Tag: Sarah Jose

Kyoto-Bristol-Heidelberg workshop: Novel frontiers in botany

Posted on by janet.crompton

Botany is an ancient field of science and often has an (incorrect!) reputation for being outdated. The recent plant sciences workshop ‘Novel Frontiers in Botany’ shook off that image by bringing together researchers from Kyoto University, Heidelberg University and the University of Bristol to discuss their cutting edge research and form exciting new collaborations.

The workshop, held in March at Kyoto University, was part of an ongoing strategic partnership between the three Universities and their botanic gardens. It built on previous plant science meetings of the partner institutions, which have already led to ongoing international research collaborations. The plant biology research interests of the three universities, whilst overlapping, incorporate different techniques and ideas, so by working together we can synergistically accelerate plant sciences research across the partnership.

Student-led success

One of the highlights of the meeting was its student-led focus. A team of graduate student organisers, led by PhD student Yumiko Sakai, Kyoto University, designed a programme of primarily short (15 minute) talks given by graduate students and post-docs, which was key to ensuring a wide range of subject areas could be included, from molecules to ecosystems, cell biology to phylogenetics.

I think the student-led aspect encouraged more discussion too; instead of a complete story presented by professors, the speakers typically presented unfinished work, which meant attendees of the workshop gave feedback and suggested potential future directions. Graduate students and post-docs perform most of the experiments that underpin academic research, as well as being the future of plant science research, so it was great to learn new techniques and ideas from each other, as well as building our professional networks and the international research profiles of the three universities. Daily poster sessions and a number of excursions certainly helped to get the group communicating, although I’m not sure how much science was discussed at our trip to a local karaoke bar!

Several potential new collaborations have already come out of the workshop, which highlights its success. PhD student organiser Yumiko Sakai summed up the meeting, “Making new friends in our research field was a wonderful experience! Developing this student-led workshop will unite the young people that undertake frontier research”.

This meeting was supported by funding from the Kyoto University’s Supporting Program for Interaction-based Initiative Team Studies (SPIRITS) and from the University of Bristol’s Lady Emily Smyth Agricultural Research Station (LESARS).

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sarah Jose, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

 

Sarah Jose

Troubled waters

Posted on by janet.crompton

Water seems like the simplest of molecules, but its complexities have enabled all life on Earth. Its high specific heat capacity allowed early aquatic life to survive extreme temperature fluctuations, its ability to dissolve a wide range of compounds means it is used as a solvent for cellular compounds, and its powerful cohesive properties allow tree sap and blood to move upwards, against the flow of gravity.

ITV science correspondent Alok Jha discussed the incredible properties of water this week as part of a Cabot Institute and Festival of Ideas talk at The Watershed, Bristol.  This was part of a promotional tour for his new book, The Water Book. He amazed the audience with where our oceans came from (ice-covered rocks pelting the Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment), the strange properties of ice (a bizarre solid that floats on its liquid), and the possibility of water and life on other planets.

It was really the universal importance of water that struck me though. As Alok discussed, water is absolutely essential not just for life, but also to enable every aspect of our lives. Its unique properties make it a critical component of almost everything we make and do. In addition to household uses like showers and toilets, the UK uses a lot of water in manufacturing, agriculture and mining, amongst other things. One report suggested that the average person’s life requires 3400 litres of water a day in the UK, with a total global requirement of four trillion litres a year.

Water is scarce

Around 2.7 billion people are affected by water scarcity worldwide. Rivers are drying up or becoming too polluted to use, climate change is altering patterns of weather around the world and mismanagement of precious sources of fresh water has led to the prediction that by 2025, two thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages.

You only have to read the news to see the warning signs.Agriculture is a huge business in California, using 80% of the freshwater to raise livestock and grow two thirds of the USA’s fruits and nuts. California’s climate makes it ideal for growing a range of crops, assuming they can be irrigated. A recent NY Times article revealed that it takes 15.3 gallons of water to produce just 16 almonds, 1.4 gallons of water for two olives, and a whopping 42.5 gallons of water to grow three mandarin oranges. As Alok commented, the state is literally shipping its freshwater to the rest of the world as food. California is currently in its fourth year of drought, and strict laws banning water wasting have been put into place.

Last week, Californian farmers in the deltas of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers volunteered to use 25% less water, in a bid to avoid even harsher restrictions being imposed by the state government. These reductions came after uproar from Californian citizens, for whom water wastage was already illegal.

