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Open access
John Cook et al
&2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024
Video abstract
We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on
anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific
literature, examining 11&944 climate abstracts from
matching the topics &global climate
change& or &global warming&. We find that 66.4%
of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7%
rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global
warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1%
endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global
warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to
rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller
percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW
(35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW,
97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and
authors& self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among
papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time.
Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the
consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published
Open access
John Cook et al
&2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 048002
The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is
shared by 90%&100% of publishing climate scientists according
to six independent studies by co-authors of this paper. Those
results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook
Environ. Res. Lett.
) based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers,
of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global
warming. A survey of authors of those papers (
N&=&2412 papers) also supported a 97% consensus.
Environ. Res. Lett.
) comes to a different conclusion using results
from surveys of non-experts such as economic geologists and a
self-selected group of those who reject the consensus. We
demonstrate that this outcome is not unexpected because the level
of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science. At one
point, Tol also reduces the apparent consensus by assuming that
abstracts that do not explicitly state the cause of global warming
(&no position&) represent non-endorsement, an approach
that if applied elsewhere would reject consensus on
well-established theories such as plate tectonics. We examine the
available studies and conclude that the finding of 97% consensus in
published climate research is robust and consistent with other
surveys of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies.
Open access
Christine Shearer et al
&2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 084011
Video abstract
Nearly 17% of people in an international survey said they
believed the existence of a secret large-scale atmospheric program
(SLAP) to be true or partly true. SLAP is commonly referred to as
&chemtrails& or &covert geoengineering&,
and has led to a number of websites purported to show evidence of
widespread chemical spraying linked to negative impacts on human
health and the environment. To address these claims, we surveyed
two groups of experts&atmospheric chemists with expertize in
condensation trails and geochemists working on atmospheric
deposition of dust and pollution&to scientifically evaluate
for the first time the claims of SLAP theorists. Results show that
76 of the 77 scientists (98.7%) that took part in this study said
they had not encountered evidence of a SLAP, and that the data
cited as evidence could be explained through other factors,
including well-understood physics and chemistry associated with
aircraft contrails and atmospheric aerosols. Our goal is not to
sway those already convinced that there is a secret, large-scale
spraying program&who often reject counter-evidence as further
proof of their theories&but rather to establish a source of
objective science that can inform public discourse.
Open access
Erik Behrens et al
&2012 Environ. Res. Lett. 7 034004
Video abstract
A sequence of global ocean circulation models, with horizontal
mesh sizes of 0.5&, 0.25&&and 0.1&, are used to
estimate the long-term dispersion by ocean currents and mesoscale
eddies of a slowly decaying tracer (half-life of 30&years,
comparable to that of
137Cs) from the local waters off the Fukushima Dai-ichi
Nuclear Power Plants. The tracer was continuously injected into the
coastal wa its subsequent spreading and
dilution in the Pacific Ocean was then simulated for 10&years.
The simulations do not include any data assimilation, and thus, do
not account for the actual state of the local ocean currents during
the release of highly contaminated water from the damaged plants in
March&April 2011. An ensemble differing in initial current
distributions illustrates their importance for the tracer patterns
evolving during the first months, but suggests a minor relevance
for the large-scale tracer distributions after
2&3&years. By then the tracer cloud has penetrated to
depths of more than 400&m, spanning the western and central
North Pacific between 25&N and 55&N, leading to a rapid
dilution of concentrations. The rate of dilution declines in the
following years, while the main tracer patch propagates eastward
across the Pacific Ocean, reaching the coastal waters of North
America after about 5&6&years. Tentatively assuming a
value of 10&PBq for the net
137Cs input during the first weeks after the Fukushima
incident, the simulation suggests a rapid dilution of peak
radioactivity values to about 10&Bq&m
&3 during the first two years, followed by a
gradual decline to 1&2&Bq&m
&3 over the next 4&7 years. The total peak
radioactivity levels would then still be about twice the
pre-Fukushima values.
Open access
Emily S Cassidy et al
&2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 034015
Video abstract
Worldwide demand for crops is increasing rapidly due to global
population growth, increased biofuel production, and changing
dietary preferences. Meeting these growing demands will be a
substantial challenge that will tax the capability of our food
system and prompt calls to dramatically boost global crop
production. However, to increase food availability, we may also
consider how the world&s crops are allocated to different
uses and whether it is possible to feed more people with current
levels of crop production. Of particular interest are the uses of
crops as animal feed and as biofuel feedstocks. Currently, 36% of
the calories produced by the world&s crops are being used for
animal feed, and only 12% of those feed calories ultimately
contribute to the human diet (as meat and other animal products).
