A multi-year drought from 2000 to 2004 that lowered crop productivity and reduced water levels across western North America may become "the new normal" over the next century as the climate warms, a new study says.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

The once-magnificent tropical forests of Borneo have been decimated by rampant logging and clearing for oil palm plantations. But in the Malaysian state of Sabah, a top official is fighting to reverse that trend by bringing sustainable forestry to the beleaguered island.

For most people, Borneo conjures up images of a wild and distant land of rainforests, exotic beasts, and nomadic tribes. But that place increasingly exists only in one's imagination, for the forests of the world's third-largest island have been rapidly and relentlessly logged, burned, and bulldozed in recent decades, leaving only a sliver of its once-magnificent forests intact.

Flying over Sabah, a Malaysian state that covers about 10 percent of Borneo, the damage is clear. Oil palm plantations have metastasized across the landscape. Where forest remains, it is usually degraded. Rivers flow brown with mud.

The fate of one sprawling tract of rainforest in Sabah, originally designed to be selectively logged and provide steady income for the people of the state, tells the tale of what has happened to Borneo's forests - and highlights a possible path to restore some of them. Covering an area of 3,861 square-miles, nearly half the size of New Jersey, the Yayasan Sabah forest tract is run by a state foundation that is supposed to oversee the selective logging of the forest and channel the profits to health and education programs.

Instead, following a pattern that has devastated tropical forests in much of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, politicians have used the Yayasan Sabah forest as a personal honey pot, logging it to enrich themselves, finance their political campaigns, and reward their patrons. The Yayasan Sabah forest was supposed to be sustainably logged over an 80-year period, but instead roughly 75 percent of Yayasan Sabah has been far more intensively logged. Today, Yayasan Sabah retains only fragments of its primary lowland forest, and the foundation's revenues for health and education have nearly dried up.

"Yayasan Sabah has been a cash register for politicians," said one senior forestry official. "Yayasan Sabah has huge area but is nearly insolvent because all the timber money has been taken out by politicians."

Now, the director of forestry for the state of Sabah, Sam Mannan, is trying to reverse the region's trend toward deforestation, moving forward with a plan to convert 10 percent of Yayasan Sabah to oil palm plantations to generate revenue, and then gradually restore most of the rest of the tract so it can be sustainably logged. Whether he will succeed or simply end up with even more of Yayasan Sabah being converted to oil palm plantations remains an open question.

In addition to trying to turn around the situation in Yayasan Sabah, Mannan has so far successfully protected some of the last remaining lowland primary forests in Sabah. Indeed, if you travel far enough in Sabah, some of Borneo's most treasured forest still exists. Colorful hornbills soar over the broccoli-like canopy, orangutan nests sit high in the treetops, and clear streams cascade over waterfalls.

The situation in much of the rest of Borneo is far worse. Forests in the neighboring Malaysian state of Sarawak have seen an environmental Armageddon over the past 30 years, its woodlands suffering multiple cycles of intensive logging, often a prelude to rapid conversion to oil palm plantations. Sarawak's chief minister and his close family are under investigation for acquiring billions of dollars in overseas assets from their timber dealings. In April, documents leaked by Malaysia's Anti-Corruption Commission revealed the transfer of millions of dollars to bank accounts linked to Sabah's chief minister, Musa Aman.

Meanwhile, the four Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan, which make up nearly all of the rest of Borneo, have suffered a plague of illegal logging; from 1985 to 2001, 56 percent of protected lowland forest was chopped down. From 2001 to 2008, nearly 9,000 additional square miles of tropical forest were cleared completely.

"Sabah is still way ahead of Sarawak and Kalimantan: surviving primary forests areas are being conserved, reforestation and forest restoration is happening, and encroachers have moved out of forest reserves," said John Payne, a conservation scientist with the Borneo Rhino Alliance. "The fear is the next government will convert forest concessions to oil palm. So Sam Mannan seems to be doing everything he can to publicize and put money into those reserves. His biggest achievement is securing the lowland forest reserves."

Sabah's forest management was born of good intentions. In 1966, the government set aside a vast tract of remote rainforest to be managed by the Yayasan Sabah foundation. The first years of the scheme went well. Forest regulations were generally respected and a generation of Sabahans benefitted from millions of dollars in scholarships and poverty alleviation programs. Businesses did well, too: the coastal of city of Sandakan - Sabah's wood processing and trading hub - boasted in the early 1980s of having the highest concentration of millionaires on the planet, mostly from the state's timber industry.

Forests not only became the state's principal rainy day fund, but eventually came to be seen as a piggy bank for politicians. The biggest potential beneficiary was the chief minister, who controls both Yayasan Sabah and appoints the director of the forestry department, obliging the most senior forest official to abide by his orders.

Soon, the push to generate more cash began to take a toll, and in the 1970s logging accelerated in forests across Borneo, including Sabah, due to rising global demand for timber products. The situation for forests outside the area designated as permanent forest estate was worse due to the emergence of a new and highly profitable crop: oil palm. Oil palm plantations in Sabah grew from almost nothing in the mid-1980s to covering nearly a fifth of Sabah's landmass by 2010.

