No, this isn’t a very good photo, is it? That’s probably because it’s an insanely good photo! Take a deep breath…and fall into White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, courtesy of Lightchaser/Flicker and shared through The Nature Conservancy’s Flickr Group.

Check out all The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images, submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you — at my.nature.org.

1. Seems fishy, but overall U.S. water consumption has declined in the past 25 years — despite a growing population and increasing water use. Huh? Tina Casey at CleanTechnica says it’s because of more efficient ag irrigation systems and better cooling schemes for power plants (which still amount to 50% of U.S. water use).
2. Barcelona climate talks update: Jeff Tollefson at Climate Feedback says the E.U. might accept a political agreement on climate at Copenhagen rather than a binding legal treaty. (Trust me: You need to know what that means.) Grist reports that European climate negotiators say success at Copenhagen is up to President Obama.
3. In case you missed it, a U.S. Senate committee passed a climate bill yesterday, with all Republican committee members boycotting the vote.  The Vine yawns, saying the real action on the bill will be separate negotiations between Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham.
4. Where could coastal wetlands go when sea level rises? Um…nowhere, says a new report in Environmental Research Letters — more than 50% of the land along the U.S. Atlantic coast that could have been used for inland wetlands migration is developed or soon will be. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)
5. Speaking of on the move, half of 36 Atlantic Ocean fish stocks have moved north as ocean temps have warmed, says a new study by NOAA researchers. Some species have left U.S. waters altogether! Just wait until Glenn Beck gets wind of these treasonous climate-change dodgers!! (Hat tip: Yale Environment 360.)

As the “energy sprawl” idea has been discussed and debated in the media, I (one of the paper’s co-authors) have  grown a thick skin against criticism. Perhaps the harshest piece of invective, however, still bothers me: the criticism by Matt Wasson in the Huffington Post.

The factual criticisms Matt makes aren’t that troublesome to me, and I can understand his perspective as someone who works to minimize the impact of coal mining on the environment. Matt makes the point that an acre of coal mining is not necessarily the same biodiversity impact as an acre with wind turbines, a point we totally agree with (that’s why we made it in the original paper!). And of course our one measure of land-use can’t capture all of the myriad ways energy production affects the environment; it was never meant to.

What bothers me is the accusation that my scientific paper is “poisoning” the public debate about climate change and energy policy. Indeed, Matt advocates “burning” his post (and perhaps my paper), as if retaining memory of energy sprawl issues was morally corrupting. What does this say about the way we today regard the meaning and responsibility of science to advocacy…and the fragility of public discourse?

I suspect similar criticism will be made of the recent paper by Searchinger and others in Science, which makes the point (intellectually related to the energy sprawl issue) that if land-use change for energy production is not accounted for in climate change policy, extra carbon could be released. From a certain perspective, Searchinger’s article is inconvenient for environmental NGOs just as much as my paper is…if not more so.

But what an anemic view of democracy! As if a scientific paper which complicates the advocacy position of environmentalists is somehow morally equivalent to the myth of death panels hidden in the health care bill! Matt’s title reflects a misunderstanding of science’s relationship to the environmental movement. It is not the job of scientists to produce papers that reinforce a preconceived advocacy position. Rather, it is the job of scientists to lay the facts on the table, so those facts can inform advocacy.

To be sure, any one scientific paper can be interpreted different ways be different actors. Different environmental NGOs may have different positions on what Searchinger’s article means for their advocacy on energy policy, for example, but they can still acknowledge that there is a scientific issue there to consider.

And what an anemic view of the media! As if the political discussion about climate change is so fragile that our messaging must be simple and without nuance! I think this is a very TV-era mentality, where infrequent, carefully-worded press releases could control the public debate. While some of that phenomenon still exists, in a world where thousands of scientists and tens of thousands of activists and lobbyists work on climate change issues, it strikes me as a bit naïve.

I would rather make sure that the scientific facts are out there, and then trust in the marketplace of ideas to sort out over the long term what is important and what is not.