Water conflict

 

Image credit: Katie Tegtmeyer. Image used under:CC BY 2.0

In Brazil, São Paulo has been suffering through the worst drought in more than 80 years. The water supply has been restricted to just six hours per day, but millions of citizens have also had several days without running water. Tensions are beginning to rise, with protests, looting and outbreaks of violence in the city of Itu. The Guardian reported one resident as saying: “We spent four days without water, and we saw what it was like. We saw people behave like animals in our building, so imagine 20 million people”.

Imagine billions.

Crown Prince General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi has declared water is now more important for his people than oil. Egypt has vowed to stop Ethiopia’s construction of a dam on the Nile at “any cost”. Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam look poised to suffer from China’s continued damming of the Mekong River. Water is predicted to be used as leverage, or as the target of terrorist attacks in the future. Paul Reig, Word Resources Institute, stated,

“Water is likely to cause the most conflict in areas where new demands for energy and food production will compete with the water required for basic domestic needs of a rapidly growing population”.

What can we do about this? It’s a problem almost as complex as the molecule itself, and I certainly don’t have the knowledge or expertise required to answer. Alok suggested that the value of water could be added into the final price of our products and services, to make people aware of how much they are consuming and to think twice before wasting it.

Whatever happens, we’re going to need massive global action on a range of issues. We need to use less water to grow our food and manufacture the items we use daily, we need to prevent shared resources being selfishly used, and we need better management systems in place to prevent further pollution or loss of freshwater. Only then will we be better prepared to face uncertainties of the future and ensure everyone has enough to drink.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sarah Jose, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.
Sarah Jose

 

George Monbiot: Shouting about socially constructed silences

Posted on by janet.crompton

Cabot Institute director Prof Rich Pancost ended his introduction by telling the audience how George Monbiot made him angry. Not having read much of Monbiot’s work before (except his Rewilding ideas), I assumed Rich was talking about his reporting of the ridiculous state we have made of the planet.

A few minutes into the talk, I wasn’t angry… I was nauseous.

The evil twin of the Climate Change Act

Monbiot began by describing the recently passed Infrastructure Act 2015. As he writes about in his Guardian blog, this Act is stuffed full of unrelated policies, forcing MPs to make a sweeping yes/no vote across a huge variety of issues.

What really got me was his revelation that after the Act had been debated for some time another policy was added; the legal obligation to “maximise the economic recovery of UK petroleum”.

Cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station.
Image credit: Alan Zomerfeld

He called it the “evil twin” of the Climate Change Act, 2008, the result of a big movement involving hundreds of thousands of people working to get the government to set a legal obligation to minimise the UK’s greenhouse emissions. The Climate Change Act was, he said, “democracy at its best”, uniting all the major parties and the general public consensus. Unfortunately, Monbiot said, the Infrastructure Act “smuggled in” a law binding us to do the polar opposite; maximising petroleum production and therefore petroleum burning.

Socially constructed silences

This is just one of the many “socially constructed silences” Monbiot highlighted in his talk. Governments around the world are signed up to significantly reduce their CO2 emissions and attempt to do this by regulating the global population instead of targeting what he described as the source of the problem; in this case, the extraction of fossil fuels by big oil companies with huge political power. Monbiot said that if governments really meant to do anything about climate change they’d tackle CO2 emissions at the fossil fuel production side of the scale, instead of making small wins trying to regulate consumption.

Monbiot put a lot of the blame on the mass media, arguing that they focus on specific issues while completely ignoring others. One stark contrast he made was the issue of benefits. Claimants of benefits like Job Seekers Allowance and Housing Benefit are regularly depicted by the media as those tiny minority of people who abuse the system, while in reality the money they can receive is capped at £26,000. At the same time, the UK government campaigned to prevent a £260,000 cap on the amount of farm subsidies a landowner can receive.

Despite Monbiot’s insistence that this would not affect farmers, I was concerned that this cap could affect friends back in Cornwall who are small dairy farmers. A quick look at their information on FarmSubsidy.org (a site with information on all recipients) shows that they all received around €10,000 – 25,000 in subsidies a year, and so small UK farmers would not be affected. The issue, Monbiot said, was that our government blocked the cap not to benefit farmers but huge landowners, who siphon off millions of pounds/euros each year without sowing a single seed. This isn’t a political blog so I’ll leave it there, but you can read more about it in his own words here.

