if enacted, work to restore the region's ecosystems. But it is not clear whether environmental regulations will be enough to compete with the lucrative rubber crops.
We could make as many laws as we want, says Jiang Pusheng, the Communist party secretary of the prefecture.
The large-scale rubber cultivation has taken a heavy toll on the local environment, says Zhu Hua, an ecologist at the XTBG.
Satellite studies show that between 1976 and 2003 forests were cleared at an average annual rate of almost 14
Average rainfall over the region is about 1, 400 millimetres per year, and occurs mostly during the rainy season.
In winter, a dense fog of water vapour trapped beneath the rainforest canopy keeps the myriad plant species alive.
But the winter fog is becoming less pronounced as rubber trees take over the landscape, says Zhu.
and climate change in the region. Using a combination of remote sensing and forest inventory data, Ma Youxin, an ecologist at the XTBG,
and his colleagues have calculated that 6 million tonnes of biomass carbon stock were lost in the prefecture between 1976 and 20031.
This might be affecting the regional climate he suggests. Temperature and precipitation data from meteorological stations in Xishuangbanna show that the region has been warming since the 1960s, with less rainfall and more severe droughts5.
Ma notes that various factors may be contributing to those changes, but stresses that large-scale deforestation is likely to have a role.
Destroying ecosystems will backfire and hit economic development in the long run, argues Cao Min, an ecologist at the XTBG.
Hu Huabin, director of the garden's research-planning and foreign-affairs division, and his colleagues have calculated the changes in the value of ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling,
erosion control, climate regulation, water treatment and recreation due to changes in land use in Menglun, a typical township of 33,500 hectares in Xishuangbanna.
Between 1988 and 2006, rubber plantations increased from 12%of the total land cover to 46,
%whereas forested areas dropped from 49%to 28%6. As a result, the value of ecosystem services dropped by US$11. 4 million.
We will soon hit the wall in an ecological credit crunch, says Cao. This is hardly a viable investment.
But until recently, local officials were evaluated on just one criterion gross domestic product which largely determined the incentives and local policies they established.
however, admit that the environmental problems caused by deforestation need to be tackled. It's a tough call,
Unless the market takes into account the value of ecosystem services lost owing to the cultivation of rubber and other crops,
The future of the botanical garden is linked intimately to the future of the ecological environment of the region,
David Battisti from the University of Washington in Seattle and Rosamond Naylor from Stanford university in California analysed data from 23 global climate models produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 scientific
analysis. Their results showed that there is a 90%chance that most of the tropics and subtropics will experience unprecedented seasonal average temperatures by the end of the twenty-first century.
The pair also used three case studies of areas that had experienced extreme heat weaves in France
France felt some of the greatest impacts of the 2003 heat wave in Western europe, seeing mean temperatures rise to 33 °C between June and August nearly 4 °C higher than the country
building appropriate irrigation systems and creating jobs outside the farming sector in the regions likely to suffer the most could all help to adapt to climate change,
Most work so far has focused on the impact of reduced rainfall and drought on agriculture.
Ringler is working on a project to study the effects of climate change on actual crop yields.
How to adapt to climate change: Nature Newssaleemul Huq of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London, is a pioneer of adaptation to climate change.
Nature News caught up with Huq in Dhaka, Bangladesh, at the Third International Conference on Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change,
which ran from 18-24 february, and asked him about the new centre that he plans to start in the country.
What is the goal of the new International Centre for Climate Change and Development? The pitch is to make Bangladesh the laboratory for adaptation to climate change.
We want to switch the current perception of Bangladesh from the iconic vulnerable country where all these journalists fly to to see vulnerability to make it the iconic adaptive country,
That's a strength we will build on in dealing with the adverse impacts of climate change.
We will start this year with short courses on climate change and development broadly, but specifically focusing on climate change adaptation.
Hopefully by the end of 2010, we can start the first cohort of master's students.