(Image credit: the_russians_are_here/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. How are things in Barcelona (aside from the shocking underperformance of its namesake soccer team this year)? For the climate talks now underway there, Climate Feedback’s Jeff Tollefson reports there’s some optimism that the world can reach political agreement on a climate deal in Copenhagen, with a binding legal agreement following in 2010.
2. We’re #1! (in funding for geothermal R&D, that is!) EcoGeek says the United States government has announced $300 million in such spending — putting it ahead of every other country and Google.org (which is its own planet, isn’t it?)
3. Another, not so nice kind of #1 — the  2009 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is out, and Ecoworldy says Ecuador tops the list of countries with the most such imperiled fauna (2,211).
4. Great white sharks aren’t such sociopathic loners, after all — the Washington Post says they like to hook up in a spot halfway between Hawaii and California that researchers are calling “the cafe.”
5. Noah’s Ark Deux? A team of scientists is proposing an effort to sequence the genomes of 10,000 vertebrate species in an effort to aid their conservation, says a report in the Journal of Heredity. (No talk of cloning…yet. Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)

As UN negotiators from around the world gather in Barcelona this week to continue hammering out a global climate deal, the question of emissions reduction targets has grabbed center stage in the press.

But even if all countries stopped emitting greenhouse gas pollution today, the impacts of climate change will be felt for years to come.

We must reduce emissions to minimize any future impacts. But negotiators must also develop policies and financial mechanisms that will help communities – and the natural resources they rely upon for survival – adapt to and overcome the climate impacts we are already seeing today.

The Nature Conservancy hosted an event here in Barcelona (webcast) last night highlighting adaptation actions we and others are launching around the world. The actions presented are the types that UN negotiators should include in a global agreement to ensure it provides the support needed to protect people and nature from the ravages of climate change.

Mike Beck, senior scientist with the Conservancy’s Global Marine Team, spoke of how sea levels are rising faster than anyone had previously projected, and how coastal communities are struggling to survive.

Mike unveiled an innovate new web tool called Coastal Resilience that shows in detail how sea level rise is hitting Long Island, NY. Users can look up how different sea-level rise scenarios will impact specific areas according to development type (commercial or residential areas); demographics (such as age or economic status); habitat types; and other specific social, economic and environmental classifications.

Residents can even look up their home addresses in Long Island and see how sea-level rise will impact their property.

The tool also allows government agencies to see where hospitals, fire stations and other emergency response organizations are located in connection to the areas that will be worst hit by sea-level rise.

“Most emergency responses to storms and flooding are made at the local level. But most localities don’t have access to this kind of information,” Mike said during the presentation.

Engaging communities in dealing with climate change impacts is crucial in places like Long Island, and even more so in developing countries where vulnerable communities are likely to face some of the greatest impacts. Several countries are now building upon the Coastal Resilience work to develop similar tools for their regions. The Conservancy is working with partners in the Caribbean to develop a similar tool.

“[In the Caribbean] most hotels and the tourist industry are based around these coastlines,” Mike said. “They’re socially and economically critical.”

Also joining the event was Rence Sore, the Solomon Islands‘ permanent secretary of environment, conservation and meteorology, who spoke of how his country is combating rising sea levels. Sore described how many of the islands in his nation are just one meter above sea level and are already dealing with coastal erosion and salt water contamination of crop lands.

“We depend on natural resources,” Sore said. “Climate change is impacting our food and water security.”

He said his government is incorporating the impacts of climate change in their development plans and are focusing on protecting their natural resources, from mangroves and coral reefs and more, to ensure they can continue to provide food and water to local communities.

The Conservancy is working in the Choiseul province of the Solomon Islands, in partnership with the Lauru Land Conference of Tribal Communities, to help plan local coastal land and resource management in response to climate impacts

These examples show how, in developed and developing countries alike, providing information and engaging communities are essential components to dealing with the impacts of climate change.

In Barcelona, our team is advocating that a global climate agreement draw on and strengthen the capacity of indigenous peoples and local communities to monitor, understand, and respond to climate change through effective adaptation measures. Protecting and restoring natural resources are some of the most effective measures for strengthening the resilience of both people and nature.

To learn more and spread the word about a global climate agreement, visit Planet Change.

(Image: Researchers in the Solomon Islands. Credit: David Wachenfeld © 2004 Triggerfish Images.)

Ecotourism is often presented as the savior for wildlife and wild places — providing local communities with financial incentives to preserve nature while also reducing poaching and development pressure.

But, lately, others question whether rich Westerners jetting around the world really help much at all: They disturb animals, create demands for new development and only employ local people in low paying jobs.

Some conservationists even consider tourism to be a significant threat to natural areas.

Which view is correct? Is ecotourism a problem, or a solution?

My biases up front: I’d rather travel for the purpose of seeing wildlife and enjoying various outdoor activities than just about anything. My wife has remarked it’s my drug of choice.

