and pollution for severely damaged fish stocks in Africa's largest freshwater lake.

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A brief history of the Earth's CO2 - BBC News

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A brief history of the Earth's CO2 - BBC News

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Climate change has been described as one of the biggest problems faced by humankind. Carbon dioxide is is the primary driver of global warming. Prof Joanna Haigh from Imperial College London explains why this gas has played a crucial role in shaping the Earth's climate.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) has been present in the atmosphere since the Earth condensed from a ball of hot gases following its formation from the explosion of a huge star about five billion years ago.

At that time the atmosphere was mainly composed of nitrogen, CO2 and water vapour, which seeped through cracks in the solid surface. A very similar composition emerges from volcanic eruptions today.

As the planet cooled further some of the water vapour condensed out to form oceans and they dissolved a portion of the CO2 but it was still present in the atmosphere in large amounts.
Tomorrow's World What is climate change?
The first life forms to evolve on Earth were microbes which could survive in this primordial atmosphere but about 2.5 billion years ago, plants developed the ability to photosynthesise, creating glucose and oxygen from CO2 and water in the presence of light from the Sun.

This had a transformative impact on the atmosphere: as life developed, CO2 was consumed so that by around 20 million years ago its concentration was down to below 300 molecules in every one million molecules of air (or 300 parts per million - ppm).

Life on Earth has evolved under these conditions - note that humans did not appear until about 200,000 years ago - and atmospheric CO2 has not exceed that concentration until the industrial revolution brought with it massive emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels: coal and oil.

CO2 plays an important role in climate because it is one of the atmospheric "greenhouse" gases (GHGs) which keep the Earth's surface about 33 degrees warmer than the -18C temperature it would be at were they not present.

They do this by being fairly transparent to the Sun's rays, allowing them through to warm the surface, but then absorbing the radiant heat that the surface emits, so trapping it and enhancing the warming. In the present climate the most effective GHGs are water vapour, which is responsible for about two-thirds of the total warming, and CO2 which accounts for about one quarter.

Other gases, including methane, make up the remainder. The atmospheric concentration of water vapour is less than 1% and, with CO2 making up only a few molecules in every ten thousand of air, it may be surprising that they can have such a significant impact on the surface temperature.

They are able to do this, however, because the structure of their molecules makes them especially effective at absorbing heat radiation while the major atmospheric gases, nitrogen and oxygen, are essentially transparent to it.

The greenhouse effect means that as the atmospheric loading of GHGs increases the surface temperature of the Earth warms. The overall increase in global temperature of about 1C over the past 150 years is almost entirely due to the human activities that have increasing amounts of atmospheric GHGs.

Most significantly, the concentration of CO2 has been rising exponentially (at a rate of about 0.17% per year) since the industrial revolution, due mainly to the combustion of fossil fuels but also to large-scale tropical deforestation which depletes the climate system's capacity for photosynthesis.

In 2015, it passed 400ppm, more than 40% higher than its pre-industrial value of 280ppm and a level that has not existed on Earth for several million years.

While the basic science of how GHGs warm the Earth is very well understood, there are complications. The climate system responds in various ways which both enhance and ameliorate the effects of these gases.

For example, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour (before it condenses out in clouds or rain) and because water vapour is a GHG, this increases the temperature rise. Another example: as the oceans warm they are less able to hold CO2 so release it, again with the result the initial warming is enhanced.

The global temperature record over the past century does not show the same smooth increase presented by CO2 measurements because the climate is influenced by other factors than GHGs, arising from both natural and human sources. Some particles released into the atmosphere by industrial activities reflect sunshine back to space, tending to cool the planet.

Similarly, large volcanic eruptions can eject small particles into the higher atmosphere, where they remain for up to about two years reducing the sunlight reaching the surface, and temporary dips in global temperature have indeed been measured following major volcanic events.

Changes in the energy emitted by the Sun also affect surface temperature, though measurements of the solar output show this effect to be small on human timescales.

Another important consideration in interpreting global temperatures is that the climate is inherently complex. Energy moves between the atmosphere and oceans in natural fluctuations - an example being El Niño events. This means that we cannot expect an immediate direct relationship between any influencing factor and surface temperature.

All these factors complicate the picture. Nevertheless, it is indisputable that the global temperature rise over the past century is a result of human-produced GHGs, mainly CO2.

While, until the industrial revolution, the CO2 concentration has not exceeded the 280ppm value that last occurred several million years ago, it has gone through periods when it was considerably lower.

Notably, during the ice ages which have occurred roughly every 100,000 years over at least the past half million, drops in global temperature of perhaps 5C have been accompanied by reductions in CO2 concentration to less than 200ppm.

The ice ages, and associated warmer interglacial periods, are brought about by changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun which take place on these long timescales. The cooling in response to a decline in solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface results in a greater uptake of CO2 by the oceans and so further cooling due to a weakened greenhouse effect.

This is an entirely natural phenomenon and it is worth noting that such amplification of temperature fluctuations will occur in response to any initiating factor regardless of its source and including human-produced greenhouse gases.

The effects of increasing CO2 are not limited to an increase in air temperature. As the oceans warm they are expanding so producing a rise in sea level, this being exacerbated by the melting of some of the ice present on land near the poles and in glaciers. The warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour resulting in increased occurrences of heavy rainfall and flooding while changes in weather patterns are intensifying droughts in other regions.

If human emissions of GHGs into the atmosphere continue unabated then the global temperature will continue to rise and the associated weather impacts become ever more severe. The UN climate conference in Paris in December 2015, at which 195 nations unanimously agreed on an aim to restrict the temperature rise to less than 2C, or preferably 1.5C, above the pre-industrial "baseline" was an extraordinary political achievement.

To achieve this, however, will require a complete cessation of global CO2 emissions by the second half of this century and, while the world considers how this might be achieved, the crossing of the 400ppm mark in CO2 concentration has been matched by a global warming of 1C.

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Climate change has been described as one of the biggest problems faced by humankind. Carbon dioxide is is the primary driver of global warming. Prof Joanna Haigh from Imperial College London explains why this gas has played a crucial role in shaping the Earth's climate.

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So much for COP23 – there's a whole class of carbon emissions we're totally ignoring

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So much for COP23 – there's a whole class of carbon emissions we're totally ignoring

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Bonn voyage. EPA

"Further, faster ambition together" is the mission statement of the global leaders attending the 23rd Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change (COP23) in Bonn. It has been met with a mixture of scepticism and urgency, particularly after the new raised projections for this year's global carbon emissions suggested a peak has yet to be reached.

As part of the conference, cities and regions across the world are adopting the Bonn-Fiji Commitment on climate action. It aims to remove up to 1.3 billion tons of CO₂ equivalent per year by curbing emissions at the local level. The system being put in place to deliver the commitment does appear impressive, but look more carefully and it seems to see sustainable cities in very much the same way as usual: primarily cutting emissions from heat and transport and by installing more renewable energy.

This is all essential but it misses an important part of the picture. My main area of interest is the sustainability of buildings, a key component of reducing city emissions. For years, policies and regulations have focused on reducing the energy demands of buildings while we live, shop and work in them. As a result, the potential to reduce carbon in other stages of a building's life has remained largely untapped.

The big unsaid

What I mean here is the carbon emissions involved in making, renovating and then eventually dismantling the building. This includes everything from mining the materials for the cement to chopping down the trees for the floorboards to transporting everything to the building site to digging the foundations; and then later from knocking the building down to disposing of its constituent parts.

