aims to increase food security by finding genetic traits that might be suited to future climates. Samples of wild plants will now be conserved alongside existing stores of domesticated seeds (such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
Canc ae'Â n climate deal United nations climate talks in Canc ae'Â n, Mexico, ended with an agreement by developed and developing countries to reduce greenhouse
Fred Upton (Republican, Michigan) 墉 who has supported frequently environmental legislation 墉 will chair the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Last-minute deal saves climate talks: Nature Newsinternational negotiators did needed what they to do in Canc  n, Mexico,
to keep the United nations climate talks from collapsing into the failure that many had feared. The true extent of their success,
and adapt to climate change. It's not just about process, it's about substance, said Connie Hedegaard, the European union's top climate official, in a news conference as the all-night talks wrapped up.
We have proven that multilateralism can create results. The negotiators built on the broader framework of last year's Copenhagen Accord.
the chief US climate negotiator. But unlike the Copenhagen document, which was blocked by a few countries in a rowdy final session,
while acknowledging that current commitments registered under the UN climate framework do not add up to meeting that goal.
both parties were able to agree on some basic requirements for reporting and verifying climate pledges.
First among them was the deforestation agreement which advocates hailed as a major accomplishment that will bolster bilateral and multi  lateral efforts already under way.
The Canc  n agreement establishes a framework that would allow wealthy nations to pay others for reducing emissions from deforestation
Delegates also agreed to establish a Green Climate Fund to be managed by representatives of the developed and developing world to help channel aid;
Tim Gore, climate-change adviser for Oxfam International, based in Oxford, UK, lauds the Green Climate Fund
but says that countries missed an opportunity to spell out long-term climate funding, perhaps through a levy on international aviation and shipping.
Nonetheless the agreement represents a solid step, says Gore. They are now walking in the right direction,
As a result of climate change and the loss of habitats from where important crops originated, there is a big risk that we will run out of options for natural genetic resistance,
The ruling meant that GM beets which provide about half of the US sugar supply could not be grown until the US Department of agriculture (USDA) completes environmental-impact statements.
since the polar bear in 2008 to be listed as'threatened'under the US Endangered Species Act because of climate change.
Climate meeting In the first major development at the United nations climate talks in Canc  n, Mexico,
Meanwhile, Brazil announced at the talks that deforestation in the Amazon was at a historic low this year,
putting the country on target to reduce deforestation by 80%by 2020 (from a 1996-2005 baseline).
Events Tracking forests by satellite Google unveiled its much-anticipated'Earth Engine'at climate talks in Canc  n, Mexico, last week.
and should help analysis of land-use trends, in support of efforts to halt carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation.
The platform was developed to work with satellite software used by researchers such as Greg Asner, an environmental scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California,
the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Observatory (SOFIA) has published its first images of the sky, focusing on the Orion star-formation complex.
an ecologist at Tohoku University in Japan who led the study. We've found that a single gene can have major effects on speciation and adaptation simultaneously.
says Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary ecologist at the National Museum of Natural history of The netherlands in Leiden,
for any contamination of their neighbours'non-GM fields. The Federal Constitutional Court said on 24 november that the 2004 (amended in 2008) legislation,
Oil-spill budget Scientists have welcomed a long-awaited peer-reviewed US government report on the short-term fate of the oil from the Deepwater horizon spill in the Gulf of mexico this summer.
Susan Lieberman, director of international policy for the Pew Environment Group in WASHINGTON DC, says the agreement showed that management of high seas fisheries was flawed and inadequate.
and food security in response to climate change in the region. go. nature. com/b4gqxb 2 december Commercial spaceflight company Spacex, of Hawthorne, California,
Climate change threatens Europe's living standards: Nature Newsjust a few key aspects of climate change could wipe out up to half of the annual gain in the standard of living for the average European household by 2080.
The European union has seen economic welfare a measure of prosperity grow by an average of around 2%each year.
But the climate of the 2080s is likely to cut that by at least 0. 2-1 percentage points, according to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
which looked at just five impacts of climate change1. On average, that might not impact individuals much.