That aside, I still think the issue of ecotourism defies easy answers. Problem or solution?

It depends.

Certainly, the ecological havoc wreaked by tourists in places like the Galapagos is well documented. A fragile ecosystem, animals unafraid of humans and an increasing number of cruise ships has been a recipe for disaster.

One doesn’t have to look hard to see tourists behaving badly in nature.

People harass and feed wild bison, leave trash strewn across the Himalayas, demand resorts in places they shouldn’t be — the list is long.

And then there’s the whole carbon footprint issue. We all know that flying has tremendous impacts, so can we really justify flying off to some far-off corner of the world to see animals or scenery?

These are important concerns. Without a doubt, ecotourism can be a threat. But is it always?

After all, would there even be a Galapagos left as we know it if it wasn’t for tourism? Really?

Consider other island ecosystems and how difficult it is to conserve native island wildlife. If it wasn’t for those tour boats, the Galapagos would likely be a highly developed, rat-infested island devoid of wildlife.

Yellowstone may at times be crowded with tourists behaving badly, but would there still be herds of bison and packs of wolves and grizzly bears without those tourists?

The Serengeti faces issues, to be sure, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the wildebeest population there continues to migrate, during a period of time when so many other large mammal migrations have disappeared.

Private ranches in places like Brazil’s Pantanal and Namibia still have large populations of wildlife, in part because many ranchers here now attract tourists. It seems naïve to expect that they will keep conserving wildlife if visitors quit showing up.

Ecotourism, ultimately, is a complicated issue. And in that way, it’s not so different from most other conservation issues.

Some conservationists have the tendency to declare activities as simply “good” or “bad” — whether it’s ecotourism, ranching, timber harvest, invasive species, hunting, fire, or agriculture. All have their proponents and detractors.

However, we should make decisions based on the reality of our world, not on utopian fantasies where humans no longer have any impacts on nature.

We can work to make sure that ecotourism is done in appropriate ways that benefit wildlife and local communities.

And as the saying goes, conservationists can’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Ecotourism isn’t perfect.

In many cases, though, it’s the best solution we have.

(Photo: Caimans draw tourists to Brazil’s Pantanal. Credit: Matt Miller/TNC.)

1. The Conservancy’s very own Duncan Marsh was quoted in this Associated Press article about an unfortunate hold-up at the U.N. climate talks happening right now in Barcelona.  Marsh says that further delays could be “tragic,” preventing necessary discussion on emissions targets.
2. It might be toxic to your wallet, or to your emotional and physical well-being, but the city of Las Vegas is the least toxic of 40 major metropolitan areas, reports GreenBiz.  Based on its number of Superfund sites, facilities that release toxic chemicals and air quality ranking, it turns out it’s Atlanta we’ve got to be really worried about.
3. Strange bedfellows Glenn Beck and PETA (yes, really) are ganging up on climate warrior Al Gore, claiming the former VP’s a hypocrite for his meat-eating ways.  Huffington Post Green says new BFFs Beck and PETA prez Ingrid Newkirk called Gore a “baby” and “steakaholic” on Beck’s Fox News show last night.  BURN!
4. German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate, with the goal of encouraging the U.S. to “to fall in line with Europe” on climate change issues and legislation, according to Twilight Earth.  Hey, if Glenn Beck and PETA can team up for a cause, anything’s possible.
5. Treehugger reports that super-high-end fashion houses Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Balenciaga have pledged to significantly reduce their carbon footprints by December 2010 by reducing the amount of paper they use, avoiding fiber from high conservation value forests, and purchasing only recycled or FSC-certified products.  Let’s celebrate by you buying me a Balenciaga handbag!

Naturally we in the Cidade Maravilhosa are delighted to have beaten out the Windy City and snatched the 2016 Olympics from under the nose of the not-quite-glamorous-enough First Couple of the United States: even Obama can’t compete with Copacabana when it comes to wowing Olympic committees.

But now that the cheering has died down along with the hangovers, a sober consideration of what the Olympics will mean for the world’s most interesting and biodiverse urban environment is in order.

You don’t normally associate biodiversity and conservation with cities, but Rio de Janeiro is an exception. Its extraordinary topography means that steep hill slopes and mountainsides are still forested: not the least of the issues associated with the growth of favelas, Rio’s hillside slums, is that their expansion corrodes this green mantle.