We sometimes refer to the emissions while a building is functioning as the operational carbon, and all the other emissions across its life cycle as the embodied carbon. Focusing on one and not the other is puzzling to say the least - we're effectively trying to take the carbon out of our energy bills while paying no attention to the carbon in the buildings themselves.

Deviatov Aleksei

While you can intervene along the way to improve the carbon emissions of a building's energy use, there's nothing you can do later about the emissions during construction. Not only that, interventions to improve a building's energy efficiency actually make the total embodied carbon worse.

We rightly love insulation as a means of reducing a building's heat requirement, but we install it with no regard for the carbon emissions produced in the process. And while, say, replacing fluorescent lighting with LEDs is an efficiency improvement that you can see, the carbon impact of the building will remain invisible until it has had an irreversible effect on the global environment.

The EU talks about Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEBs) as the goal of its energy efficiency regulations. The closer it gets to this goal, the greater the share of the building's environmental impacts when you look at carbon emissions overall. If we ever achieve nZEBs, embodied carbon will be the totality of emissions and it will be far too late to start worrying about it then. Even now, it can make up as much as 90% of the whole-life emissions on some buildings, while its share is growing across the board.

What to do

So how to move forward? The most effective strategy is prevention, and a great deal can be done by designing our buildings with resource efficiency in mind. We tend to put much more materials into buildings than we need to - steel being a case in point. Buildings will still stand using much less steel, we just need to change the regulations.

There are also various other things we can do: pre-manufacturing component parts under controlled industrial conditions is an important way of saving emissions. Sourcing materials closer to home needs to be taken more seriously, as does recycling materials from old buildings and using waste to help us build. A great example is the Brighton Waste House in the south of England, which showed for instance that you can fill cavity walls with everything from old clothes to videotapes.

What this all requires is concerted and coordinated action from all the key stakeholders. Unfortunately, the COP23 Bonn-Fiji Commitment is only the latest initiative to essentially ignore this issue. Governments have broadly failed to pass regulations around embodied carbon, and the topic is often relegated to the margins or completely ignored when it comes to policymakers' sustainability agendas. This is despite the fact that industry bodies and NGOs have actually led the way by producing a fair amount of guidance in this area.

Governments and other policy players are not even managing to agree on how to undertake a whole-life carbon assessment. If they don't do this accurately, we're liable to end up with a gap between how much embodied carbon we think we are creating and how much ends up being released into the atmosphere. This, too, needs much more attention.

The whole problem is particularly relevant at a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is saying there's an urgent need to reduce carbon emissions sooner rather than later as it is too risky to rely on yet unproven technologies to save us at some point in the future.

Compared to some of the carbon reduction required to meet the commitments in the Paris Agreement - weaning us off electricity from fossil fuels, say - focusing on the embodied carbon emissions in buildings is actually low-hanging fruit. It is time for policy people to step up their game and join the challenge while there is still time. And once they have tackled buildings they should start considering all the other embodied carbon emissions that they have been ignoring, too.

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So much for COP23 - there's a whole class of carbon emissions we're totally ignoring

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"Further, faster ambition together" is the mission statement of the global leaders attending the 23rd Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change (COP23) in Bonn. It has been met with a mixture of scepticism and urgency, particularly after the new raised projections for this year's global carbon emissions suggested a peak has yet to be reached.

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A forest corrupted ~ The Latin American Review of Books

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A forest corrupted ~ The Latin American Review of Books

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IN EARLY 2016, when the Yacu Kallpa, a vast freight ship transporting timber from the Peruvian Amazon to the US via Brazil and the Dominican Republic, was detained at port in Mexico, 96% of its timber cargo was found to be 'not of legal origin'. This was not the first time the Yacu Kallpa had been caught carrying illegally logged timber. In August 2015 US Customs had turned away a shipment of timber when it arrived in Houston under suspicion of being illegally logged.

Regardless, after the Mexican stoppage Peru's then Minister of Trade and Tourism, Magali Silva, wrote to the Secretary of Economy in Mexico to explain that the cargo 'had all the legal documents' required of it by the regional government - and this despite the fact that Peru's own public prosecutor had attempted to seize the ship's cargo before it had even left the Peruvian port of Iquitos.

In their new report, Buyers in good faith: How timber exporters are complicit in plundering Peru's Amazon, the NGO Global Witness describes the Yacu Kallpa case as 'the biggest timber scandal in Peru's history'. As their detailed report makes clear, the scandal is not just about the illegal deforestation of a resource that has essential ecological significance on a global scale, but is also about the fact that it was made possible through widespread falsification of documents such as harvesting plans and transport permits that point to the corruption that is endemic in the Peruvian timber industry. Global Witness claim that tree locations are routinely faked for the purpose of permit-granting, enabling illegally logged timber to appear as though it has come from legal logging zones.

This matters because Peru is the 10th most forested country in the world, with around 260,000 square miles, or slightly over half of the country, covered by trees. Only Brazil holds a larger area of the Amazon rainforest. According to the World Wildlife Fund, over 330,000 Peruvian residents depend directly on the country's forests for their livelihoods, with countless others deriving secondary benefits from it. Yet around 1,100 square miles of Peruvian rainforest are cut down each year, and around 80% of this is done illegally. Not only is this a travesty for the plant and animal communities whose habitats are being routinely devastated; it also accounts for nearly half of Peru's total greenhouse gas emissions, giving the question of illegal logging in Peru global significance.

As part of their report, Global Witness have caught timber exporters on camera admitting that they are aware of the regular falsification of documents and permits. Nor are they the first to point to the problem of endemic corruption in the Peruvian Amazon. Scholarly research in Nature's Scientific Reports journal had already highlighted the problem, as have countless journalistic exposes.

Yet when the public prosecutor attempted to stop the Yacu Kallpa in Iquitos the offices of OSINFOR, the government's forest inspection agency, were fire-bombed by protestors and the organisation's president, Rolando Navarro, who now lives in exile in the US, was sacked. The Yacu Kallpa was the only ship operating a route from the Peruvian Amazon to the US, and the stoppage angered both the timber industry and their supporters whose incomes and livelihoods often depend upon the continuing timber trade.

Despite its great beauty and important ecological status, Peru's Amazon is a place of great violence, and not just against the environment. Illegal logging and mining companies have been responsible for forcing indigenous communities from their lands and, in only the most dramatic recent example, the members of an indigenous community who had heretofore opted to live uncontacted by the outside world were murdered. The murder in 2014 of Edwin Chota and three other activists for campaigning against deforestation and illegal logging further highlights the human costs inflicted on those who get in the way of this vast industry.

The Amazon is an essential ecological resource that holds common benefits for people across the region and worldwide. This vast forest plays a key role in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, thus helping to mitigate our contribution to enhancing Earth's greenhouse effect and limiting global warming. Not only this, but forests play an important role in local rainfall patterns. When it rains in the Amazon, the vast majority of the water that falls is intercepted by the leaves of plants and evaporates back into the atmosphere shortly after. When the trees are removed a greater quantity of water runs over the land surface and flows out of the area via river channels. Consequently there is less moisture available for evaporation which can lead to smaller clouds that lack the capacity to create rainfall events. Amazonian deforestation is considered to have been one of the causes of the 2010 drought that struck parts of Brazil, and is also held responsible for the increased number of wildfires being seen across the region.

At the COP23 UN climate talks in Bonn over the past two weeks, forest management has been an important topic of discussion. As Inger Andersen, Director General of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, said at the meeting: 'Protecting and restoring forests can contribute over one-third of the total climate change mitigation required by 2030 to keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius'.