The report is one of the first to use models that can distinguish differences in climate at the city-scale
and to count up the costs of specific climate impacts such as flooding. Most previous studies have used global models to estimate the costs of climate change.
These are certainly the kinds of studies we want, says Tim Wheeler of the University of Reading, UK,
who studies the impact of climate change on agriculture but was not involved with the work.
and his colleagues considered two models of the climate, along with two scenarios of low and high carbon dioxide emissions, which together predict temperature increases of between 2. 5 Â C and 5. 4 Â C between 1970 and 2080.
Dividing Europe into five regions, they tallied for each region how this climate regime would affect today's economy in five areas agriculture, human health, coastal flooding, river flooding and tourism.
and that the destinations tourists choose are based on the weather. Such assumptions aren't realistic,
such as a shutdown in ocean currents that might dramatically cool Northern europe, and a range of other factors that would have economic impacts such as forestry and biodiversity loss.
it might see a 52%boost in agriculture because of the warmer weather; thousands of people might be spared river floods
as a result of reduced spring snow melt; and 25%more tourists might flock to its shores. Throughout Europe, the expected decrease in deaths thanks to warmer winters could outweigh the increase from summer heatwaves,
for example, Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs published the first batch of plans from the agencies responsible for national infrastructure,
setting out the potential risks associated with climate change, and possible solutions. These range from adopting the same building standards for roads as those for the south of France,
Because of the large uncertainties in the estimated impact of climate change, some researchers prefer to avoid putting dollar figures on climate-change costs at all.
The United kingdom's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change concluded that climate change might wipe 5-20%off global GDP by the beginning of the next century.
which considers just four economic impacts of climate change, and looks at Europe alone. Wheeler says that, in general,
He adds that the costs of dealing with the environmental and human problems already facing the world could swamp the additional costs of future climate change the cost of achieving the United nations Millennium Development Goals,
Malaysia leads way in study of deforestation: Nature Newsas Malaysia prepares to convert around 7, 000 hectares of forest into an oil-palm plantation,
ecologists are starting one of the biggest environmental projects ever run. The ten-yearlong Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems project will be launched on 29 january in the forests of the Maliau Basin on the island of Borneo,
where the study is based. It is being funded with 30 million ringgits (US$10 million), from Sime Darby,
and the resources and processes provided by the ecosystem as the forest is logged and replanted with oil palms.
says Rob Ewers, an ecologist at Imperial College London and the project's scientific director.
They will also study how patches of conserved forest totalling 750 hectares contribute to the environmental effects of the logging.
and manage oil-palm plantations to minimize the environmental impacts. We want to use the data to optimally design future forest clearance for agricultural income and biodiversity.
and minimize environmental costs? asks Ewers. Researchers have begun already sampling birds and will begin to do the same for insects in February.
Tim Killeen, an ecologist with Conservation International, a not-for-profit environmental group, says that he is glad to see that someone is doing this study.
We are expanding our vision to look beyond natural ecosystems and towards improving functional landscapes so they are not just making food,
for example, but also providing ecosystem services. This kind of study looks at that question in a well organized way,
Permit for mountaintop mine revoked The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) has revoked for the first time a permit for mountaintop mining.
But the EPA has ruled that Spruce 1 Mine in the Appalachian mountains of West virginia presented major environmental and water-quality concerns,
Climate records Last year was one of the two warmest years on record, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration (NOAA.
Spill science scarce The presidential commission investigating last year's huge oil spill in the Gulf of mexico has called for more science in federal decisions on oil production and spill response.
In its final report, released last week, the commission asked Congress to supply more funding for scientific and environmental studies
One stresses economic growth but gives low priority to the environment, whereas the other emphasizes feeding the world while preserving ecosystems.
The second scenario, based on a food intake of 3, 000 kcal per person per day in all regions of the world, including 500 kcal per day of animal origin,
The report leaves out details on issues such as land use, biofuel and climate change, as these will be addressed in future studies by the agencies'joint interdisciplinary Agrimonde platform,
living standards, climate and other factors call for new avenues of research, according to the report. The two agencies have started already work on several programmes in response to questions raised by their study.
