The cost to natural ecosystems and to human economies could be devastating. Insects pollinate 80 per cent of wild plants, feed on species that could otherwise become pests, recycle plant and animal waste, and are themselves food for 60 per cent of birds. One calculation places the value of wild insect pollination at $57 billion a year in the United States.

Vanishing insects

Researchers have already expressed concern about the vanishing numbers of butterflies in parts of Europe, possibly as a consequence of climate change. But the latest study does not distinguish individual species or even groups. It concentrates just on the sheer mass of flying insects in a German growing season.

The research – published in the Public Library of Science journal, PLOS ONE – assembles 1,503 records of winged insects, all caught in a standard field trap, in 63 unique locations in protected areas in lowland Germany during spring, summer and early autumn from 1989 to 2016. The data told a disconcerting story: the average seasonal mass of flying insects declined by 76 per cent in under three decades. At the height of summer, the decline reached 82 per cent.

The decline was consistent regardless of the type of habitat – dunes, heathland, rich and poor grasslands, wastelands, shrub cover and so on – and changes of land use or weather, or shifts in the habitat itself offered no obvious explanation. Researchers have identified reasons that one species, or a group of insects, might be at risk from climate change, perhaps because earlier flowering disrupts the feeding cycle or because the mix of species in an ecosystem changes with rising temperatures.

But there has always been an unspoken assumption that other species or groups of species may be likely to benefit from the change, by extending their range. The study is based on observations made only in one country. However, the finding implies that ecosystems across the whole of Europe could be affected, on a huge scale and at every level.

Downward trend

“As entire ecosystems are dependent on insects for food and as pollinators, it places the decline of insect-eating birds and mammals in a new context. We can barely imagine what would happen if this downward trend continues unabated,” says Hans de Kroon, an ecologist at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, one of the authors.

“The only thing we can do right now is to maintain the utmost caution. We need to do less of the things that we know have a negative impact, such as the use of pesticides, and prevent the disappearance of farmland borders full of flowers. But we also have to work hard at extending our nature reserves and decreasing the ratio of reserves that border agricultural areas.”

A version of this article originally appeared on the Climate News Network

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If humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate, then rainfall will diminish by 30 per cent, average temperatures will rise by 4.5 C, and the flow from the Jordan’s most important tributary could fall by 75 per cent. The frequency of droughts will increase threefold, to recur almost every year

And since the kingdom of Jordan − wedged between Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iraq − is already one of the most water-poor nations of the world, the future is challenging.

Political hotspots

Scientists in California report in Science Advances journal that they took a look at future conditions for one of the world’s political hotspots, and focused on the problems for one state in the region.

Pressure on water supplies has been exacerbated by population growth, economic development, dramatic increases in irrigated farming, and abstraction of groundwater from the aquifers that once filled wells and topped up desert oases.

In 1946, a Jordanian citizen could count on 3,600 cubic metres of water a year. Right now, this supply has dropped to 135 cubic metres – way below the 500 cubic metres a year set by the United Nations as the threshold for “absolute scarcity”.

The scientists looked at rates of water use between 1981 and 2010, and then fed in climate scenarios – including the notorious “business-as-usual” one in which humans go on burning fossil fuels – for the decades between 2011 and 2100.

They thought about drought in different ways, such as lower rainfall, higher temperatures, greater evaporation, changes in the way land is used. The changes could happen in Jordan itself, or upstream, in territories controlled by other nations.

The Jordan river is celebrated in three of the world’s great religions, but it is now a modest stream. It rises on the slopes of Mount Hermon, on the border between Syria and Lebanon, flows south through northern Israel, through the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias), whose waters are at their lowest level in a century, then meanders down a 200 km valley and ends in the Dead Sea.

It runs through a region already cruelly hit by drought and by the civil war in Syria that itself may have been precipitated by the same drought.

The Jordan is just one of the world’s 278 waterways that flow across national boundaries or that divide nations − that is, rivers that deliver water to more than one set of peoples. So the study has wider lessons.

Future problems

Researchers have already identified future problems connected with the Nile, one of the other great rivers of biblical history.

But the Nile, for most of its history, has flowed and has delivered annual floods. The River Jordan was never famous for its floods, and its flow is likely to diminish as less water falls in the uplands, and as more people compete for more water from the trickle that is left.

The end of the Syrian civil war upstream could mean a return to farming and even more demand for water that would otherwise flow into the Jordan.

“The ability of the Jordan to satisfy future urban and agricultural water demands will be stressed by cascading effects on its freshwater supply,” says one of the report’s authors, Steven Gorelick, the Cyrus Fisher Tolman Professor in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stamford University, California..

“These impacts are from increasingly severe droughts and eventual agricultural land-use recovery in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war.”

