Amazon – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Wheel of Time is set thousands of years from now, yet it’s still burdened with today’s climate change

Posted on January 6, 2022March 29, 2023 by janet.crompton

The epic fantasy series has been turned into a tv show on Amazon.
JAN THIJS/AMAZON STUDIOS

Wheel of Time, the 14-book epic fantasy now turned into an Amazon Prime TV series, is a medieval-style adventure set in the Third Age of the World of the Wheel. While not explicit in the storyline, notes from the late author suggest that the First Age was actually modern-day Earth, which ended with a dramatic event (perhaps even climate change). From these notes, we estimate the show takes place around 18,000 years from today.

For climate scientists like us, this poses an interesting question: would today’s climate change still be experienced in the World of the Wheel, even after all those centuries?

About a quarter of carbon dioxide emitted today will remain in the atmosphere even 18,000 years from now. According to biogeochemistry models, carbon dioxide levels could be as high as 1,100 parts per million (ppm) at that point. That’s compared with a present-day value of 415ppm. This very high value assumes that the Paris climate goals will be exceeded and that many natural stores of carbon will also be released into the atmosphere (melting permafrost, for instance).

But the high carbon dioxide concentrations do not necessarily mean a warmer climate. That’s because, over such a long period, slow changes in the orbit and tilt of the planet become more important. This is known as the Milankovitch Cycle and each cycle lasts for around 100,000 years. Given that we are currently at the peak of such a cycle, the planet will naturally cool over the next 50,000 years and this is why scientists were once worried about a new ice age.

But will this be enough to offset the warming from the remaining carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? The image below shows a version of the classic warming stripes, a ubiquitous symbol of the past 150 years of climate change, but instead applied over 1 million years:

Annotated stripes — Warming stripes of Earth (and the World of the Wheel) for a million years. Today’s climate crisis will disrupt the Milankovitch cycle and its effects will last for many thousands of years.
Authors modified from Dan Lunt et al, Author provided

You can clearly see the 100,000 year Milankovitch cycles. Anything red can be considered anthropogenic climate change, and the events of the Wheel of Time are well within this period. Even the descending Milankovitch cycle won’t be enough to counteract the increased warming from carbon dioxide, and so the inhabitants of the World of the Wheel would still experience elevated temperatures from a climate crisis that occurred 18,000 years ago.

Simulating the weather of the World

However, some of the weather changes from the still-elevated temperatures could be offset by other factors. Those 18,000 years aren’t very long from a geological perspective, so in normal circumstances the landmasses would not change significantly. However, in this fantasy future magical channelers “broke” the world at the end of the Second Age, creating several new supercontinents.

To find out how the climate would work in the World of the Wheel, we used an exoplanet model. This complex computer program uses fundamental principles of physics to simulate the weather patterns on the hypothetical future planet, once we had fed in its topography based on hand-drawn maps of the world, and carbon dioxide levels of 830ppm based on one of the high potential future carbon pathways.

According to our model, the World of the Wheel would be warm all over the surface, with temperatures over land never being cold enough for snow apart from on the mountains. No chance of a white Christmas in this future. Here the story and the science diverge, as at times snow is mentioned in the Wheel of Time. The long-term effects of climate change may have surpassed the imagination of its author, the late great Robert Jordan.

An animated map with arrows — A simulation focused on where The Wheel of Time events take place, showing surface winds (white arrows).
climatearchive.org, Author provided

The World of the Wheel would have stronger and wavier high-altitude jet streams than modern-day Earth. This is likely because there are more mountain ranges in the World of the Wheel, which generate atmospheric waves called Rossby waves, causing oscillations in the jet. There is some limited evidence that the jet stream gets wavier with climate change as well, although this is likely to be less important than the mountain ranges. The jet would bring moisture from the western ocean on to land, and deposit it north of the Mountains of Dhoom. Surprising then, that this region (The Great Blight) is so desert-like in the books – perhaps there is some magic at play to explain this.

Our simulation of the World of the Wheel, showing the jet stream (red and yellow arrows), surface winds (white arrows) and cloud cover (white mist). Source: https://climatearchive.org/wot.

