# data[].attributes.headline
Trade-offs of European agricultural abandonment

# data[].attributes.subject
Trade-offs of European agricultural abandonment

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837716314417

# data[].attributes.body
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/19152

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Potent, climate warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found.

Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy.

However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted.

Levels of some emissions from India and China are so uncertain that experts say their records are plus or minus 100%.

These flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC Radio 4's Counting Carbon programme.

Bottom-up records

Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years.

Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.

But air-sampling programmes that record actual levels of gases, such as those run by the UK and Switzerland, sometimes reveal errors and omissions.

In 2011, Swiss scientists first published their data on levels of a gas called HFC-23 coming from a location in northern Italy.

Between 2008 and 2010, they had recorded samples of the chemical, produced in the refrigeration and air conditioning industries, which is 14,800 times more warming to the atmosphere than CO2.

Now the scientists, at the Jungfraujoch Swiss air monitoring station, have told the BBC the gas is still going into the atmosphere.

"Our estimate for this location in Italy is about 60-80 tonnes of this substance being emitted every year, then we can compare this with the Italian emission inventory, and that is quite interesting because the official inventory says below 10 tonnes or in the region of two to three tonnes," said Dr Stefan Reimann, from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology.

"They actually say it is happening, but they don't think it is happening as much as we see.

"Just to put it into perspective, this greenhouse gas is thousands of times stronger than CO2.

"So, that would be like an Italian town of 80,000 inhabitants not emitting any CO2."

The Italian environment agency told the BBC its inventory was correct and complied with UN regulations and it did not accept the Swiss figures.

Another rare warming gas, carbon tetrachloride, once popular as a refrigerant and a solvent but very damaging to the ozone layer, has been banned in Europe since 2002.

But Dr Reimann told Counting Carbon: "We still see 10,000-20,000 tonnes coming out of China every year."

"That is something that shouldn't be there.

"There is actually no Chinese inventory for these gases, as they are banned and industry shouldn't be releasing them anymore."

China's approach to reporting its overall output of warming gases to the UN is also subject to constant and significant revisions.

Its last submission ran to about 30 pages - the UK's, by contrast, runs to several hundred.

Back in 2007, China simply refused to accept, in official documents, that it had become the largest emitter of CO2.

"I was working in China in 2007," said Dr Angel Hsu, from Yale University.

"I would include a citation and statistics that made this claim of China's position as the number one emitter - these were just stricken out, and I was told the Chinese government doesn't yet recognise this particular statistic so we are not going to include it."

A report in 2015 suggested one error in China's statistics amounted to 10% of global emissions in 2013.

The BBC investigation also discovered vast uncertainties in carbon emissions inventories, particularly in developing countries.

Methane, the second most abundant greenhouse gas after CO2, is produced by microbe activity in marshlands, in rice cultivation, from landfill, from agriculture and in the production of fossil fuels.

Global levels have been rising in recent years, and scientists are unsure why.

For a country such as India, home to 15% of the world's livestock, methane is a very important gas in their inventory - but the amount produced is subject to a high degree of uncertainty.

"What they note is that methane emissions are about 50% uncertain for categories like ruminants, so what this means is that the emissions they submit could be plus or minus 50% of what's been submitted," said Dr Anita Ganesan, from the University of Bristol, who has overseen air monitoring research in the country.

"For nitrous oxide, that's 100%."

There are similar uncertainties with methane emissions in Russia, of between 30-40%, according to scientists who work there.

"What we're worried about is what the planet experiences, never mind what the statistics are," said Prof Euan Nisbet, from Royal Holloway, University of London.

"In the air, we see methane going up. The warming impact from that methane is enough to derail Paris."

The rules covering how countries report their emissions are currently being negotiated.

But Prof Glen Peters, from the Centre for International Climate Research, in Oslo, said: "The core part of Paris [is] the global stock-takes which are going to happen every five years, and after the stock-takes countries are meant to raise their ambition, but if you can't track progress sufficiently, which is the whole point of these stock-takes, you basically can't do anything.

"So, without good data as a basis, Paris essentially collapses. It just becomes a talkfest without much progress."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Dodgy' greenhouse gas data threatens Paris accord - BBC News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Potent, climate warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found. Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy. However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Posted August 08, 2017 10:06:14

Thousands of residents in Adelaide's south-west could be banned indefinitely from using groundwater due to contamination from a dangerous industrial chemical.