There are other courses on climate change and development being started up. We feel our comparative advantage is the setting in a developing country,
How can people adapt to climate change? One example already adopted in Bangladesh is rainwater harvesting to deal with increasing salinity on the coasts.
what Terry Cannon a social scientist at the University of Greenwich, London calls archetypal ecosystems and livelihood systems so coastal, farming, fishers, people living near forests, drylands, floodplains and so on.
Climate researchers in a spin after satellite loss: Nature Newsthe climate community is counting the costs of losing NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO),
which plummeted into the ocean during launch on 24 february. The satellite would have measured carbon dioxide concentrations in unprecedented detail,
says Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory for Climate Sciences and the Environment in Saclay, France.
satellites like OCO might smooth the passage of future climate agreements: The absence of reliable emissions data is a problem at every level,
says John Burrows, a co-investigator on the OCO project and science director at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford,
and Climate Observation of Planet Earth) would use a laser to actively probe the CO2 in the atmosphere.
A-SCOPE would be able to perform measurements at night and in the presence of cloud cover.
a researcher who worked on an independent feasibility study of A-SCOPE for ESA at the Laboratory for Climate Sciences and the Environment in Saclay.
the climate community will have to settle for GOSAT. The Japanese satellite covers more ground but has less resolution,
It has been exposed to so many rusts in many different environments for a long period of time, and we haven't seen any sign of selection for virulence against that gene.
says Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a non-governmental organization in Beijing.
To many, such as Gong Peng, an ecologist at the University of California in Berkeley, California and the Beijing-based Institute of Remote Sensing Applications
when there is no scientific evidence of danger to health or environment; once approved the crop may be cultivated in all 27 member states.
the dossier on France and Greece will now have to be considered by the environment ministers of the EU nations within the next three months.
Ad infinitum, ad absurdum, says an insider at the environment ministry. The legal framework is based science
and the Bavarian environment minister Markus Soder announced his intention to block cultivation of GM CROPS in the state.
and more nitrogen is lost into the environment. The team tracked the fate of fertilizer nitrogen
an agricultural ecologist at Stanford university in California who was not involved with the study. In the United states, farmers use 100 kilograms per hectare on wheat farmland.
The current level of fertilizer use in the country has serious environmental consequences at both regional and global levels.
While strong winds continue to fan the flames, thousands of homeless families in search of shelter and food are flooding Red cross relief centres set up around the state.
and looks at the environmental fallout from the disaster. Why is this fire so severe?
Combined with record-breaking temperatures, unusually strong winds and alleged arson attacks, the fires have been particularly quick to spread through suburban areas that back onto bushland.
Lightning usually triggers wildfires, but there were no reported thunderstorms in the region until yesterday. This lends weight to the claim that at least some of the fires may have been started by people
perhaps deliberately acts described as mass murder by Australian Prime minister Kevin Rudd. Could climate change be responsible for the wildfire,
or the weather that has sustained it? No single weather event can be attributed to climate change with any degree of certainty.
Warm and dry summers are a typical feature of Australia's subtropical climate, as are frequent wildfires.
Moderate fires are actually ecologically beneficial, and can provide nutrients for fresh plant growth, for example.
Most trees and tall vegetation can survive normal bushfires, and smaller, more frequent fires reduce the risk of a catastrophic blaze.
However, climate models do suggest that Australian summers will get warmer and drier as the century proceeds,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in its most recent Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.
and the amount of rainfall could decrease by up to 80%.%In southeast Australia, the frequency of very high and extreme fire danger days is likely to rise by 4-25%by 2020 and by 15-70%by 2050, according to the IPCC's report.
Ecologists are still assessing the best time of year for setting different types of vegetation on fire, to find the best strategy that causes the least damage to plants.
Tinbergen argued that animals come into the world with instincts already adapted to their environments. Adult gulls have a red spot on their lower bill.
agrees ecologist Hans Kruuk, Tinbergen's biographer4 and former student. He'd often simplify and gloss over complications:
Climate change crisis for rainforests: Nature Newsthe tropical forests of South america, Africa and Asia take up and release huge amounts of carbon each year.
So, are we in danger of losing our closest allies in the fight against climate change?