A version of this article first appeared on the Climate News Network

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Both studies come within weeks of a finding that African villagers will conserve their forest plots more carefully if given even quite small payments not to clear the woodland.

Forest conservation is a key part of any global strategy to mitigate climate change: forests are also reservoirs of natural biodiversity and play a vital role in water conservation.

Finding incentives

Their value to the planet is beyond question: it has always been harder, however, to find ways to persuade the people who live in or by the world’s forests that conservation is in their interests too.

But, since concern about climate change began to grow, there has been a series of initiatives to reduce deforestation. A team from the U.S. reports in the journal Ecological Economics that they went beyond simple analysis of canopy loss in the Ecuadorian region of the Amazon basin to find out what compensation payments to landowners did for the diversity of species in the forests.

Not only did payments make a difference; they found that those species being protected were twice as likely to be of commercial value as timber, and also more likely to be at risk of extinction.

Between 2008 and 2014 payments stopped 9 per cent of the forest area from being cleared. And of the 40 hectare (100 acre) forest plots enrolled in the scheme, each contained one or two more species than those in non-enrolled forests.

Huge loss

“More than 7 billion acres of tropical rain forests were destroyed between 1995 and 2015, so policy makers established voluntary compensation programs to slow down tropical deforestation and degradation,” said Francisco Aguilar, a forester at the University of Missouri school of natural resources. 

“While these programmes seem to be making a difference, there aren’t enough on-the-ground evaluation tools to see if biodiversity is being maintained, too. Therefore we looked for other ways to observe the value of these payments for forest conservation.”

The Chinese study told a different story: total woodland cover in China has increased in the last two decades, but the nation has continued to say goodbye to its native forest.

That is because, while the nation has policies to encourage landowners to protect and restore forests, these have not been used to restore the biodiversity that characterises native forest.

Researchers from the U.S. and universities in China and the World Agroforestry Centre point out in the journal Conservation Letters that land owned by rural communities is home to 60 per cent of the country’s forests, including most of the newly-established forest cover.

“However, existing forest policies largely neglect collectively-owned lands and provide no mechanism for restoring native forests on them,” said Fangyuan Hua, of the Kunming Institute of Botany in Yunnan, who is also based at Cambridge University in the UK.

She and colleagues point to a proposed new Mechanism of Compensation for Ecological Protection that could establish effective, socially-just compensation.

“Rural communities would receive badly-needed income, while benefits such as improved soil health, greater biodiversity and reduced erosion would benefit society as a whole. China should not let this opportunity slip away,” she said.

A version of this article first appeared on the Climate News Network

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They have identified a set of erosion processes made 11,500 years ago in the Dead Sea Basin. This would represent the first hint of what increasingly has been called the Anthropocene, a geological era in which the planet’s characteristics are defined by just one species, Homo sapiens.

The evidence comes from the Dead Sea Drilling Project, which provides a sedimentary record of the last 220,000 years. And the scientists have found that erosion rates in the Dead Sea Basin during the Neolithic were, they say, dramatically at odds with the known tectonic and climatic regimes of the period under review, less than 12,000 years ago.

“Human impact on the natural environment is now endangering the entire planet,” said Shmuel Marco, of the Tel Aviv University school of geosciences.

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Agriculture’s mark

“It is therefore crucial to understand these fundamental processes. Our discovery provides a quantitative assessment for the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems.”

That is an academic’s way of conceding that the discovery is of only academic importance: archaeologists have known for more than a century that human civilisation began, roughly 12,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent with the end of the last Ice Age.

Stone Age nomad hunter-gatherers began to domesticate animals, cultivate grains and pulses and plant fruit trees and vines, and then build first small villages, and ultimately great ancient cities.

“Natural vegetation was replaced by crops, animals were domesticated, grazing reduced the natural plant cover, and deforestation provided more area for grazing,” said Professor Marco. “All these resulted in the intensified erosion of the surface and increased sedimentation, which we discovered in the Dead Sea core sample.”

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Human footprint

The scientists report in the journal Global and Planetary Change that they measured a threefold increase in the fine sand carried into the Dead Sea by seasonal floods, and indicated changes in human activity that coincided with, and made possible, the exponential growth of humankind over the last 11,000 years.

The 100 centuries since the end of the last Ice Age have been known as the Holocene. Geologists argue that human-wrought change has altered the Earth so much that it warrants a new name: they propose a new epoch called the Anthropocene.    

Humans have burned fossil fuels at such a rate that they could warm the planet to levels not seen for many millions of years. In doing so, they have altered the climate of the planet so dramatically that there is no fear of any return of the Ice Ages. 

They have built, produced and destroyed on such a scale as to create a geological stratum that will survive as a permanent record of human existence long after Homo sapiens is extinct.