Trichloroethylene (TCE) is found in industrial solvents and exposure to the chemical can cause some types of cancer.

The Environment Protection Authority (EPA) said TCE had been detected in groundwater accessible from properties in Edwardstown, South Plympton, Plympton Park, Park Holme, Ascot Park and Melrose Park.

EPA director of regulation Peter Dolan said the contamination was "well known" but the authority was now looking into whether a blanket ban was needed.

"There's about seven source sites [and] a number of contamination plumes in the groundwater and they've been assessed over quite a long period of time," he said.

"We've decided we need to group them all together and consider banning groundwater taken in the whole area.

"What we're considering is banning the use of groundwater taken from bores which are shallower than 30 metres deep [and] that's because that's where the contamination happens to be.

"The reason for doing it now is the science has been done [and] we've been able to figure out exactly where the contamination is."

"The affected area is bordered by Daws Road to the south, South Road to the east, just past Marion Road to the west and Maxwell Avenue to the north."

Mr Dolan said residents had been warned for several years that the bore water was not safe for use.

"[TCE] is known to cause ... rarer forms of liver and kidney cancers and also non-Hodgkin lymphoma," he said.

"You can live in close proximity with this stuff, it's just a matter of not getting exposed through either breathing it in, drinking it or contact with the skin.

"We know that most people in the area don't use groundwater - it would be as low as maybe 3 per cent of households that have access to a bore.

"The challenge is, we don't know where they all are."

Information sessions will be held for affected residents next month, with a final decision on a ban expected to be made by the end of the year.

Topics: environmental-health, environmental-impact, edwardstown-5039, melrose-park-5039, park-holme-5043, plympton-park-5038, south-plympton-5038, adelaide-5000, sa

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
EPA considers banning the use of groundwater in several Adelaide suburbs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Posted August 08, 2017 10:06:14 Thousands of residents in Adelaide's south-west could be banned indefinitely from using groundwater due to contamination from a dangerous industrial chemical. Trichloroethylene (TCE) is found in industrial solvents and exposure to the chemical can cause some types of cancer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The first-ever study to map U.S. wild bees suggests they are disappearing in the country's most important farmlands -- from California's Central Valley to the Midwest's corn belt and the Mississippi River valley.

If wild bee declines continue, it could hurt U.S. crop production and farmers' costs, said Taylor Ricketts, a conservation ecologist at the University of Vermont, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting panel, Plan Bee: Pollinators, Food Production and U.S. Policy on Feb. 19.

"This study provides the first national picture of wild bees and their impacts on pollination," said Ricketts, Director of UVM's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, noting that each year $3 billion of the U.S. economy depends on pollination from native pollinators like wild bees.

At AAAS, Ricketts briefed scholars, policy makers, and journalists on how the national bee map, first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late 2015, can help to protect wild bees and pinpoint habitat restoration efforts.

At the event, Ricketts also introduced a new mobile app that he is co-developing to help farmers upgrade their farms to better support wild bees.

"Wild bees are a precious natural resource we should celebrate and protect," said Ricketts, Gund Professor in UVM's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. "If managed with care, they can help us continue to produce billions of dollars in agricultural income and a wonderful diversity of nutritious food."
TROUBLE ZONES
The map identifies 139 counties in key agricultural regions of California, the Pacific Northwest, the upper Midwest and Great Plains, west Texas, and Mississippi River valley, which appear to have most worrisome mismatch between falling wild bee supply and rising crop pollination demand.

These counties tend to be places that grow specialty crops -- like almonds, blueberries and apples -- that are highly dependent on pollinators. Or they are counties that grow less dependent crops -- like soybeans, canola and cotton -- in very large quantities.

Of particular concern, some crops most dependent on pollinators -- including pumpkins, watermelons, pears, peaches, plums, apples and blueberries -- appeared to have the strongest pollination mismatch, growing in areas with dropping wild bee supply and increasing in pollination demand.

Globally, more than two-thirds of the most important crops either benefit from or require pollinators, including coffee, cacao, and many fruits and vegetables.

