Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

groundwater

This paper in Water Resources Research is about global groundwater depletion and pollution, and how groundwater can be managed better.

With rivers in critical regions already exploited to capacity throughout the world and groundwater overdraft as well as large-scale contamination occurring in many areas, we have entered an era in which multiple simultaneous stresses will drive water management. Increasingly, groundwater resources are taking a more prominent role in providing freshwater supplies. We discuss the competing fresh groundwater needs for human consumption, food production, energy, and the environment, as well as physical hazards, and conflicts due to transboundary overexploitation. During the past 50 years, groundwater management modeling has focused on combining simulation with optimization methods to inspect important problems ranging from contaminant remediation to agricultural irrigation management. The compound challenges now faced by water planners require a new generation of aquifer management models that address the broad impacts of global change on aquifer storage and depletion trajectory management, land subsidence, groundwater-dependent ecosystems, seawater intrusion, anthropogenic and geogenic contamination, supply vulnerability, and long-term sustainability. The scope of research efforts is only beginning to address complex interactions using multi-agent system models that are not readily formulated as optimization problems and that consider a suite of human behavioral responses.

They get something important right here, which is that if you are formulating a question in a way that the answer can be “optimized”, you have probably defined the question much too narrowly. Water resources are one part of much larger complex natural and social systems. Modeling and technical analysis is important to pare the universe of all possible decisions down to a smaller set where each possible decision is close to “optimal” or efficient in the technical and economic senses. But then this information needs to be fed into a stakeholder or political process where a much wider range of factors can be considered and decisions made.

I am concerned that the current laser focus on “science, technology, engineering, and math” in education is pushing people too far down the path of expecting clear-cut technocratic answers to questions that have messy political and cultural dimensions in reality. All these subjects are good to study, but they need to pared with solid education in planning processes and tools, and an appreciation of systems in general.

photosynthesis

From the journal Cell, here is a long, technical but interesting open source article on photosynthesis. First, it concludes that the current rate of increase in grain yields will not be sufficient to keep up with population and demand growth through 2050. Then they go through a range of biotechnology research avenues that hold promise to boost photosynthetic efficiency by up to 60%. They argue that the pipeline from beginning the research to seeing it pay off could be 20-30 years. With a lag this long, we can’t just wait until scarcity develops and drives up food prices enough to make the investments obviously profitable. Instead, the research needs to start now.

Two questions come to mind. First, is it the right approach to rely on biotechnology to increase yields so that demand can keep growing forever? Or should we be finding smarter ways to reduce waste, modify lifestyles and make do with what we are producing now? If we remove sunlight as a limiting factor, something else may become the limiting factor, such as water or phosphorus.

Second, if we create super-efficient crops is there a chance they will escape into native ecosystems and choke out all our native plants? Maybe the kinds of modifications that help annual crops produce more edible biomass under industrial field conditions won’t help them compete in the wild at all – you don’t hear about genetically modified corn or wheat straying far afield now. But it still seems like the ethics need to be considered.

 

antibiotics on the farm

Here’s a journal article about antibiotic use on farms worldwide. Pigs get the highest doses relative to their body size, followed closely by chickens, then cows as a distant third. Developing countries are expected to increase their use by a lot as their populations grow and demand more meat.

Demand for animal protein for human consumption is rising globally at an unprecedented rate. Modern animal production practices are associated with regular use of antimicrobials, potentially increasing selection pressure on bacteria to become resistant. Despite the significant potential consequences for antimicrobial resistance, there has been no quantitative measurement of global antimicrobial consumption by livestock. We address this gap by using Bayesian statistical models combining maps of livestock densities, economic projections of demand for meat products, and current estimates of antimicrobial consumption in high-income countries to map antimicrobial use in food animals for 2010 and 2030. We estimate that the global average annual consumption of antimicrobials per kilogram of animal produced was 45 mg⋅kg−1, 148 mg⋅kg−1, and 172 mg⋅kg−1 for cattle, chicken, and pigs, respectively. Starting from this baseline, we estimate that between 2010 and 2030, the global consumption of antimicrobials will increase by 67%, from 63,151 ± 1,560 tons to 105,596 ± 3,605 tons. Up to a third of the increase in consumption in livestock between 2010 and 2030 is imputable to shifting production practices in middle-income countries where extensive farming systems will be replaced by large-scale intensive farming operations that routinely use antimicrobials in subtherapeutic doses. For Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the increase in antimicrobial consumption will be 99%, up to seven times the projected population growth in this group of countries. Better understanding of the consequences of the uninhibited growth in veterinary antimicrobial consumption is needed to assess its potential effects on animal and human health.

environmental regulations and profitability

If I understand this somewhat convoluted abstract from Ecological Economics correctly, empirical evidence shows that environmental regulation can actually increase corporate profitability by incentivizing innovation. The data also show that investors believe the exact opposite.

