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The Nexus of Water, Energy and Climate (Video)
Heather Cooley, The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco via FORA.tv
We hear a great deal about the world’s challenges with energy, climate change and the shortage of good quality fresh water. Come learn about the important interconnections among these subjects and how by solving any of these problems, we can help solve the others as well – The Commonwealth Club of California.
(15 August 2007)
Interesting talk about the connections between water and energy. Although Cooley centers her talk on California, the general ideas probably apply to many locations.
If you click on “Open Tools” at the bottom left of the viewer, you can move around to different segments of the talk. You can also access a transcript in this way. The talk itself begins at about 4:30 minutes into the recording.
Heather Cooley is a Senior Research Associate with the Pacific Institute’s Water and Sustainability Program.
The Pacific Institute is “an independent, nonpartisan think-tank studying issues at the intersection of development, environment, and security.”
Dirt Isn’t So Cheap After All
Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service via Common Dreams
Soil erosion is the “silent global crisis” that is undermining food production and water availability, as well as being responsible for 30 percent of the greenhouse gases driving climate change.
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BROOKLIN, Canada – “We are overlooking soil as the foundation of all life on Earth,” said Andres Arnalds, assistant director of the Icelandic Soil Conservation Service.
“Soil and vegetation is being lost at an alarming rate around the globe, which in turn has devastating effects on food production and accelerates climate change,” Arnalds told IPS from Selfoss, Iceland, host city of the International Forum on Soils, Society and Climate Change which starts Friday.0831 05
Along with many other international partner institutions, Iceland is marking the centenary of its Soil Conservation Service by convening this forum of experts.
Every year, some 100,000 square kilometres of land loses its vegetation and becomes degraded or turns into desert.
“Land degradation and desertification may be regarded as the silent crisis of the world, a genuine threat to the future of humankind,” Arnalds said.
Food production has kept pace with population growth by increasing 50 percent between 1980 and 2000. But it is an open question whether there will be enough food in 2050 with an estimated three billion more mouths to feed.
That means more food has to be produced within the next 50 years than during the last 10,000 years combined he noted.
“Global food production per hectare is already declining,” said Zafar Adeel, director of the United Nations University’s Canadian-based International Network on Water, Environment and Health.
There are a number of reasons for this decline, including the fact that soil degradation is producing growing shortages of water. Soil and vegetation act as a sponge that holds and gradually releases water, Adeel explained.
The newest challenge to food production and conserving land and water resources is the boom in vegetable-based biofuels, says Andrew Campbell, Australia’s first National Landcare Facilitator.
“Soils are under greater pressure than ever before,” Campbell said in an interview. “Governments around the world are subsidising crops to produce biofuels.”
(31 August 2007)
Planetary Thinking
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
No corner of the planet is so remote that it hasn’t felt humanity’s footprint. We have become a force of nature: influencing everything, accelerating destruction. And whether we admit it or not, we’re increasingly in the position of having to choose the fate of much (perhaps all) of life on Earth.
One of the most stunning scientific measurements of this fact is net primary productivity. Worldchanger David Zaks recently shared with me some of the papers arising from the research he and his colleagues have been doing on net primary productivity, and the results they came to are pretty awe-inspiring.
In short and simple terms, their work confirms that humans are now using a quarter of all of the Earth’s productivity (and in the process undermining the health of the rest). More than half of this impact is from direct harvest — reaping crops, catching fish, cutting trees. Forty percent is the result of land use changes. The remainder is the result of fires. As David himself puts it, “The importance of these studies lies in reframing previously benign numbers into a story that more effectively portrays our collective actions on the planet.”
(31 August 2007)
Original has links to the three original papers (as PDFs).