How is climate change affecting the growth of the forests? Atmospheric CO2 levels are now 40%above
and more negative aspects of climate warming may still be ahead. The biggest worry is drought.
and after the drought revealed that forest patches subjected to a 100-milimetre decrease in rainfall released on average 5. 3 tonnes of carbon per hectare as trees in the area died.
So does climate change mean that rainforests will not be carbon sinks in the future? That's not clear,
because current climate models are not very good at simulating rainfall. The formation and distribution of clouds and precipitation are controlled by atmospheric processes that occur on smaller scales than existing climate models can resolve.
As a result, climate models reproduce observed temperatures reasonably well but diverge rather wildly when it comes to rainfall,
and particularly so in the tropics. Projections of rainfall must therefore be taken with a pinch of salt.
Nonetheless, many scientists do strongly suspect that, in a warmer climate, dry conditions such as those of 2005 will become more frequent in the Amazon region and around the tropics.
If they are right tropical forests could gradually cease to act as a solid buffer against climate change.
How large a carbon sink are the world's tropical forests at the moment? Scientists estimate that mature tropical forests,
which cover about 10%of Earth's land, take up as much as 1. 3 billion tonnes of carbon per year.
This is a substantial amount, equivalent to almost 20%of carbon emissions from fossil-fuel burning. Tropical forest thus accounts for around 40%of the global terrestrial carbon sink.
The good news is undisturbed that old forests keep getting better at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.
Given the many uncertainties, forests have been excluded from national carbon budgets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.
and outside the tropics do indeed continue to grow and accumulate carbon. There is little doubt that tropical forests have acted as a substantial carbon sink for at least the past couple of decades.
Deforestation and forest degradation, through logging, clearing and fire, are only the most obvious problems.
What does all this mean for forest management and the politics of climate change? Climate change and deforestation pose a double threat to rainforests.
Keeping alive large amounts of forest will require big areas to remain undisturbed from logging and clearing.
and more likely to be overrun by climate change. These forests have given us a subsidy for a long time,
says Oliver Phillips, an ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK, who coordinates the Amazon Forest Inventory Network,
whether this is just the calm before the storm. However the pandemic alert level is still at five today, one level below a full pandemic.
The US Environmental protection agency is reviewing its own ruling that will establish greenhouse-gas criteria under the national biofuels mandate.
Tim Searchinger, an environmental researcher at Princeton university in New jersey, identified the indirect effect in 2008 (T. Searchinger et al.
and we are increasing our interest in climate change. In all of the five areas we're interested in health
sustainable agriculture, climate change, growth and governance we're increasing our spend. There is already a huge body of research on climate change,
how does DFID's research fit in with that? It focuses on countries where there is poverty, and it has broadly two themes.
Most climate models don't look with particular granularity at areas around the equator, which is where the majority of poverty tends to be.
and climate change. With climate change there are many things we'd like to see: new technologies or new ways of doing things that take account of changing climate patterns,
particularly changed water patterns, including changed rainfall. In growth, we'd like to see which of the technologies
or systems for doing things will allow developing countries to maximize the speed of their growth.
It's clear that in the long run the way to deal with development is to get countries to grow to the point where they are completely self-sustaining.
US environment agency declares greenhouse gases a threat: Nature Newsthe US Environmental protection agency (EPA) today declared greenhouse gases a threat to public health and welfare, a move that gives the Obama administration broad powers to regulate greenhouse gases without going through Congress.
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said the proposed endangerment finding confirms that greenhouse gases pose a serious problem for current and future generations,
who could face an increased frequency of droughts, air pollution and flooding, as well as a rise in sea level.
says David Doniger, who handles climate policy issues for the Natural resources Defense Council in WASHINGTON DC.
Only one thing was required of the EPA: a determination that carbon dioxide, then deemed a pollutant,
Under President George w bush, EPA scientists and officials prepared an endangerment finding, but the administration delayed a final decision,
On Friday, the EPA included in its endangerment finding not only carbon dioxide but also methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride,
hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons all of the greenhouse gases covered under the United nations climate treaty. The document specifically cited greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles as a danger to public health.