The Porter hypothesis asserts that properly designed environmental regulation motivates firms to innovate, which ultimately improves profitability. In this study, we test empirically the Porter hypothesis and the competing hypothesis that regulation undermines profitability (“costly regulation hypothesis”). In particular, we estimate the effect of clean water regulation, as reflected in the stringency of firm-specific effluent limits for two regulated pollutants, on the profitability of chemical manufacturing firms. As our primary contribution, we contrast the effect of clean water regulation on actual profitability outcomes and its effects on investors’ expectations of profitability. Our results for actual profitability are consistent with the Porter hypothesis, while our results for expected profitability are consistent with the costly regulation hypothesis. Thus, our empirical results demonstrate that investors do not appear to value the positive effect of tighter clean water regulation on actual profitability.

designing fragmented ecosystems

This article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution is about purposely controlling spatial fragmentation in ecosystems in order to maximize ecosystem services. If I understand correctly, their hypothesis seems to be that a system that is fragmented in a carefully designed way could provide more ecosystem services than an unfragmented system.

Landscape structure and fragmentation have important effects on ecosystem services, with a common assumption being that fragmentation reduces service provision. This is based on fragmentation’s expected effects on ecosystem service supply, but ignores how fragmentation influences the flow of services to people. Here we develop a new conceptual framework that explicitly considers the links between landscape fragmentation, the supply of services, and the flow of services to people. We argue that fragmentation’s effects on ecosystem service flow can be positive or negative, and use our framework to construct testable hypotheses about the effects of fragmentation on final ecosystem service provision. Empirical efforts to apply and test this framework are critical to improving landscape management for multiple ecosystem services.

This idea is important to the idea that we could hypothetically design a civilization that is not only less bad than the one we have now, but one that is actually good for the planet and people.

critical natural capital

This article in Ecological Economics is about the idea of critical natural capital. Critical natural capital is meant to bridge the gap between strong sustainability, which says manufactured capital cannot be substituted for natural capital, and weak sustainability, which says it can. Critical natural capital says that some, but not all, of it can be substituted, because some of it is, well, critical.

The other theme of this paper is the “capability approach”, which is based on the ideas of Amartya Sen. Reading Amartya Sen is on my list of things to do eventually someday, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.

This article is an attempt to conceptually improve the notion of strong sustainability by creating a rapprochement between its core concept, critical natural capital, and the capability approach. We first demonstrate that the capability approach constitutes a relevant framework for analysing the multiple links between human well-being and critical natural capital. Second, we demonstrate that the rapprochement between critical natural capital and the capability approach can form both the normative basis and the informational basis for a deliberative approach to human development which embraces a strong sustainability perspective. This conceptual rapprochement, as illustrated in our case study, opens up avenues of research towards the practical implementation of human development projects from a strong sustainability perspective.

designing ecosystem complexity

This article in Ecological Engineering is about measuring and purposely designing complexity into ecosystems to support biodiversity. I like this idea – certainly grass and trees are a step up from concrete in cities, but there might be some relatively simple design choices that could improve conditions for both wildlife and people without adding effort or cost. We actually expend enormous amounts of time, effort, and money maintaining our grass and trees, whereas natural ecosystems manage to maintain themselves while being more beautiful, diverse, and productive. The first step is to understand the systems better, the second would be to understand what variables we can manipulate, then the third and most difficult step is always translating that new understanding to actions on the ground and getting people to actually take them.

Simplification of natural habitats has become a major conservation challenge and there is a growing consensus that incorporating and enhancing habitat complexity is likely to be critical for future restoration efforts. Habitat complexity is often ascribed an important role in controlling species diversity, however, despite numerous empirical studies the exact mechanism(s) driving this association remains unclear. The lack of progress in untangling the relationship between complexity and diversity is partly attributable to the considerable ambiguity in the use of the term ‘complexity’. Here, we offer a new framework for conceptualizing ecological complexity, an essential prerequisite for the development of analytical methods for creating and comparing habitat complexity. Our framework distinguishes between two fundamental forms of complexity: information-based complexity and systems-based complexity. Most complexity–diversity studies are concerned with informational complexity which can be measured in the field through a variety of metrics (e.g. fractal dimensions, rugosity, etc.), but these metrics cannot be used to re-construct three-dimensional complex habitats. Drawing on our operational definition of informational complexity, it is possible to design habitats with different degrees of physical complexity. We argue that the ability to determine or modify the variables of complexity precisely has the potential to open up new lines of research in diversity theory and contribute to restoration and reconciliation by enabling environmental managers to rebuild complexity in anthropogenically-simplified habitats.