Additionally, human-edible calories used for biofuel production
increased fourfold between the years 2000 and 2010, from 1% to 4%,
representing a net reduction of available food globally. In this
study, we re-examine agricultural productivity, going from using
the standard definition of yield (in tonnes per hectare, or similar
units) to using the number of people actually fed per hectare of
cropland. We find that, given the current mix of crop uses, growing
food exclusively for direct human consumption could, in principle,
increase available food calories by as much as 70%, which could
feed an additional 4 billion people (more than the projected
2&3 billion people arriving through population growth). Even
small shifts in our allocation of crops to animal feed and biofuels
could significantly increase global food availability, and could be
an instrumental tool in meeting the challenges of ensuring global
food security.
Open access
Simon Albert et al
&2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 054011
Low-lying reef islands in the Solomon Islands provide a valuable
window into the future impacts of global sea-level rise. Sea-level
rise has been predicted to cause widespread erosion and inundation
of low-lying atolls in the central Pacific. However, the limited
research on reef islands in the western Pacific indicates the
majority of shoreline changes and inundation to date result from
extreme events, seawalls and inappropriate development rather than
sea-level rise alone. Here, we present the first analysis of
coastal dynamics from a sea-level rise hotspot in the Solomon
Islands. Using time series aerial and satellite imagery from 1947
to 2014 of 33 islands, along with historical insight from local
knowledge, we have identified five vegetated reef islands that have
vanished over this time period and a further six islands
experiencing severe shoreline recession. Shoreline recession at two
sites has destroyed villages that have existed since at least 1935,
leading to community relocations. Rates of shoreline recession are
substantially higher in areas exposed to high wave energy,
indicating a synergistic interaction between sea-level rise and
waves. Understanding these local factors that increase the
susceptibility of islands to coastal erosion is critical to guide
adaptation responses for these remote Pacific communities.
Open access
Steven R H Barrett et al
&2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 114005
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has alleged that
Volkswagen Group of America (VW) violated the Clean Air Act (CAA)
by developing and installing emissions control system &defeat
devices& (software) in model year
with 2.0 litre diesel engines. VW has admitted the inclusion of
defeat devices. On-road emissions testing suggests that in-use NO
x emissions for these vehicles are a factor of 10 to 40
above the EPA standard. In this paper we quantify the human health
impacts and associated costs of the excess emissions. We propagate
uncertainties throughout the analysis. A distribution function for
excess emissions is estimated based on available in-use NO
x emissions measurements. We then use vehicle sales data
and the STEP vehicle fleet model to estimate vehicle distance
traveled per year for the fleet. The excess NO
x emissions are allocated on a 50 km grid using an EPA
estimate of the light duty diesel vehicle NO
x emissions distribution. We apply a GEOS-Chem
adjoint-based rapid air pollution exposure model to produce
estimates of particulate matter and ozone exposure due to the
spatially resolved excess NO
x emissions. A set of concentration-response functions
is applied to estimate mortality and morbidity outcomes. Integrated
over the sales period () we estimate that the excess
emissions will cause 59 (95% CI: 10 to 150) early deaths in the US.
When monetizing premature mortality using EPA-recommended data, we
find a social cost of &$450m over the sales period. For the
current fleet, we estimate that a return to compliance for all
affected vehicles by the end of 2016 will avert &130 early
deaths and avoid &$840m in social costs compared to a
counterfactual case without recall.
Open access
Leah H Samberg et al
&2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 124010
Video abstract
Smallholder farming is the most prevalent form of agriculture in
the world, supports many of the planet&s most vulnerable
populations, and coexists with some of its most diverse and
threatened landscapes. However, there is little information about
the location of small farms, making it difficult both to estimate
their numbers and to implement effective agricultural, development,
and land use policies. Here, we present a map of mean agricultural
area, classified by the amount of land per farming household, at
subnational resolutions across three key global regions using a
novel integration of household microdata and agricultural landscape
data. This approach provides a subnational estimate of the number,
average size, and contribution of farms across much of the
developing world. By our estimates, 918 subnational units in 83
countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and East
Asia average less than five hectares of agricultural land per
farming household. These smallholder-dominated systems are home to
more than 380 million farming households, make up roughly 30% of
the agricultural land and produce more than 70% of the food
calories produced in these regions, and are responsible for more
than half of the food calories produced globally, as well as more
than half of global production of several major food crops.