California Democrat Barbara Boxer, who handles climate regulation in the Senate as chairwoman of the Environment and Public works Committee
Administration officials have said repeatedly that they would prefer to work with lawmakers on climate legislation.
says Jeff Holmstead, a former EPA official under Bush who now works for the Washington-based firm Bracewell and Giuliani.
Dying trees may exacerbate climate change: Nature Newsforestry experts have warned again that climate change could transform forests from sinks to sources of carbon.
The carbon storing capacity of global forests could be lost entirely if the earth heats up 2. 5 °Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to a new report1.
It is the most thorough assessment of the negative and positive effects of climate change on the world's forests.
temperate, tropical and subtropical would be affected under four climate-change scenarios: unavoidable, stable, growth and fast growth.
Under these two scenarios, forests will have difficulty adapting to climate change. Droughts, insect invasions, fires and storms would cause widespread forest destruction.
The impacts of these fires and pest infestations will lead to an additional release of carbon into the atmosphere,
which again exacerbates climate change, says Buck. In a warmer world, subtropical and southern temperate forests such as those in the western United states, northern China
This would lead to more carbon being released a recent report in Science2 found that a 2005 drought in the Amazon basin released about 1. 2 billion-1. 6 billion tonnes of carbon (See'Climate change crisis for rainforests'.
the short-term positive impacts would be cancelled out by damage from increased insect invasions, fires and storms.
says Allan Carroll, an insect ecologist with the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British columbia. By 2020, the projected end of the outbreak, about 270 megatonnes of carbon will have been emitted to the atmosphere3.
The report stresses that sustainable forest-management practices urgently need to be put in place around the globe to reduce the vulnerability of forests to climate change.
and there is little being done to monitor the impacts of climate change on forests, says John Innes, a forestry expert at the University of British columbia in Vancouver,
Buck says the report could have an impact on future climate negotiations, including the Copenhagen climate conference in December.
The climate convention is focused on reducing emissions from deforestation, but it has considered not adequately the problem of adaptation.
Policy-makers have indicated that they need more information for their negotiations he adds. Carroll thinks that some governments are now ready to listen.
The mountain pine beetle outbreak and the climate signal associated with it is the canary in the coal mine about future disturbances.
which spent US$278 million and seven years developing OCO, put together a committee of two dozen climate scientists to weigh up various options.
and clouds, could both use more money if they are to stay on schedule. And other new Earth-science missions recommended as priorities by the National Academies also need to get started.
especially considering the importance of enforcing international climate treaties. Try putting a CO2 station the middle of China,
Stuart Pimm and his colleagues at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke university in Durham, North carolina, have found that fewer fires are being lit to clear trees inside reserves in the Brazilian Amazon than outside them.
rainfall variation across the Amazon and El Ni  o droughts are taken into account. Aaron Bruner
to their surroundings. It is one thing to assert that protected areas are a good thing,
and state reserves in an attempt to prevent the new road from becoming a corridor for deforestation.
The federal government has made them a key policy tool in avoiding deforestation, he says, and some states are hoping that a market for carbon credits based on retaining forests will make them money.
Protected areas shouldn't be the only way governments tackle deforestation, says Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental law & Policy in New haven,
Decisive action from Australia could help build momentum for international climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen this December,
says Senator Penny Wong, Australia's minister for climate change and water, who spoke on 30 march in WASHINGTON DC at a talk hosted by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change,
based in Arlington, Virginia. The best chance of an agreement at Copenhagen is for as many countries as possible to act,
In November 2007, a wave of public concern about climate in drought-ridden Australia helped Rudd win office over incumbent John Howard.