Inside the Yayasan Sabah concession, logging was rampant, with companies cutting ever-smaller trees and using helicopters to harvest steep slopes. Yayasan Sabah's revenue plunged with declining timber yields. The situation reached a crescendo in 1998 when the then-chief minister signed off on a massive pulp mill to be run as a Malaysian-Chinese joint venture. The mill would require nearly a third of Yayasan Sabah's concession to be cleared and planted with fast-growing acacia. When Sam Mannan, then director of forestry, objected to the project, he was relieved of his post by Sabah's chief minister.

Parts of Yayasan Sabah were laid to waste, but it was all for naught, as the pulp project never materialized. Even with the official abandonment of the mill project in 2001, logging continued, eventually serving as a catalyst for early re-logging of nearly three-quarters of Yayasan Sabah. Logging generated a short upswing in revenue for Yayasan Sabah, but it wasn't sustainable. The long-term economic outlook for Yayasan Sabah was bleak.

Eventually restored to his post as director of forestry, Sam Mannan proposed a radical plan for addressing Yayasan Sabah's budget shortfall: establish oil palm plantations on 100,000 hectares of land cleared for the non-existent pulp plantations. His thinking was that the revenue created by oil palm would generate the needed funds for Sabah's social programs. Otherwise, with the state desperate for money, he feared that Sabah officials would remove Yayasan Sabah from the forestry department's control and turn it over permanently to oil palm developers. "If Yayasan Sabah fails, we'll all eat grass," Mannan said in an interview. "It won't be able to meet its economic obligation."

Glen Reynolds, an ecologist with the Royal Society Southeast Asia Research Program, last year published a seminal paper with John Payne on the condition of Sabah's forests, saying that a reasonable amount of biodiversity can survive in partially logged forests, whereas "catastrophic" losses occur when there is conversion to plantations. "The problem is whenever there are calls for money, further areas could be pared away," said Reynolds. "The big risk in Yayasan Sabah is conversion of what's left of the lowland forest."

Some of Sabah's forests are so wrecked they might not recover to their original structure of a closed canopy of tall hardwoods. So the department of forestry is pushing active management of forest areas, cutting choking vines, and doing "enrichment planting" with native trees. The long-term plan is to restore the forests to a state of health where they can be logged again, albeit under more stringent guidelines set forth under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an eco-certification body. The Sabah Forestry Department is targeting 2014 for full certification of Sabah's forest concessions. At the same time there is experimentation occurring in parts of the Yayasan Sabah concession, including the world's first Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) project.

"One of the strategies within the forestry department is linking with the FSC because it binds loggers to compliance," said one forestry official. "So if a chief minister or a politician wants to log, it becomes controversial because we've got areas that are FSC-certified. It becomes more difficult for politicians to use as a personal ATM."

What happens in Sabah could portend what transpires on a larger scale across Borneo. Sabah has committed its forest reserves to the Heart of Borneo initiative, a plan pushed by WWF to protect and link remaining quality forest areas across the island. (Sarawak's commitment is virtually nil.) Forever Sabah, a grassroots push to transition Sabah toward a sustainable, low-carbon economy, has been created. The question going forward is whether there will still be enough forest across Borneo to save.

"We can't do business as usual," said Mannan. "We don't have huge areas of virgin forest available for logging anymore."

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

By Ed Struzik

With melting sea ice opening up previously inaccessible parts of the Arctic Ocean, the fishing industry sees a potential bonanza. But some scientists and government officials have begun calling for a moratorium on fishing in the region until the true state of the Arctic fishery is assessed.

When scientists with the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program began tracking 323 vertebrate species across the entire Arctic several years ago, most assumed that many fish and animals would not fare well in a region where rapid warming is causing such profound changes.

But in a report released recently at the International Polar Year (IPY) conference in Montreal, that scenario isn't turning out to be as dark as some had originally thought. While it appears that ice-dependent mammals such as polar bears and beluga whales could be in trouble, scientists are reporting that the great bowhead whale that was nearly hunted to extinction in the early twentieth century is making a remarkable comeback. And commercial fish populations such as Pacific herring and ocean perch appear to be expanding dramatically in some places.

Not surprisingly, the world's fishing industry is watching the swift disappearance of Arctic sea ice and the potential fishing bonanza with great interest. But so are a growing number of scientists, government officials, and conservationists, who are calling for a fishing moratorium in this area until the health of fish stocks can be assessed.

A key concern is the so-called 1.1 million-square-mile "donut hole" in the central Arctic Ocean that does not fall under any country's jurisdiction. Until a few years ago, this part of the Arctic Ocean was locked in ice for virtually 12 months a year. But now climate change is melting that barrier and making it seasonably accessible. In 2007, when sea ice cover in the Arctic was at a record low, 40 percent of the "donut hole" was open.

What fish live in that area now and in what numbers, and which species might move in as sea ice continues to melt, are not well understood. But a number of factors - including melting sea ice, warmer and fresher water, and shifting gyres and currents - appear to be improving productivity in many areas, including those that used to be covered in ice for most of the year.

