Ecosystems and Poverty

If it isn’t about climate change, it seems it is about biofuels.  One of the questions about biofuels, aside from the obvious environmental concerns, is the extent to which it can provide benefits to the poor.  Up till now the biofuels market seems to be cornered by large-scale agriculture, with a few exceptions.  A paper by John Mathews from Macquarie University calls for a biofuels pact to ensure that biofuels are not produced on newly cleared land, but also to ensure that developing nations can compete in global markets to achieve triple-bottom line outcomes, contributing to environmental sustainability and poverty alleviation.  Sounds like perfect sense to me.  But then the whole issue of capping carbon emissions 10 years ago also made perfect sense and look at the progress one decade later.  Call me a cynic, but…

And while we are on the subject of biofuels in developing nations, the oil palm industry seems to be cleaning up its act.  Or at least that is what the literature shows.  Edgar Turner and colleagues from Cambridge reviewed 30 years of oil palm research, finding that there has been a steady increase in research on environmental issues, and massive increase in biofuel-related research (what a surprise!), but almost nothing on biodiversity.  They call for more emphasis on biodiversity issues in and around oil palm fields.

And finally, we blogged about Virgin’s plan to fly a 747 across the English Channel on pure biofuels.  Well, they’ve done it, and there are mixed reactions out there.  But they certainly achieved something with the stunt - CABI Blog used it as an excuse to contribute quite a long article on the biofuel debate.  Well worth reading.

Citations:

Turner EC, Snaddon JL, Fayle TM, Foster WA (2008) Oil Palm Research in Context: Identifying the Need for Biodiversity Assessment. PLoS One 3(2): e1572. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001572 http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001572

Mathews, J.A., 2008, Biofuels, climate change and industrial development: can the tropical South build 2000 biorefineries in the next decade? Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining, Early View, doi:10.1002/bbb.63.

A few stories have come up over the past week related to health and ecosystem services.  First, a studyblows common-knowledge about the occurrence of American Cutanous Leishmaniasis (ACL) in forest environments out of the water.  The authors examined patterns of the disease throughout Costa Rica, and related disease prevalence with socio-economic and biophysical factors.  Surprisingly, their index of social marginalisation based on data such as income, literacy, level of education, distance to health center, correlated most with diseases prevalence.  And the word on the street that less forest means less disease?  Blown out the water - the relationship didn’t seem to exist, although a complex interaction with ENSO was shown to impact, whereby highly deforested areas suffered more from the effect of El Niño and in turn had higher levels of disease prevalence.

A second story did a fairly impressive mapping of emerging infectious diseases across the globe.  They conclude greater prevalence in wildlife areas, though Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog overlaid the data with livestock atlases and found little agreement.  This is definitely a paper that merits further analysis to further understand the drivers, but the fact that the map now exists is very encouraging.

And finally, I’m sure they are talking about all these issues in Ireland this week, where the 2nd International Conference on Health and Biodiversity is going on.  Thanks Luigi. 

Citations:

Chaves LF, Cohen JM, Pascual M, Wilson ML (2008) Social Exclusion Modifies Climate and Deforestation Impacts on a Vector-Borne Disease. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 2(2): e176. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000176.

Kate E. Jones, Nikkita G. Patel, Marc A. Levy, Adam Storeygard, Deborah Balk, John L. Gittleman & Peter Daszak. Nature 451, 990-993 (21 February 2008); doi:10.1038/nature06536.

Navin Ramunkutty, probably our most blogged-about personality, has just come out with another useful dataset on cropped land across the entire globe.  The methodology is outlined in a paper in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, and the data (10km resolution unfortunately) is also made available online.  Global estimates are that 12% of ice-free land is cropland, and a further 22% is being used as pastures.

We really are struggling to find a decent measure of poverty for our study.  It’s an age old problem.  The World Bank, IMF, United Nations and other such organisations base many of their country indicators on factors such as infrastructure, access to education, health and measures of income.  Government departments can fairly easily provide these numbers, and so we have loads of info out there at the national and sub-national scale on these types of capital.  However, we’ve discovered a strong allergy to such indicators in our region, and if we really want to understand how ecosystem services are related to poverty and poverty alleviation, we’ve been encouraged to take on a definition of poverty that embraces calidad de vida (quality of life).  Nice in theory, but in practice pretty difficult to quantify.

But there is at least a glimmer of hope thanks to a new paper I stumbled upon that develops a worldwide life satisfaction index.  The authors generate a score for each country of the world based on actual life satisfaction surveys, or in their absence and of most interest to us, regression techniques for approximating life satisfaction from human, natural and socio-political capital indicators (of the kind that are widely available).  This might just be a way of moving towards quality of life indicators without having to do endless surveys in the region.  In the modelled life satisfaction, Nordic countries came out best, and eastern European countries like Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus came out worst, alongside Zimbabwe for fairly obvious reasons.  For our region, we had Brazil (7.09), Colombia (6.80), Venezuela (6.76), Ecuador (6.75), Bolivia (6.40) and Peru (6.31).  The trick now is reducing the scale to the sub-national to really get to grips with how the state of ecosystem services relate to life satisfaction.

On a side note, quite astonishing to me was the fact that there have been 4,300 articles published that discuss “life satisfaction” or “subjective well-being”, and many of these are in the fantastically titled Journal of Happiness Studies.  No sign of a Journal of Sadness studies fortunately.

And finally, it is worth a mention on how they actually calculate life satisfaction.  Well, there is a reason that it is also known as subjective well-being.  In a random survey, people are asked:

In general, would you say that you are satisfied with your life?

Given that, I cannot for the life of me understand how the Brits got a score of 7.40.  They must have held the survey down the pub at 10pm.

A few smart people hit the headlineslast week with the news that biofuels are bad for global warming - somewhat of a bombshell.  They make the fairly obvious (but incredibly important) point that the environmental benefits of using a biofuel over an oil-based fuel depends entirely on the land-use in the field prior to the planting of oil palm, sugar or corn.  So it is official - planting sugar cane in the Amazon for the sake of the planet is not a sound idea.  So please don’t do it. 

Check out the Nature Conservancy report here, but if you are lazy, you get the policy brief from here.  A few select quotes to spoil your Monday morning:

Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’ by releasing 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the fossil fuels they replace.

Soybean biodiesel produced on converted Amazonian rainforest would incur a biofuel carbon debt that would require approximately 320 years to repay.

Sugarcane ethanol produced on Cerrado sensu stricto, which is the wetter and more productive end of this woodland-savanna biome, would incur a biofuel carbon debt that would require approximately 17 years to repay.

The analyses suggests that biofuels produced on converted lands could, for long periods of time, be greater net emitters of greenhouse gasses than the fossil fuels they typically displace.