Agriculture and deforestation, which account for about 27%of Australia's emissions, would not initially be included.
or the Greens, says Andrew Macintosh, associate director of the Australian National University's Centre for Climate Law and Policy in Canberra.
who worked on climate policy for the Howard administration. Everybody's now panicking that they won't have time to see how this thing will work before they're forced to buy their first permits,
the US Environmental protection agency submitted a proposed finding to the White house, widely thought to state that the greenhouse gases are pollutants endangering the public's health.
president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. In Australia, the recent heat wave, wildfires and floods point to a need for urgent action,
says Chris Cocklin, a sustainability policy expert at James Cook University in Townsville. Every year we wait
He says that it is recognized now that protecting forests is also important for efforts to stabilize climate change
so if we are failing to meet the target it could be even worse for climate stabilization than for biodiversity.
defined by the conservation group WWF as areas containing geographically distinct groups of natural communities that share many of their species and similar environmental conditions,
of global forest cover from the United nations Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge,
John Healy, a forest ecologist at the University of Wales, Bangor, says that the study is important
Lauren Coad, a forest scientist at the Environmental Change Institute University of Oxford, UK, and another of the paper's authors, says that the 10%target is arbitrary but politically important.
On 5 may, the US Environmental protection agency proposed greenhouse-gas standards for various biofuels, but made no provision for electric transport.
Democrats in the House of representatives have included such provisions in the climate legislation that is currently under consideration and President Barack Obama supports the Californian approach as well.
Averting a climate-led food crisis in Africa: Nature Newsmost African farmers will be able to find heat-resistant crop varieties within their own borders or in other countries on the continent,
providing an easy first step towards adapting to climate change, according to new research. A study to be published in the journal Global Environmental Change1 found that by 2050,
most African countries will experience temperatures they have encountered never before over at least half of their crop-growing areas.
and surviving under future climate conditions. It also points to the crop varieties that are most important for adaptation strategies,
Warming is expected generally to cause reductions in rain-fed crop yields and crop suitability in Africa,
Using historical climate-change data, the researchers calculated average temperatures over the past 40 years for the maize-growing areas across all countries in Sub-saharan africa.
They forecasted the rise in temperature using 18 climate-change models, then added these projections to the average historical temperatures to work out the probable temperatures in maize-growing regions in 2050.
the climate will be hotter than anything farmers have experienced before anywhere in Africa. For these countries, there is a much smaller potential pool of foreign genetic resources in
if the varieties that currently grow under higher temperatures those that will be most important for farmers as the climate warms are preserved well.
Gerald Nelson, an agricultural economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute an independent research organization in WASHINGTON DC says the study shows there are some fairly easy ways to start the process of adapting to climate change.
will be vital to take advantage of the existing capacity to deal with climate change. Emile Frison, director-general of Bioversity International, a not-for-profit research organization in Rome, says the study clearly demonstrates the interdependence of countries regarding plant genetic resources.
But he says he is disappointed that the study did not highlight the need for farmers to increase the diversity of crops they grow as a means of adapting to climate change.
and shed it into the environment. Past pandemic viruses have gone also on to become endemic in pig populations.
and plant breeders who are searching for crops that can withstand the effects of climate change or emerging diseases.
They hope the funding will help them to adapt their growing strategies to the increasing temperatures they are experiencing as a result of climate change.
Deforestation emissions on the rise: Nature Newscarbon dioxide emissions from deforestation in the Amazon are increasing as loggers
and land developers move deeper into dense regions of the forest, a new study suggests.
Researchers have analyzed Brazilian deforestation data from 2001-2007 in an effort to quantify emissions as deforestation moves from the forest outskirts to the interior,
according to the study. 1the arc of deforestation started out in the southeast, where forests contain less biomass,
The results underscore the danger posed by deforestation, which is responsible for upward of 20 percent of global carbon emissions.
deforestation in the Amazon averaged about 1. 6 million hectares annually from 2001 to 2007,
Ruth Defries, a deforestation expert at Columbia University in New york says the results are solid
what scientists know about both forest carbon and the drivers of deforestation. It makes perfect sense,
and the alpine tundra ecosystem above the treeline in the Rocky mountains in Colorado. Technology to warm soils is more than a decade old,
says ecologist Scott Bridgham, of the University of Oregon in Eugene. Researchers have tended to shy away from forests.
an ecologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. The most important determinant of where a species can grow is where the juvenile trees can grow
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Peter Reich, a forest ecologist at the University of Minnesota in St paul,
an experiment in the Rocky mountains led by Lara Kueppers, an ecologist at the University of California,
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