A call to action

Monbiot’s talk was about what a green government can do if it really tries, but he said that really it’s about what green citizens can do. It seems that the media and the politicians are not willing to open up dialogue around socially constructed silences, so it’s time for grass roots movements to take charge. Monbiot encouraged everyone in the audience to think about what you really want in the world, as unlimited ambitions are the big ideas needed to engage people with politics. We can be the new media, leading from the bottom and speaking boldly about the changes we want to see in the world.
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George also met with the Bristol 2015 campaign to discuss Bristol’s role at the European Green Capital this year. Check out his interview below.

 

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sarah Jose, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

 

Professor Dame Julia Slingo: Modelling climate risk

Posted on by janet.crompton

When Professor Dame Julia Slingo visited the Cabot Institute last week, her message was clear: We need to look at climate risk in real world contexts.

Dame Julia was in the city to receive a Cabot Institute Distinguished Fellowship, which involved giving a talk about her work as a world leading meteorologist and Chief Scientist at the Met Office.

One of the first things she highlighted was that climate change isn’t isolated from other pressures like population growth and limited resources, so we need to understand the risks it poses in a real world context. We need to define the effects it may have on the security of food, water, health and energy around the world, and use the science as a guide to define an evidence-based and cost effective plan of action going forward. This, she said, is “one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century”.

Are we making extreme weather worse?

Today, the huge global population boom is putting an ever increasing strain on limited resources like land and water, which are also at risk from the cyclical climate variations that occur naturally. The big and controversial question is whether climate change caused by human activity has exacerbated the problem.

Dame Julia described an annual report produced by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) that analyses extreme weather events around the world each year, aiming to determine whether the effects were magnified by anthropogenic climate change. As she pointed out, it is important that we recognise that not every bit of bad weather can be attributed to climate change, however the AMS often do find that we have played a role in making the situation worse.

One example she picked out was 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which killed 233 people across eight countries in central and north America. The AMS report found that if sea level had been at the level that it was 50 years ago, the devastating effects of the storm would not have been as bad. It also suggested that continuing on our current path of climate change will mean minor storms will have increasingly severe impacts, leading to Sandy-level hurricanes more frequently in the future.

“We need a more nuanced discussion”

Last year was the warmest on UK record, making a total of 8 out of 10 of our hottest years having occurred since 2002. While of course there is variability in our climate from year to year and even decade to decade, intricate scientific climate models have shown that these record-breaking UK temperatures are made ten times more likely due to anthropogenic climate change.

While we may prefer a hot summer, temperatures don’t change uniformly across the entire planet. Worryingly, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, leading to a huge decrease in the amount of sea ice cover and corresponding sea level rise, which is already threatening communities living on low lying islands. Dame Julia reminded us all that it’s not as simple as trying to prevent a 2°C global temperature increase. The danger that climate change poses depends on who you are and where you live, and we need models to show what the risks will be.

Predicting climate risk

So how can we predict what the effects of climate change will be across the world? It begins with having a sophisticated model of the current global system. The Met Office has led decades of climate modelling, producing incredibly sophisticated simulations of climate systems on both short term (weather) and long term (climate change) scales.

I was absolutely amazed by the intricacy of these models. Millions of lines of computer code recreate the true physical nature of the planet, to the extent where large scale meteorological patterns like El Niño are emergent properties of the model, that is to say that they are a result of the basic physics encoded in the model, rather than being specifically programmed into it.

By altering the model with new data taken from the present extent of climate change or its predicted level in the future, the Met Office can model the global response at incredible resolution, showing the specific risks posed with increasingly detailed clarity (while still incorporating the inherent uncertainties present in all models). These models can then be used to test potential mitigation approaches and of course inform the global communities of the dangers they face.

What can we do?

Dame Julia explained that her role as Chief Scientist is to determine the needs of the people around the world, their risk tolerance and the information they require to make their own decisions. Science, she says, has a lot to offer in enabling governments to make wise, informed and efficient decisions with how best to spend their funds within the wider context of other societal issues, upholding the global securities of food, water, health and energy for the future.

Flooded Pakistan



Image: “There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events” – Professor Dame Julia Slingo


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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sarah Jose, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

 
Sarah Jose

Kyoto and Bristol: Working together on plant science

Posted on by janet.crompton

Last month Bristol’s plant scientists were pleased to welcome visiting researchers from Kyoto University, one of Japan’s leading universities.

The two universities have a strong partnership, which led to large cross-disciplinary symposia in 2013 and 2014. As Dr. Antony Dodd explains, the popularity of the 2014 plant science session led to the emergence of the latest workshop: “The second symposium included a large plant science session that attracted around 50 scientists. Following this, it was decided to expand upon this success and hold a focused three-day plant sciences workshop in the University of Bristol’s new Life Sciences Building”. Bristol’s Dr. Dodd and Professor Simon Hiscock and Kyoto’s Professors Minoru Tamura and Hiroshi Kudoh organised the event, which took place on 23-25 September 2014.