Smallholder systems in these three regions direct a greater
percentage of calories produced toward direct human consumption,
with 70% of calories produced in these units consumed as food,
compared to 55% globally. Our approach provides the ability to
disaggregate farming populations from non-farming populations,
providing a more accurate picture of farming households on the
landscape than has previously been available. These data meet a
critical need, as improved understanding of the prevalence and
distribution of smallholder farming is essential for effective
policy development for food security, poverty reduction, and
conservation agendas.
Most cited
Open access
Erik van Sebille et al
&2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 124006
Microplastic debris floating at the ocean surface can harm
marine life. Understanding the severity of this harm requires
knowledge of plastic abundance and distributions. Dozens of
expeditions measuring microplastics have been carried out since the
1970s, but they have primarily focused on the North Atlantic and
North Pacific accumulation zones, with much sparser coverage
elsewhere. Here, we use the largest dataset of microplastic
measurements assembled to date to assess the confidence we can have
in global estimates of microplastic abundance and mass. We use a
rigorous statistical framework to standardize a global dataset of
plastic marine debris measured using surface-trawling plankton nets
and coupled this with three different ocean circulation models to
spatially interpolate the observations. Our estimates show that the
accumulated number of microplastic particles in 2014 ranges from 15
to 51 trillion particles, weighing between 93 and 236 thousand
metric tons, which is only approximately 1% of global plastic waste
estimated to enter the ocean in the year 2010. These estimates are
larger than previous global estimates, but vary widely because the
scarcity of data in most of the world ocean, differences in model
formulations, and fundamental knowledge gaps in the sources,
transformations and fates of microplastics in the ocean.
Open access
Tyler J Lark et al
&2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 044003
Cultivation of corn and soybeans in the United States reached
record high levels following the biofuels boom of the late 2000s.
Debate exists about whether the expansion of these crops caused
conversion of grasslands and other carbon-rich ecosystems to
cropland or instead replaced other crops on existing agricultural
land. We tracked crop-specific expansion pathways across the
conterminous US and identified the types, amount, and locations of
all land converted to and from cropland, . We found
that crop expansion resulted in substantial transformation of the
landscape, including conversion of long-term unimproved grasslands
and land that had not been previously used for agriculture
(cropland or pasture) dating back to at least the early 1970s. Corn
was the most common crop planted directly on new land, as well as
the largest indirect contributor to change through its displacement
of other crops. Cropland expansion occurred most rapidly on land
that is less suitable for cultivation, raising concerns about
adverse environmental and economic costs of conversion. Our results
reveal opportunities to increase the efficacy of current federal
policy conservation measures by modifying coverage of the 2014 US
Farm Bill Sodsaver provision and improving enforcement of the US
Renewable Fuels Standard.
Open access
Jordan Graesser et al
&2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 034017
Latin America has the planet&s largest land reserves for
agriculture and had the most rapid agricultural expansion during
the twenty-first century. A large portion of the expansion replaced
forests, as shown by many local and regional studies. However,
expansion varied regionally and also replaced other land covers.
Further, it is important to distinguish between changes in cropland
and pastureland as they produce food at different levels of
efficiency and intensity. We used thirteen years ()
of MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite imagery
to characterize cropland and pastureland expansion at multiple
scales across Latin America. From 2001 to 2013, 17% of new cropland
and 57% of new pastureland replaced forests throughout Latin
America. Cropland expansion from 2001 to 2013 was less (44.27 Mha)
than pastureland (96.9 Mha), but 44% of the 2013 cropland total was
new cropland, versus 27% of the 2013 pastureland total, revealing
higher regional expansion rates of row crop agriculture. The
majority of cropland expansion was into pastureland within core
agricultural regions of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and
Uruguay. On the contrary, pastureland largely expanded at
frontiers, such as central Brazil, western Paraguay, and northern
Guatemala. As others have suggested, regional agriculture is
strongly influenced by globalization. Indeed, we find an overall
decrease in agricultural expansion after 2007, coinciding with the
global economic slowdown. The results illustrate agricultural
cropland and pastureland expansion across Latin America is largely
segregated, and emphasize the importance of distinguishing between
the two agricultural systems, as they vary in land use intensity
and efficiency.