Winds would often revolve around two particularly enormous mountains, Dragonmount and Shayol Ghul, before blowing downslope and reaching far across the land masses. The peak of Dragonmount itself is nearly always surrounded by clouds, and this is because the mountain is so large the winds travelling up it force surface moisture to higher altitudes, thus cooling it, and forming clouds.

The fact winds would be so different from modern-day Earth is predominantly caused by topography, not the underlying increased temperatures from climate change. Nevertheless, in the World of the Wheel, it is clear that despite the extremely long time since carbon polluted the atmosphere, the inhabitants are still exposed to warmer than usual temperatures.

Acknowledging just how long the effects of climate change will persist for should be a catalyst for change. Yet, even after accepting the facts, we face psychological barriers to subsequent personal action, not least because comprehending the timescales of climate change requires a considerable degree of abstraction. But, given the known changes in extreme weather from climate change, and given how long these changes will remain, we must ask ourselves: how would the mysterious and powerful Aes Sedai stop the climate crisis?

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This blog is by Caboteers Professor Dann Mitchell, Professor of Climate Science, University of Bristol; Emily Ball, PhD Candidate, Climate Science, University of Bristol; Sebastian Steinig, Research Associate in Paleoclimate Modelling, University of Bristol; and Rebecca Áilish Atkinson, Research Fellow, Cognitive Psychology, University of Sussex.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why I’m mapping the carbon stored in regrowing Amazonian forests

Posted on March 22, 2021April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

As we navigate our way out of the global medical pandemic, many are calling for a “green economic recovery”. This green recovery should be at the forefront of many discussions as world leaders, policy makers, scientists and organisations are preparing for the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) due to take place in November this year in Glasgow, UK. This conference will once again try to unite the world to help tackle the next and even larger global emergency, the Climate Emergency.

In recent years, the conversations around the Climate Emergency have increased dramatically with many individuals, groups, companies and governments aiming to tackle this emergency, in part, through replanting, restoring and reforesting large areas of land.

But what if we let forests regrow back naturally? How much carbon can they absorb from the atmosphere?

As part of my PhD research at the University of Bristol, I have been looking at naturally regrowing forests in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. These forests are known as “Secondary forests” and regrow on land that has previously been deforested and used for agricultural or other purposes and has since been abandoned, allowing the natural vegetation to return.

Figure 1: Secondary Forest in the Tapajos region of the Brazillian Amazon (credit Ricardo Dalagnol)

Secondary Forests in the Brazilian Amazon are expected to play a key role in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. They have a large climate mitigation potential, given their ability to absorb carbon up to 11 times faster than old-growth forests. However, the regrowth of these secondary forests is not uniform across the Amazon and is influenced by regional and local-scale environmental drivers and human disturbances like fires and repeated deforestations.

I worked with numerous scientists from Brazil and the UK to determine the impact of different drivers on the regrowth rates of the secondary forests, using a combination of satellite data. The key datasets we needed were:

Maps of Secondary Forests area and their ages
Maps that tell us about the amount of Aboveground Carbon the forest areas contained
Maps of the spatial patterns of key driving variables like fire extent and rainfall.

What we did

We combined the satellite data maps and overlayed them to extract information on the carbon stored in relation to the forest age to model the regrowth rate with increasing age. We overlayed the information of key environmental drivers and human disturbances to see if and how these factors impact the regrowth rates.

What we found out

Overall, we found that the environmental conditions in Western Amazon enable secondary forests to regrow faster. Here the land received lots of rainfall and does not experience much drought. In the eastern parts of the Amazon, where the climate is drier and experiences more drought, the regrowth rates were up to 60% lower.

Figure 2: Schematic summary of the main results from the paper, highlighting the spatial patterns of regrowth dependent on both climate and human disturbances. The map in the middle shows the regions of secondary forest in the Brazillian Amazon and the four panels correspond to these regions.

In addition to this, we found that the regrowth rates were reduced even further by as much as 80% in eastern regions if the forests were subject to human activities like burning and repeated deforestations before the land was finally abandoned.