The UN suggests that illegal logging is the most economically valuable of all environmental crimes, causing around US$50 billion per year in economic damage. So far, although deforestation has featured prominently in discussions at the COP23 talks there have been only limited commitments. Corporations such as Walmart and Mars have committed to work towards reducing the role played by deforestation in their commodity chains, and an Ecuadorean proposal to reduce emissions in the forest sector by 15 million tonnes of CO2 has been adopted. More important might be the continued efforts to work towards implementation of the New York Declaration on Forests, which 130 governments, companies and civil society groups have so far endorsed, pledging to halve forest losses worldwide by 2020 and committing to ending forest loss by 2030, as well as restoring around 350 million hectares of lost forest. This could have a significant climate benefit; however, it is merely a non-legally binding commitment, and it is thus hard to see where real action to meet these targets will come from. The $2.1billion in private investment funds that has been promised to support forest restoration across the Caribbean and Latin America at COP23 will certainly help, but in the face of continued illegal logging it remains insufficient.

Forests currently remove around 30% of man-made carbon emissions from the atmosphere, as well as playing vital roles in sustaining the human communities living in or near to them. At COP23 Janio Sangama, of the Kichwa tribe from San Martin in the Peruvian Amazon, suggested that incorporating indigenous ways of 'looking after the management of our resources in a more orderly way' could be an important step towards sustainable development in the rainforests. In the face of open violence by the agents of deforestation, much more needs to be done in order to support indigenous communities and enable them to play a leading role in the sustainable management of the Amazon.

It remains to be seen whether any firmly binding commitments will come out of the COP23 talks that will have a real, material and long term impact on reducing forest loss and increasing the restoration of degraded forest areas. For all the talk, signs of really meaningful action have so far been slight. And in the face of a global illegal logging industry that operates seemingly with impunity, it is hard to see how a few comparatively small investments here and there can compensate for the daily losses being inflicted on the Amazon. Truly serious work to reduce deforestation, then, might need to focus less on what is happening at COP23, and more on the failure so far to prosecute the business people and officials involved in illegal logging across the Amazon.

In this sense, the Yacu Kallpa case is emblematic of a failure to clamp down on illegal logging out of both fear for the economic implications that might result from putting pressure on the timber industry, and out of the simple greed that has driven the bribery and corruption that goes hand in hand with illegal logging.

If we are serious about ending deforestation, we must support the calls by Global Witness and others for full prosecutions to be brought against all those - business executives, middlemen, and local and national officials - involved in the Yacu Kallpa case.

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A forest corrupted ~ The Latin American Review of Books

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IN EARLY 2016, when the Yacu Kallpa, a vast freight ship transporting timber from the Peruvian Amazon to the US via Brazil and the Dominican Republic, was detained at port in Mexico, 96% of its timber cargo was found to be 'not of legal origin'.

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Climate's magic rabbit: Pulling CO2 out of thin air - BBC News

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Climate's magic rabbit: Pulling CO2 out of thin air - BBC News

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UN climate negotiators are meeting in Bonn amid a welter of reports indicating that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have broken records, while international attempts to curb greenhouse gases are not doing enough to avoid dangerous levels of warming. Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath has travelled to Switzerland to see if technology to remove CO2 from the air could be the answer to this ongoing carbon conundrum.

While CO2 concentrations are now higher than they have been in at least 800,000 years, the gas still only accounts for a tiny 0.04% of our atmosphere.

However, extracting carbon dioxide from well mixed air is not just technically difficult, it's expensive as well.

A half-hour outside Zurich stands one of the frontline attempts to develop a commercial approach to sucking down CO2.

On the roof of a large recycling centre at Hinwil stand 18 metal fans, stacked on top of each, each about the size of a large domestic washing machine.

These fans suck in the surrounding air and chemically coated filters inside absorb the CO2. They become saturated in a few hours so, using the waste heat from the recycling facility, the filters are heated up to 100C and very pure carbon dioxide gas is then collected.

This installation, called a direct-air capture system, has been developed by a Swiss company called Climeworks.

It can capture about 900 tonnes of CO2 every year. It is then pumped to a large greenhouse a few hundred metres away, where it helps grow bigger vegetables.

This is not supposed to be a demonstration of a clever technology - for the developers, making money from CO2 is critical.

"This is the first time we are commercially selling CO2; this is the first of its kind," co-founder Jan Wurzbacher told BBC News.

"It has to be for business; CO2 capture can't work for free."

Right now Climeworks is selling the gas to the vegetable growers next door for less than $600 per tonne, which is very expensive.

But the company says that this is because it has built its extraction devices from scratch - everything is bespoke. The firm believes that like solar and wind energy, costs will rapidly fall once production is scaled up.

"The magic number we always say is $100 per tonne," said Jan Wurzbacher.

"We have drawn a road down to the region of $100 and that is something we think is feasible. We can do it by scaling up the mass production of our components. I'd say half of the way to go there - we know what to do. We just have to do it over the next two or three years."

One of the things about CO2 that makes it attractive for developers is that it has many uses in the world.

From fish food to concrete; from car seats to toothpaste - entrepreneurs are trying to use carbon dioxide as a raw material. There's also a roaring trade in CO2 in the US, where it's being used, without irony, to boost the extraction of oil from wells.

One of the most ambitious plans is to extract CO2 and turn it into fuel.

A couple of years ago, car manufacturer Audi announced it had developed what it called "e-diesel", a liquid fuel made from water and CO2. Climeworks supplied some of the CO2 for the trials. Driving down the price of capturing CO2 is key to making this idea work.

"If you have to pay $100 per tonne of CO2 that makes roughly 25 cents per litre of gasoline," said Jan Wurzbacher.

"It is a reasonable amount per litre or per kilogramme of natural gas."

Making fuel or other products out of CO2 might help but it won't achieve the type of large scale take-down from the atmosphere that many scientists now fear will be necessary over the next 20-30 years if the goals of the Paris climate agreement are to be met.

'Natural' solution

The terms of the pact state that there needs to be a "balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases" in the second half of this century. To reach that balance, many experts believe we will have to resort to technological means of taking carbon out of the air.

"There are some things we can do in the real near-term but to get to zero emissions we will probably need some technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere," Dr Glen Peters from the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research told BBC News.

"So we need to focus on getting things deployed that we know already work and at the same time we also need to focus on developing new technologies that will help us go the last part of the journey."

Back in 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) might be one way to do this. BECCS involves growing plants that suck down carbon, then burning them to make energy while capturing and burying the carbon that is released.

Critics point out that to make a real impact with BECCS would take up way too much land that could be used for planting food.

However, a recent study showed that a simpler approach, including planting more trees and better management of soils and grasslands, could actually make a significant difference.

The report said that this could account for 37% of all actions needed by 2030 - the equivalent to China's current emissions from fossil fuel use.

So would the world be better off planting trees than waiting for Climeworks and others to perfect their technology?

"We're not against trees," said Anka Timofte, an engineer with the company.

"It is all about the efficiency of the surface area that you are using. Our machine has a higher capacity of removing CO2 from the air and this CO2 can be re-used, and our machines are location-independent, so we could place them in the desert or anywhere there is an energy source."

Climeworks has big ambitions. Recently it opened a plant in Iceland. CO2 is captured and buried underground where it will eventually turn to stone.

The Swiss company wants to capture 1% of global emissions of CO2 by 2025. But to make a small dent in the global picture would require the use of 750,000 units similar to the one installed in Hinwil right now. It would also require huge amounts of energy to run these devices.

'Magical techno-fixes'

The Swiss company is not alone. There are similar efforts underway in Canada with a company called Carbon Engineering, and a Finnish-German consortium is also in the direct air-capture business.