Open access
Yuyu Zhou et al
&2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 054011
Urbanization, a major driver of global change, profoundly
impacts our physical and social world, for example, altering not
just water and carbon cycling, biodiversity, and climate, but also
demography, public health, and economy. Understanding these
consequences for better scientific insights and effective
decision-making unarguably requires accurate information on urban
extent and its spatial distributions. We developed a method to map
the urban extent from the defense meteorological satellite
program/operational linescan system nighttime stable-light data at
the global level and created a new global 1 km urban extent map for
the year 2000. Our map shows that globally, urban is about 0.5% of
total land area but ranges widely at the regional level, from 0.1%
in Oceania to 2.3% in Europe. At the country level, urbanized land
varies from about 0.01 to 10%, but is lower than 1% for most (70%)
countries. Urbanization follows land mass distribution, as
anticipated, with the highest concentration between 30& N and
45& N latitude and the largest longitudinal peak around 80&
W. Based on a sensitivity analysis and comparison with other global
urban area products, we found that our global product of urban
areas provides a reliable estimate of global urban areas and offers
the potential for producing a time-series of urban area maps for
temporal dynamics analyses.
Open access
A Tyukavina et al
&2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 074002
Tropical forests provide global climate regulation ecosystem
services and their clearing is a significant source of
anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and resultant
radiative forcing of climate change. However, consensus on
pan-tropical forest carbon dynamics is lacking. We present a new
estimate that employs recommended good practices to quantify gross
tropical forest aboveground carbon (AGC) loss from 2000 to 2012
through the integration of Landsat-derived tree canopy cover,
height, intactness and forest cover loss and GLAS-lidar derived
forest biomass. An unbiased estimate of forest loss area is
produced using a stratified random sample with strata derived from
a wall-to-wall 30 m forest cover loss map. Our sample-based results
separate the gross loss of forest AGC into losses from natural
forests (0.59 PgC yr
&1) and losses from managed forests (0.43 PgC yr
&1) including plantations, agroforestry systems
and subsistence agriculture. Latin America accounts for 43% of
gross AGC loss and 54% of natural forest AGC loss, with Brazil
experiencing the highest AGC loss for both categories at national
scales. We estimate gross tropical forest AGC loss and natural
forest loss to account for 11% and 6% of global year 2012 CO
2 emissions, respectively. Given recent trends, natural
forests will likely constitute an increasingly smaller proportion
of tropical forest GHG emissions and of global emissions as fossil
fuel consumption increases, with implications for the valuation of
co-benefits in tropical forest conservation.
Latest articles
Open access
Yuan Lin et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 024017
Haze pollution over the past four decades in Southeast Asia is
mainly a result of forest and peatland fires in Indonesia. The
economic impacts of haze include adverse health effects and
disruption to transport and tourism. Previous studies have used a
variety of approaches to assess the economic impacts of haze and
the forest fires more generally. But no study has used contingent
valuation to assess non-market impacts of haze on individuals. Here
we apply contingent valuation to estimate impacts of haze on
Singapore, one of most severely affected countries. We used a
double-bounded dichotomous-choice survey design and the
Kaplan-Meier-Turnbull method to infer the distribution of
Singaporeans& willingness to pay (WTP) for haze mitigation.
Our estimate of mean individual WTP was 0.97% of annual income (
n = 390). To calculate total national WTP, we stratified by
income, the demographic variable most strongly related to
individual WTP. The total WTP estimate was $643.5 million per year
(95% CI [$527.7 million, $765.0 million]). This estimate is
comparable in magnitude to previously estimated impacts of
Indonesia&s fires and also to the estimated costs of peatland
protection and restoration. We recommend that our results be
incorporated into future cost&benefit analyses of the fires
and mitigation strategies.