What it all means

Our results show the importance of protecting and expanding secondary forest areas to help us meet the Paris Agreement Targets. Our regrowth models can be used to help determine the contribution of current and future regrowing forests in the Brazilian Amazon in a spatial manner.

We found that in 2017, the secondary forests in the Brazilian Amazon stored about 294 Terragrams Carbon aboveground (that excludes carbon stored in roots and soils). However, this number is equivalent to about 0.25% of the carbon that is already stored in Amazon’s old-growth forests. Limiting carbon emissions through deforestation and degradation through burning of old-growth forests is therefore extremely important to help tackle the Climate Emergency.

We calculated that the annual carbon absorbed by the present secondary forest area in the Amazon is enough to contribute to about 5% of Brazil’s pledged contribution to the Paris Agreement by 2030. This number may seem small, but the area covered by the Amazonian secondary forests is currently equivalent to less than 2% of the whole of Brazil. If the area of secondary forest were to be expanded this would bring with it numerous co-benefits such as generating income to landowners and re-establishing ecosystem services.

In December 2020, many countries submitted updates to their so-called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), a country’s individual contributions to the Paris Agreement, this included Brazil. However, Brazil’s updated NDC no longer includes a clear position on reforestation, restoration and eliminating illegal deforestation.

At a time when we have all seen and felt the impacts of a true global emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic, it becomes easier to imagine the potential impacts of climate change if left at the back of politician’s agendas. In the run up to COP26 it is now more important than ever to raise, not lower ambitions as we continue to tackle the global Climate Emergency.

You can read the full paper and download the data here: https://rdcu.be/cg4um.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Viola Heinrich, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.

Viola Heinrich

Journey to the heart of academic research

Posted on March 2, 2021April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

Many believe that keeping feelings, emotions, individualities and identities out of the field, the lab and the experiment is the golden rule that guarantees the validity of scientific work. From this perspective, good science requires neutrality and objectivity.

I’m not so sure, and today I want to share stories about the feelings and emotions I have lived with BIOsmart, a project where British, Colombian, Chilean, Irish and Spanish citizens work together, and tell you about how my emotions have made me reflect on what we may mean by good science.

María Paula delighted with her walking stick, lovingly crafted by one of our drivers.

I’ll start by saying that I am both Colombian and British. I have lived in the UK for 20 years now and when I have brought the UK team to do fieldwork in Colombia, I have felt pride and joy in having them taste our ajiaco, arepas, empanadas and aguardiente, and feast on the bounty of colours, textures and tastes of our fruit markets. I have felt pride too because my fellow Colombians always greet us with our traditional warmth and cheeky humour and this has put a finger on my nostalgia as an immigrant; for this warmth, the easiness with which we smile and become best friends in a matter of minutes, are what I most dearly miss when I am in England. But this nostalgia is mixed with gratitude, for the academic system in the UK has allowed me to return to Colombia and work for people I love. My identity matters and is at the heart of the passion and commitment with which I work.

These feelings are replenished at every farm visit we make. Coffee, freshly squeezed lemonade, home-made juices and yogurts, even hot chocolate made with home-grown cocoa beans are always waiting for us. We reciprocate this generosity and always arrive with fresh bread from the bakeries and meal by meal we learn about farmers’ lives in Caquetá and they learn about our own lives in the UK. This learning happens outside the lab, before we start counting plants and insects and before we begin the formal interview. This learning, and the feelings of respect, solidarity and gratitude that come with it, is inconspicuous in the data that will go into papers and presentations; but without it, our research practice would be less meaningful for all involved. This learning, imbued with emotions, is what gives real meaning to our work and I feel pride in the British team too, for I have seen them care about the farmers and our Colombian partners as much as I do. This shows in the friendships they have built and the character with which they work. They have spent time with farmers’ children, they have kept in touch with farmers, drivers and colleagues. It shows too when we get up at the crack of dawn because we want to be as hard-working as the farmers and the Colombian team of scientists who are already waiting for us: we don’t want to be late and mess up their day. Good science cares, so we are out in the cars by six in the morning. I was moved by how this caring goes both ways. My aging body and my city lifestyle makes it tricky for me to walk in this hilly and boggy terrain. The drivers have become part of the team too and, one of them surprised me one day with a gift. He had chosen a branch from a guava tree, peeled it and polished it and crafted a beautiful walking stick that I have with me.

