CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Mine is 5.68 – what is yours?

I’m talking about my carbon footprint, of course, which I just had calculated for me by British Gas, and I thought I’d share it with you. It is actually the carbon footprint for my household, which I found out is a bit above the British household average (5.1 tonnes per year). I also found out I could save around £74 and 374.5 kg of CO2 per year by turning my heating down by 1degree C.  If you want to learn more about the contents of my report and how to get your own, please read on. 

How Green are Biofuels?

Biofuels are often touted as a way of efficiently generating power with lower effects on the environment than existing fuel production methods. But how effective are they if you weigh everything up? A paper by Lucas Reijnders in CAB Reviews looks at life-cycle assessments of biofuels and finds that they are much less efficient than solar cells in energy conversion, and some perform worse that conventional fossil fuels in emission of chemicals contributing to acidification and eutrophication. Some even appear set to worsen climate change.

Life-cycle assessments are very complex to do, because it is hard to work out what effects to rule in or out and on what basis to make comparisons. Factors such as what the land was previously used for need to be taken into account. Thus fuel from sugarcane grown on cleared Cerrado savannah has a lower net effect on greenhouse gas emissions than conventional diesel, but if a rainforest is being cleared, the biofuel does worse than diesel. Biofuels look much better if grown on land that isn’t currently absorbing much CO₂. Reijnders, from the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam, points out that incentives may be needed to encourage the use of abandoned soils rather than clearing rainforest, as the rainforest clearance gives producers income from the sale of timber.

The input of fuel into producing biofuel needs to be estimated. Reijnders concludes that total fossil-fuel demand is relatively high for ethanol produced from European grain or US maize, and relatively low for palm oil or ethanol from sugarcane. However, palm oil tends to do worse than fossil fuel in greenhouse gas emissions.

“The ‘seed-to-wheel’ emissions of greenhouse gases associated with current transport biofuels are often higher than the corresponding life-cycle emissions of conventional fossil fuels”, says Reijnders. “Palm oil and ethanol from maize and wheat may contribute to energy security, but are counterproductive in limiting climate change,” he writes.

'Transport biofuels – a life-cycle assessment approach' by Lucas Reijnders, CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources, 2008, 3, No. 071

Only 2 Days Left until World Rabies Day 2008!

Organisations around the world will be aiming to raise awareness and understanding about the importance of rabies prevention on the second annual World Rabies Day on 28 September.

The Alliance for Rabies Control (ARC) is leading World Rabies Day (WRD) initiative, which is sponsored by numerous human and animal health organizations worldwide too. Its aim is to raise awareness and understanding about the importance of rabies prevention, which kills 55,000 people each year, half of which are children under the age of 15 and mostly in Africa and Asia. Its principle objectives are also to enhance education and resources in order to prevent and stop the disease by combating it in animals. Experience has shown that rabies can be successfully eradicated if control programmes are well defined, resourced and implemented, but around 8000 cases are still observed in Europe alone every year, of which about 60% in wildlife and 40% in domestic animals and also some human cases.

During the successful inaugural World Rabies Day 2007, over seventy countries participated through activities such as prevention messages for the public, dog vaccination campaigns, lectures and educational seminars, press conferences, museum and zoo exhibits, parades, festivals, marches, runs or dog walks. This year’s campaign shows promise for participation of even greater number of countries and organizations across the globe.

Hospital Food Anyone?

There's a new virus spreading around geriatric wards of the UK's National Health Service and it's got hospital managers quaking in their pinstriped suits. Even more worrying than MRSA, this infectious little viral is set to infect the elderly, making them - and their carers - proactive.

Climate Change – What Will Happen to Weeds and Diseases?

Much attention has focused on what plants will be able to grow where as the effects of climate change are felt. A key factor that plays into that analysis is what effect climate change will have on diseases and weeds.Two new papers in CAB Reviews look at those two elements and show that that the picture is a complex and sometimes surprising one.

Sukumar Chakraborty (from CSIRO Plant Industry) and co-authors note that modelling experiments suggest that the range of key pathogenic fungi may shift significantly towards the poles as a result of global warming. The impacts of raised CO₂ and temperature together are more difficult to estimate, as raised CO₂ may increase the vigour of some trees and crops. From certain studies it seems that C₃ plants, such as cereals, may suffer from increased numbers of pathogens with increased CO₂, while C₄ plants (most other crops and trees) may not. Chakraborty and colleagues write that minor changes in climate can tip the balance in favour of an exotic species, and the same may be true of disease outbreaks. Import risk analysis will need to take into account changes in the risks of establishment of pests and pathogens as the climate alters.