Rio’s forests are a remnant of the Atlantic Forest that once covered most of coastal Brazil and stretched as far inland as Paraguay. Only 7 per cent is left, making it much more threatened than the Amazon and even more biodiverse, since the surviving fragments act as refuge areas for species that once had much wider ranges. This makes what survives of the Atlantic Forest extraordinarily important. One of Latin America’s oldest national parks, Tijuca National Forest, lies entirely within the city’s boundaries, a natural treasure greater than any of its beaches. What does the Olympics mean to all this? In short, a mixed bag.

There will be big environmental benefits. The thing that first strikes visitors arriving at Rio’s international airport, after the dilapidation of the airport itself, is the stench when you step outside the terminal. This toxic olfactory cocktail comes from the chemical plants and oil refineries that line Guanabara Bay, together with the sewage produced by the 5 million inhabitants of the Zona Norte, where tourists never go but half Rio’s population lives. Gagging on your way into town is an appropriate introduction to the contradictions produced by our glamorous international profile.

With the eyes – and, more to the point, the noses – of the world upon us, something will finally be done: serious sewage treatment and pollution control is coming. Maybe by 2016, for the first time in generations, it will even be possible to swim in the bay. One shudders to think what will happen to the yachting crews otherwise.

But beyond the bay, things are more ambiguous. The coming construction boom will provide alternative employment to the young men in the favelas who would otherwise move into our biggest growth industry after oil: narcotráfico. This boom will damp down violence from criminals and the police (there’s a big overlap between the two). The easy headlines about the risks posed by violence in Rio are misleading: nobody, from the drug lords down, has any interest in choking off the multidimensional bonanza the Olympics promises to be.

And therein lies a problem: after having been stable for 20 years, the city’s population is likely to jump again as the boom attracts migrants from all over Brazil, which means expanding favelas and more human pressure on that precious Atlantic Forest.

This will be most acute in the southern beachside neighbourhoods of Barra, Recreio and Vargem Grande, which were booming for years even before the Olympics. Many of the new sporting facilities in Rio’s bid, including the Olympic village, will be built here. As recently as the 1970s this area was still largely undeveloped, the stupendous beach of Barra fringing an unspoiled expanse of mangroves, coves and headlands ending in Barra da Sepetiba, a scalloped and shifting promontory of dunes and beaches pointing twelve miles into the Atlantic and the glorious (now rapidly overdeveloping) coastline south of Rio.

This oasis of nature so close to a megacity couldn’t last. From the late 1970s, a gigantic real estate boom saw Barra transformed into a depressingly Americanized complex of malls, highways, condominiums and apartment blocks. As the only reasonably flat area with land available anywhere in the city, it was inevitable this area would be earmarked for Olympic development, but the key issue is what impact this will have on the coast’s surprisingly strong zoning and development controls.

Rio’s governments, appalling as they often are, occasionally get some things spectacularly right – the 40% drop in driving deaths since a well-enforced ban on alcohol and driving began last year is a current example. In the late 1990s, in the nick of time, a municipal park called Prainha put the coast immediately south of the real estate boom off limits to developers, preserving the two stunning beaches of Prainha and Grumarí and linking them up to the still pristine coastline around and including Barra da Sepetiba, long preserved by the Brazilian Navy, to whom the promontory belongs. Ironically, a few months before the success of the Olympic bid, the developers had managed to get the zoning laws in Prainha relaxed. Now, with blood already in the water, the level of development is about to spiral. It could well spiral out of control — and if it does, the last piece of properly preserved coastline within the city’s boundaries will go.

Those of us who know and love Rio feel torn. On the one hand, there’s no denying this is a great city with a great talent for spectacle, and it has all the potential to stage a great world event like the Olympics, perhaps more memorably than has ever been done before. But Rio is a memorable place in other, less positive ways. Many local politicians would shock even Tony Soprano, and their corruption and incompetence has mismanaged the city into the ground. Many of its well-known problems are directly traceable to the city’s dreadful politics. With Brazil’s international image on the line, the federal government may have to step in.

The stakes for Rio’s environment are even higher. An image taking a hit is, in the final analysis, a trivial thing –  but once a coast or a forest goes, it almost never comes back. Fingers crossed.