Pesticides, climate change and diseases threaten wild bees -- but their decline may be caused by the conversion of bee habitat into cropland, the study suggests. In 11 key states where the map shows bees in decline, the amount of land tilled to grow corn spiked by 200 percent in five years -- replacing grasslands and pastures that once supported bee populations.
RISING DEMAND, FALLING SUPPLY
Over the last decade, honeybee keepers facing colony losses have struggled with rising demand for commercial pollination services, pushing up the cost of managed pollinators -- and the importance of wild bees.

"Most people can think of one or two types of bee, but there are 4,000 species in the U.S. alone," said Insu Koh, a UVM postdoctoral researcher who co-hosted the AAAS panel and led the study.

"When sufficient habitat exists, wild bees are already contributing the majority of pollination for some crops," Koh adds. "And even around managed pollinators, wild bees complement pollination in ways that can increase crop yields."
MAKING THE MAPS
A team of seven researchers -- from UVM, Franklin and Marshall College, University of California at Davis, and Michigan State University -- created the maps by first identifying 45 land-use types from two federal land databases, including croplands and natural habitats. Then they gathered detailed input from national and state bee experts about the suitability of each land-use type for providing wild bees with nesting and food resources.

The scientists built a bee habitat model that predicts the relative abundance of wild bees for every area of the contiguous United States, based on their quality for nesting and feeding from flowers. Finally, the team checked and validated their model against bee collections and field observations in many actual landscapes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
agriculture and food; wild animals; food and agriculture; animals; insects (including butterflies); fisheries; fish; birds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bee decline threatens US crop production: First US wild bee map reveals 139 'trouble zone' counties

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The first-ever study to map U.S. wild bees suggests they are disappearing in the country's most important farmlands -- from California's Central Valley to the Midwest's corn belt and the Mississippi River valley. If wild bee declines continue, it could hurt U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Delicate and upturned, with curving petals arranged in threes, it looks like the subject of a Monet painting. In fact, it is what scientists believe the bloom of the last common ancestor of all living flowers looked like.

Flowering plants - or angiosperms - are thought to make up about 90% of all living land plants. There are more than 300,000 different species on the planet, from tiny forget-me-nots to glorious magnolias.

But while flowering plants are thought to have emerged between 140m and 250m years ago, there are no fossil flowers more than 130m years old, making it challenging to work out what the first flowers might have looked like.

"We almost know nothing about how flowers evolved since their origin and yet this is extremely important for their ecological role and the role that plants play today on Earth," said Hervé Sauquet, an evolutionary biologist and first author of the new study from Paris-Sud University.

The evolution of flowering plants also foxed Darwin, who described their sudden diversification as an "an abominable mystery".

But now Sauquet and an international team of researchers say they have unravelled an important piece of the puzzle - the structure of the ancestral flower.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team describe how they constructed a family tree of flowering plants based on genetic data from 792 species, and mapped the structural characteristics of the plants' flowers.

They then explored the structure of flowers at each branching point on the family tree and traced back to explore what the blooms of the last common ancestor of all flowering plants would have looked like. The process was repeated using family trees produced using different methods to check whether the results held.

The upshot is a delicate-looking flower with rings of upturned petals. "This is what we infer to be the ancestral flower of all living flowering plants," said Sauquet.

Like most modern flowers, the ancestral flower has both male and female parts. Beverley Glover, professor of plant systematics and evolution at the University of Cambridge and who was not involved in the study, said the finding was exciting, since there is a species alive today that comes from an early branch on the angiosperm family tree, making it an ancient relative to all other flowering plants. However, this species, known as Amborella, has separate male and female flowers.

The study also reveals that the ancestral flower's stamens, petals and sepals - protective petal-like parts - were arranged not in spirals but concentric circles called whorls, with three petals or sepals in each.

That, says Sauquet, overturns a long held idea that such structures in early flowers had a spiral arrangement which gave way to the whorled configuration that is prevalent today. "I think many people are not going to believe us at first," he said.

The model also suggests the ancestral flower would have had three or four such whorls for each organ, although most living flowers today have fewer. "To get to the living flowers it is very simple; just get rid of some whorls," said Sauqet, adding that as only one whorl of sepals for protection and one of petals to attract pollinators is needed for a functional flower, having more might have been a waste of the plant's resources.

Furthermore, he said, a reduction in the number of whorls might have given rise to structural changes that made for more efficient pollination, for example by making it easier for pollinators such as bees to approach.

"Working out why this might have happened will keep us scratching our heads for some time," said Glover.

But not everyone was as enthusiastic about the study. William Crepet, a plant biologist at Cornell University, said that while he had some reservations about the model, the results were interesting and raise questions about the ancestry of the flowering plants.

Glover conceded that the team's findings were still only a set of predictions, but said the study incorporated swaths of data, making them the best yet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mother of all blooms: is this what the last common ancestor of flowers looked like?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Delicate and upturned, with curving petals arranged in threes, it looks like the subject of a Monet painting. In fact, it is what scientists believe the bloom of the last common ancestor of all living flowers looked like. Flowering plants - or angiosperms - are thought to make up about 90% of all living land plants.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The first in-car measurements of exposure to pollutants that cause oxidative stress during rush hour commutes has turned up potentially alarming results. The levels of some forms of harmful particulate matter inside car cabins was found to be twice as high as previously believed.

Most traffic pollution sensors are placed on the ground alongside the road and take continuous samples for a 24-hour period. Exhaust composition, however, changes rapidly enough for drivers to experience different conditions inside their vehicles than these roadside sensors. Long-term sampling also misses nuanced variabilities caused by road congestion and environmental conditions.

To explore what drivers are actually exposed to during rush hour, researchers from Duke University, Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology strapped specially designed sampling devices into the passenger seats of cars during morning rush hour commutes in downtown Atlanta.

The devices detected up to twice as much particulate matter as the roadside sensors. The team also found that the pollution contained twice the amount of chemicals that cause oxidative stress, which is thought to be involved in the development of many diseases including respiratory and heart disease, cancer, and some types of neurodegenerative diseases.

The results were published on June 27 in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

"We found that people are likely getting a double whammy of exposure in terms of health during rush-hour commutes," said Michael Bergin, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke. "If these chemicals are as bad for people as many researchers believe, then commuters should seriously be rethinking their driving habits."

For the experiment, Roby Greenwald, a research assistant professor at Emory at the time, built a sampling device that draws in air at a similar rate to human lungs to provide detectable levels of pollution. The device was then secured to the passenger seats of more than 30 different cars as they completed more than 60 rush hour commutes.

Some drivers took highway routes while others stuck to busy thoroughfares in downtown Atlanta. While other details like speed and having windows rolled down varied, all of the sampling found more risk in air exposure than previous studies conducted with roadside sampling devices.

"There are a lot of reasons an in-car air sample would find higher levels of certain kinds of air pollution," said Heidi Vreeland, a doctoral student in Bergin's lab and first author of the paper. "The chemical composition of exhaust changes very quickly, even in the space of just a few feet. And morning sun heats the roadways, which causes an updraft that brings more pollution higher into the air."

Reactive oxygen species found by this study can cause the body to produce chemicals to deal with the reactive oxygen. Particulate matter causes the same response. In combination, the exposure triggers an overreaction that can be destructive to healthy cells and DNA.

Oxidative stress -- the phenomenon antioxidant foods are supposed to address -- is thought to play a role in a wide range of diseases including Asperger's syndrome, ADHD, cancer, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, atherosclerosis, heart failure and heart attack, sickle cell disease, autism, infection, chronic fatigue syndrome and depression.

"There's still a lot of debate about what types of pollution are cause for the biggest concern and what makes them so dangerous," Bergin said. "But the bottom line is that driving during rush hour is even worse than we thought."

"My two cents is that this is really an urban planning failure," said Greenwald, who is now an assistant professor of environmental health at Georgia State University. "In the case of Atlanta, the poor air quality on the highways is due to the fact that 6 million people live in the metro area, and most of them have little choice but to get into an automobile to go to work or school or the store or wherever. Auto-centric transportation plans do not scale well to cities of this size, and this is one more example of how traffic negatively affects your health."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
chronic illness; diseases and conditions; heart disease; lung disease; air quality; air pollution; pollution; environmental science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rush hour pollution may be more dangerous than you think: In-car air study of commuting cars finds dangers to human health

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Everyone knows that exposure to pollution during rush hour traffic can be hazardous to your health, but it's even worse than previously thought. In-car measurements of pollutants that cause oxidative stress found exposure levels for drivers to be twice as high as previously believed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the UK, Oftec, the Oil Firing Technical Association, is investigating the viability of low carbon biofuels that it hopes will allow for the replacement of kerosene in household heating by 2022 in line with government targets. The green liquid fuel is the second of a two-step process to help transition heating to more sustainable consumption, followed by a boiler replacement program. Off-grid homes are particularly targeted. The association hasn't specified the nature of the fuel it is developing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UK Oil Firing Technical Association looking into biofuel to replace kerosene by 2022

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the UK, Oftec, the Oil Firing Technical Association, is investigating the viability of low carbon biofuels that it hopes will allow for the replacement of kerosene in household heating by 2022 in line with government targets. The green liquid fuel is the second of a two-step process to help transition heating to more sustainable consumption, followed by a boiler replacement program.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Biochar from recycled waste may both enhance crop growth and save health costs by helping clear the air of pollutants, according to Rice University researchers.

Rice researchers in Earth science, economics and environmental engineering have determined that widespread use of biochar in agriculture could reduce health care costs, especially for those who live in urban areas close to farmland.

Biochar is ground charcoal produced from waste wood, manure or leaves. Added to soil, the porous carbon has been shown to boost crop yields, lessen the need for fertilizer and reduce pollutants by storing nitrogen that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere.

The study led by Ghasideh Pourhashem, a postdoctoral fellow at Rice's Baker Institute for Public Policy, appears in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Pourhashem worked with environmental engineering graduate student Quazi Rasool and postdoc Rui Zhang, Rice Earth scientist Caroline Masiello, energy economist Ken Medlock and environmental scientist Daniel Cohan to show that urban dwellers in the American Midwest and Southwest would gain the greatest benefits in air quality and health from greater use of biochar.

They said the U.S. counties that would stand to save the most in health care costs from reduced smog are Will, La Salle and Livingston counties in Illinois; San Joaquin, San Diego, Fresno and Riverside counties in California; Weld County in Colorado; Maricopa County in Arizona; and Fort Bend County in Texas.

"Our model projections show health care cost savings could be on the order of millions of dollars per year for some urban counties next to farmland," Pourhashem said. "These results are now ready to be tested by measuring changes in air pollutants from specific agricultural regions."

Pourhashem noted the key measurements needed are the rate of soil emission of nitric oxide (NO), which is a smog precursor, after biochar is applied to fields. Many studies have already shown that biochar reduces the emissions of a related compound, nitrous oxide, but few have measured NO.

"We know that biochar impacts the soil nitrogen cycle, and that's how it reduces nitrous oxide," said Masiello, a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary science. "It likely reduces NO in the same way. We think the local impact of biochar-driven NO reductions could be very important."

NO contributes to urban smog and acid rain. NO also is produced by cars and power plants, but the Rice study focused on its emission from fertilized soils.

The Rice team used data from three studies of NO emissions from soil in Indonesia and Zambia, Europe and China. The data revealed a wide range of NO emission curtailment -- from 0 percent to 67 percent -- depending on soil type, meteorological conditions and the chemical properties of biochar used.

Using the higher figure in their calculations, they determined that a 67 percent reduction in NO emissions in the United States could reduce annual health impacts of agricultural air pollution by up to $660 million. Savings through the reduction of airborne particulate matter -- to which NO contributes -- could be 10 times larger than those from ozone reduction, they wrote.

"Agriculture rarely gets considered for air pollution control strategies," said Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. "Our work shows that modest changes to farming practices can benefit the air and soil too."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
soil types; agriculture and food; organic; food and agriculture; air quality; environmental science; air pollution; pollution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Biochar could clear the air in more ways than one: Health, economic benefits of capturing agricultural nitric oxide outlined in study

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Biochar could reduce local air pollution from agriculture by reducing emissions of nitric oxide from soil. Researchers argue that a better understanding of nitric oxide response to biochar will save lives and money, especially on farms near urban areas where agricultural emissions contribute to ozone and particulate matter formation.