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The rebound effect is overplayed
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Increasing energy efficiency brings emissions savings. Claims that it backfires are a distraction, say Kenneth Gillingham and colleagues.
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The rebound effect is overplayed
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Increasing energy efficiency brings emissions savings. Claims that it backfires are a distraction, say Kenneth Gillingham and colleagues.
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The Relative Impact of Harvest and Fire upon Landscape-Level Dynamics of Older Forests: Lessons from the Northwest Forest Plan
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Interest in preserving older forests at the landscape level has increased in many regions, including the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The North- west Forest Plan (NWFP) of 1994 initiated a sig- nificant reduction in the harvesting of older forests on federal land. We used historical satellite imagery to assess the effect of this reduction in relation to: past harvest rates, management of non-federal forests, and the growing role of fire. Harvest rates in non-federal large-diameter forests (LDF) either decreased or remained stable at relatively high rates following the NWFP, meaning that harvest reductions on federal forests, which cover half of the region, resulted in a significant regional drop in the loss of LDF to harvest. However, increased losses of LDF to fire outweighed reductions in LDF harvest across large areas of the region. Elevated fire levels in the western United States have been correlated to changing climatic conditions, and if recent fire patterns persist, preservation of older forests in dry ecosystems will depend upon practical and coordi- nated fire management across the landscape.
Key words: disturbance; fire; landsat; forest management; Northwest Forest Plan; old growth.
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The Rescaling of Global Environmental Politics
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Key Words
governance, international, linked issues, networks, scale
Abstract
In the past half-century, the practice and study of global environmental politics and governance have been dramatically rescaled. They have be- come increasingly complex and interconnected with respect to the level (between local and global) at which they take place, the range of actors engaged in them, and the linkages between them and nominally nonen- vironmental issues. Global environmental politics and governance have been rescaled vertically down toward provincial and municipal gov- ernments and up toward supranational regimes. They have also been rescaled horizontally across regional and sectoral organizations and net- works and across new issues, such as development, security, and trade among others. This rescaling reflects shifts in the magnitude, complexity, and interconnectedness of the global environmental problems humans face as well as epistemological shifts in how humans understand and respond to these problems, and rescaling has implications for both the practice and study of global environmental politics.
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The River Discontinuum: Applying Beaver Modifications to Baseline Conditions for Restoration of Forested Headwaters
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Billions of dollars are being spent in the United States to restore rivers to a desired, yet often unknown, reference condition. In lieu of a known reference, practitioners typically assume the paradigm of a connected watercourse. Geological and ecological processes, however, create patchy and discontinuous fluvial systems. One of these processes, dam building by North American beavers (Castor canadensis), generated discontinuities throughout precolonial river systems of northern North America. Under modern conditions, beaver dams create dynamic sequences of ponds and wet meadows among free-flowing segments. One beaver impoundment alone can exceed 1000 meters along the river, flood the valley laterally, and fundamentally alter biogeochemical cycles and ecological structures. In this article, we use hierarchical patch dynamics to investigate beaver-mediated discontinuity across spatial and temporal scales. We then use this conceptual model to generate testable hypotheses addressing channel geomorphology, natural flow regime, water quality, and biota, given the importance of these factors in river restoration.
Keywords: fluvial geomorphology, hierarchical patch dynamics, stream ecology, river continuum concept, river restoration
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The Role of Livestock Production in Carbon and Nitrogen Cycles
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This review looks at the role of the livestock sector in carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles from a global perspective and considers impacts at the various stages of the commodity chain. With regard to livestock, N and C cycles are closely connected to livestock’s role in land use and land-use change. Livestock’s land use includes grazing land and cropland dedicated to the production of feed crops and fodder. Considering emissions along the entire commodity chain, livestock currently contribute about 18% to the global warming effect. Live- stock contribute about 9% of total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but 37% of methane (CH4), and 65% of nitrous oxide (N2O). The latter will substantially increase over the coming decades, as the pasture land is currently at maximum expanse in most regions; future expansion of the livestock sector will increasingly be crop based. The chapter also reviews mitigation options to reduce C and N emissions from livestock’s land use, production, and animal waste.
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The Role of Local Governance and Institutions in Livelihoods Adaptation to Climate Change
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The most important implications of climate change from the perspective of the
World Bank concern its potentially disastrous impacts on the prospects for development,
especially for poorer populations in the global South. Earlier writings on climate change
had tended to focus more on its links with biodiversity loss, spread of pathogens and
diseases, land use planning, ecosystem change, and insurance markets, rather than its
connections with development (Easterling and Apps 2005, Harvell et al. 2002, Tompkins
and Adger 2004). But as the Social Development Department of the World Bank recently
noted, “Climate change is the defining development challenge of our generation” (SDV,
2007: 2). These words echo the World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s statement at the
United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2007 in Bali where he called climate
change a “development, economic, and investment challenge.” Indeed, understanding the
relationship between climate change, the human responses it necessitates, and how
institutions shape such responses is an increasingly urgent need. This report directs
attention towards a subset of such relationships, focusing on rural institutions and poor
populations in the context of climate variability and change-induced adaptations.
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The role of stomata in sensing and driving environmental change
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Stomata, the small pores on the surfaces of leaves and stalks, regulate the flow of gases in and out of leaves and thus plants as a whole. They adapt to local and global changes on all timescales from minutes to millennia. Recent data from diverse fields are establishing their central importance to plant physiology, evolution and global ecology. Stomatal morphology, distribution and behaviour respond to a spectrum of signals, from intracellular signalling to global climatic change. Such concerted adaptation results from a web of control systems, reminiscent of a ‘scale-free’ network, whose untangling requires integrated approaches beyond those currently used.
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The role of terrestrial plants in limiting atmospheric CO2 decline over the past 24 million years
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Environmental conditions during the past 24 million years are thought to have been favourable for enhanced rates of atmospheric carbon dioxide drawdown by silicate chemical weathering1–7. Proxy records indicate, however, that the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations did not fall below about 200–250 parts per million during this period8. The stabilization of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations near this minimum value suggests that strong negative feedback mechanisms inhibited further drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide by high rates of global silicate rock weathering. Here we investigate one possible negative feedback mechanism, occurring under relatively low carbon dioxide concentrations and in warm climates, that is related to terrestrial plant productivity and its role in the decomposition of silicate minerals9–11. We use simulations of terrestrial and geochemical carbon cycles and available experimental evidence to show that vegetation activity in upland regions of active orogens was severely limited by near-starvation of carbon dioxide in combination with global warmth over this period. These conditions diminished biotic-driven silicate rock weathering and thereby attenuated an important long-term carbon dioxide sink. Although our modelling results are semi-quantitative and do not capture the full range of biogeochemical feedbacks that could influence the climate, our analysis indicates that the dynamic equilibrium between plants, climate and the geosphere probably buffered the minimum atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 24 million years.
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The search for unknown biodiversity
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1st paragraph: in a world being rapidly transformed by human activities, an alarming possibility is that many species might disappear before we have a chance to study or even scientifically describe them. This possibility goes beyond a simple desire to document biodiversity, because unknown species could have important benefits for humanity. For instance, who might have imagined that an obscure herb endemic to Madagascar, the rosy periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus), would yield the only known treatment for childhood leukemia (1)?
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