Pioneer says that field studies show its new hybrids will increase maize yields by 5%in water-limited environments
Policy Emissions control The US Environmental protection agency's first controls on greenhouse-gas emissions came into effect on 2 january.
contributing to climate change. The'blue carbon'concept aims to protect some of the most endangered wetlands by assigning credits to their stored carbon2.
director of the marine climate change programme at Conservation International, the environmental group in WASHINGTON DC that has been promoting the concept alongside the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland,
and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission based in Paris. The effort faces some sizeable scientific hurdles.
Stephen Crooks, climate change programme manager at the environmental consultancy ESA PWA in San francisco, California, estimates that emissions from drained mangroves and salt marshes total half a billion tonnes
By comparison, deforestation contributes 10-25%of emissions. But Crooks acknowledges that his estimate is limited based on data and many assumptions.
some 12%smaller than the previous estimate from the United nations. Some scientists argue that despite their ecological importance,
Pollution fight US oil giant Chevron of San Remon, California, says that it will appeal a US$8. 6-billion fine imposed for environmental damages by an Ecuadorian court on 14 february,
They can have severe socioeconomic, health and environmental impacts: some of the most damaging diseases are Rift valley fever (Phlebovirus),
Perchlorate ruling The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) will start to regulate perchlorate in drinking water 墉 a significant moment in a debate that has raged since the late 1990s,
Perchlorate interferes with the production of thyroid hormones and mainly leaches into the environment from its use in the manufacture of rocket fuel and explosives.
the EPA had decided in 2008 that regulation was needed not. Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, announced the reversal of that decision on 2 february.
Research Record ice core drilled Researchers at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Ice Core project have drilled a column of ice nearly
should provide a 100,000-year climate record. It is the longest ice core ever drilled solely by US scientists
State of the World's Forests 2011 says that the rate of deforestation has slowed in the past decade,
The report emphasizes that local communities'knowledge about managing forests should be taken into account in top-down efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation.
The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, a deal between the forestry industry and environmental groups, aims to set aside nearly 30 million hectares of northern wilderness and subject a further 42 million to strict tree
president of the Forest Products Association of Canada in Ottawa, lauded former antagonists for working together on how to meet the needs of humanity without trashing the environment, our own nest.
Under the agreement, 21 forestry companies and 9 environmental groups are discussing ways to preserve large sections of Canada's northern forest a big storehouse of carbon and a crucial habitat for the threatened woodland caribou
in exchange, the environmental groups have stopped urging buyers to boycott the companies'products. The parties now have one year left to make significant progress on two decision tracks.
said Steven Kallick, director of the International Boreal Conservation Campaign of the Pew Environment Group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the Washington briefing.
The original agreement pledged to respect the principles of ecosystem-based management, an approach that takes into account human needs as well as ecological concerns.
This would include the needs of aboriginal communities and others who are tied economically to the forest, such as trappers and tourism organizations.
Brooks says that the final plan must respect all aspects including human ones of ecosystem-based management.
The 8, 000-year-old climate puzzle: Nature Newsscientists have come up with new evidence in support of the controversial idea that humanity's influence on climate began not during the industrial revolution,
but thousands of years ago. Proposed by palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman in 2003, the theory says that human influences offset the imminent plunge into another ice age
and helped create the relatively stable climate that we are familiar with today. It has been panned repeatedly as implausible by palaeoclimate researchers,
but eight years on, Ruddiman and others say that they have the data to support early anthropogenic climate change.
Researchers presented some of the work this week at the American Geophysical Union's Chapman Conference on Climates, Past Landscapes and Civilizations in Santa fe, New mexico.
Switzerland, led by climate modeller Thomas Stocker, who is co-chairman of Working group I for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The study takes advantage of the fact that plants preferentially take up the isotope carbon-12,
whereas no one can refute the idea that humans played a significant part in influencing the Holocene climate,
Both Kaplan and Fuller say that their focus is not so much on Ruddiman's specific hypothesis as on the idea that humans might have influenced climate well before the industrial revolution.
