USA
Other
Watersheds
Lost Up to 22% of Their Forests in 14 Years. Here’s How it Affects Your Water
Supply High erosion deteriorates water quality and reduces reservoir
capacity, increasing the cost of water treatment and the risk of contamination.
High erosion risk is usually linked to erodible soil, intense rainfall, steep
topography and conversion of forest and other natural lands to pasture,
cropland and more.
How
fast will we need to adapt to climate change? Using sea-level rise as a
case study, researchers at Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology have
developed a quantitative model that considers different rates of sea-level
rise, in addition to economic factors, and shows how consideration of rates of
change affect optimal adaptation strategies. If the sea level will rise slowly,
it could still make sense to build near the shoreline, but if the sea level is
going to rise quickly, then a buffer zone along the shoreline might make more
sense. "It is a very different thing to adapt to a sea level that is three
feet higher if you think that sea level will rise no farther after that, than
to adapt to a sea-level rise that is three feet higher with the expectation
that the seas will keep rising," remarked Soheil Shayegh, a former
Carnegie postdoc and lead author of the study.
Reservoirs
play substantial role in global warming The world's reservoirs are an
underappreciated source of greenhouse gases, producing the equivalent of
roughly 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide a year, or 1.3 percent of all greenhouse
gases produced by humans.
Evaluating
forecasting models for predicting rainfall from tropical cyclones more than
50 percent of the deaths associated with hurricanes from 1970 to 2004 were
caused by fresh water flooding. And from 1981 to 2011, hurricane damage
accounted for almost half -- $417.9 billion -- of the total monetary damage
from all weather and climate disasters during that same time period (adjusted
for inflation to 2011 dollars). Current models can forecast both where and how
much rainfall a tropical cyclone will produce up to two days in advance.
However, the forecast's accuracy decreased significantly when the prediction
window increased to five days.
Hurricane
Matthew is just the latest unnatural disaster to strike Haiti At least
1,000 people were killed when Hurricane Matthew battered the Tiburon peninsula
in Haiti last week, destroying houses and displacing tens of thousands. Other
experts describe disasters as “manifestations of unresolved development
problems”. Therefore, disasters are not a natural phenomenon. Humans play a
central role. As a result, a natural hazard such as Hurricane Matthew impacts
each country in its path differently. We know that development, imposed by
external forces that exploit the local labour force is not in the interest of
the marginalised. A failure to respect human rights, local needs, the
environment and human-environment relations simply creates disaster risk.
Scientists
find link between tropical storms and decline of river deltas Lead
researcher Professor Stephen Darby of the University of Southampton said: “Our
study is the first to show the significant role tropical storms play in
delivering sediment to large river deltas.
We show that although human impacts affect the amount of sediment in a
river – cyclonic activity is also a very important contributing factor. These
results are very significant because the Mekong’s sediment load is already
declining as a result of upstream damming and other human impacts such as sand
mining. Understanding the role played by changes in tropical cyclone
climatology gives us a broader knowledge of the threats facing this delta and
others like it around the world.”
Receding
glaciers in Bolivia leave communities at risk A new study published in The
Cryosphere, an European Geosciences Union journal, has found that Bolivian
glaciers shrunk by 43% between 1986 and 2014, and will continue to diminish if
temperatures in the region continue to increase. "On top of that, glacier
recession is leaving lakes that could burst and wash away villages or
infrastructure downstream," says lead-author Simon Cook, a lecturer at the
Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK.