Open access
Yunfeng Peng et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 024018
Nitrogen (N) availability is a key regulator of carbon (C)
cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. Anthropogenic N input, such as N
deposition and fertilization, increases N availability in soil,
which has important implications for an ecosystem&s C storage
and loss. Soil respiration (Rs), which is the second largest C flux
from terrestrial ecosystems to the atmosphere, plays an important
role in terrestrial C cycles. The direction and magnitude of the
responses of Rs and its components to N addition have been widely
evaluated, but it remains unclear how these processes change across
multiple N addition levels. Here we conducted a two-year field
experiment to examine the changes of Rs and its autotrophic
respiration (Ra) and heterotrophic respiration (Rh) components
along a gradient of eight N levels (0, 1 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32 g m
&1) in a Tibetan alpine steppe, and used
structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore the relative
contributions of biotic and abiotic variables and their direct and
indirect pathways regulating the Ra and Rh. Our results indicated
that both Rs and Ra exhibited first increasing and then subsequent
decreasing trends at the threshold of 8 g N m
&1. In contrast, the Rh declined linearly with the
N addition rate continuously increasing. SEM analysis revealed
that, among various environmental factors, soil temperature was the
most important one modulating Rs, which not only had a direct
effect on the two Rs components, but also indirectly regulated the
Ra and Rh via root and microbial biomass. These findings suggest
that the nonlinear response patterns of Rs should be considered for
better predicting terrestrial C balance, given that anthropogenic N
input to the terrestrial ecosystems is increasing continuously.
Open access
Alicia English
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 021002
Open access
Romain Millan et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 024016
Recent studies indicate that the glaciers and ice caps in Queen
Elizabeth Islands (QEI), Canada have experienced an increase in ice
mass loss during the last two decades, but the contribution of ice
dynamics to this loss is not well known. We present a comprehensive
mapping of ice velocity using a suite of satellite data from year
1991 to 2015, combined with ice thickness data from NASA Operation
IceBridge, to calculate ice discharge. We find that ice discharge
increased significantly after 2011 in Prince of Wales Icefield,
maintained or decreased in other sectors, whereas glacier surges
have little impact on long-term trends in ice discharge. During
, the QEI mass loss averaged
6.3&&&1.1 Gt yr
&1, 52% from ice discharge and the rest from
surface mass balance (SMB). During , the mass loss
from ice discharge averaged 3.5&&&0.2 Gt yr
&1 (10%) versus 29.6&&&3.0 Gt
&1 (90%) from SMB. SMB processes therefore
dominate the QEI mass balance, with ice dynamics playing a
significant role only in a few basins.
Open access
Narasimha D Rao and Shonali Pachauri
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 025011
A subset of Sustainable Development Goals pertains to improving
people&s living standards at home. These include the
provision of access to electricity, clean cooking energy, improved
water and sanitation. We examine historical progress in energy
access in relation to other living standards. We assess regional
patterns in the pace of progress and relative priority accorded to
these different services. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa would
have to undergo unprecedented rates of improvement in energy access
in order to achieve the goal of universal electrification by 2030.
World over, access to clean cooking fuels and sanitation facilities
consistently lag improved water and electricity access by a large
margin. These two deprivations are more concentrated among poor
countries, and poor people in middle income countries. They are
also correlated to health risks faced disproportionately by women.
However, some Asian countries have been able to achieve faster
progress in electrification at lower income levels compared to
industrialized countries& earlier efforts. These examples
offer hope that future efforts need not be constrained by
historical rates of progress.
Review articles
Open access
Antti S?yn?joki et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 013001
Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is an established methodology that
can provide decision-makers with comprehensive data on the
environmental impacts of products and processes during the entire
life cycle. However, the literature on building LCAs consists of
highly varying results between the studies, even when the assessed
buildings are very similar. This makes it doubtful if LCA can
actually produce reliable data for supporting policy-making in the
building sector. However, no prior reviews looking into this issue
in the building sector exist. This study includes an extensive
literature review of LCA studies on the pre-use phase of buildings.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the variation between the
results of different studies and find out whether the differences
can be explained by the contextual differences or if it is actually
the methodological choices that cause the extremely high variation.
We present 116 cases from 47 scientific articles and reports that
used process LCA, input&output (IO) LCA or hybrid LCA to
study the construction-phase GHG emissions of buildings. The
results of the reviewed studies vary between 0.03 and 2.00 tons of
GHG emissions per gross area. The lowest was assessed with process
LCA and highest with IO LCA, and in general the lower end was found
to be dominated by process LCA studies and the higher end by IO LCA
studies, hybrid LCAs being placed in between. In general, it is the
methodological issues and subjective choices of the LCA
practitioner that cause the vast majority of the huge variance in
the results. It thus seems that currently the published building
LCAs do not offer solid background information for policy-making
without deep understanding of the premises of a certain study and
good methodological knowledge.