Jill Anderson, an evolutionary ecologist at Duke university in North carolina, and her team had discovered previously thousands of seeds in the guts of Colossoma macropomum fish in Peru's Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve1.
and her colleagues radio-tracked 24 of the animals during three flood seasons at the reserve
although written about for decades as of great potential value in this important ecological role, says Michael Horn,
Many fish may provide a hugely important link between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and not only in the Amazon.
In the African tropics, for example, it is likely that fish distribute grass seeds, and fish in North america and Europe probably also move seeds around.
a worrying development given the emerging proof of the importance of these animals to the ecosystem (see also:
Nature Newsto ecologists overseas, the invitation might sound tempting. It offers travel to Australia and unspecified remuneration to serve on an advisory panel considering a juicy scientific question:
More than 100 Australian ecologists have signed a letter to the Australian government denouncing the trial. The letter's organizers claim that the trial is a naked attempt to use the imprimatur of science to allow cattle to graze in an ecologically sensitive area,
an ecologist at the University of Melbourne who helped to organize the protest letter. The decision in question is the return of cattle to portions of the 646,000-hectare park, a landscape of deep ravines, high plateaux and snow gum trees.
and manure damage sensitive wetland ecosystems. Coleman says that the cattle do stop fires, by eating the vegetation that forms potential fuel,
and that ecologists have ignored mountain cattlemen's knowledge of the land. We've got generational knowledge that goes back 150 years in my family.
Libby Rumpff, an ecologist at the University of Melbourne and an organizer of the scientific protest, disagrees.
and Environment have told the government that the trial may amount to repetition of previous work.
an ecologist at the University of Sydney, has been invited by the Victoria government to lead the program of research that will accompany the trial, according to Victoria's website.
but merely testing methods suitable for measuring the impact of cattle on fuels and on ecosystem functions.
Australia's environment minister, demanded that the state ask the federal government for approval to release the cattle.
Winter snows will arrive soon, and the cattle would have been taken down from the mountains by Mid-april anyway.
The ecologists have been indoctrinated by politicians on the left, he says, whereas the coalition is trying to deliver on a political promise.
Ninety per cent of the general public couldn't give a shit about the cattle or the environment,
Biodiversity's ills not all down to climate change: Nature Newsclimate change is affecting the world in many ways.
But attempts to directly link local changes in species distribution and biodiversity to climate warming hold little promise, ecologists warn in Nature Climate Change1.
including climate change. But when it comes to managing and conserving species and ecosystems, trying to figure out exactly how much of any one particular decline is due to greenhouse gases is not necessarily helpful,
and may actually not be possible. You can, of course, attribute various individual biological changes to climate events,
and even climate change, provided you have long-term studies. But linking observed changes to the man-made component of climate change requires a different scale.
That level of attribution is best done for large areas the size of Northern europe or the western United states. The more local a scale you look at,
the harder it is to link single events to greenhouse-gas-driven global climate change.
Take the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly Euphydryas editha quino of Southern California. We do know that climate change is important:
if you dry and warm the butterfly's habitat it will cause increased starvation and extinction.
It just doesn't make any sense to ask what percentage of the decline is due to anthropogenic climate change from a scientific standpoint it doesn't have much value.
and set up new reserves that anticipate climate change that is, placed in areas the butterflies can colonize as climate shifts.
So how is climate change affecting Earth's flora and fauna? Climate change is impacting biodiversity worldwide.
Spring comes, on average, two weeks earlier. Almost two-thirds of species, including many birds, frogs, butterflies, trees and grassland flowers, breed or bloom earlier.
More than 50%are changing where they live. There is a consistency in the global pattern of more than 1,
Plants and animals often respond to rising winter temperatures whether due to climate change or to increased urbanization,
It does partly depend on how climate sensitive a species is. But we shouldn't focus too much on how a species is impacted by climate change on its own
that's much too narrow a focus. Other factors are often far more important and the ultimate impact of climate change on any given population is going to be dependent upon how stressed that population is by these other problems.