Examining the 12 most serious weeds, Xianshong Wang (from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) and Jacqueline Mohan (from the University of Georgia) suggest the competitiveness of weeds at higher temperatures and CO₂ levels may be affected greatly by water availability. Most of the weeds will be expected to be boosted by rising temperatures. Field bindweed may become a more serious weed in drier regions, while it may be outcompeted in well-watered soils. Purple nutsedge may suffer because of expected reductions in moisture and rising soil nitrogen.

Wang and Mohan point out that the move to biofuels may exacerbate some of the projected weed problems: “Altered land use and the unforeseen consequences of energy plants may have a greater impact on the seriousness and injuriousness of weeds and weed-crop interactions than the effects of other global environmental changes, including rising CO₂, global warming and more frequent and severe droughts.”

Effects of global environmental changes on weeds by Xianzhong Wang, J.E .Mohan
CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources, 2008, 3, No. 067, 20 pp.

Impacts of global change on diseases of agricultural crops and forest trees by S. Chakraborty, J .Luck, G. Hollaway, A. Freeman, R. Norton, K.A. Garrett, K. Percy, A. Hopkins, C. Davis, D.F. Karnosky
CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources, 2008, 3, No. 054, 15 pp.

World Tourism Day focuses on climate change

For those of us living in the UK, there hasn't been much sign of global warming this year as we head into the autumn seemingly without ever having had a summer. Nevertheless, the overwhelming consensus is that climate change is a reality, and that we will all have to adapt accordingly. With tourism one of the industries most likely to be affected as the climate changes (positively in some destinations, negatively in many others), and air travel an activity much criticised by the environmental lobby, 'Tourism responding to the challenge of climate change' has been made the theme of this years World Tourism Day. (It's on Saturday 27 September, by the way).

New Video: Water Wars or Water Woes?

In the new video ‘Water Wars or Water Woes? Water Management as Conflict Management' Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) Director Geoff Dabelko explains that although newspapers and politicians constantly warn of impending “water wars,” water rarely leads to interstate violence. By focusing on “water wars,” which evidence shows are extremely rare, we “are missing a lot of what is important around conflict management around water,” argues Dabelko.

Invaders – the good, the bad and the ugly…

Not all invasive species are bad, and in the case of plants it seems that they usually increase biodiversity rather than making native plants extinct. A recent article in PNAS by Dov Sax, an ecologist at Brown University and Steven Gaines, a marine biologist at the University of California, investigates how species invasions and extinction influence the future of biodiversity on islands. They point out that despite the introduction of 22,000 non-native plants to New Zealand and the naturalisation of 2,436 (NZPCN) of these, only 3 of the 2,357 native plants are now extinct. Vascular plants, as well as mammals and freshwater fish have seen dramatic increases in richness across both continental and oceanic islands, with a doubling in plant richness on oceanic islands over the last 2 centuries – many exotics have become naturalised, whereas few native species have gone extinct. However, the story is very different for birds which usually fare worst during species invasions, e.g. 38 of 91 native land bird species in New Zealand have become extinct. For native birds, the number of extinctions is high worldwide and is largely matched by the number of exotic birds that have become naturalised.

Melamine in the Centre of Food Safety Scandal in China

Two infants have already died after they were fed milk formula laced with melamine and doctors are fighting to save the lives of over 1250 babies who have fallen ill with kidney stones.

Live Webcast of a meeting of the board that finances projects on cleaning the environment in developing countries

The Live Webcast of the 3rd Meeting of the Adaptation Fund Board can be seen from today (15^th September) until Thursday (18^th September). The Adaptation Fund (AF) was established by the parties to the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to finance concrete adaptation projects and programmes in developing countries who are part of the Kyoto Protocol.

The Fund will be financed with 2% of the Certified Emission Reduction (CERs) issued for projects of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and with funds from other sources.

The AF board is meeting for the third time from September 15-18, 2008 in Bonn, Germany. All sessions are being webcasted live starting today, Monday September 15, at 9 AM (GMT+1).

To watch the session and read the documents visit www.adaptation-fund.org