(Image: Prainha, Rio de Janerio, Brazil. Credit: Rodrigo_Soldon/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

It’s Election Day in the United States — get out and vote! Then immediately get back on your smartphone and check out the hottest in online green this morning — including what might possibly be the best green name ever…

1. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s ice cap is disappearing — but is that climate change’s fault? Two research teams are disagreeing, reports The New York Times, with one blaming a decline in moisture rather than rising temperatures. (No word on which side of this debate the band Toto — which had the 1982 smash hit song “Africa,” which in an eerie coincidence mentions both Kilimanjaro and “the rains of Africa” — comes down. We’ll keep you posted.)
2. Meanwhile, Nepal’s cabinet plans to meet on Mount Everest to show the world how global warming is melting Himalayan glaciers, reports Associated Press. (No need for oxygen tanks — they’re only going to base camp, not all the way up.)
3. The leader of Orthodox Christianity — Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who calls himself “the green patriarch” — is in Washington this week, talking up the spiritual importance of environmentalism, reports the Washington Post.
4. Speaking of the Post, check out their great infographic tool that tracks total national per capita CO2 emissions since 1950. (Hat tip: Treehugger.)
5. Which societies will survive climate change best? Gaia Vince (which has to be one of the great green names in history) surveys the field at Yale Environment 360 and likes…Laos, among other places.

(Image: Mount Kilimanjaro. Credit: Picture_Taker_2/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

My husband returns to the same reefs every year in the Bahamas, where he has been teaching a coral reef ecology class for the last 14 years. On his 2008 trip, he noticed that the reef fish were missing. The culprits were quickly identified — and during his 2009 course, he and his students were eating them.

Lionfish.

Lionfish do not belong in the Caribbean. They are native to the South Pacific and Indian Ocean and made their way into the Caribbean through the release (the exact event is unknown) of aquarium fish. Some say they were in a tank that was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Others say it was a release of just 3 or 6 specimens. Whatever the case, lionfish are now spotted as far north as Rhode Island, and are popping up all over the Caribbean, from Colombia to the Virgin Islands to the Bahamas.

The Bahamas‘ marine ecosystem has already been hard hit. The people that know these reefs well are witnessing a rapid decline in reef fish thanks to these voracious predators, which have an appetite for juvenile reef fish. Their method of attack is particularly unique. Instead of an ambush attack or high-speed chase, lionfish make their presence known and confuse their prey by displaying their beautiful fins like a peacock, slowly dancing towards their prey and then rapidly sucking the prey into their mouths like a vacuum. This technique is so effective because no other predator in the Caribbean uses it — so prey are not adapted to avoid it.

Lionfish have no natural predators in Caribbean waters and are thriving on the tasty but already dwindling choice of baby reef fish. Some think that native grouper might have preyed on lionfish — but because grouper are overfished in the Caribbean (and in most parts of the world), the options beyond human predators are few.

As the distribution of lionfish in the Caribbean expands and the severity of this invasion is becoming more apparent, managers are trying to figure out what to do before the adult populations of reef fish are seriously affected. In the Bahamas, they have issued a “kill on sight” directive. The Caribbean Fisheries Management Council has even developed a Most Wanted Poster to encourage removal of these fish.

The best way to get rid of them? Put them on the menu! In Asia, lionfish are a popular menu item. That’s not yet the case in the Caribbean, so folks are working to change the culture of fear that surrounds lionfish (they have toxic spines that really hurt when they touch you) into a culture of desire for a delightful bite of this light and tasty fish. There are even websites that are collecting lionfish recipes — everything from sushi to Bahamian style fritters to smoked lionfish dip (yum!).

The hope is that people will be motivated to hunt and remove these fish, taking advantage of the existing tradition of artisanal fishing in the Caribbean and turning fishers toward this undesirable species and perhaps away from dwindling populations of grouper and snapper.

An additional approach to this problem — and one that would benefit the reef in multiple ways as well — would be to beef up protection of large predators such as grouper and sharks so that they can work to keep this ecosystem in balance and potentially keep the lionfish population in check.

My husband’s students decided to do a small research project to examine the gut contents (i.e., what is in the bellies) of lionfish they found on the Bahamian reefs, and discovered that their bellies were quite full of baby reef fish. The reward for their efforts was a yummy dinner of fried lionfish…and my husband assures me that in terms of flavor and texture, they compete with any flakey white fish you can think of or catch in the Caribbean. So…

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me advocating for people to eat fish. If you want to eat fish, I’d usually refer you to Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch — a guide that helps diners make decisions about the most sustainable and healthy options for seafood. However, when it comes to lionfish in the Caribbean, I say chow down to your heart’s content!