Scientists have linked previously the extinction of Costa rica's iconic mountaintop golden toad Bufo periglenes to climate change.
Was that premature? No I believe that was a correct assessment. The golden toad was endemic to Costa rica's Monte Verde preserve.
So yes, climate did cause the extinction, but we have only 17 years of data.
whether or by how much such events are more likely under a greenhouse-gas-driven global climate.
Are these not clear fingerprints of climate change? Sure, the sea urchin is probably shifting due to warming waters.
As it shifts, it's been devastating local ecosystems. But it may not have become invasive
So there's an interaction between climate change and overfishing. Same with coral reefs: the fact that many are dying after high ocean temperature events may have something to do with humans stressing them with pollution, dynamite fishing, recreational activities and coastal development.
Finland and Estonia are linked to long-term climate warming in Europe. But if you go to one population in the UK
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supports an evermore-detailed approach to biological attribution not least to inform conservation efforts.
to pin down how greenhouse warming affects the likelihood of specific weather-related events, such as heatwaves, heavy rain and floods?
No, we have very different approaches. If climate scientists can get to where they feel comfortable in terms of assigning attribution on very local scales, fine.
We would even benefit from it. But biology and ecology are fundamentally different from and
I argue more complex than climate science humans are doing much more harm to wild species than just adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
How much wildlife is harmed by global warming depends on how stressed the system is by all the other things humans are doing locally.
or at least knew nothing of the threat they might pose to native ecosystems. So Hulme decided to check
With climate change altering growing conditions and populations rapidly increasing sharing crop diversity is no longer optional,
Winning projects included a scheme to develop strategies for growing potatoes in the Peruvian Andes in the increased temperatures resulting from climate change.
says that conserving global plant genetic diversity is the only way to develop crops that are adapted to changing climates and resistant to new diseases.
says Lian Pin Koh, an ecologist with The swiss Federal Institute of technology Zurich and a member of the study team.
however, the team found significantly greater deforestation than the average. In the Indonesian provinces of North Sumatra and Bengkulu,
Climate-smart agriculture is needed: Nature News2011's biggest problem will be food, John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, told a meeting in London on 28 february.
Agriculture must become central to future climate-change discussions, he said, because it contributes a significant proportion of global carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions.
The need to tackle climate change while producing more food to feed the world's growing population means that climate-smart agriculture is the only way forward,
he told scientists, farmers and policy experts at the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science.
when they meet at the end of the year to negotiate a climate deal at the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South africa.
and then suddenly become wet a situation that may become more frequent with climate change.
while tackling climate change. The scientists, who are working together as the Commission on Sustainable agriculture
and Climate Change, held their first meeting in WASHINGTON DC on 15 february. They will deliver their findings in a report to world leaders at the UNFCCC meeting at the end of the year in Durban.
according to a plan approved by the Prime minister's Council on Climate Change on 23 february.
Subject to expected parliamentary approval, this'National Mission for a Green India'墉 one of eight missions under a national action plan on climate change 墉
It is the third time that Australia's government has vowed to tax carbon emissions to tackle climate change;
Oil-spill health study A study claiming to be the largest ever to follow up the long-term effects of an oil spill on human health was launched on 28 february (see nihgulfstudy. org.
its National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences hopes to spend a decade following 55,000 of the workers
and volunteers who supported the cleanup effort after the Deepwater horizon disaster in the Gulf of mexico. Booking a rocket The first contracts have been signed to send researchers into suborbit using commercial spacecraft.
Climate inquiry An inquiry has exonerated climate scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration in WASHINGTON DC of data manipulation or unethical behaviour.
but environmental campaigners such as the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, bemoaned the fact that politicians had lifted protection rather than waiting for due process under the Endangered Species Act.
focusing on topics including climate change. These are networks of industry and academic partnerships with EIT funding of ¢ 308.7 million (US$439 million) to 2013.
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