Open access
Kemen G Austin et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 014005
Industrial-scale oil palm cultivation is rapidly expanding in
Gabon, where it has the potential to drive economic growth, but
also threatens forest, biodiversity and carbon resources. The
Gabonese government is promoting an ambitious agricultural
expansion strategy, while simultaneously committing to minimize
negative environmental impacts of oil palm agriculture. This study
estimates the extent and location of suitable land for oil palm
cultivation in Gabon, based on an analysis of recent trends in
plantation permitting. We use the resulting suitability map to
evaluate two proposed approaches to minimizing negative
environmental impacts: a High Carbon Stock (HCS) approach, which
emphasizes forest protection and climate change mitigation, and a
High Conservation Value (HCV) approach, which focuses on
safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystems. We quantify the forest
area, carbon stock, and biodiversity resources protected under each
approach, using newly developed maps of priority species
distributions and forest biomass for Gabon. We find
2.7&3.9&Mha of suitable or moderately suitable land
that avoid HCS areas, 4.4 million hectares (Mha) that avoid HCV
areas, and 1.2&1.7&Mha that avoid both. This suggests
that Gabon&s oil palm production target could likely be met
without compromising important ecosystem services, if appropriate
safeguards are put in place. Our analysis improves understanding of
suitability for oil palm in Gabon, determines how conservation
strategies align with national targets for oil palm production, and
informs national land use planning.
Open access
Bernhard Schauberger et al
&2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 123001
Variability of crop yields is detrimental for food security.
Under climate change its amplitude is likely to increase, thus it
is essential to understand the underlying causes and mechanisms.
Crop models are the primary tool to project future changes in crop
yields under climate change. A systematic overview of drivers and
mechanisms of crop yield variability (YV) can thus inform crop
model development and facilitate improved understanding of climate
change impacts on crop yields. Yet there is a vast body of
literature on crop physiology and YV, which makes a prioritization
of mechanisms for implementation in models challenging. Therefore
this paper takes on a novel approach to systematically mine and
organize existing knowledge from the literature. The aim is to
identify important mechanisms lacking in models, which can help to
set priorities in model improvement. We structure knowledge from
the literature in a semi-quantitative network. This network
consists of complex interactions between growing conditions, plant
physiology and crop yield. We utilize the resulting network
structure to assign relative importance to causes of YV and related
plant physiological processes. As expected, our findings confirm
existing knowledge, in particular on the dominant role of
temperature and precipitation, but also highlight other important
drivers of YV. More importantly, our method allows for identifying
the relevant physiological processes that transmit variability in
growing conditions to variability in yield. We can identify
explicit targets for the improvement of crop models. The network
can additionally guide model development by outlining complex
interactions between processes and by easily retrieving
quantitative information for each of the 350 interactions. We show
the validity of our network method as a structured, consistent and
scalable dictionary of literature. The method can easily be applied
to many other research fields.
Open access
Sophia C Johannessen and Robie W Macdonald
&2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 113001
Blue carbon, the carbon fixed by vegetated coastal ecosystems
including seagrasses, is reported to have a large potential to
sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide. Planting, expanding or
protecting seagrass meadows has, accordingly, been proposed as a
form of geoengineering. Seagrasses are reported to account for up
to 18% of the carbon burial in the world&s oceans, which is
on the same order of magnitude as other proposed geoengineering
techniques, including iron fertilization. International protocols
have been developed to quantify carbon sequestration in seagrass
meadows, with a view to awarding carbon credits under the Verified
Carbon Standard. Unfortunately, because these protocols do not
adequately account for post-depositional processes in marine
sediment, they significantly overestimate carbon capture by
seagrass beds and give an incorrect view of its distribution.
Specifically, neglecting biomixing and remineralization of carbon
in surface sediments biases burial rates high, while using sediment
carbon inventory (soil carbon stock) over the top 1 m as a proxy
for burial rate incorrectly identifies areas of high carbon burial.
Seagrass beds likely provide a limited setting for geoengineering,
because they generally comprise slowly-accumulating, fine to medium
sand, which captures organic carbon less efficiently than
fine-grained sediments or rapidly-accumulating delta deposits.