No one believes that the central Arctic Ocean is ripe for fishing just yet. But because there are snow crab on the Chukchi Shelf and fish such as Arctic cod along the shallower perimeters of the region, it wouldn't require a long migration for these fish to move in and out of the "donut hole." The small Arctic cod is not what commercial fishermen are after. But because they are found across the Arctic region and play a key role in supporting larger fish populations, they will play a pivotal role in the expansion of Arctic fisheries.

Concern about the exploitation of this untapped resource in the heart of the Arctic is growing.

"I was there in 1992 when the last trawler brought in the last catch of cod off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador," says Trevor Taylor, a one-time fishing vessel captain and former Minister of Fisheries for the Canadian province. "It's been 20 years since the cod fishery was shut down, and although there are hopeful signs of a recovery, it's going to be a long time, if ever, before it's even half recovered. The same thing is going to happen in the Arctic if we open the door to commercial fishing without understanding the presence and abundance, the structure and movements, and the role these fish play in the broader ecosystem of the central Arctic Ocean."

Taylor is now policy director for Oceans North Canada, which advocates science-based policies on fishing, shipping, and energy development in the Arctic Ocean that are consistent with indigenous land claims and traditional practices. The group is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts in the United States, which worked to persuade more than 2,000 scientists from 67 countries to sign a letter at the IPY meeting in April calling for the development of an international fisheries agreement that would protect the waters of the central Arctic Ocean. Other Arctic waters within 200 miles of coastlines are governed by various nations as part of their Exclusive Economic Zone, or EEZ, rights.

As indifferent as governments often are in responding to such petitions, some Arctic states are paying attention to the issue of fishing in the polar regions. The U.S. closed its Arctic waters to fishing in 2009 to allow scientists to assess the changes that are taking place in the marine ecosystem. While the new regulations close all U.S. waters north of Alaska's Bering Strait, fishing in the Bering and Chukchi seas continues.

Canada is considering doing the same thing on its side of the Beaufort Sea in advance of energy developments that could have an impact on a fishery that is only beginning to be inventoried.

Marine conservationists see this as a good start because management of the world's fish stocks has generally been disastrous. The United Nations estimates suggest that 28 percent of global fisheries are overexploited, 3 percent are depleted, 52 percent are fully exploited, and just 1 percent is recovering.

Large parts of the Arctic, particularly those on the periphery of the Arctic Ocean, are fertile fishing grounds that have already been overexploited. From the 1960s to the 1980s, fishing trawlers scooped up - often illegally - redfish and round-nosed grenadier in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, to the point that stocks there are now almost completely depleted. Both Barents Sea cod and Bering Sea pollock have also suffered from extreme harvesting pressures.

The situation could actually be far worse than has been estimated. A team of University of British Columbia researchers reported last year that fisheries catches in the Arctic totaled 950,000 tons from 1950 to 2006. That's almost 75 times the amount reported by fishermen to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) during this period.

Oceanographer Eddy Carmack has conducted 90 field investigations in rivers, lakes, and seas and published over 170 scientific articles during his long career. Having first traveled to the Arctic in 1969, the year of Woodstock, he is only half joking when he says that "things are a-changing" in the region. While he doesn't doubt that some fish populations are expanding, he says the issue of harvesting is not as simple as one might imagine.

"You can't expect to exploit one species in the Arctic when you really don't have any idea what role that species plays in a larger ecosystem that is undergoing dramatic change that we really don't understand very well," he said.

Carmack and other oceanographers have been studying life on the sea bottom and the changes that are occurring as a result of early ice melt. In the Bering Sea, they're already seeing a shift from an Arctic ecosystem to one that is sub-Arctic. Everything, from amphipods to gray whales, is moving northward.

Henry Huntington, science director for Pew's Arctic Program, says the time has come for Arctic states to act fast, especially in areas such as the central Arctic that are currently unprotected. "For the central Arctic Ocean, the rapid retreat of summer sea ice means that the international waters are accessible to fishing vessels for the first time in recorded history," Huntington said. "Everywhere else in the world, fisheries have rapidly expanded into accessible waters. Rather than see a repeat of the sad history of fisheries in most of the world - when we were left to wonder where the fish went and start some science and management later - we have a chance to get the science and management in place before fishing begins."

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

Budget shortfalls, launch failures, and mission changes have caused a decline in U.S. earth observation satellites over the last five years, a trend that could undermine the nation's ability to forecast weather and monitor natural disasters and climate change, according to a new report. The report, published by the National Research Council (NRC), said that a lack of satellite-based earth monitoring technologies "will have profound consequences on science and society." One factor slowing progress is a shortage of reliable medium-class launchers to send satellites into space, the NRC said. The report said that NASA is making up for some of the shortfalls in earth observation systems by increasing sub-orbital missions and jet flights, and by cooperating on missions with other countries that have launched earth observation satellites. "It's likely our capabilities will decline fairly precipitously at just the time they're most needed," Dennis Hartmann, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and chair of the committee that wrote the report, told the New York Times. "If nothing is changed, we're predicting to be down to 25 percent of our current capabilities by 2020."

Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360