The farmers always showed us great hospitality, we even enjoyed hot chocolate made with homegrown cacao beans. Photo: María Paula.

But there have been other kinds of emotions too. Too often, farmers apologise for their lack of formal education and tell us how this makes them feel ignorant and inferior. This has made me feel angry, for I know this lack of formal education and this sense of inferiority are the result of a political, economic, social and cultural system, of global dimensions, that neglects and despises peasants. On every occasion I tell farmers that their level of formal education does not reflect their worth and I tell them how they are knowledgeable in ways that humble us. I strive for our conversations to return to them the dignity they are owed. This has made me think about objectivity and neutrality. If being objective is the commitment to understand what the real problem is and good science is about caring, then I don’t want to be neutral. I have wanted to spend more time with them and contribute beyond the knowledge we are all creating.

Enjoying some downtime in Florencia. Teamwork is at the heart of BioSmart.

Sometimes, these contributions have been real and immediate. After we finished the interview and we had become instant friends in the way Colombians do, a farmer told me they had come to the village that day not only to see me, but also to sell some chickens. They would have preferred to keep them for longer because then they would have sold for a better price. But they were short of money to pay the electricity bill and the only option was to sell the chickens. However, what they got was not enough and now, they did not have the chickens or the money to pay the bill. Chickens are income and food and electricity is essential. I gave them some of my own money. Some might think my gesture creates a culture of assistencialism, that what I ought to do is help them be more productive so they can improve their income and not have money problems. Perhaps, more cynical views would even question their story. I didn’t and even though my work is meant to help alleviate poverty in the long term, I felt I wanted to help there and then. Was I right to do so? I feel I was.

María Paula conducting an interview with a farmer in Caquetá, Colombia.

This questioning of neutrality has been fuelled by other emotions too. For example, one morning, I felt deep sorrow and broke into a deluge of tears as I listened to a woman deliver an improvised fifteen-minute speech. Standing tall by the porch of her house, she wanted to know if we were visiting the farm on behalf of the oil and mining companies. She told us how their presence makes her fear for the future of her children and despair for the effects that extractive projects are having on the land she grew up in. She also told us how some project implementers, not all, have discriminated her and refused to sign her up to agri-environmental initiatives because she is a woman. We were all moved by her courage and her eloquence, including her husband and her children. What a brave mother and wife you have, I told them. As we said goodbye, we had a long and tight hug and again, I felt that I need and I want to do more.

Sometimes this feeling comes with urgency. At the time of writing, my heart is worried about a man who is thinking that selling his land, the most pristine of all the farms I visited, is his only option because he is in debt. The only way to earn a living is to have cows but he does not want to have cows: he would much rather look after the forest, but this does not provide him with a living. “Help me find a buyer”, he says, “but someone who cares for the forest just as I have”.

I feel rage for the injustices these people live in. I cannot and I don’t want to be neutral. I feel conflicted and wonder if I need to worry, for I am pondering how to be at once the researcher and the activist, the University employee and the solidarity campaigner. I want to help and, as I ponder how, I feel that what we mean by good science might be better practised from this place where my emotions and my research meet. I want to think my feelings and emotions articulate a goodness where impact is not only what comes at the end of the project, often in the shape of outputs or closure activities, but what touches and nurtures the lives of all involved from the beginning.

I want to think good science involves acknowledging emotions to the point of writing publicly about them. Vulnerability may be challenging, but embracing it enriches you as a person and as researcher: after all, one cannot be extricated from the other.

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This blog is by Cabot Institute member Dr María Paula Escobar-Tello. She is the Principal Investigator on the BioSmart project and leads the cultural geographical components. This blog has been reposted with kind permission from María Paula. View the original blog. View the blog in Spanish.