From left, organisers Minoru Tamura, Antony Dodd, Simon Hiscock
and Hiroshi Kudoh

Academics, post-docs and (I was pleased to see) several PhD students from Kyoto’s Department of Botany and Center for Ecological Research made the long trip to Bristol. During the talks and poster presentations given by researchers from both Kyoto and Bristol, I was amazed by how similar our research interests were, for example in the areas of circadian rhythms (nature’s body clock), plant shade avoidance and the environmental regulation of the growing plant.
Botanic garden partnership

Plant science at both universities is enhanced by their botanic gardens. During the workshop, visitors from Kyoto had the opportunity for a guided tour of Bristol’s Botanic Garden by its director, Professor Hiscock. Many of us think of the Botanic Garden as somewhere pleasant to spend an afternoon, but it is an important resource for researchers at Bristol and further afield and as Dr. Dodd explains, “Both Kyoto and Bristol have long-standing interests in plant evolution and taxonomy”. At the end of the visit, Professors Hiscock and Tamura, the Director of the Kyoto Botanic Garden, signed a formal partnership between the two botanic gardens. Dr. Dodd expands on the importance of this agreement: “The new partnership between our two Botanic Gardens is very exciting because it will allow us to share good ideas and good practice in curation, cultivation, science and education”.

Professors Tamura and Hiscock sign the botanic
gardens partnership. Image credit: Botanic Gardens

Benefiting from international collaboration

The main aim of the workshop was to form collaborations between Kyoto and Bristol scientists. “The portfolio of techniques, ideas and approaches to academic research varies considerably between countries. International collaboration forms a brilliant way to accomplish science that would not otherwise be possible, by providing access to new techniques, facilities, and ideas”, says Dr. Dodd. The end of the meeting gave researchers a chance to meet with others with similar interests and discuss new ways to work together. Dr. Dodd and Professor Kudoh also announced that they had just won a funding grant to investigate circadian rhythms in the field in Kyoto, which sounded like a fascinating project. One of the aims of the project is a short-term graduate exchange programme, which will give the students a unique chance to learn new techniques and experience international research, forming new collaborations of their own.
I really enjoyed the workshop. It was fantastic to hear about the research underway in Kyoto University and to discuss my own work with people in related fields. It was also interesting to hear about the similarities and differences in academia half the world away. Thanks to the organisers, and I look forward to hearing about the international collaborations that come out of this event soon!
Image credit: Botanic Garden
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This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Cabot Institute, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol

 
Sarah Jose

Sir David Attenborough declares new Life Sciences Building open

Posted on by janet.crompton

Research came to a standstill on Monday 6 October in Bristol’s new £56 million Life Sciences building as Sir David Attenborough, hero of biologists and nature lovers everywhere, took to the microphone at the opening ceremony.
His speech was, frankly, inspirational. He talked about the problems that humanity has caused, but insisted that they won’t be solved unless we can better understand how the world works. He reminded us that knowledge of life sciences isn’t just vital for our future, but that understanding natural processes enhances them and brings joy to our lives.

 

“There can be no more important area of knowledge for humanity at the moment than the life sciences. It has never been more important, ever, that human beings should understand the workings of the world”.  Sir David Attenborough.

The Life Sciences building is set up to do just that. The meeting areas and large research offices and laboratories mean that scientists are already communicating with colleagues with other research interests far more often than they did in the long corridors of the old Biological Sciences building. I think this will prove essential for developing a deeper understanding of how the world works, which should help us to solve some of the problems we face.

Of course, undergraduate students are an important part of the University and as such their new teaching lab is amazing. It can hold 200 students, either as one large class or broken down into separate areas. Screens connected to cameras allow the demonstration of fiddly techniques or show what sort of result the students can expect to see from their experiments. Also, each group has a tablet computer in their work area to augment their learning. Almost makes me wish I were an undergraduate again, until I remember the exams!

 

As a plant scientist, I can’t talk about the new building without getting excited about the GroDome, the hi-tech glasshouse on the top of the Life Sciences building. It can recreate the perfect conditions for plants or experiments, with automated temperature controls and lighting to give researchers much more control. Each of the six chambers can be regulated separately, and negative pressure systems on the doors to each chamber prevent plant material or diseases from accidentally being spread to other parts of the building.

We were pleased to learn that the building has been rated Excellent in the BREEAM sustainable buildings assessment. Rainwater collected from the roof is used to flush the toilets, heat from the laboratory ventilation systems is reused and the building is air conditioned using chilled beams, with cold air passively sinking from the beam to cool the rooms below.

One of my favourite features of the building is the green wall. Eleven species of plants are included in the four storey high vertical garden, apparently arranged to depict a cell dividing when they flower. The green wall houses bird and bat boxes to promote biodiversity, while also providing an attractive front to the building from St. Michael’s Hill. As Sir David said, it’s important for us to engage with the public, and I think that a building that outwardly tells the world that we are keen to encourage biodiversity is a great starting point.

“It’s places like this which will spread the understanding to the community at large, the world at large, of how important it is for us to do something”.  Sir David Attenborough.

The new facilities of the Life Sciences building are world-class, so I believe we’ll be able to help to fulfill Sir David’s dream of using a deeper understanding of biology to solve the big problems we face today. The building promotes collaboration and public engagement, making it a fantastic place to work and conduct research.

Check out the #BristolLifeSciences TagBoard for many more photos of the opening ceremony and the Life Sciences building.

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This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Cabot Institute, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol

 

 
Sarah Jose

John Cook in Bristol: The consensus gap

Posted on by janet.crompton

As a biologist, the fact that anthropogenic climate change is occurring has been explained to me throughout my education. We are interested in how crops might respond to global warming or what might happen to bees or coral reefs, not the basic question of whether or not it is happening at all.  So that is why I was keen to attend John Cook’s talk at the Cabot Institute and learn a bit more about climate science and how it is perceived both within and outside the climate change science community

John Cook is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia. He runs the popular Skeptical Science blog, with the aim of explaining the scientific consensus on global warming. As he pointed out, his website has received a lot of criticism from people who do not agree that climate change is significantly driven by human effects.

The climate consensus

97% of climate scientists agree that humans are responsible
for climate change. Image credit: Skeptical Science

Several studies, including John’s own (Cook et al., 2013), have shown that 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are significantly contributing to global warming. Doran and Zimmermann (2009) asked earth and climate scientists whether they thought that humans are significantly impacting global climate change and found that 97.4% agreed we are, while Anderegg and colleagues (2010) found that 97-98% of climate scientists agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finding that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for most of the Earth’s global warming.

 

Public perception of consensus

John described how the public does not seem to realise the extent of scientific agreement. When asked to estimate “how many climate experts agree that the global warming we are witnessing is a direct consequence of the burning of fossil fuels by humans”, the average response was 55%, a marked underestimate of the 97% consensus.

John
is working to improve public understanding of
the scientific consensus around global
climate change.
Image credit: Skeptical Science 

John showed a video from comedian John Oliver, who insisted that the only reason there was still an ongoing debate about climate change is because it is always portrayed with an “inherently misleading” 50:50 divide in representation. He goes on to hold a “mathematically fair” debate with three sceptics and 97 climate scientists, which ends with the immortal line, “I can’t hear you over the weight of scientific evidence”.

John Cook tried to bridge the consensus gap with a more balanced approach in his latest project, entitled “97 hours of consensus”. A total of 97 experts were asked to address the topic of humans causing global warming. Cabot’s own director, Professor Rich Pancost, was one of the scientists included.

Cabot Institute Director Professor Rich Pancost was a featured
climate expert in the 97 Hours
of Consensus project.
Image credit: Skeptical Science 

John said that there is a lot of misinformation out there, causing confusion for the public who put their trust in scientific experts. He highlighted one particular website, the Global Warming Petition Project, which as of today [10 February 2014] had been signed by 31,487 American scientists urging their government to reject any limits on greenhouse gas emissions. As John pointed out, only 39 of these people are actually climatologists, therefore 99.9% of them are simply people with science degrees. As I mentioned earlier, I’m a biologist, but that doesn’t give me the expertise needed to decide whether anthropogenic climate change is occurring or what the causes are. I leave that to the experts. Instead, I focus my intellectual energy on ecosystems and how global warming (and other factors) will affect them.

Dr. Tamsin Edwards is a climate scientist who actively engages with people who differ in their opinions on what the science shows. In her blog, she states, “We can’t avoid scientific uncertainty, because we can’t perfectly measure or understand the universe. So we need to be very clear about what we know, what we don’t know, and the surprises we might face”. It can be tempting to avoid discussing difficult topics, but Tamsin inspires me (and hopefully her fellow climate scientists) to explain the science behind the conclusions and hopefully enable the public to make informed decisions too.

Do we need to close the consensus gap?

John said that he fears that if people don’t realise there is 97% scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change, they won’t accept that it is happening and/or care enough to do anything about it. In the video abstract for his 2013 paper, John states that, “This misperception has real world consequences. When people correctly understand that the scientists agree, they are more likely to support policy that mitigates climate change”.

In the UK, several polls over the past five years have looked at what people consider the main cause of global climate change. Where two options (humans versus natural causes) were given, 43-71% of respondents chose humans as the main driver of global warming. These results were diluted when a third option (both human and natural causes) was given, however it is encouraging to note that only around 10-15% blamed natural processes alone.

Carbon
Brief compared UK participants’ opinions on what
causes climate change. Image
credit: Carbon Brief

The weekend following John’s talk was a perfect example of a possible change in public opinion of climate change globally. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities across the world in the People’s Climate March, including a couple thousand locally in Bristol.  This was the largest climate march in history. The biggest turnout was in New York, where over 300,000 people called for action from the UN climate summit, which convened in the city on Tuesday 23 September 2014. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon marched with the crowd, an unusual move highlighting the importance of the event. He said, “Action on climate change is urgent. The more we delay, the more we will pay in lives and in money”.

I think Joel Pett’s cartoon sums up my thoughts pretty well on the subject of climate change…
Joel Pett, USA Today and Kentucky.com 


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This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Cabot Institute, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
Sarah Jose

FIFA World Cup 2014: environmental friend or foe?

Posted on by janet.crompton

“One of the key objectives through the 2014 FIFA World Cup is to use the event as a platform to communicate the importance of the environment and ecology”

While FIFA boast of the most environmentally friendly World Cup ever, with solar-powered stadia and carbon offsetting for every match, critics demand to know why more isn’t being done to reduce the impact of such a huge event, both to Brazil’s native habitats and to the world at large.

Fuleco the endangered armadillo

Almost 28,000 people have signed a petition calling for FIFA to commit to the conservation of the Brazilian three-banded armadillo (Tolypeutes tricinctus), the inspiration for the 2014 World Cup mascot ‘Fuleco’. Conservationists at the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) were initially thrilled that the armadillo, which is classified as “Vulnerable”, would be the centre of the most environmentally friendly tournament so far, attracting money for sustainable development in Brazil.

Sadly Fuleco, whose name is a combination of the Portuguese words futebol (football) and ecologia (ecology), has done little to help his brothers in the wild. So far only one of the tournament sponsors, Continental Tyres, has donated money to protect the armadillo. Nothing but empty words have come from FIFA and its $2 billion World Cup profit.

Striving for sustainability

FIFA have been keen to promote their environmental sustainability strategies in other areas however, which are impressive at first glance. The new and improved stadia are designed to promote air flow and provide shade whilst maximising natural light. Two of the twelve venues are solar-powered, with water conservation and waste reduction features that led to all stadia receiving LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. FIFA also recently pledged to offset 331,000 tonnes of carbon, including 80,000 tonnes from fans who entered a contest to make their travel carbon neutral.

The Brazilian three-banded armadillo is one of two
species that can roll itself into a tight ball. Source: BBC
Unfortunately FIFA’s proposals aren’t nearly enough. According to the ABC, the huge scale of travel and accommodation required for the 3.7 million visitors means the actual impact is likely to be around 1.4 million tonnes of carbon. This was further compounded by the failed rejuvenation of Brazil’s dilapidated public transport systems, which left many fans relying on private taxis to get them to the games. These problems have left many skeptics asking whether FIFA’s proposals were just greenwashing over the bigger issues.

Empty stadia

Among the criticisms is the question of longevity. Once the fans leave, what will become of the facilities left behind? The International Business Times reports that Brazil spent almost $4 billion on its World Cup infrastructure, but many of the stadia are located in cities with lower division football teams. When the World Cup visitors leave, matches played by local teams are likely to draw only a tiny fraction of the number of fans needed to fill the seats.

The Arena da Amazônia in Manaus. Source: Wikimedia 
One of the best (or worst) examples is Manaus, a city of almost two million people located in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Its remote location and poor access roads meant that during the building of the new Arena da Amazônia, materials were transported by ship from Portugal. According to the New York Times, the heat and humidity meant workers spent days connecting each steel joint together.

And after all that effort, only four World cup games are being played there!

The stadium seats 41,000 fans (the majority of whom have to reach the city by boat or plane), which is fantastic for the World Cup but when the games are over, how will the local teams (whose recent games have drawn around 1000 spectators) ever hope to generate the approximately $250,000 a month required for its upkeep? Was it all just a waste of time, money and resources?

Wider impacts

The Brazilian government have justified extravagance like the Manaus stadium by stating that the attraction will bring more tourists to the area. Manaus is often the starting point for visitors drawn to the fantastic Amazon rainforest and the government hopes that their eco-tourism will do a lot for the local community, the economy and the national sustainability targets.

Have FIFA done enough to ensure that the World Cup is eco-friendly? Their carbon offsetting and solar-powered stadia have been somewhat counteracted by the poor public transport, Fuleco’s lack of impact for conserving his native Caatinga forest, and the gigantic venues that may lie empty after the final. I think the organisers have done enough to earn some bragging rights, but in a time where sustainability is so important they could and should have done more.

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This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Cabot Institute, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
Sarah Jose

How much money should we spend to protect ourselves from climate change?

Posted on by janet.crompton

Investing in climate change resilience

 
The February floods left many asking how the damage could have been avoided and why we weren’t better prepared. The government came under attack from all sides; David Cameron said “money is no object” for the relief effort, but angry residents asked why this wasn’t the case when funding was cut to flood protection a few years before.

 

Peter Gist, an economist and Director of Arup Management Consultancy, visited the University of Bristol this week to give a lecture asking why we aren’t more resilient to climate change and what we can do about it.

It is a complicated question. Spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is not without its risks. In April, a report was released showing that the £473 million stash of Tamiflu was essentially useless.  It was stockpiled against the risk of a flu pandemic that never happened.  Was this money wasted?  Only because the problem didn’t arise.  The risk to public health was too high to leave to chance.

The same can be said of resilience to climate change. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Gist nailed it when he said, “the huge costs of not getting it right tend to lead to people acting like rabbits stuck in the headlights”.

Investment returns

Diverting resources to resilience measures is an investment, and Gist explained that this means trying to get the best return for your pound, in this case by limiting losses. It’s extremely difficult to calculate this for climate change, thanks to a lack of information, inherent uncertainties about the frequency and impact of the problem, and a decision process divided between numerous groups with different priorities.

An important economic technique when calculating the cost:benefit of different resilience methods is discounting. A price paid in today’s money cannot be directly compared with the future benefit of the scheme, so the value of the future benefit (prevention of loss) is transformed into today’s prices. An event predicted to occur far in the future will be severely discounted, making it unlikely to seem worth the cost to us today.

The problem with discounting is similar to that of politics; the focus is on short-term pressing concerns not future problems, even if they are predicted to have a huge impact. Gist explained, “in the case of severe weather events, we are almost always bound to discover that we haven’t done enough”.

Uncertainty

 

The Dawlish train line was damaged in winter storms.
Image credit: BBC News

Even if the risks were quantifiable, it would still be difficult to know where to channel resources because of the uncertainty in forecasting models. Would it be better, for example, to improve the resilience of the Dawlish train line to flooding, or to build an entirely new route to avoid the problem entirely? We need to know how often the line is likely to flood in the future, especially with regards to climate change, but Gist noted how difficult it is to confidently link global warming to specific extreme weather predictions.

Improving the decision

Value for money is still the aim of the game. How can we make better decisions on climate change resilience in the future?

Reducing the discount rate for long term effects is vital. Gist agrees with Lord Nicholas Stern that we should hold the impacts on the next generation with greater or equal importance than our own, rather than passing the problems on to them.

To counteract the uncertainty, of course we must keep collecting data and improving the models, but Gist believes we should go further. We need to consider more “no regrets” options, for example trees in a new development provide shade and enhance water run off, as well as making the area a more desirable place to live. He urged, “uncertainty should be an imperative to act, not an excuse not to”.

Consulting the wider public is vital in improving spending decisions. Gist described how difficult it is to factor in non-monetary benefits into the investment planning models. An area of moorland or forest might have incalculable value to people living nearby, but the property developers in the next town might see it as cut price real estate. Only by talking to a large range of people, institutions and regulatory bodies can you understand the different priorities in play and begin to factor in benefits that aren’t measured in pounds and pence. Pragmatically, Gist believes that all politicians should consult the people involved, whether in local councils or at the national level, because everyone takes part of the responsibility for the consequences and by removing the blame it clears the path to making decisions.

Get involved

Limited resources mean that we can’t always have the perfect solution for every problem. Money must be spent in the most beneficial way possible, so we can’t avoid making these investment choices. Gist urged the audience to get involved in decisions, make your voice heard and for the scientists among us to keep up the research that might yield more information. On the other hand, it is vital that we don’t fall victim to “analysis-paralysis”. If you’re waiting for the perfect data set before making a decision, you’ll be waiting a long time.

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This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Cabot Institute, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
Sarah Jose

Your planet needs you!

Posted on by janet.crompton

We are under attack. Our assailants threaten to kill millions of people, destroy our homes and wipe out our crops. Who are these fiends?

Us.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) focusses on how we can stop runaway climate change before it’s too late.  Despite our “best efforts”, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase at an alarming rate. The IPCC estimates that without any additional effort to reduce emissions, we’re looking at a rise in temperature of between 3.7 and 4.8°C by 2100, although variability in the effects of climate change mean the rise could be as high as 7.8°C. Anything over 2°C means we risk runaway climate change with catastrophic effects felt around the world.

A call to action

The UK energy secretary Ed Davey responded to yesterday’s IPCC press conference by stating,

“we need a worldwide, large-scale change to our energy system if we are to limit the effects of climate change”

and called for an international effort to reduce carbon emissions by 2015.

The question is, are politicians willing to put in the effort needed to reduce emissions by 40-70% in the next couple of decades? It’s hard to put a price on the cost of mitigation, but as Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC team, stated “Climate policy is not a free lunch”. His colleague Professor Jim Skea was more optimistic, saying that,

“it is actually affordable to do it and people are not going to have to sacrifice their aspirations about improved standards of living”.

That’s the kind of thing that politicians like to hear.

Change doesn’t happen unless something dramatic happens to force us to act. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events doesn’t seem to be working, so what would? As the IPCC brief states, “Emissions by any agent (e.g. Individual, community, company, country) affect other agents”. We need to invoke some Blitz mentality; we ARE facing a deadly enemy and we ALL need to do our part to stop it.

How to mitigate climate change

The IPCC used 10,000 scientific references to ensure that their models are properly founded in science and all the uncertainty that entails. The IPCC defined mitigation as “a human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases”, and look at a range of scenarios to find the most effective and efficient methods.

The report particularly favoured low carbon energy sources as a major way to reduce emissions, using natural gas as a transition fuel into renewable energies. Encouragingly, renewable energy comprised over half of all new electricity-generating developments globally, with wind, hydro- and solar power leading the way. The costs of renewable energies are falling, making them viable for large scale deployment in many areas, and Professor Skea enthused that

“Renewables are going to be ubiquitous no matter which part of the world you look at”.

Cities will play a big part in reducing CO2 emissions too; a combination of better urban planning to incorporate public transport and compact walkable city centres will be vital. The report also recommended high speed rail networks between cities to reduce short haul air travel and its associated high emissions.

Replanting forests will be an important way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Plants take in CO2 for use in photosynthesis, but can also be used to remove pollutants from the air and soil, as well as preventing soil erosion and providing important habitats for other plants and animals.

It is important for all nations that mitigation does not mean a halt to economic development. Dr. Youba Sokona, IPCC team co-chair, said, “The core task of climate change mitigation is decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from the growth of economics and population”. This will be the main challenge for governments around the world, but the overwhelming message from the IPCC is that mitigation is affordable, whilst doing nothing is not.

Social justice

There has been an undercurrent of unease alongside the IPCC report; the sticky question of who, exactly, is going to pay for this mitigation? A few days before its release, pressure from unspecified developed nations led to the removal of a section in the IPCC report stating that developing countries should receive billions of dollars a year in aid to ensure that they grow their economies in a sustainable way.

The argument centres on whether developing nations should have the right to exploit fossil fuels to expand their economies, as developed countries were able to do. Dr. Chukwumerije Okereke, one of the lead authors of the report, said that this “is holding them down from developing”, believing that “this is reinforcing historical patterns of injustice and domination”. I would argue that with the impacts of climate change predicted to affect those in developing countries most drastically, perhaps we should adopt the mentality that we are all in this together and help each other to overcome the problem.

Act now

The take home message from the IPCC is that if we act now, we can probably prevent hitting the 2°C temperature increase that would have disastrous consequences for us all. The mitigation strategies suggested are affordable and certainly cheaper than dealing with the consequences of climate change. Will politicians and all the rest of us do our parts to drastically reduce carbon emissions? Only time will tell. A lot of hope rests on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is hoped to yield a global agreement on climate to avoid passing the 2°C safety threshold.

Cross your fingers and turn off your lights.

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This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Cabot Institute, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol

 

You can follow Sarah on Twitter @JoseSci 
Sarah Jose
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