So the Dead Sea evidence is just an indicator of when the era of permanent change may be said to have begun: long before the first bronze or iron tools, humans made their mark with stone adzes, stone sickles and fire, and changed a landscape.

The sediments from the Dead Sea core have already evidenced periods of lush growth and extended drought, and serve as a reminder that the region is still affected by climate change.

Right now, the region is experiencing the worst drought in 900 years. Climate change could deliver even harsher things to come, according to a new study last year. 

So the discovery by the Tel Aviv scientists represents a possible starting point: the story of human civilisation and human-induced climate change had a beginning that has now been identified in the sands of time 11 millennia ago at a depth of 457 metres under the Dead Sea.

The ending has yet to be written, but that too will be recorded, ultimately, in geological strata.

A version of this article first appeared on the Climate News Network

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The Nile is the natural world’s great gift to human history: its annual flood delivered nourishing silt and vital water for the farmers who supported a hierarchy that founded a civilisation.

So vital was the Nile flood that the first hydraulic scientists – priests of the ancient temples – built and managed a series of “nilometers” to detect, predict and monitor the size of the annual inundation.

And so important was this annual flow that it gave the world the biblical story of Joseph, the Hebrew slave who helped Pharaoh make the most of the harvests in seven fat years, to survive seven lean years of drought.

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Need for the Nile

And the Nile now matters more than ever: 400 million people in 11 countries depend on the flow in the Nile basin. Many of them already live at water scarcity levels of below 1,000 cubic metres of water per person per year.

By 2050, the population of the Nile basin will double, and start heading towards a billion. So people need the river more than ever.

But, according to a new study, the Nile is about to become more unpredictable. Climate change, as a consequence of global warming driven by carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere, itself a consequence of ever more prodigal combustion of fossil fuels, will overall mean that more rain will fall and flow down the water courses that feed the Nile system.

But the same computer simulations, reported in Nature Climate Change, also predict that under the notorious “business as usual scenario” in which humans go on exploiting fossil fuels, there will be substantially fewer “normal” years, with flows of between 70 and 100 cubic kilometres of water per year, and more years of either devastating flood or withering drought.

The Nile flow is affected by the cycle of Pacific temperature oscillations: 2015 was an intense El Niño year, which saw a drought in Egypt. The same oscillation’s obverse, La Niña in 2016, was linked to high flooding.

“It’s not abstract. This is happening now,” says Elfatih Eltahir, a civil and environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, and one of the researchers. “We think climate change is pointing to the need for more storage capacity in the future.”

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Management problem

Management of the river’s flow has been a political problem for decades, to be made more complex by the construction of Africa’s largest reservoir, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam near the border with Ethiopia and Sudan.

And the region faces problems that come with climate change, and, in particular, extremes of heat. Researchers have already warned that the Middle East and North Africa could become increasingly inhospitable, and in 2015 Professor Eltahir warned that the Gulf region could become so hot and humid as to be potentially lethal.

He and his co-author arrived at the unhappy forecast for the Nile by testing computer simulations of future climate change and checking flow rates and rainfall records for the past 50 years.

And they find that the average volume of flow could increase by 10 per cent to 15 per cent, but the flow variation from year to year – the shift towards too much or too little – is likely to increase by 50 per cent.

A version of this article first appeared on the Climate News Network

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They have identified 94 vital ecological processes that support healthy ecosystems, and have found that more than 80 per cent of them are already affected by global warming.

With the UN climate change conference taking place in Marrakech, Morocco, the scientists report in Science journal that although global temperatures have risen on average by just 1 C in a century, the living world has begun to respond.

The shifts in global and regional temperatures have altered the genetic diversity of animal populations, skewed predator-prey relationships, shifted the timing of breeding and spawning behaviour, affected the numbers and age structures of animal communities, and even begun to alter the size and coloration of plants, birds and insects.

Protecting ecosystems

“Disruptions scale from the gene to the ecosystem, and have documented consequences for people, including unpredictable fisheries and crop yields, loss of genetic diversity in wild crop varieties, and increasing impacts of pests and diseases,” the scientists warn.

Inger Andersen, director general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), says: “The extent to which climate change is already wreaking havoc with nature is simply astounding.

“These findings send a very clear message to world leaders gathering for climate change negotiations in Marrakech: cutting greenhouse gas emissions and protecting the ecosystems on which we depend is an urgent matter of self-preservation.”

For at least two decades, biologists have been warning that climate change offers a threat to the living world. They have foreseen widespread risk in the plant kingdom and dramatic change in the ranges of plants.

They have also predicted marine ecosystems disruption, amphibian extinction, and even changes to national wildlife calendars.

But human population growth and the loss of habitat remain the principal threats for most wild things.

“The extent to which climate change is already wreaking havoc with nature is simply astounding”

What the latest study has done is to identify all the changes in ecological processes that can be linked specifically to global warming. And of the 94 studies, climate change is at work in 82 per cent of them.