Visit the BioSmartAmazonia website https://www.biosmartamazonia.org/

María Paula Escobar-Tello

In the Amazon, forest degradation is outpacing full deforestation

Posted on September 15, 2020March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased abruptly in the past two years, after having been on a downward trajectory for more than a decade. With the country’s president Jair Bolsonaro notoriously enthusiastic about expanding into the rainforest, new deforestation data regularly makes global headlines.

But what fewer people realise is that even forests that have not been cleared, or fully “deforested”, are rarely untouched. Indeed, just 20% of the world’s tropical forests are classified as intact. The rest have been impacted by logging, mining, fires, or by the expansion of roads or other human activities. And all this can happen undetected by the satellites that monitor deforestation.

These forests are known as “degraded”, and they make up an increasingly large fraction of the world’s remaining forest landscapes. Degradation is a major environmental and societal challenge. Disturbances associated with logging, fire and habitat fragmentation are a significant source of CO₂ emissions and can flip forests from carbon sinks to sources, where the carbon emitted when trees burn or decompose outweighs the carbon taken from the atmosphere as they grow.

Forest degradation is also a major threat to biodiversity and has been shown to increase the risk of transmission of emerging infectious diseases. And yet despite all of this, we continue to lack appropriate tools to monitor forest degradation at the required scale.

A man chainsaws a tree trunk in Amazon rainforest

Degraded – but not deforested.
CIFOR / flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The main reason forest degradation is difficult to monitor is that it’s hard to see from space. The launch of Nasa’s Landsat programme in the 1970s revealed – perhaps for the first time – the true extent of the impact that humans have had on the world’s forests. Today, satellites allow us to track deforestation fronts in real time anywhere in the world. But while it’s easy enough to spot where forests are being cleared and converted to farms or plantations, capturing forest degradation is not as simple. A degraded forest is still a forest, as by definition it retains at least part of its canopy. So, while old-growth and logged forests may look very different on the ground, seen from above they can be hard to tell apart in a sea of green.

Degradation detectives

New research published in the journal Science by a team of Brazilian and US researchers led by Eraldo Matricardi has taken an important step towards tackling this challenge. By combining more than 20 years of satellite data with extensive field observations, they trained a computer algorithm to map changes in forest degradation through time across the entire Brazilian Amazon. Their work reveals that 337,427 km² of forest were degraded across the Brazilian Amazon between 1992 and 2014, an area larger than neighbouring Ecuador. During this same period, degradation actually outpaced deforestation, which contributed to a loss of a further 308,311 km² of forest.

The researchers went a step further and used the data to tease apart the relative contribution of different drivers of forest degradation, including logging, fire and forest fragmentation. What these maps reveal is that while overall rates of degradation across the Brazilian Amazon have declined since the 1990s – in line with decreases in deforestation and associated habitat fragmentation – rates of selective logging and forest fires have almost doubled. In particular, in the past 15 years logging has expanded west into a new frontier that up until recently was considered too remote to be at risk.

Map of deforestation and degradation in the Brazilian Amazon, 1992-2014.

The Brazilian Amazon, shaded in grey, covers an area larger than the European Union.
Matricardi et al

By putting forest degradation on the map, Matricardi and colleagues have not only revealed the true extent of the problem, but have also generated the baseline data needed to guide action. Restoring degraded forests is central to several ambitious international efforts to curb climate change and biodiversity loss, such as the UN scheme to pay developing countries to keep their forests intact. If allowed to recover, degraded forests, particularly those in the tropics, have the potential to sequester and store large amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere – even more so than their intact counterparts.

Simply allowing forests to naturally regenerate can be a very effective strategy, as biomass stocks often recover within decades. In other cases, active restoration may be a preferable option to speed up recovery. Another recent study, also published in the journal Science, showed how tree planting and cutting back lianas (large woody vines common in the tropics) can increase biomass recovery rates by as much as 50% in south-east Asian rainforests. But active restoration comes at a cost, which in many cases exceeds the prices that are paid to offset CO₂ emission on the voluntary carbon market. If we are to successfully implement ecosystem restoration on a global scale, governments, companies and even individuals need to think carefully about how they value nature.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Tommaso Jucker, Research Fellow and Lecturer, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tommaso Jucker