“robot scientist”

This article is about a robot that can somehow develop its own experiments to test new drugs.

There is an urgent need to make drug discovery cheaper and faster. This will enable the development of treatments for diseases currently neglected for economic reasons, such as tropical and orphan diseases, and generally increase the supply of new drugs. Here, we report the Robot Scientist ‘Eve’ designed to make drug discovery more economical. A Robot Scientist is a laboratory automation system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to discover scientific knowledge through cycles of experimentation. Eve integrates and automates library-screening, hit-confirmation, and lead generation through cycles of quantitative structure activity relationship learning and testing. Using econometric modelling we demonstrate that the use of AI to select compounds economically outperforms standard drug screening. For further efficiency Eve uses a standardized form of assay to compute Boolean functions of compound properties. These assays can be quickly and cheaply engineered using synthetic biology, enabling more targets to be assayed for a given budget. Eve has repositioned several drugs against specific targets in parasites that cause tropical diseases. One validated discovery is that the anti-cancer compound TNP-470 is a potent inhibitor of dihydrofolate reductase from the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium vivax.

Planetary Boundaries 2

Johan Rockstrom and company have published a sequel to their original “planetary boundaries” work. Here’s a summary from the Stockholm Resilience Center:

Four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a result of human activity, says an international team of 18 researchers in the journal Science (16 January 2015). The four are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).

Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call “core boundaries”. Significantly altering either of these “core boundaries” would “drive the Earth System into a new state”.

“Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human wellbeing in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries,” …

Nine planetary boundaries
1. Climate change
2. Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)
3. Stratospheric ozone depletion
4. Ocean acidification
5. Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
6. Land-system change (for example deforestation)
7. Freshwater use
8. Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
9. Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).

And for the video watchers, here is Mr. Rockstrom himself on Youtube:

Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy

Here is Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy report. They talk about the importance of fossil fuels in the progress in living standards over the past couple centuries. They talk about the rise of the middle class in developing Asia, and how that is going to lead to rising living standards and health, but also big increases in demand for energy, food and materials. Now, you can’t begrudge people rising living standards and health, which are wonderful things. However, I wouldn’t equate progress just with more traffic, concrete and shopping malls full of designer hand bags. I would equate it more with things like safe drinking water, affordable food and health care. And air conditioning – I would never begrudge any human being in the tropics air conditioning.

They make a crucial logical error – using the rate of carbon emissions, rather than accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere, as a proxy for ecological footprint. They say the rate of global emissions is expected to peak around 2030.

While every country faces a unique set of priorities and resource
constraints, we expect that most every nation, regardless of circumstance, will seek solutions that help curb emissions without harming the prospects of greater prosperity for its own citizens.
Toward this objective, two of the most effective solutions are improving energy efficiency across the economy (also referred to as reducing energy intensity) and reducing the CO2 content across the energy mix. Through 2040, each will play a powerful role in slowing emissions growth, and ultimately reversing what had been a decades-long rise in global CO2 emissions. In fact, we expect global energy-related CO2 emissions will rise
by about 25 percent from 2010 to 2030 and then decline approximately 5 percent to 2040.

In absolute terms, global CO2 emissions are expected to be about 6 billion tonnes higher in 2040 than they were in 2010. While that increase is significant, it is only about half the level of emissions growth seen from 1980 to 2010. This is all the more remarkable considering the growth in economic output from 2010 to 2040 will be about 150 percent more than the prior 30-year period.

Stabilizing the rate of emissions will not do the trick, unless the rate of emissions is below the rate the atmosphere can absorb without permanent harm to the environment or economy. That’s like saying the amount of credit card debt you add each month is the same each month. You are still spending more than your income, and one day this is going to “harm your prospects of greater prosperity”.

We will have really turned the corner if our rate of emissions is reduced to the point where the concentration in the atmosphere is stable or declining. And even if we manage to do that, we need to think about other impacts – nutrient pollution, soil depletion, groundwater and glacier loss, biodiversity and habitat loss, ocean acidification, and the list goes on.