The IUCN scientists examined a huge range of ecosystem studies, including the water flea in the UK, the cornflower in France, the migration of pink salmon in the Pacific, and changes in the patterns of hybridisation between species of chickadees, flying squirrels and trout in the US.

Sex ratios of marine and freshwater species of fish, turtle and lizard populations have all shifted in response to warming. Six species of woodland salamander have dwindled in body size as the thermometer has inched upwards. And one long-distance migrant bird, the red knot, is now producing smaller offspring with smaller bills and a lower chance of survival.

“We now have evidence that, with only around 1 C of warming globally, major impacts are already being felt,” says study leader Brett Scheffers, a member of the IUCN Climate Change Specialist Group and an ecologist at the University of Florida.

“These range from individual genes changing, significant shifts in species’ physiology and physical features such as body size, and species moving to entirely new areas.”

Changes in polar sea ice have hit ivory gulls, ringed seals and polar bears in the northern hemisphere, but – for the moment, at least – have benefited Adélie penguins in the southern hemisphere.

Corals around Japan have shifted their range by up to 14kms a year over the last 80 years. And host plants are dying before the butterflies that feed on them can go into dormancy.

In the Serengeti region of east Africa, a cocktail of extreme weather, abundance of ticks, and suppressed immunity to canine distemper virus may have led to widespread mortality among the lion population.

Temperature extremes

One of the study’s authors, John Pandolfi, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia, warns: “Temperature extremes are causing evolutionary adaption in many species, changing them genetically and physically.

“These responses include changes in tolerances to high temperatures, shifts in sex ratios, reduced body size, and migration of species.”

His Queensland colleague and co-author, James Watson, who is also director of science and research initiatives at the Wildlife Conservation Society, says: “Some people didn’t expect this level of change for decades.

“The impacts of climate change are being felt everywhere, with no ecosystem on Earth being spared. It is no longer sensible to consider climate change as a concern only for the future.”

This post originally appeared on the Climate News Network

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Anand Osuri of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India and colleagues from 14 other institutions report in Nature Communications that large animals play a key role in conserving tropical forests and mitigating climate change – because these are the creatures that spread the seeds of the largest trees that store the most carbon.

This is not a new finding, but an extension of other research into the importance of seed-eaters and the potential hazard to the forests presented by over-hunting.

The new study confirms that the tree species dispersed by large animals differed from those dispersed by smaller animals, or by wind and gravity.

“There is growing recognition that the loss of animals from ecological communities, known as defaunation, poses a threat to carbon storage in tropical forests, but much of this understanding is derived from patterns seen in South American forests alone,” said Mahesh Sankaran of the faculty of biological sciences at the University of Leeds, UK, one of the co-authors.

Evolutionary effect

“Our work shows that carbon storage responses to defaunation will vary across the tropics, largely as a result of differences in the evolutionary histories of forests on different continents.”

But the composition of the forests in which birds and mammals make their homes is also an important part of the climate machine, according to Sarah Frey of the department of forest ecosystems at Oregon State University and colleagues.

They report in the journal Science Advances that old growth forests – the ones with soaring canopy and a dense understorey – could more successfully buffer themselves and their plant and animal ecosystems against the soaring temperatures promised by climate change.

Those forests in the Oregon Cascades that had “vertical complexity” – in other words, foliage all the way down to the ground – could be as much as 2.5°C cooler than plantations of trees or younger, second-growth forests.

“Though it is well-known that closed-canopy forests tend to be cooler than open areas, little is known about more subtle temperature differences between mature forest types,” Frey said. “We found that the subtle but important gradient in structure from forest plantations to old growth can have a marked effect on temperatures in these forests.”

Forest threats

But the preservation of soaring canopy also promises to be a challenge in a rapidly-changing world. David Lindenmayer of the Australian National University in Canberra and Bill Laurance at James Cook University in Queensland argue inTrends in Ecology and Evolution that prolonged drought, invasive species, new pathogens and habitat destruction compound the problems the forests’ oldest, grandest, tallest giants must face.

They considered the potential plight of the giants, the ancient oaks that reach more than 40 metres in Poland’s Bialowieza Forest, the giant baobabs of Madagascar, the towering gums and mountain ash of Tasmania that grow to 90 metres, and the giant redwoods of California that tip 110 metres, trees that have survived for hundreds and even thousands of years.

And big trees matter: they have a giant part in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but their very height means that they must work harder to haul water to the canopy. And their size and staying power mean they provide food and shelter for wildlife.

“They’re really the breadbaskets, the supermarkets, of the forest,” said Professor Laurance. “This is a very environmentally and ecologically important group of organisms, and they need special care and handling.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network.

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