So plentiful are they becoming that environmental groups have started to map the progress of these and other geo-engineering projects that aim to curb climate change through technology.

Many greens are deeply suspicious of these efforts. They argue that we need a fundamental rethink of the way that we produce and consume to put sustainability at the heart of everything we do.

"We need to step back and actually question what are all the possible pathways to a climate safe future," said Lili Fuhr from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

"Have we seriously explored them and are they not more realistic than relying on these magical technologies that in my view hold immense risks and uncertainties and are certainly harmful for many people around the planet?"

Other critics are worried that if the technology works, then it will encourage politicians not to make the cuts in carbon and rapidly move to renewable energy.

Question of time

Climeworks' Jan Wurzbacher rejects this idea. He says it is all a matter of timing.

"If you had asked me 20 years ago I would have said that, yes, you should just focus on reducing emissions.

"But as of today we may have passed the point of being able to achieve it just by that. People say we will need to remove 10 gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year by 2050. It's not enough to develop it then; you need to deploy it and scale it, and that will take 30 years!"

Lili Fuhr doesn't agree. She says that approaches to capturing carbon are all part of a self-preservation strategy by the fossil fuel industry.

"For many decades the fossil fuel industry has funded climate sceptics and in that way tried to prevent climate action. But they've seen that is not working, so instead of denying, they are beginning to come up with these magical techno-fixes that would help prolong the lifespan of their industry.

"What we are seeing is a shift in the broader denial-ism and prevention strategy of the fossil fuel industry."

Follow Matt on Twitter and on Facebook

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Climate's magic rabbit: Pulling CO2 out of thin air

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UN climate negotiators are meeting in Bonn amid a welter of reports indicating that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have broken records, while international attempts to curb greenhouse gases are not doing enough to avoid dangerous levels of warming.

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GIS Story Map which includes Data Analysis and Geographical Skills relating to the Water Cycle

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GIS Story Map which includes Data Analysis and Geographical Skills relating to the Water Cycle

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Map Provides High-Resolution Look at Nearly Entire Arctic Region - Eos

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Researchers highlight the value of the time element incorporated into imagery and having a baseline for revisiting and comparing topography.

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The first 'negative emissions' carbon-capture plant is up and running

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The first 'negative emissions' carbon-capture plant is up and running

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Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski

The first 'negative emissions' carbon-capture plant is up and running.

On Wednesday, Iceland flipped the switch on the first project that will remove more CO2 than it produces. The plant is operated by Climeworks, which also opened the first commercial carbon-capture plant in Switzerland earlier this year.

Here's how direct-air carbon capture works: Giant turbines pull in huge quantities of air, hoovering up molecules of carbon dioxide so we can store it somewhere that's NOT the atmosphere.

The Icelandic pilot program can remove an estimated 50 metric tons of CO2 from the air in a year. It pumps the collected gas deep into the island's volcanic bedrock, where it reacts with basalt and essentially turns into limestone. Voilà! No massive reservoirs to manage for millennia - just a lot of rock.

If all this sounds too good to be true, there's a reason. Ambitious "clean coal" plants have been engaged in a very public struggle with the economic reality of carbon capture in recent years, and direct-air capture is an even tougher sell.

But it's getting more affordable. Today, companies estimate it would cost between $50 and $100 to capture a single metric ton of carbon. Iceland's plant has already achieved $30 per metric ton. It will never work as a substitute for action to reduce emissions, but carbon capture could be a crucial part of keeping global temperatures in check this century.

Read the original article on Grist. Copyright 2017. Follow Grist on Twitter.

More from Grist:

SEE ALSO: Why people around the world fear climate change way more than Americans do

NOW WATCH: Everything we know about the mysterious SR-72 - Lockheed Martin's successor to the fastest plane ever

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The first 'negative emissions' carbon-capture plant is up and running

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The first 'negative emissions' carbon-capture plant is up and running. On Wednesday, Iceland flipped the switch on the first project that will remove more CO2 than it produces. The plant is operated by Climeworks, which also opened the first commercial carbon-capture plant in Switzerland earlier this year.

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Podcast on the role of Forests in the Carbon Cycle

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What's the role of forests in the #carbon cycle? We talk to @BIFoRUoB in our latest #podcast 🎙 https://t.co/q59J2yzP27

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What's the role of forests in the #carbon cycle? We talk to @BIFoRUoB in our latest #podcast 🎙 https://t.co/q59J2yzP27 https://t.co/Ksbp8W9ute

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What's the role of forests in the #carbon cycle? We talk to @BIFoRUoB in our latest #podcast 🎙 https://t.co/q59J2yzP27 https://t.co/Ksbp8W9ute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
What's the role of forests in the #carbon cycle? We talk to @BIFoRUoB in our latest #podcast 🎙 https://t.co/q59J2yzP27 https://t.co/Ksbp8W9ute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
What's the role of forests in the #carbon cycle? We talk to @BIFoRUoB in our latest #podcast 🎙 https://t.co/q59J2yzP27

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BBC - Future - The great thaw of America’s north is coming

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BBC - Future - The great thaw of America’s north is coming

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Vladimir Romanovsky walks through the dense black spruce forest with ease. Not once does he stop or slow down to balance himself on the cushy moss beneath his feet insulating the permafrost.

It's a warm day in July, and the scientist is looking for a box that he and his team have installed on the ground. It's hidden nearly six miles (10km) north of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, where he's a professor of geophysics and heads the Permafrost Laboratory.

The box, which is covered by tree branches, contains a data collector connected to a thermometer installed below ground for measuring permafrost temperature at different depths. Permafrost is any earth material that remains at or below 0C (32F) for at least two consecutive years.

Romanovsky connects his laptop to the data collector to transfer the temperature data for this location - called Goldstream III - which he will later add to an online database accessible to both scientists and interested individuals.

"Permafrost is defined on the basis of temperature, the parameter that characterises its stability," Romanovsky says.

The thaw is deepening and expanding, causing the permafrost underneath to become less stable

When the temperature of permafrost is below 0C (32F), for example -6C (21F), it is considered stable and will take a long time to thaw or to change. If it's close to 0C, however, it's considered vulnerable.

Every summer the portion of soil overlaying the permafrost, called the active layer, thaws, before refreezing the following winter. At Goldstream III, on this July day, the summer thaw currently ends at 50cm depth.

As the Earth warms and summer temperatures climb, the thaw is deepening and expanding, causing the permafrost underneath to become less stable.

The consequences, if this thawing continues, will be profound, for Alaska - and for the world. Nearly 90% of the state is covered in permafrost, which means entire villages will need to be relocated, as the foundations of buildings and roads crumble. And if this frozen cache releases the millennia of accumulated carbon it has locked within, it could accelerate the warming of our planet - far beyond our ability to control it.
A vulnerable state
As permafrost thaws, houses, roads, airports and other infrastructure built on the frozen ground can crack and even collapse.

"We are seeing some increased maintenance on existing roads over permafrost," says Jeff Currey, materials engineer for Northern Region of the Alaska Department of Transportation Public Facilities. "One of our maintenance superintendents recently told me his folks are having to patch settling areas on the highways he's responsible for more frequently than they were 10 or 20 years ago."

Similarly, infrastructure built underground - such as those for utilities - is suffering as temperatures rise.

"In Point Lay - on the coast in northwest Alaska - for instance, they're having all sorts of trouble with their water and sewer lines buried in permafrost soil," says William Schnabel, director of the Water & Environmental Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "The permafrost soil has thawed and we get water and line breaks because the ground shifts."

The concern is even more pronounced for those living in rural areas who don't have enough funds to combat the effects of thawing permafrost. For those residents it's not just about collapsing buildings, which is common now, but also water supply.