While there is no question that seagrass meadows provide valuable
habitat, nor that they are disappearing rapidly, their contribution
to the global burial of carbon has not yet been established. The
danger of geoengineering with seagrasses before reliable assessment
methods have been established is that overestimated carbon offsets
could lead to a net increase in emissions of carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere.
Open access
P Modernel et al
&2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 113002
Video abstract
New livestock production models need to simultaneously meet the
increasing global demand for meat and preserve biodiversity and
ecosystem services. Since the 16th century beef cattle has been
produced on the Pampas and Campos native grasslands in southern
South America, with only small amounts of external inputs. We
synthesised 242 references from peer-reviewed and grey literature
published between 1945 and mid-2015 and analysed secondary data to
examine the evidence on the ecosystem services provided by this
grassland biodiversity hotspot and the way they are affected by
land use changes and their drivers. The analysis followed the
requirements of systematic review from the PRISMA statement (Moher
et al 2009
Acad. Clin. Ann. Intern. Med.
151 264&9). The Pampas and Campos provide feed for
43 million heads of cattle and 14 million sheep. The biome is
habitat of 4000 native plant species, 300 species of birds, 29
species of mammals, 49 species of reptiles and 35 species of
amphibians. The soils of the region stock 5% of the soil organic
carbon of Latin America on 3% of its area. Driven by high prices of
soybean, the soybean area increased by 210% between 2000 and 2010,
at the expense of 2 million ha (5%) of native grassland, mostly in
the Pampas. Intensification of livestock production was apparent in
two spatially distinct forms. In subregions where cropping
increased, intensification of livestock production was reflected in
an increased use of grains for feed as part of feedlots. In
subregions dominated by native grasslands, stocking rates
increased. The review showed that land use change and grazing
regimes with low forage allowances were predominantly associated
with negative effects on ecosystem service provision by reducing
soil organic carbon stocks and the diversity of plants, birds and
mammals, and by increasing soil erosion. We found little
quantitative information on changes in the ecosystem services water
provision, nutrient cycling and erosion control. We discuss how
changing grazing regimes to higher forage allowance can contribute
to greater meat production and enhancing ecosystem services from
native grasslands. This would require working with farmers on
changing their management strategies and creating enabling economic
conditions.
Featured articles
Open access
Gonéri Le Cozannet et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 014012
Despite progresses in climate change science, projections of
future sea-level rise remain highly uncertain, especially due to
large unknowns in the melting processes affecting the ice-sheets in
Greenland and Antarctica. Based on climate-models outcomes and the
expertise of scientists concerned with these issues, the IPCC
provided constraints to the quantiles of sea-level projections.
Moreover, additional physical limits to future sea-level rise have
been established, although approximately. However, many probability
functions can comply with this imprecise knowledge. In this
contribution, we provide a framework based on extra-probabilistic
theories (namely the possibility theory) to model the uncertainties
in sea-level rise projections by 2100 under the RCP 8.5 scenario.
The results provide a concise representation of uncertainties in
future sea-level rise and of their intrinsically imprecise nature,
including a maximum bound of the total uncertainty. Today, coastal
impact studies are increasingly moving away from deterministic
sea-level projections, which underestimate the expectancy of
damages and adaptation needs compared to probabilistic laws.
However, we show that the probability functions used so-far have
only explored a rather conservative subset of sea-level projections
compliant with the IPCC. As a consequence, coastal impact studies
relying on these probabilistic sea-level projections are expected
to underestimate the possibility of large damages and adaptation
Open access
David B Lobell and George Azzari
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 014014
The future trajectory of crop yields in the United States will
influence food supply and land use worldwide. We examine maize and
soybean yields for
in the Midwestern U.S. using a
new satellite-based dataset on crop yields at 30m resolution. We
quantify heterogeneity both within and between fields, and find
that the difference between average and top yielding fields is
typically below 30% for both maize and soybean, as expected in
advanced agricultural regions. In most counties, within-field
heterogeneity is at least half as large as overall heterogeneity,
illustrating the importance of non-management factors such as soil
and landscape position. Surprisingly, we find that yield
heterogeneity is rising in maize, both between and within fields,
with average yield differences between the best and worst soils
more than doubling since 2000. Heterogeneity trends were
insignificant for soybean. The findings are consistent both with
recent adoption of precision agriculture technologies and with
recent trends toward denser sowing in maize, which
disproportionately raise yields on better soils. The results imply
that yield gains in the region are increasingly derived from the
more productive land, and that sub-field precision management of
nutrients and other inputs is increasingly warranted.