Often as permafrost thaws on the side of a lake that a village might use as water supply, there's a breach and a lateral drain occurs. "It usually requires pretty expensive infrastructure to take water from a lake, bring it to a village and store it and all the components of this infrastructure are vulnerable to thawing permafrost," Romanovsky says.

If a village depends on an affected lake for water, the community members would have to move their infrastructure and sometimes their entire village to another lake, which can be very costly.

Villages like Kivalina in Alaska will have to move within the next 10 years

According to research conducted by US Geological Survey, villages like Kivalina in north-west Alaska will have to move within the next 10 years, Romanovsky explains. "But estimates show cost of moving is about $200m (£150m) per village of 300 people."

Those kinds of sums are only possible with federal government funding - but there are also no guarantees that a new location wouldn't be affected eventually too.

"I think by now there are 70 villages who really have to move because of thawing permafrost," Romanovsky says. "But moving villages to another location on permafrost is very difficult to guarantee for 30 years or so and the federal government doesn't want to pay for something they have to pay for again."

It's possible that building Alaskan settlements on permafrost may also be making the problem worse. "When you think about water and sewers you have to keep those above freezing and when you have permafrost you have to keep that below freezing," Schnabel says. "So you're running relatively warm water through the permafrost and there's going to be some heat dissipation in there."

Similarly, when a road is built, a lot of the vegetation that insulates the permafrost is cleared and then paved over with black covering that increases the amount of absorbed solar radiation. So although the maintenance burden has increased for those like Currey, not all the distress that comes with infrastructure can be solely attributed to a changing climate.
Defrosting a freezer full of carbon
Alaska, no doubt, is on the front lines of climate change, but the issues related to permafrost aren't just specific to The Last Frontier. What happens to the frozen earth material in the 49th state will affect the lower 48, as well as the entire globe.

According to Romanovsky, half of the state's and 90% of interior Alaska's permafrost will thaw if there's a global average rise of 2C in air temperature.

This is especially worrying because an enormous amount of organic carbon is sequestered in permafrost and the overlaying active layer. Since there's not enough heat in frozen soil to help microbes to decompose dying vegetation, over thousands of years organic matter has accumulated in permafrost. Some estimates say the amount of carbon in the permafrost is more than two times than there is in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

"If we maintain our current course of operation, business as usual they call that, then it's pretty certain by 2100 a significant fraction of the permafrost in the upper five metres would thaw out and with it all the organic matter that is currently frozen in the permafrost," says Kevin Schaefer, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. "That would indicate a release of carbon dioxide and methane, which would amplify the warming due to the burning of fossil fuels."

If this carbon is released, the amount of CO2 will be three times more than what is in in the atmosphere now

In fact, in a 2012 report published in the journal Nature, Schaefer and his co-authors indicated that past sudden warming events were essentially triggered by the release of carbon dioxide and methane from permafrost some 50 million years ago in Antarctica.

And the projected numbers don't look promising: "Theoretically if this carbon is released to the atmosphere, the amount of CO2 will be three times more than what is in there [in the atmosphere] now," says Romanovsky.

So it's a true feedback loop as it amplifies the warming due to the burning of fossil fuels. And despite the fact that the warming is accelerating, the feedback effects will be gradual, taking time to be noticeable. "It's a very slow feedback," Schaefer says. "Imagine trying to steer a steam ship with a canoe paddle, that's the kind of feedback we're talking about."

Unfortunately, once permafrost starts to thaw, it'll be hard to refreeze it again - at least in our lifetime. Furthermore, once the decay is out of the ground and into the atmosphere, there's no easy way to put that carbon back into the ground.

"The only way to do that would be to lower the global temperature and refreeze the permafrost, which would mean you're removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," Schaefer says.

Climate models show that current intergovernmental commitments to reduce warming - as laid out by the Paris Climate Accord - may not be enough, Romanovsky explains.

In a 2016 report published in Nature Climate Change, researchers Sarah Chadburn

and colleagues estimate that even if the climate was stabilised as agreed upon by the 196 parties in 2015, "the permafrost area would eventually be reduced by over 40%".

However, with US President Donald Trump's announcement of withdrawal from the Paris agreement last June, more permafrost loss is likely on the horizon.
The blame game
Alaska is a politically conservative state, so outsiders might assume that residents reject the idea that the planet is warming beyond our control. The truth is more complex.

According to a poll of 750 participants conducted earlier this year by the Alaska Dispatch News, more than 70% of Alaskans are concerned about the effects climate change.

"In Alaska anybody you ask will say 'yes there's warming,'" Romanovsky says. "The farther north you go, northwest especially, the stronger that feeling. Because it's happening, you see it. Of course, the question of who's responsible depends on political beliefs."

At Denali National Park & Preserve, park ranger Anna Moore has witnessed warming affect wildlife across only a couple of years. She's noticed that the Arctic hare, which switches between brown and white coat colours with the seasons can't seem to keep up with the changes as a result of temperature rise, essentially putting itself at risk.

" In the wintertime they get white tips to their hair," Moore says. "As it gets warmer, the snow is melting faster, but their bodies are acclimatised to certain temperature change and so even though the snow is already melting they're still white and in more danger from predators."

Moore says though she believes in climate change and is watching it affect flora and fauna at the park, she considers it a result of both human activities and a natural cycle.

Her colleague Ashley Tench also echoes the sentiment: "I agree with her [on] how it's part man-made and also natural." To that effect, Tench doesn't believe the United States' pullout of the Paris Agreement makes a difference in the climate.

But not everyone in Alaska is on board with that sentiment. To Bill Beaudoin, a retired submariner and educator who's now the proprietor of a bed and breakfast in Fairbanks, it's obvious that humans are to blame and that we should work on reversing the effects of our actions.

People are worried, because of course there's no insurance for thawing permafrost

"I think the Paris climate accord was necessary," he says. "In fact, I didn't think [it was] enough. There's one country, Nicaragua, that didn't sign on to the agreement because they didn't think it was strong enough. I would probably side with Nicaragua on that issue."

No matter who is to blame for the warming and resulting thaw of permafrost, Alaskans are for the most part concerned about their future.

"People are worried, because of course there's no insurance for thawing permafrost," Romanovsky says. "Insurance is not covering damage from permafrost like it does in California for earthquakes."

Back at Goldstream III, Romanovsky notes that at 50cm depth, the temperature of the soil is -0.04C (31.9F). At one metre it's -0.23C (31.5F). The last time he checked the data was in March, where at one metre, the soil temperature measured -1.1C (30F).

He takes his shovel and makes a hole in the ground to look at the soil and check for carbon within. Darker soil indicates accumulated organic carbon. The further down he digs, the colder the soil gets. Romanovsky digs until the shovel hits the permafrost and seemingly can't go any further.

He pushes down a bit more and manages to dig up a bit of the permafrost - about the size of a small coin. Seconds after he holds the frozen soil between his fingers it melts as if it were an ice cube. He returns the dug up dirt back into the hole, disconnects his laptop from the data collector, closes up the box and covers it up with branches and packs up to leave the site. In a week he'll head up north to log the temperature at other sites adding yet more data to one of the most comprehensive permafrost databases in the world.

Meanwhile, bit by bit, America's frozen north is thawing and what happens next is unknown. What's certain is the great thaw will forever change a once-familiar landscape - and likely a planet and its inhabitants too.
Correction: A quote by Bill Beaudoin has been corrected to state that it was Nicaragua that did not originally agree to sign the Paris climate agreement.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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The great thaw of America's north is coming

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Vladimir Romanovsky walks through the dense black spruce forest with ease. Not once does he stop or slow down to balance himself on the cushy moss beneath his feet insulating the permafrost. It's a warm day in July, and the scientist is looking for a box that he and his team have installed on the ground.

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The Minus Sign: pulling carbon from the air - Geographical

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The Minus Sign: pulling carbon from the air - Geographical

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Geographical's regular look at the world of climate change. This month, Marco Magrini looks at carbon capture and storage options

Let's tell the blunt truth: the world's climate goals are simply not attainable. Keeping global warming below the fabled 2°C mark is remarkably wishful thinking. True, growth in fossil fuel emissions has stalled over the past three years. In the same time frame though, the atmosphere has witnessed the addition of another 110 billion tons of CO2. It's time to start making subtractions.

Carbon capture and storage technology has long been a favourite refrain for politicians and polluters daydreaming of retrofitted smokestacks capable of making coal magically 'clean'. After much initial fanfare, investors have since retreated and governments (Britain included) have scrapped their projects, as capturing CO2 turned out to be a hellish endeavour and storing it a nightmarish one. Only Norway is pushing ahead with its plan to store carbon dioxide in subsea caverns, in spite of a €1.4billion tally (and €100million annual operating costs).

Enter Climeworks, a Swiss company with a brave idea: instead of capturing CO2 from industrial chimneys, why not suck it out of the atmosphere? Instead of burying it underground, why not commercialise it? Its first plant in Zurich can already collect 900 tons of carbon dioxide per year, to be piped into a nearby greenhouse to help vegetables grow. That same CO2 could be employed in producing carbonated drinks, synthetic fuels and, theoretically, bricks. Separate research projects at UCLA and MIT have demonstrated the possibility of employing the very molecule that endangers our future as a raw commodity for construction materials. In the long-term, it could even partially displace cement production, one of the most carbon-intensive industrial processes out there.

However, the huge Climeworks machine can subtract the equivalent emissions of a mere 200 cars. We would need a bigger version, and hundreds of thousands of them all over the world, to make a difference to the climatic algebra. Needless to say, we already have a wondrous technology for going negative - photosynthesis. Halting deforestation altogether would still be the smartest way to make the subtractions. Yet, after almost two centuries of burgeoning additions and the chance of a catastrophic sum by the end of the current era, the more subtraction operators we have at our disposal, the better.

This was published in the October 2017 edition of Geographical magazine.

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The Minus Sign: pulling carbon from the air - Geographical

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Geographical's regular look at the world of climate change. This month, Marco Magrini looks at carbon capture and storage options Let's tell the blunt truth: the world's climate goals are simply not attainable. Keeping global warming below the fabled 2°C mark is remarkably wishful thinking.

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Saharan dust feeds the ocean and locks away carbon too

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Saharan dust feeds the ocean and locks away carbon too

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The Saharan dust that clogged air and dirtied cars recently may seem like a nuisance, but in fact contains some essential nutrients - if, that is, you're phytoplankton.

The dust and sand blown from Africa into the ocean provides nutrients for these microscopic ocean plants, upon which the entire marine food chain depends. The most important is iron. And although these plants only need very small quantities, iron is essential - and only supplied by dust or by other contact with land masses.

As part of a wide ranging endeavour to study changes in the open ocean and to improve our predictions of how the oceanic system may change over the coming decades, the National Oceanography Centre maintains three multidisciplinary observatories. These are observation and recording stations anchored to the ocean floor around 4,800m deep with but with sensors extending up to the surface.

Attached to these moorings are a variety of sensors and samplers some of which send data every few hours by satellite to the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Each is set in a very different environment, in terms of how productive the ocean around it is, how much desert dust reaches it, and the extent of carbon dioxide exchange between the air and sea.

Vital dust cycle

For example, the observatories at the Northern Oligotrophic Gyre ( NOG, in the middle of the North Atlantic), and the Southern Oligotrophic Gyre ( SOG, between Brazil and West Africa,) are fixed in locations right in the middle of the most unproductive, desert-like parts of the world's oceans. But one of the crucial differences seen from comparing recordings from them is that although phytoplankton concentrations from satellite observations at each seem very similar, the amount of carbon being sequestered at NOG is about double that at SOG.

Richard Lampitt/NOC

The reason for this difference is the greater supply of Saharan dust reaching the NOG, although the exact mechanism for this is still under discussion.

It could be that the iron from the dust enables some specialist phytoplankton called diazotrophs to take up nitrogen from the seawater as dissolved nitrogen gas (a process which requires a lot of iron), providing a growth spurt just as fertiliser would do on crops on land. As the growing phytoplankton use this nitrogen and other nutrients they also take up carbon dioxide, as do plants on land. Another explanation could be that the dust supply itself acts as ballast, making sticky carbon-rich organic particles heavier and dragging them to the bottom where the carbon can be considered sequestered from the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years.

The third observatory, the Porcupine Abyssal Plain observatory ( PAP, well beyond the edge of the continental shelf southwest of Ireland) is one of the most sophisticated and longest-running observatories in the open ocean. For the past 25 years an increasing number of measurements have been recorded at the site, sending back data on carbon dioxide, oxygen, plant pigment, particle and nutrient concentration by satellite every few hours. Other recordings such as time lapse photographs of the seabed and passing creatures and the downward flux of particulate matter in the deep ocean are recovered once per year when we visit the site on one of the NERC research vessels.

Brian Bett/NOC

Although this recent visit of Saharan dust to Britain's south and east has caused some consternation, the supply reaching the PAP observatory has not been very great as its trajectory from the Sahara swept across the continent and not out to sea. In any case, at this time of year iron would probably not be in short supply at PAP.

Seeding the oceans

This regular supply of dust to the ocean has changed massively over timescales of 10,000 to 100,000 years, and will do so again in the future - possibly much more quickly as a result of climate change brought about by human activity. It's of key importance to understand how the system functions and what the consequences of these changes will be on the oceans' ability to continue to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. At present it draws up about a third of the planet's carbon emissions, but there is considerable debate about whether this will increase or decrease in the future.

Our ambition to reduce atmospheric CO 2 further has driven a debate over whether we could encourage the oceans to take up more CO 2 than at present. After all, much of the ocean is short of iron nutrients, and it was suggested around 25 years ago that fertilising the ocean with iron to boost phytoplankton growth and so drawn out more carbon from the atmosphere would be inexpensive as such small quantities are required.

The jury is still out about whether this is a viable proposal, and such research has been strictly regulated due to possible unintended consequences. This is in my opinion the right way forward, although funds for carrying out this research have so far been hard to acquire. It is essential for decisions about geoengineering to be taken with a good knowledge of the benefits and costs; hopefully such research can be conducted before it is too late.

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Saharan dust feeds the ocean and locks away carbon too

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The Saharan dust that clogged air and dirtied cars recently may seem like a nuisance, but in fact contains some essential nutrients - if, that is, you're phytoplankton. The dust and sand blown from Africa into the ocean provides nutrients for these microscopic ocean plants, upon which the entire marine food chain depends.

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Wild is the wind: the resource that could power the world

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Wild is the wind: the resource that could power the world

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The wind rips along the Humber estuary in Hull. It's the kind that presses your coat to your back and pushes you on to your toes. "A bit too windy," shouts Andy Sykes, before his words are swept away. He is the head of operational excellence at the Siemens Gamesa factory, which supplies blades - the bits that turn - to windfarms in the North Sea. At 75 metres long, they are hard to manoeuvre when it's gusting.

Inside the vast factory hall, the blades lie in various states of undress. Several hundred layers of fibreglass and balsa wood are being tucked into giant moulds by hand. There are "naked" blades that require paint and whose bodies have the patina of polished tortoiseshell. Look through the hollow blades from the broadest part, and a pale green path, the tinge of fibreglass, snakes down the long tunnel, tapering to a small burst of daylight at its tip.

"Alice in Wonderland," Sykes says. "That's how I feel. That's the emotion coming through. It's 75 metres long. We know that. But stood here the perspective is just fantastic. It's my favourite view." Down this strange green rabbithole is a glimpse of a greener future, the possibility of a world powered by wind.

This is not as fanciful a vision as it once seemed. In the UK, the wind energy industry is celebrating. Last month, the cost of renewable energy dropped dramatically to undercut by almost half the government's projections for 2025. At £57.50 per megawatt-hour (MWh), it is far cheaper than the state-backed price of £92.50 awarded in 2016 to Hinkley nuclear power station. The speed of wind's progress is extreme and inarguable.

Emma Pinchbeck, executive director of RenewableUK, and a former climate change activist, can't keep the happiness from her voice. But she is happy for new reasons. What's really exciting, she says, is the fact that she "is not having to talk to officials about decarbonisation any more as a starting point. Windfarms are low carbon. But that's not why we want to build them. We want to build them because they're bloody cheap!"

Wind is in the news. And not just in terms of the energy it provides. One after another, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate have devastated the Caribbean and parts of the US mainland. In the UK, with a turbulent autumn looming, this month marks the 30th anniversary of 1987's great storm, which felled 15 million trees in one night. A book exploring this event, Windblown: Landscape, Legacy and Loss, sold in a keenly contested auction last year and has just been published. Another new book, Where the Wild Winds Are, sees its author, Nick Hunt, walk the "invisible pathways" of Europe's winds. In short, wind is in the air. But why do lay people know so little about it - and can it really power the world?

The wind energy sector is certainly booming. Across the river from the Siemens Gamesa factory in Hull, in this long windy corridor of development on the east coast of the windiest country in Europe, there's the Dong Energy hub, the screens of its operation room flickering with the data of wind captured by blades turning in the North Sea. Next month, the company will change its name - short for Danish Oil and Natural Gas - to Ørsted, after the celebrated Danish scientist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, to reflect its near complete shift from black energy to green.

Dong was among the companies that achieved the landmark price of £57.50, and Emma Toulson, who works in their Grimsby office, explains how they did it.

Since the government ruled out new onshore windfarms in England - a promise in its 2015 manifesto - energy companies have been forced offshore, making the UK the world's offshore leader. Allowed to develop beyond the vision of land-dwellers who see windfarms as a blot on the countryside, the turbines have grown steadily larger, as have the farms to which they belong. Dong's Hornsea Project Two will span 480 sq km, and Toulson's PowerPoint outlines a large jagged blue diamond for Project Three and an even larger blue rocket shape for Four.

Toulson has a slide that shows one very clear reason for the falling cost of wind energy. Over time, the diameter of the blades have enlarged. A turbine commissioned in 2002 swept 80 metres; in 2005, that figure rose to 90 metres; in 2011, it was 120 metres. By 2020, it will be 180 metres.

Of course, the supply chain has improved, and there have been engineering refinements. But put baldly, wind energy costs less, and will go on costing less, because the turbines are growing taller and the blades longer. The manufacturers of these machines are in a race to produce the largest.

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A car is crushed by a falling tree during the great storm of 1987. Photograph: Georges DeKeerle/Getty Images

Making something bigger in each incarnation seems a very basic idea of advancement. How much of a future is there in a pursuit of progress through perpetual excess?

Andrew Garrad co-founded Garrad Hassan, which has grown to become the world's largest wind consultancy. "When I started, in 1984, I could carry the biggest wind turbine blade on my back," he says. "I've made all sorts of embarrassing pronouncements about how big the blades can get ... Never bigger than 50 metres or 70 metres or 90 metres, and I'm always wrong."

One limit is that if a blade can't support its own weight, it buckles. And the size at which this would happen? Garrad laughs. "About 1.5km in length."

To add to the sense of the fantastical, last week two scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, California, published a study that suggested a windfarm the size of India, in the North Atlantic, could power the world.

"A generation doesn't last long in wind," Garrad says. A new one is born every three to four years. Progress has been so fast that this year saw the first decommissioning of an offshore windfarm, Vindeby, in Denmark. At 25 years old, it is practically ancient, its entire output exceeded by that of a single 8MW Vestas turbine.

And yet despite the size of its gargantuan machines, the offshore wind industry is still in its infancy. Wind turbines may look alike, but as Garrad points out, "we are a long way from a design consensus". There are fixed turbines and floating turbines, which can access deeper seas, turbines with gears and turbines without. The sight of three blades harmoniously turning has become commonplace. But there is no reason why offshore turbines should look like this. They could operate with a single blade (ruled out on land because one blade, whirring faster, is noisy), or with two blades (ruled out on land because an optical illusion makes them appear to pause as they pass the tower, flummoxing passersby). Offshore, there would be only the gulls to offend, and the people who will live, in four-weekly shifts, on the new accommodation vessels that are being deployed to manage the farms' growing distance from shore.

The open ocean is a blank blue slate. "An engineer's dream," Garrad muses, who built his first windmill from old bicycle parts in his back garden when he was 17. When he was older, he climbed to the top of one of the first giant turbines and stuck his head out of the nacelle - the bit near the blades that houses the components - just to feel the wind in his hair.

"You poke your head through the trapdoor and you get the most fantastic feeling of the power of the wind," he says, his voice growing faster, louder. "You can feel the torque on the rotor, feel the blades bending, and the whole machine taking the power out of the wind ... That first primordial step from the wind itself into the rotating shaft."

Wind has long had a transformative power in myths and legends. From Aeolus, the keeper of the winds in Greek mythology, to Vayu, the Hindu god of wind and Native American legends, humans have toyed with the idea of capturing it. (This preoccupation can be seen in object form at the Bora wind museum in Trieste, Italy: it has an exhibition of gusts trapped in bottles, sent in by wind lovers from around the world.)

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The Great Wave off the coast at Kanagawa, c1830, from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c1831, by Katsushika Hokusai. Photograph: UniversalImagesGroup/Getty Images

Wind is a metaphor for change, the passage of time, the past and the future ("The answer, my friend ..."). It blows through the art of Van Gogh, through Hokusai to the far western tip of Cornwall and Gill Watkiss, whose landscapes are peopled by figures permanently bent, snapped over by the wind, hair whipped. "I like to feel it playing havoc with me," she says. "You feel alive."

Humans have a complex relationship with the wind. We have many names for rain, from mizzle to drizzle, torrents to downpours. But wind is different. "There are no borders to the wind. It blows across land, across oceans. It's bigger than we can imagine," says Tamsin Treverton Jones, who wrote Windblown. We know it by how it sounds or feels, which is severe enough in places for scientists to have explored the link between strong winds and suicide, and by the damage it leaves behind.

Poets aside, we have few words for the wind between a breeze and a gale. Even the Beaufort scale, which measures wind speed, categorises it specifically in relation to its impact on objects. Ted Hughes knew a "brunt wind". Robert Macfarlane knows a "katrizper", an Orcadian wind derived from the Norse for cat scratches. Watkiss, the Cornish artist, tells "exhilarating" wind by the way the telegraph wires hum. Debra Nicholson at the Wind Energy Museum in Great Yarmouth, with its bunting gently flapping over an assortment of 20th-century windmills, cites a 45-degree wind - one that gusts so hard, you have to walk into it at that angle. And a few miles away at E.ON's Scroby Sands windfarm visitor centre, there's talk of a "scowl", a wind that whips around in all directions. Just along the promenade a kiosk sells children's windmills and, at the dock, hulking Siemens Gamesa blades lie ready to be taken to sea.

But while most of us know what wind does and how it sounds, we don't know what it is, or why it blows when air at the earth's surface moves to equalise low and high pressure areas. There is much still to understand.

Ken Caldeira is one of the two Stanford climate scientists behind the idea of a North Atlantic windfarm the size of India. To understand the significance of his discovery, he says, it is important to know that when wind turbines are arrayed in rows, the extraction of wind by the first row reduces the amount of wind available for the second row, and so on. Row by row, the wind's potential diminishes.

To counter this effect, turbines need to extract energy from the wind that's above them. What Caldeira found was that that is exactly what can happen in parts of the North Atlantic, where heat "pours out of the ocean", causing greater "cyclonic activity". But could a farm the size of India really be built in open ocean? "You wouldn't want to," he says. Better to have many very large ones ( China currently has the largest). A wind power station that size "would be a climate change in itself". For one thing, "pulling that much energy out of the sky shifts the direction of wind".

The challenges facing the wind energy industry remain immense. These include global political challenges: the presence of a climate-change sceptic in the White House, the UK government's dislike of onshore wind (cheaper and so far more productive than offshore) and the potential impact of Brexit.

There are technical challenges, too, such as the difficulty of storing the energy captured. Batteries for this purpose - such as the E.ON facility that opened in Sheffield last week - are still developing and are crucial to securing the supply, making it reliable. But still, the possibilities are immense.

"The total amount of power in winds globally is something like 50 times bigger than the total amount of power used by human civilisation," Caldeira reckons. "If we were to power civilisation by winds, we would need to capture about 2% of winds today," he says, sounding a little like Odysseus on his way home from Troy, bag of winds in hand.

And if the ocean is a blank blue state, there is another one above. The idea has been floated. Wind turbines on kites are in research and development. The jet stream, for Caldeira, is "the largest, most concentrated renewable energy source on the planet, 20 times as potent in every square metre as direct sunlight in the middle of the day".

No one thinks that wind alone offers the answer to the world's energy needs. But for now, at least, the possibilities are boundless.

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Wild is the wind: the resource that could power the world

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The wind rips along the Humber estuary in Hull. It's the kind that presses your coat to your back and pushes you on to your toes. "A bit too windy," shouts Andy Sykes, before his words are swept away.

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2. Video showing human impact on the carbon cycle

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2. Video showing human impact on the carbon cycle

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Water in the Anthropocene is a 3-minute film charting the global impact of humans on the water cycle. 

Evidence is growing that our global footprint is now so significant we have driven Earth into a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene. 

Human activities such as damming and agriculture are changing the global water cycle in significant ways. 

The data visualisation was commissioned by the Global Water Systems Project for a major international conference (Water in the Anthropocene, Bonn, Germany, 21-24 May, 2013). 
http://conference2013.gwsp.org 

As datasets build upon one another, the film charts Earth's changing global water cycle, why it is changing, and what this means for the future. The vertical spikes that appear in the film represent the 48,000 large dams that have been built. 

The film was produced by Globaïa and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme.
www.globaia.org // www.igbp.net

The film is part of the first website on the concept of humans as a geological force, www.anthropocene.info

Datasets:
- Base map: NASA, Natural Earth, Globaïa
- Total precipitation: GEOS-5 — http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a030000/a030000/a030017/index.html
- Ocean currents: OSCAR — http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003900/a003958/index.html
- Dams & Reservoir capacity: GRanD — http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/grand-v1-dams-rev01
- Cities: VIIRS 2012 — http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/download.html
- Cropland (North America): Agriculture Lands 2000 — http://www.earthstat.org
- Anthroposphere: Several sources, see Cartography of the Anthropocene on Globaïa's website — http://www.globaia.org
- Sea ice: Sea Ice for Science on a Sphere — http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003579/index.html
- Rivers: NGIA vMAP — http://geoengine.nga.mil/geospatial/SW_TOOLS/NIMAMUSE/webinter/vmap0_legend.html
- Lakes: Global Lakes and Wetlands Database — http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/GCMD_GLWD.html
- Human Water Security Index: Adjusted HWS Threat — http://www.riverthreat.net

Music
Earlyguard — http://earlyguard.bandcamp.com
Jana Winderen — http://www.janawinderen.com

Produced for the Global Water Systems Project (GWSP)

GWSP is sponsored by:
DIVERSITAS
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
International Human Dimensions Programme
World Climate Research Programme

Scientific sponsors of the Welcome to the Anthropocene website:
CSIRO
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
Stockholm Resilience Centre
Future Earth

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1. Are the world's tropical rainforests becoming a source and not a sink?

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1. Are the world's tropical rainforests becoming a source and not a sink?

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The world's tropical forests are so degraded they have become a source rather than a sink of carbon emissions, according to a new study that highlights the urgent need to protect and restore the Amazon and similar regions.

Researchers found that forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia - which have until recently played a key role in absorbing greenhouse gases - are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, which is more than all the traffic in the United States.

This is a far greater loss than previously thought and carries extra force because the data emerges from the most detailed examination of the topic ever undertaken. The authors say their findings - published in the journal Science on Thursday - should galvanise policymakers to take remedial action.

"This shows that we can't just sit back. The forest is not doing what we thought it was doing," said Alessandro Baccini, who is one of the leader authors of the research team from Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University. "As always, trees are removing carbon from the atmosphere, but the volume of the forest is no longer enough to compensate for the losses. The region is not a sink any more."

The study went further than any of its predecessors in measuring the impact of disturbance and degradation - the thinning of tree density and the culling of biodiversity below an apparently protected canopy - usually as a result of selective logging, fire, drought and hunting.

This can reduce biomass by up to 75%. But it is more difficult for satellites to monitor than deforestation (the total clearance of foliage) because, when viewed from above, the canopy appears uninterrupted despite the depletion underneath.

To get more accurate data, scientists combined 12 years of satellite data with field studies. They found a net carbon loss on every continent. Latin America - home to the Amazon, the world's biggest forest - accounted for nearly 60% of the emissions, while 24% came from Africa and 16% from Asia.

Overall, more carbon was lost to degradation and disturbance than deforestation. The researchers stressed this was an opportunity as well as a concern because it was now possible to identify which areas are being affected and to restore forests before they disappeared completely.

"Prior to this we knew degradation was a problem but we didn't know where or how much," said Wayne Walker, another of the lead authors. "It's easier to address the problem when there is still some of the forest left standing."

The priority is to protect pristine forests with high carbon density. The most effective way of doing this, he said, was to support land rights for indigenous people. "Those living in the forest can make a difference," Walker said.

Unfortunately, many governments whose territories are home to tropical forests are moving in the opposite direction. In Brazil and Colombia, for example, deforestation has accelerated rapidly in the past year.

"When I look at these numbers and the map of where the changes are occurring, it's shocking," said Baccini, who has a two-year-old son. "My child may not see many of the forests. At this rate of change, they will not be there."

But he said the numbers should be a driver for action. "We need to be positive. Let's turn tropical forests back into a sink. We need to restore degraded areas" he said. "As far as technology for reducing carbon is concerned, this is low-hanging fruit. We know how to protect and sustain forests. It's relatively cost effective"

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Alarm as study reveals world's tropical forests are huge carbon emission source

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The world's tropical forests are so degraded they have become a source rather than a sink of carbon emissions, according to a new study that highlights the urgent need to protect and restore the Amazon and similar regions.