Open access
Ashwin Ravikumar et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 014015
Revenues derived from carbon have been seen as an important tool
for supporting forest conservation over the past decade. At the
same time, there is high uncertainty about how much revenue can
reasonably be expected from land use emissions reductions
initiatives. Despite this uncertainty, REDD+ projects and
conservation initiatives that aim to take advantage of available
or, more commonly, future funding from carbon markets have
proliferated. This study used participatory multi-stakeholder
workshops to develop divergent future scenarios of land use in
eight landscapes in four countries around the world: Peru,
Indonesia, Tanzania, and Mexico. The results of these future
scenario building exercises were analyzed using a new tool,
CarboScen, for calculating the landscape carbon storage
implications of different future land use scenarios. The findings
suggest that potential revenues from carbon storage or emissions
reductions are significant in some landscapes (most notably the
peat forests of Indonesia), and much less significant in others
(such as the low-carbon forests of Zanzibar and the interior of
Tanzania). The findings call into question the practicality of many
conservation programs that hinge on expectations of future revenue
from carbon finance. The future scenarios-based approach is useful
to policy-makers and conservation program developers in
distinguishing between landscapes where carbon finance can
substantially support conservation, and landscapes where other
strategies for conservation and land use should be prioritized.
Open access
Anders Ahlstr?m et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 014004
Global vegetation models and terrestrial carbon cycle models are
widely used for projecting the carbon balance of terrestrial
ecosystems. Ensembles of such models show a large spread in carbon
balance predictions, ranging from a large uptake to a release of
carbon by the terrestrial biosphere, constituting a large
uncertainty in the associated feedback to atmospheric CO
2 concentrations under global climate change. Errors and
biases that may contribute to such uncertainty include ecosystem
model structure, parameters and forcing by climate output from
general circulation models (GCMs) or the atmospheric components of
Earth system models (ESMs), e.g. as prepared for use in IPCC
climate change assessments. The relative importance of these
contributing factors to the overall uncertainty in carbon cycle
projections is not well characterised. Here we investigate the role
of climate model-derived biases by forcing a single global
ecosystem-carbon cycle model, with original climate outputs from 15
ESMs and GCMs from the CMIP5 ensemble. We show that variation among
the resulting ensemble of present and future carbon cycle
simulations propagates from biases in annual means of temperature,
precipitation and incoming shortwave radiation. Future changes in
carbon pools, and thus land carbon sink trends, are also affected
by climate biases, although to a smaller extent than the absolute
size of carbon pools. Our results suggest that climate biases could
be responsible for a considerable fraction of the large
uncertainties in ESM simulations of land carbon fluxes and pools,
amounting to about 40% of the range reported for ESMs. We conclude
that climate bias-induced uncertainties must be decreased to make
accurate coupled atmosphere-carbon cycle projections.
Open access
Stefanos Mystakidis et al
&2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 014009
The feedbacks between climate, atmospheric CO
2 concentration and the terrestrial carbon cycle are a
major source of uncertainty in future climate projections with
Earth systems models. Here, we use observation-based estimates of
the interannual variations in evapotranspiration (ET), net biome
productivity (NBP), as well as the present-day sensitivity of NBP
to climate variations, to constrain globally the terrestrial carbon
cycle feedbacks as simulated by models that participated in the
fifth phase of the coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP5).
The constraints result in a ca. 40% lower response of NBP to
climate change and a ca. 30% reduction in the strength of the CO
2 fertilization effect relative to the unconstrained
multi-model mean. While the unconstrained CMIP5 models suggest an
increase in the cumulative terrestrial carbon storage (477 PgC) in
response to an idealized scenario of 1%/year atmospheric CO
2 increase, the constraints imply a ca. 19% smaller
change. Overall, the applied emerging constraint approach offers a
possibility to reduce uncertainties in the projections of the
terrestrial carbon cycle, which is a key determinant of the future
trajectory of atmospheric CO
2 concentration and resulting climate change.
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Journal history
2006-present Environmental Research Letters
doi:10.1088/issn.
Online ISSN: