If the definition of insanity is making the same mistakes over and over, then many cities have taken a certifiable approach to securing their water supplies — and they need some radical therapy before taking the big economic, ecological, and human hits that come with a permanent state of thirst.

That’s the conclusion from a new study in the journal Water Policy, whose authors compared the water supply histories of four cities — San Diego, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Adelaide, Australia. Among the lessons learned? Urban water conservation, recycling, and desalination aren’t silver bullets. In fact, the best solution may lie upstream with farmers — saving just 5-10 percent of agricultural irrigation in upstream watersheds could satisfy a city’s entire water needs.

But the time to act is now, argues Brian Richter, a senior freshwater scientist at The Nature Conservancy and the study’s lead author — he says a global urban water crisis is already here. Below, Richter tells us more about what cities need to do to say on the right side of dry.

Q. Many cities take a similar pattern of water development, according to your research – going from exhausting local surface and groundwater supplies to importing water to implementing water conservation to finally recycling water or desalination. Why is this pattern unsustainable?

A. When we overuse a freshwater source, we set ourselves up for disaster. Each of the cities we reviewed in our study has contributed to the drying of a major river or important groundwater spring. That has obvious ecological impacts and social consequences — it affects livelihoods and human health by compromising fish production, concentrating pollution, or curtailing recreational activities.

Our research is revealing that water scarcity also causes severe economic losses by limiting or disrupting agricultural, industrial, and energy production. Texas lost nearly $8 billion in agriculture last year due to water shortages; electricity generation from hydropower dams on the Colorado River in 2010 dropped by 20 percent due to water shortages. Some estimates suggest that China may be losing $39 billion each year due to crop damage and lessened industrial production, and hundreds of thousands of people around the globe are being forced to move due to water shortages.

Because these impacts are so pervasive and damaging, we need to begin investing in water supply approaches that don’t just minimize these adverse impacts but instead begin to reverse them.

Q. Are we looking at a crisis in securing urban water supplies in the near future, either for U.S. cities or globally?

A. That crisis is already upon us. Our study revealed that half of all cities — both in the United States and globally — are located in watersheds where more than 50 percent of the renewable supply of water to our rivers and aquifers is being consumed, at least seasonally. Now, that’s not a problem as long as we’re receiving plentiful precipitation. But if you’re using that much water on an average, ongoing basis and you go into a severe drought, there isn’t enough water to meet all needs.

Q. Phoenix, another one of your case studies, has lowered its per capita water use by 25 percent since 1990 through various water conservation measures — and yet Phoenix is water scarce. Why? 

A. Water scarcity results when we heavily deplete a freshwater source. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re experiencing regular water shortages in your home or business. But it does mean that you’re at considerable risk if the water supplies continue to be increasingly depleted by other users, or you get into a drought situation.

Phoenix’s water conservation efforts are admirable, but they need to do much more. They are heavily dependent on the Colorado River, which is so thoroughly overused that it dries up before reaching its delta in the Gulf of California. During a severe, prolonged drought, the reliability of that water source will be in jeopardy.

Q. So storm- and wastewater recycling aren’t enough?

A. Contrary to popular belief, water conservation and recycling may not result in a net improvement in the affected water source. If the water that’s conserved is simply used to supply additional urban growth, then the water source is no better off.

The vast majority (80-90 percent) of water used in cities is returned to the freshwater source after use. So only 10-20 percent of the water is “lost” or “depleted” — most of that goes to outdoor landscaping or golf courses. Water recycling shuts off the return of water to the freshwater source — instead of discharging the used water back to a river, the water is used for domestic, commercial, industrial, or agricultural purposes.

So water recycling will “save” water — and reduce water scarcity in the freshwater source — only if it reduces the fraction of water that was previously being lost from the freshwater system.

Q. What about desalination if you’re a city on the coast? It’s expensive — but Adelaide’s desal plant is supposed to provide more than 25 percent of that city’s water supply by 2013.

A. Desalination could be a wonderful solution to our water challenges — more than one in every two people on Earth lives near a coast. But removing salts from ocean water requires a tremendous amount of energy, and the expense of that energy makes desalination the most costly way by far to supply fresh water to cities.

And there’s a wicked climate change feedback loop for desalination: using it to create fresh water produces carbon emissions that change our climate, which in turn affects the precipitation that supplies fresh water. Without a radical breakthrough in energy production, desalination will continue to supply only a tiny fraction of the world’s freshwater needs. (Note that Adelaide is using 100 percent renewable energy to power its desalination plant.)

Q.  You cite San Antonio as a leader in integrating water conservation into its planning. What’s San Antonio getting right that other cities aren’t?

A. Few cities in the world have pushed urban water conservation as far as San Antonio. Their community outreach program is outstanding. … San Antonio is also investing in agricultural water conservation to reduce overall use of the Edwards Aquifer, the city’s primary water source. That’s the way of the future: Cities leading efforts to help everyone that uses the same water source to do so in the most conservative and sustainable manner possible.

Q. You argue that cities should help upstream farmers implement irrigation conservation that will leave more water for urbanites downstream. It sounds good in theory — but since agriculture accounts for 90 percent of all freshwater depletions, why should cities foot the bill?

A. Because most farmers won’t implement water-saving measures unless it saves them money — or at the very least, until it doesn’t cost them anything. Many farmers are already implementing water conservation measures because they reduce electricity costs. But sometimes the cost savings aren’t sufficient to motivate a farmer to go through the time, trouble, and change in farming practices.

That’s why cities need to step in to help. As we point out in our paper, saving just 5-10 percent of the water being consumed in irrigated agriculture can usually free up enough water to meet a city’s needs. It can also free up water to restore river health.

Q. So how do we do this? Do these partnerships exist already?

A. One great way is to create a water market, such as exists in the Murray-Darling basin in Australia or in the Edwards Aquifer of Texas, where farmers can sell any “saved” water to other farmers, cities, or environmental interests as long as it does not harm other water users or the environment. There are few better things that governments could do to improve water management.

Another urban-rural water partnership that can work is a bilateral agreement between a farmer, or an entire irrigation district, and a city. The deal between San Diego and the Imperial Irrigation District in southern California is a great example. That arrangement will provide 37 percent of San Diego’s water supply by the year 2020, it’s very cost-effective, and it provides a new source of income and security for the farmers. Our analysis suggests that one in every two medium- to large-sized cities could — or should — pursue partnerships of this nature.

Q. What should urbanites do to prepare for the coming urban water crisis — pressure their lawmakers? Take personal water conservation measures? Other steps?

A. In my Water Sustainability course at the University of Virginia, I teach that everyone needs to take responsibility. Figure out how much water you use, and what impacts you might be causing. Almost everything you do requires water — not just the water you use directly in the kitchen, bathroom or laundry room, but also the water required to produce your electricity, food, clothing, gasoline, and other consumer goods. Regardless of your political party, be conservative in water use.

And to the point of our study: Ask your city manager or water supplier why they aren’t working with local farmers to help them save water and restore health to our rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

The evidence keeps sprouting up like daffodils: Experiencing nature is good for us — physically, emotionally, cognitively. (Check out this new study on how a walk in the park can reduce brain fatigue.) But as the world becomes ever more urbanized, which urbanites have enough access to nature to reap these benefits … and how can we make that access more equitable?

Enter City Nature — a new project from Stanford University that maps the “greenness” and “paved-ness” of more than 2,500 neighborhoods in 34 U.S. cities (as determined by the shade of remotely sensed pixels) and then lays over that demographic data such as ethnic diversity and average home value as well as access to parks to produce portraits of American urban nature — who lacks it, who has it in abundance, and how those disparities match up with individual city plans and visions.

Those disparities are wide, according to Jon Christensen, an environmental historian who is one of City Nature’s two principal investigators and who teaches in UCLA’s History Department and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. The hope, says Christensen, is that urban planners and activists can use City Nature’s data to eventually pinpoint the neighborhoods that have the greatest “nature need” — and take action.

But City Nature’s data also holds surprises — including how much urban nature in the United States has happened in spite of central planning, and how little impact great landscape architects such as Frederick Olmsted have had on that development. I caught up with Christensen to learn more:

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Q. City Nature has a project called “Naturehoods” that measures neighborhood proximity to parks as well as neighborhood levels of “greenness” — which includes plants in backyards, parkways, street tree canopies. What disparities are you finding between parks and greenness across the United States? And does having a park nearby always mean you have “access” to greenness?

A. Parks don’t seem to be distributed in U.S. cities in a way that is biased towards any particular class. That’s partly a historical artifact of the way the cities have developed and the flight to the suburbs — there are lots of parks throughout cities.

But greenness or unpaved spaces tend to not be evenly distributed. There is a tendency — although it’s not uniform — that greener parts of cities tend to be wealthier neighborhoods with higher per-capita income and higher percentages of owner-occupied homes. That doesn’t mean that wealthy people live only in green parts of town — they can choose to live wherever they want, so they are often found in a lot of different neighborhoods and increasingly, we know, back in dense downtowns where there is often less green space.

But the greenest parts of cities often seem to be areas where people have big lots, backyards, lots of trees, nearby open space, and expensive homes. An economist might say these homeowners have made a trade-off. As one person I talked to here in L.A. told me, she doesn’t need a park, she has a big backyard. She’s only been to the local park once in decades. By contrast, the least green parts of town often seem to be home to people with lower incomes and less valuable property. They might have parks, but those parks may be more neglected, run down, more paved over to make maintenance easier for cash-strapped city park agencies, and there are fewer trees and smaller backyards, if any, and less open space around.

Q. So there is unequal access to greenness in U.S. cities — how do we fix that? Can we?

A. By investing in bringing nature to neighborhoods where it’s possible to do that and where the need is greatest. Nature is a public good, and it’s going to have to be kept alive in these cities through public investment, either by governments or by nonprofits, conservation organizations. It’s an equity issue and a health issue, as we know from other research, not to mention an issue of building a lasting constituency for nature.

Jon Christensen

Q. What in the City Nature data surprises you?

A. Just how much variation there is in how U.S. cities have incorporated nature. When we originally started Naturehoods, we thought we might be able to actually lump similar neighborhoods from different cities together in what we called “Frankencities” that would all have similar patterns of nature and development. But the variation is so great that wasn’t possible.

I think what this shows is that a lot of the most important historical shaping of nature in cities seems to have happened along the margins —at the neighborhood level — rather than through grand plans. If you live in one of these cities, you can look up your neighborhood in Naturehoods and see that it shares many characteristics with other neighborhoods in your city and around the country. But the amount of nature that you have around you is going to very different from what otherwise similar neighborhoods enjoy. Parks, large and small, will make a big difference, but so will things like trees, gardens, streetside plantings, medians and patches of undeveloped land.

To me, that variation also means that we can make a big difference in restoring and maintaining nature in cities. Some of the patterns that are there are explained by big factors, like wealth disparity among different neighborhoods — but not all of them, and not in a way that is really overwhelming. The decisions that people make about their neighborhoods, their visions and plans and how government and conservationists can feed into those decisions, can really make a difference.

Another surprising thing: We also began to look at urban plans in these 34 cities to explore how they articulate visions and plans for nature, parks, open space, habitat. We used some digital humanities methods — text mining and topic modeling — to produce an objective measure rather than a subjective one of the words and language used in these plans.

And there does not seem to be a consistent, coherent or clear way in which these largest cities in the United States think about nature and articulate a vision and plan for parks and open space and habitat. It’s hard to tell within these plans that there’s a vision and plan for parks and open space that relates to these cities’ visions for themselves.

Again, that’s a kind of negative result. But I think also one could look at this as an enormous opportunity for us and for conservation organizations in cities and in individual neighborhoods to make sure that nature in the city is an important, clear, visionary part of plans going forward.

It’s especially important because population dynamics over the next two generations are going to double the built environment of cities around the planet. I hope we can do a gap analysis for city nature that could guide choices and priorities.

Q. When you look at individual cities such as, say, Kansas City, are there disconnects between what you saw in the city plan and the nature that’s on the ground in neighborhoods?

A. Yes. That’s a city that discusses parks and open space in the vision element of its plan. If we think that visions and plans are really important, Kansas City has it. And that makes sense because Kansas City has this great parkway system that was designed by George Kessler, one of America’s great landscape planners.

But our analysis shows that the city is below average in discussing parks as community facilities, and parks aren’t mentioned in critical sensitive areas as habitat, and they are not mentioned that much elsewhere in the plan. So the city had a great vision, but I think it’s very likely a historical artifact of that parkway system. Kansas City hasn’t come up with a new vision for the 21st century that has more of the things that we think are important about parks and open space and habitat these days.

Q. Back to parks: City Nature looks at people’s access to parks — their “park need,” as you call it. There are a number of studies out that show you don’t need a lot of nature to have a positive mental and emotional health effect on people. So why look at parks?

A. We wanted to look at both greenness and parks at the same time, because parks are an important public good — particularly for people who aren’t surrounded by a lot of nature in their daily lives. We have a long tradition of providing parks as a public good here in the United States and really around the world. And the reality is that, even in those neighborhoods that already have parks but don’t have a lot of nature, the most likely and quite possibly only way you are going to get more nature into these neighborhoods is as a public good — i.e., a park.

Q. Not through tree-planting initiatives?

A. It might be tree planting. It could be through tree planting and bigger medians, or urban farming in medians. There are people in South L.A. doing that. There are opportunities to create pocket parks, neighborhood gardens, little patches of habitat along places like the L.A. River. Again, at that scale, there are going to be dozens of different ways to do this.

Q. Are there assumptions about American urban history or environmental history that the data in City Nature could challenge?

A. A few. One, that urban vision and plans are really important. It’s not really clear that that’s true. They have great normative power, and we should have visions and plans, but I’m not sure that visions and plans explain that much about this variation.

Another assumption our data might challenge is that the great landscape planners like Kessler or the Olmsteds really left a distinctive mark on cities. While they certainly designed some of our great parks all around the United States, including Central Park in New York, when you are looking at nature in cities at this comparative scale, it’s not clear that you can discern any particular difference in the cities where great landscape planners worked versus other cities.

Finally, the incredible variation of nature in cities that we’re finding puts the lie to the idea that preserving nature or open space or habitat is somehow an impediment to the rational economic development of cities — an argument that some urbanists make against conservation, be it of nature or historical buildings.

This research shows that cities develop, regardless of how much nature they protect. On the one hand, you could say, well, then nature doesn’t really matter for the development of the city, or you could say that’s true, but you can choose to have nature. We know that there are other enormous benefits to having nature, parks, open space, other forms of nature even just outside your window, and that’s a choice that we can make.

Q. How would an urban planner use Naturehoods to do that?

A. We don’t yet have this combined in a good way with habitat. If we combined what Naturehoods shows with the kinds of data and maps that folks at The Nature Conservancy and elsewhere have, we could really add the human dimension to our knowledge of urban nature. If we’re taking seriously the idea that people should be part of the equation when we calculate the benefits of investments in nature and habitat and conservation, Naturehoods could provide a way to do that — a way based on need.

There’s a lot of power in doing this kind of comparative analysis, and if we could expand it from 34 cities in the United States to, say, the 6,000 cities or so worldwide that are expected to become home to the doubling of urban population in the next two generations and that have some of the greatest environmental need, then we could potentially make a good contribution to rules of thumb for how those cities are shaped. Because the way that those cities get shaped — and they will have half of the urban population on the planet by 2050 — is really going to determine a lot about the future of how people live with nature and with each other.

Cross-posted from Cool Green Science.

Mercury pollution — nothing to worry about if I don’t live in the rural Northeast and don’t eat tons of fish, right?

Guess again, says a new report done by the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy. The report, “Hidden Risk,” details the widespread and deep impacts of mercury pollution in terrestrial nature — particularly on animals such as songbirds and bats. Researchers are discovering how mercury is causing big declines in reproductive success among these species, as well as physiological oddities — like developmental asymmetries and an inability of some birds to hit high notes.

And the same rain that brings mercury pollution down from the sky falls on us, too. So are these species a kind of canary in the coal mine for mercury’s effects on other vertebrates, including people? And will strict new federal standards limiting U.S. power plant pollution be enough in a world where mercury pollution is on the rise from China and other nations? I talked with two co-authors of “Hidden Risk” — BRI’s executive director, Dave Evers, and Tim Tear, the Conservancy’s director of science for New York — to find out more. (Download the report here.)

Q. Some are going to be surprised that mercury pollution is still a problem — didn’t various agencies and industries take steps to reduce mercury emissions over the last decade in the United States? So why are high levels of mercury still a problem in many wildlife species?

Dave Evers: Yes, a lot of mercury has been taken out of air pollution over the past few decades — but our understanding is growing of how just a little mercury can adversely affect wildlife, and how many species have been affected. More species are being impacted than we had thought, and the toxicity of methylmercury to those species is at lower threshold levels than we ever realized.

Tim Tear: Many of these species and many of the places affected are in people’s backyards. People used to think that mercury pollution was a problem isolated to remote areas of the Northeast. No more.

Q. So, would someone see a bird or a bat acting strangely because of mercury pollution? Or is this something that data is telling you?

Evers: The effects are difficult to see in the field for the average observer. Mercury doesn’t create physical mutations, and an individual animal with mercury will probably die from predation first. But mercury is a neurotoxin that does impact wildlife behavior, and that behavior impacts their survival and reproduction. We focus on data to really quantify the impacts of mercury on the reproductive success of species.

For example, we quantified mercury impacts on the common loon. Common loons need to spend about 98 percent of their time on a nest incubating their eggs to have those eggs successfully hatch. We’ve quantified with over 5,000 hours of observation that loons with high mercury levels spend only 85 percent of their time incubating those eggs. So they spend less time in an incubation posture, and because of that, eggs do not hatch, and because of that, the species’ reproductive success goes down.

Q. Where is the mercury pollution still coming from? And what U.S. regions are of most concern?

Tear: Most of the research has really focused on the Northeast United States — an area that’s been really hard hit by acid rain, which makes mercury a bigger problem. But mercury pollution is happening all over the world. It comes globally from Asia, as well as nationally from power plants in the Midwest, to locally from waste incinerators. We’re going to need to address all sources of mercury to be successful in stopping these impacts.

Q. And in different habitats, right? Most people in the United States who know about mercury in nature know about it through warnings about the fish they eat.

Evers: Yes, there’s been a paradigm shift in new findings. In the past, most of the scientists assessing risk from mercury in an ecosystem would be looking at fish-eating birds and fish-eating mammals — because we knew methylmercury (the organic form of mercury) moved through the food web in aquatic organisms. But there’s been a missing link in looking at mercury in terrestrial ecosystem food webs and looking at how species that eat insects and spiders — what we call “invertivores” — can be affected.

In the invertivore food web, the key pieces are no longer fish, but spiders. A bird that eats a spider that ate a spider that ate a fly — that’s four different changes in the trophic food web. We’ve established that a little songbird like a northern waterthrush or a sparrow that eats spiders can actually be higher up in the food web than a bald eagle, which eats fish — and so that songbird has more mercury in its body than does the eagle.

Tear: We’ve also discovered that mercury is in many more food webs than we realized. It is not just in lakes and ponds. It’s in our forests, our estuaries; it’s in the lowlands and on the mountaintops. It’s in the spiders in the Adirondacks, and it’s in backyard birds in New York City.

Q. You mentioned effects on reproductive success. What are some of the other impacts of mercury on terrestrial wildlife?

Evers: For example, bird song is affected. Two recent studies show that birds with high mercury can’t hit the high notes, and their songs are simplified. I also worry about long-distance migration, because high mercury has been shown to affect the symmetry of development. If a bird’s left wing is 5 percent different in shape than its right wing, that bird is going to fly in a crooked way to compensate for it, which requires more energy to make a flight of thousands of miles to its wintering area. Ultimately, that’s going to affect its survival.

Q. That’s sad. But ultimately, why should humans care?

Tear: First, if you care about the environment and you care about birds and bats and bugs, then you should care that many of these animals are being heavily impacted.

But the second answer is that the neurotoxic rain that contains mercury falls on humans as well as wildlife. We already know that mercury can be a big problem in human health. This research establishes that the effects of mercury are happening all over the planet, all over many habitat types, to vertebrate species other than ourselves. So people should be concerned about these effects, because there’s a link between human health and ecosystem health.

Q. Back to the science of this. How the heck do you measure mercury in a bird population, anyway?

Evers: It’s actually very simple and straightforward. There are nice and easy ways to capture and/or take samples from an individual bird that are quick and are non-harmful to the bird and do very little disruption to its routine, other than just having it in a net or hand for a half hour or so. We take a blood sample — just a drop does the trick. We also can take a feather sample, which gives us more of a long-term picture of how much mercury has come into that individual over time.

Q. But how do you disentangle the effects of mercury on birds and bats from other factors? How do you know that it’s mercury that is causing the decline of the wood thrush or the little brown bat?

Evers: It’s a question we’re still studying. There are multiple stressors at play for many species and habitats, and as conservation biologists, we are trying to understand those. We want to provide scientific information to landscape managers and policymakers, so we will have these birds around for a few more hundred years at least.

Take the olive-sided flycatcher. In the last four years, it’s declined by 80 percent, so 80 percent of this population is gone in comparison to four years ago. It’s a bird that lives in bogs. Bogs are known to have high methylation rates of mercury, but they are not well-studied as a habitat whatsoever. Neither is the olive-sided flycatcher. So here you have a species in a habitat that I think is at great risk to mercury as a potential driver and a primary stressor for why this decline is happening. Mercury is an omnipresent stressor, but the question is always: Where is it a primary stressor?

Tear: I’d also add that, in some places where birds are declining, there has been no obvious habitat change, and many people think of the challenges as being primarily habitat loss, but we certainly know that, for example, some species like the wood thrush within the Adirondack Park, there are fewer wood thrush today than there were 20 years ago. They’re still there, but there aren’t as many. The question is why, and this is part of the disentangling of those different stressors that Dave is referring to.

Q. Is there any relationship between mercury emissions and greenhouse-gas emissions? Is there a climate change connection?

Tear: Well, many of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxides and other air pollutants — such as nitrogen and sulfur, which cause acid rain, and mercury, which brings us this neurotoxic rain — come from power plants, and all of these air pollutants have negative impacts on our environment. Our research shows that we should be factoring in these ecological impacts when we consider the cost and benefits of regulatory programs such as the recent Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule. But so far, estimating the ecological impact of these air pollutants that are coming from similar sources as CO₂ has not been done.

Evers: Climate change might also be causing great mercury methylation rates into ecosystems or even remobilizing mercury that was stored in the system. For instance, forest fires have become more predominant because of climate change in some parts of the country — and those forests hold a lot of legacy mercury in their systems, which can be released quite rapidly with a fire. Greater storm intensity and frequency could be increasing deposition of mercury from the global atmospheric pool to landscapes below. Increased wetting and drying cycles could be another factor in greater mercury methylation.

Q. It sounds dire. So what can anyone do?

Tear: First, while we need more research on this, there are definitely landscape and wildlife management actions that might help reduce the amount of mercury embedded in the environment.

Dave mentioned that hotter forest fires that occur for whatever reason can release a great deal more mercury than cooler burns — so using fire management in our forest systems could have a significant impact on the amount of mercury that’s released. How we manage artificial reservoirs is extremely important — if we manage those in a way to make the wetting and drying cycles greater, we might also be increasing the amount of mercury methylation.

Evers: Another example: It makes a lot of sense not to log in a riparian area anyway — and it also makes sense from a mercury standpoint. There is a lot of legacy mercury and even new mercury coming into these forest ecosystems, and the less we disturb that mercury the better. There are studies right now quantifying the mercury effects of logging practices in Oregon.

Q. What else?

Tear: We need greater investment in this country’s mercury monitoring network. A stronger network would help us gather data systematically and also help us know whether current efforts to reduce mercury pollution — like the EPA’s recent Mercury and Air Toxics Rule standard — are enough to improve these areas already damaged by mercury.

We also need continued research on this issue. We’re just beginning to understand the impacts of mercury on both ecological and human health. And we need to support efforts at all levels to reduce mercury — global, regional, and local. Mercury is coming from multiple levels, and no single level will be enough.

Evers: On the importance of a national network — I’ve been fortunate to work with both U.S. Senate and House representatives to introduce bills that would establish the first national mercury monitoring network, which we need from a federal accountability standpoint. But industry also has been supportive of this idea. Industry likes certainty, and a national monitoring network could really help provide a standard playing field for the industry in terms of installing emission protections on their smokestacks.

And a national monitoring network could also help the United States politically wrangle with other countries where mercury emissions are increasing. About 50 percent of mercury emissions have been taken out of U.S. sources between 1990 and 2005 — but the global pool of mercury continues to increase because countries like China are putting in a new coal-fired power plant once a week. A standardized mercury monitoring program provides us the way to really track our progress both spatially and temporally.

Photo: Scott Pena

Let’s say the rise in sea level that climate change will bring us — from melting ice caps and expanding seas — won’t be “all that bad” by, oh, the year 2080. Maybe … just half a meter (a little under 20 inches). We can deal with half a meter, right?

Well, yeah — if we’re ready to “deal with” almost 50 percent more affected people and 73 percent more property losses from a typical Category 3 hurricane — all because of the higher storm surge that’ll come from that additional 20 inches of sea level. (“Storm surge,” in case you don’t know, describes the ocean water that a storm’s winds bring ashore, in addition to what’s usually there with normal tides.)

Those kinds of losses are the scenario the southern shores of Long Island, N.Y., are looking at, according to a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Natural Hazards. And it’s a scenario that could apply to lots of other U.S. coastlines, says Christine Shepard, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow with the Nature Conservancy’s Global Marine Team.

Unfortunately, she adds, sea-level rise hasn’t been on the radar of most U.S. coastal planners until recently. So is there any good news? Yes, says Shepard: The study offers a set of approaches and accessible tools with which those coastal planners can start mapping their own communities’ vulnerabilities. (Are you listening, Islip, N.Y.?) I caught up with Shepard to find out more.,

Christine Shepard.Q. Why did you choose to study sea-level rise and storm surges along the southern shores of Long Island? How typical are these places of other U.S. coastlines?

A. First, it’s a very densely populated area, so the modeling gives us a good look at how damaging storm surge can be to such an area. We also have access to some very good elevation data on the area. And there’s also a history of storm surges here — they had an intense Category 3 storm in 1938. All that made it a good area to test the development of our methods.

But while Suffolk County is one of the most populous counties in the United States, the results that we found are comparable to other studies that evaluated the effect of sea-level rise on storm surge in less densely populated areas. So we can definitely extrapolate these results to other U.S. metropolitan areas or coastal cities.

Q. We’re talking about 20 inches of sea-level rise. (The height of an English Springer Spaniel, if that helps anyone visualize it.) Just how damaging could 20 inches be?

A. Just a small amount of sea-level rise increases the damage — especially in areas with intense development and a high concentration of people and properties stretching from the coast inland, like the area of Long Island that we studied. Also, the damage per property increases with the depth of the water. Even just a slightly higher storm surge gives you more damage per property — you can really see these impacts at the town level.

Q. Besides having high concentrations of people and development, what else makes a coastal community especially vulnerable to storm surge? In your study, the town of Islip (which has a population of almost 325,000) already has a lot of risk today, and 0.5 meters of sea-level rise is going to accentuate that quite a bit.

A. Two variables: socioeconomic considerations, and critical infrastructure and facilities.

Some of the common socioeconomic characteristics of communities that are more likely to have disproportionate impacts from coastal hazards include having 1) areas with high population density and housing unit density, 2) areas with a lot of poverty, or 3) areas with a lot of households that lack access to vehicles they could use to evacuate.

Part of the point of this study was to create maps that communities can use to develop targeted approaches to hazard mitigation. We created a social vulnerability index to help map these communities so that hazard mitigation policies or grants could be targeted towards communities that are socially vulnerable, to reduce their risk. And for critical facilities and infrastructure, just to have easily accessible maps of where these are with respect to present and future storm surge risk is very valuable for community planning.

It’s also valuable for conservation. I’ve been working on maps that prioritize marsh restoration projects adjacent to population centers and vulnerable communities. These marshes may help mitigate storm impacts, so that kind of planning could be a win-win for coastal communities and conservation.

Q. The 0.5-meter sea-level rise estimate by 2080 you used – that’s a pretty conservative estimate, isn’t it, given some of the modeling that’s now out there?

A. I would say it is pretty conservative, so you could conclude that the results from this paper are conservative. And our estimates of damage are also conservative because our analysis only incorporates losses due to flooding, not wind.

Q. Why haven’t coastal agencies and towns in the United States taken sea-level rise into account when they’ve thought about managing storm surges?

A. First, FEMA didn’t really acknowledge sea-level rise and the impacts on storm surge until the last couple of years. There’s been a cultural dichotomy between the people who analyze the impacts of sea-level rise versus those who plan for hurricanes and storm surges.

But most municipalities aren’t currently planning for increases in inland extent of storm surge. Their proposed maps for a variety of strengths of hurricanes assume present conditions and don’t incorporate sea-level rise. The same goes for flood maps.

Q. The study gives communities a methodology for getting prepared. What do they need to do to tap into it?

A. It’s never been easier for them to do their own planning for storm surge and sea-level rise. The tools that we incorporate into our approach are readily available, and the organizations or government agencies that provide them provide training for them. And we tried to pull from those processes and tools that someone with an intermediate level of GIS [geographic information systems] expertise — someone who would be a typical GIS analyst for a county or a city — could use with training offered by some of the agencies that provide the tools, such as FEMA and NOAA.

Q. 2080 is an awfully long time off. Is there anything in this report that should set off alarm bells for ordinary people, either for right now or 10 to 20 years down the road? Should they be buying property in places vulnerable to these kinds of storm surges?

A. If they’re thinking about purchasing coastal property, they definitely need to consider that current flood zone maps do not reflect any sea-level rise. Those maps may soon be obsolete.

Joanne Wilson surveying coral reefs in Raja Ampat

You’ve probably heard about coral bleaching — the mass die-off of coral reefs because of warming sea temperatures, a dynamic that can be attributed at least indirectly to climate change. It’s a problem of growing concern to the hundreds of millions of people whose lives depend on reefs and the fish they shelter. But as ocean temps continue to rise, is there any hope for coral?

Science to the rescue! Researchers are learning tons about which kinds of coral species are either resistant to bleaching or bleach more quickly — and using that data to figure out which reefs are going to be more resilient to climate change … which will feed into where to focus protection efforts. As part of the work, marine scientists often need to do painstaking fish and coral surveys in beautiful but remote locations — which is why The Nature Conservancy sent a science team led by Joanne Wilson and Sangeeta Mangubhai to spend two weeks in November in the Indonesian archipelago of Raja Ampat, known as the global center of marine biodiversity. I caught up with Wilson and Mangubhai — barely dry from all their diving — to get the skinny on what they found, including giant clams and an anchovy fish ball.     

Q. You found less coral bleaching on this expedition than you’d thought you would. How significant is that finding? Should we be less worried about coral bleaching than we were before?

Joanne Wilson: Coral bleaching occurs when water temperatures are warmer than normal — for example, during La Niña events like the one we experienced last year. The increasing frequency and intensity of these warming events is associated with climate change. Fortunately, during our expedition, water temperatures were within normal ranges, so corals on Misool reefs were not bleaching. But with bleaching events predicted to increase in the future, we are still vigilant and concerned about Raja Ampat’s reefs.

Q. OK, so we’re still concerned about bleaching — but what can we really do about it?  

JW: We can help build reef resilience. During the surveys we did find a few pale corals, indicating slight temperature stress. These corals belonged to a species that is very sensitive to temperature stress. Studying those corals will help us better understand the different responses of coral species to increased water temperatures. By combining this new knowledge with information on the distribution of coral species, we can predict with increased accuracy which reefs are likely to be more vulnerable to bleaching in the future — which can in turn can guide reef resilience efforts.

Q. Marine protected areas like the one you were visiting often have “no-take” zones where fishing is restricted or banned. You were studying whether fish were bigger and more numerous in these zones — essentially, whether these zones were serving as “fish banks” for the rest of the region. Are they?

Sangeeta Mangubhai: Our expedition took us to the Southeast Misool MPA [marine protected area], which is still in the process of being zoned, though there is currently one 425-square-kilometer [164-square-mile] no-take zone that is being actively enforced. Our data show that the fish biomass and abundance were higher within the existing no-take zone, especially in areas with high current (often at the points of islands) where many fish species tend to aggregate. We also recorded more sharks in the no-take zone as compared to other areas of the MPA where fishing continues. So yes, the existing no-take zone is acting as a fish bank. However, given how overfished the reefs are in Misool, it will take a few more years before the no-take zone accumulates enough fish to spill over into adjacent areas.

Q. How do you determine whether fish are bigger and more abundant in a particular region? How do you know you’re not just finding a lot of big fish that day?

SM: Over the last two years, we’ve been classifying the reefs in Misool to give us a better understanding of the range of coral reef habitats there. We do this because we know all coral reefs are not the same — they differ depending on the habitat and oceanographic conditions they are exposed to, and so do their fish populations. The fish population in a lagoonal reef is going to be different — both in terms of species and numbers — from the fish population in an adjacent reef that’s exposed to waves and wind.

When we do our reef health surveys, we make sure that we are surveying similar reef habitats so that the data is comparable. We also survey multiple reefs belonging to the same habitat type, so that we can develop an average that reflects the general condition of the reefs. In addition, we know which fish tend to spread themselves out on a reef, and which tend to aggregate in large schools, and we take this into account when we do our surveys and when we interpret the data.

Q. Speaking of aggregation, you also found a “fish ball” of anchovies — which I’m guessing isn’t something that goes into a Caesar salad. What is it? Why is it significant?

JW: An anchovy fish ball is an aggregation of perhaps millions of these small silver fish. By following the principle of safety in numbers, these anchovies were hoping that at least some of them would escape being eaten. Anchovies form the base of the food chain — they’re a staple meal for fish like tuna, for sea birds and for many whale and dolphin species. They are also caught by the ton and then dried and sold for human consumption in Indonesia. So it’s important that anchovy habitat is protected and the anchovy fishery is well managed to provide for both a healthy ecosystem and a sustainable harvest.  

A veritable Dr. Seuss book of coral. From left to right, cynarina, physogyra, euphyllia ancora and lobophyllia coral.Q. One scientist I know described the fish and corals in the Coral Triangle (CT) like something out of a Dr. Seuss book — totally wild. You both have done a lot of diving in the CT — did you see anything this time you’d never seen before?

JW: Absolutely. This is the center of reef biodiversity, so we certainly saw a lot of creatures that are not commonly found in other reefs and had us poring over photos and reaching for the reference books each evening! Some of the coral species form weird and wonderful fragile shapes in very sheltered coves among the limestone karst. We found a strangely shaped anemone that looked a lot like a black fern and also came across mating octopuses on two occasions.

Q. A number of Indonesian scientists helped you do the monitoring on this expedition. Does that presence help the credibility of your findings with the people who live in Raja Ampat? And how are your findings going to be used there?

SM: There are a number of reasons we have mainly Indonesian scientists on our trips. First, the Conservancy feels that if we work in a country like Indonesia, it is important to invest in long-term capacity and empower local scientists to lead the monitoring work themselves instead of relying on outsiders. Second, it does create real credibility for our findings at the local level as well as a great sense of pride for communities to have locals involved in an expedition and collecting data on their reefs. And third, it is the Indonesian scientists that will be working with outreach staff and the local communities to finalize a zoning plan for the MPA — to do this, they need to be experts with firsthand knowledge and understanding of the reefs, to enable them to stand on equal footing with local communities while discussing the communities’ resources and how best to manage them. Local scientists know how to speak to their government and communities better than outsiders.

Q. Everybody thinks diving is fun and glamorous, but Raja Ampat isn’t an easy place to work — you had to bring in everything you needed from a town 98 miles away across open ocean, which I understand is 16 hours by steamboat. What was the most challenging thing about this expedition?

SM: Given how remote this region is, we had to put a lot of thought and planning into the trip before it began. There was no shop we could duck into to pick up something we had forgotten, so we needed spares of essential equipment. We had to be prepared to fix any equipment that malfunctioned or broke down ourselves. Every night, on top of entering our data, we also had to take inventory — check how much fuel we had used, investigate the state of our gear, and decide where we could safely anchor the boat each night, taking into account that there were many unmarked reefs we couldn’t afford to damage. In some areas, we had to rely on the local knowledge of our community monitoring assistants to safely navigate narrow passages. With no accurate information available on tides and currents, we had to make sure that, when we chose dive sites, the currents were not too strong. And we had to be prepared to put into place additional safety measures, if they were required for the dive.

Q. Coral reefs are in trouble worldwide — most everybody knows that. But are you as scientists more hopeful now than you were before the expedition about our ability to protect them? Why or why not?

JW: We came away from the expedition with mixed feelings. Raja Ampat is certainly a very beautiful and diverse area, but even this far-flung corner of Indonesia, the reefs showed signs of overexploitation and damage from bomb fishing.

But we saw strong positive signs, too — all of the local community members on our expedition used to be illegal fishermen, and now they’re now active conservationists. There’s now an agreement between Misool Eco Resort — a local dive resort — and local villages to sustainably manage local reefs while creating livelihood opportunities. We’re also supporting the local government’s efforts to develop management plans for all of Raja Ampat’s marine protected areas. This will give some communities their first opportunity to affect the decisions that determine how their resources are used and accessed. So while there’s still reef exploitation, these developments give us hope.

What’s more ecologically valuable — national parks, or median strips and vacant lots? Could dreaded invasive species actually be more beneficial than native ones? Are environmentalists clinging to a timeless notion of nature that science has thoroughly discredited? Can we actually make nature better than it is in its “natural” state?

Emma Marris asks these and other icon-busting questions her new book Rambunctious Garden — potentially the most optimistic and controversial work about the future of nature to appear in years. Marris, a former correspondent for Nature magazine, takes big issue with enviro doom-and-gloomers and last-great-places conservationists, arguing in Rambunctious Garden that pristine wildness has been a myth for at least 13,000 years and that we live on a thoroughly domesticated planet whose nature it’s up to us to manage … and even improve upon. It sounded so heretical that I had to call her up and ask her to explain.

Q. The title of your book — Rambunctious Garden — encapsulates your vision for nature, as a garden that we as humans firmly control, consciously making decisions about which kind of nature goes where. You know that’s going to raise the hackles of a lot of environmentalists, don’t you? It has connotations of playing God and engineering nature solely for our benefit.

A. Yes. I decided to go for it and be provocative, because the title is meant to describe what the Earth is and can be. Because the planet already is a garden, and we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t admit the depth of human influence over nature. We’re in charge about where plants and animals are, either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s our space that we’re landscaping now.

Q. Like a farm?

A. It doesn’t have to be a sterile, formal garden that doesn’t have any sort of oomph or spirit to it. It can have this rambunctious and free side to it. We can let parts of the garden go feral, and it can have a lot of energy and beauty to it, but it’s still ultimately a garden. We’re still ultimately in charge.

The flip side of that phrase also describes the future home garden. I’m sitting at my desk right now, looking across the street at my neighbor here in Columbia, Mo., and her front yard is a very short, neat, tidy lawn and about half‑a‑dozen hybrid, sterile, ornamental flowers in a row. If you replace that with something much more biodiverse, much more untended, weedy-looking, buggy, your biodiversity is going to go way up. Your conservation value can go way up, and you get a more rambunctious kind of garden aesthetic. So I meant for the phrase to work on both scales — the whole planet, and your backyard.

Q. That’s a big theme for the book — that nature is everywhere, and why don’t we embrace that? That nature isn’t just some spectacular landscape, the way most conservation organizations talk about it, but that it’s your backyard, the sliver of median strip you drive by every day, and in vacant lots and industrial waterways, and that’s the sense of nature that we should be cultivating, as background to our everyday lives. But doesn’t that argument really reemphasize the marginality of nature, a nature that’s weedy and degraded and that no one will really fight for?

A. When you use the phrase “marginal” to describe this kind of nature, that’s a tip-off as to where you’re coming from. Because nature isn’t marginal. Dirt is underneath everything — the built landscape floats like islands on the sea of nature. Some of that nature pokes through in skinny bits, but when you connect those together, there’s a lot of nature.

And just because I want people to get out and get excited about the vines growing in the alley doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also get excited about going to national parks, or that conservation should swerve away from having big interconnected pieces of undeveloped nature for some species. What I’m really proposing is a shift in our value system. What we value and don’t value can change. “Weedy” is an interesting cultural concept — in reality, weeds are successful plants. We should celebrate them, because they’re the plants we don’t have to worry about it. They’re gong to be fine. They’re the resilient part of nature.

But you’re right — we do have a long road to go before we look at an empty lot and, instead of thinking “neglected,” “weedy,” “trash,” we instead think: “Oh, I wonder what species are here. Gosh, there must be lots of pollination going on in this area, and, boy, if I come here at a certain time of day, maybe I can see some neat bird species. And, oh, gosh, isn’t this pretty?” But the weeds are the nature we’re beating back constantly.

Q. Is there enough of that kind of nature around to make a difference, both for biodiversity and for what nature gives us?

A. My argument comes down to acreage. Big national parks have an impressive amount of acreage, but if you look at doing conservation in all these little spaces, the combined acreage of those could kick the ass of the acreage of the big parks. It’s just a huge playing field that we can do conservation on. It’s practically everything. Getting a certain amount of conservation value out of farm management, for instance — that would be a huge victory globally.

Q. You write a lot about conservation in Europe versus how it’s practiced in America. Is Europe ahead of America in understanding this?

Emma Marris.

A. Yeah, absolutely, and not necessarily because they’re massively enlightened. It’s because they don’t have the Grand Canyon to distract them. They don’t have the grand wildernesses to take over their mental space, so they’ve been able to see the beauty and complexity of nature in these much smaller canvases. And they’re constantly fiddling with their conservation efforts. Management of nature is just second nature to them. They have to work really hard not to manage things, whereas we have to sort of grit our teeth to admit to ourselves that we do have to manage things.

Q. You have this fascinating chapter on the Oostvaardersplassen, a nature reserve outside of Amsterdam in which an entire landscape has been designed by an ecologist to run as it did 10,000 years ago, except the predators are largely gone, so it’s been created for nothing to look as if nothing had ever changed. Except, of cour
se, that it’s one of the most intensely managed places you could possibly find outside of agriculture. How do you feel about re‑wilding projects like this? Are they valuable? Are they curiosities? What are they saying to us?

A. I love that place. I mean, here you are, in one of the tidiest, densest, most organized countries in the world, and then you go through these gates, and all of a sudden, you’re in the savannah, with huge herds of animals running around. It’s fascinating and just unbelievable.

And if part of what we value about nature is that sense of awe that it can give us, I was awed by that place. They’ve also had a lot of success attracting animals that have showed up voluntarily and responded well to the habitat. So I think that if that keeps happening, then the Oostvaardersplassen is an argument that re‑wilding projects are not just curiosities but can be really valuable conservation tools.

Q. Back to the garden idea: You’re advancing a radical idea in this book — that people can make more nature or better nature than we have now. That cuts directly against the usual pessimistic paradigm of environmentalism — as advanced by Bill McKibben and others — which assumes that there is a set amount of nature, that nature left alone is the ideal, and all we can do is defend it against the ravages of rampant development. How did you come to this idea?

A. Partly because I was never classically trained as either an ecologist or an environmentalist. So I came to the ecology and conservation beat at Nature as an outsider, and while I sort of casually held a number of the sort of common beliefs about what is wilderness and what counts as nature, I wasn’t really wedded to them culturally. So it was easier for me to see where some of the more traditional ideas of conservation and environmentalism are starting to come apart at the seams a little bit, the more we learn about paleoecology and the dynamic nature of ecosystems and how nature has always been changing. And this thinking has been popping up at ecology conferences over the last few years.

I also had a childhood where I spent a lot of time in really crappy ecosystems and had a ball — in badly maintained city parks and third-growth forests — and it just never occurred to me that I wasn’t in nature.

Q. But you’re basically saying there is no wilderness anymore — that nature as we once thought about it, a place apart from humanity, untouched by it — doesn’t exist.

A. That’s now generally acknowledged in the literature. I have to add: My personal experiences in nature have always been pretty close to the road, and when I started hanging out with ecologists, I found that they were sticking pretty close to the road, too. Then it sort of suddenly hit me: Everything is now close to the road. You have to work really hard to get away from it.

Q. Conservation doesn’t come off really well in your book — it seems dogmatic, nostalgic, sometimes even anti-scientific, and not ready to take up the challenge of the economic and cultural forces that seem to be arrayed against it. In your view, how can conservation catch up?

A. First, I hope I don’t come across as really beating up on conservationists, because I admire them very much, and I feel that what they’re trying to do is a really important thing.

One priority I think conservation has to focus on more is genetics. I’ve very fond of using a genetic lens — genes are the raw material of what we have to work with for the future, so it seems a smart move to throw out as few genes as possible.

But I do think that keeping conservation and environmentalism separate from other progressive movements like human rights and global human development has made environmentalism just another special interest fighting for its place, almost in competition with some of these other positive movements. That’s got to change. You can’t just care about nature and not care about humanity. So an ideal mix would be a conservation movement that was also strong on human rights and human development, with a mix of priorities that was decided on in a very fair, democratic way.

I also think that there will be change toward the directions I outline in the book — whether the conservation field wants them or not — just on the basis of generational turnover of its scientists. There’s that old chestnut about there are no revolutions in science, you just wait for the old guard to die, and I think there’s probably a bit of truth to that in this case, too.

Q. In the book, you talk about a number of bêtes noire for conservation — including assisted migration of species in the face of climate change to other geographies where they might have a chance of surviving. That’s still a really controversial topic with conservationists.

A. Conservationists should get on board with assisted migration, because the industry is going to lead the way. What is industry going to move? Timber species, crop species. They might, if they’re clever, move the wild ancestors of crop species, so that we’ll still have good pools of them to play with, and they might move horticultural species. But who is going to move everything else? Who is going to move the little squiggly guys that aren’t as glamorous or aren’t commercially valuable? If conservationists find the whole thing too distasteful because it’s meddling with nature, then they might as well stand back and watch those squiggly guys turn to charcoal.

Q. Final question: What’s your favorite place on Earth, and does it match up with the kind of nature that in Rambunctious Garden you’re asking people to revalue?

A. I grew up in Seattle, and I really like the forests in the Pacific Northwest. They don’t have to be old growth. What I really love is the bounce of the turf in a forest with lots of cedar and Douglas fir, because of all the needles that have accumulated in the turf.

Q. So not necessarily a managed place?

A. No, although I’m also thinking about a place I haven’t been to in years in the Cascade Mountains, which a childhood friend’s parents owned, which had third-growth forest with mostly alders and salmonberries and other early successional stuff, and then some big, old stumps from when it had been logged. I spent many happy summers there just really enjoying the space. It never really occurred to me that the nature there wasn’t good enough.

Cross-posted from Cool Green Science.

Want to know how climate change might affect a seashore near you? Look at what it’s already done over the past 20 years to a stretch of the Florida Gulf Coast, according to a pathbreaking new study published in the journal Climatic Change.

Sea-level rise along the Waccasassa Bay area (90 miles north of Tampa) is already picking winners and losers in nature there — and the losers include the habitat the iconic Florida black bear and the bald eagle depend upon. People up and down Florida’s Gulf Coast might soon suffer, too, if sea-level rise destroys the coastal wetlands that produce world-class sport fishing and protect cities from storm surges.

A rendering of Florida coastline with 3.3 feet of sea-level rise.Image: Dave Sag

But will these losses continue? And what can anyone do about them? Laura Geselbracht, senior marine scientist with The Nature Conservancy and lead author of the study — one of the first to test a sea-level-rise model using existing data from the past — gives some answers below.

Q. Why is sea-level rise such a big deal for Florida?

A. Because so much of the Gulf Coast here is under 4.9 feet in elevation. If the Earth experiences 3.3 feet of sea-level rise over the next 100 years — and that’s the most recent “moderate” scenario projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — that will mean very substantial change for Florida, not only to our coastal wetlands and natural systems, but also for people who live along the coast.

Q. The Waccasassa Bay area is one of the best places in the world to study sea-level rise — why is that?

A. First, it isn’t very populated. So you can really study the effects of sea-level rise without having to worry about development getting in the way.

Second, there have been 20-plus years of field studies done there, and you can very clearly see over that period how sea-level rise has affected that habitat. You can see where coastal forest has transitioned into salt marsh and tree islands. When you go out in the field, you come across tree trunks all over the place in the salt marsh. The habitats are changing fast, and it gives us a glimpse of what will happen in areas that aren’t as low-lying.

Q. So who’s winning and who’s losing in this race against sea-level rise?

A. We were really surprised to find that it’s not the salt marsh — which is closest to the water’s edge — that has changed so substantially. It’s actually the coastal forest, which is set back from the salt marsh. So very small, even modest changes in sea-level rise will have a fairly significant impact on the coastal wetland systems, quite a ways back from the coast. That means that, where development does exist, it will get in the way of coastal wetland systems that are trying to transition to higher elevations because of sea-level rise.

Q. About that transition to higher elevations … what’s going to happen in the future to these coastal habitats, according to your model? (I might add that you plugged the 20 years of data into the model you’re using, to see how accurately it would predict what actually happened … and it was very accurate.)

A. The predictions vary with time and with which sea-level-rise projection you use. In one 25‑year period, tidal flats and salt marsh might do well, but in the next 50 to 100 years, those habitats may be squeezed out against either higher elevations, inappropriate soil types, or coastal development. But coastal forest almost completely disappears in our 3.3-feet sea-level rise scenario.

Q. How are species that depend on the forest going to be affected? Is there anywhere for them to go?

A. Coastal forest supports some of the larger species that we all can relate to, like the Florida black bear. There is a particular population in the Waccasassa Bay area that is a very threatened population. So, as their habitat there gets more fragmented, as large swaths of it disappear due to salt water intrusion, they may not have enough room to forage and do the things that bears do, and they might ultimately die out.

Another is the bald eagle. A lot of people think, “Well, can’t they just fly to some other trees?” But those other coastal forest areas are already occupied by bald eagles, so their populations will be diminished in that area because of the loss of coastal forests. There’s a whole suite of other species that are associated coastal forests that would be impacted as well.

Q. Okay, but that’s bears and eagles. Why should people care, outside from caring about bears and eagles?

A. These effects are important anywhere along the coast. Some low-lying communities along Florida’s Big Bend Coast are going to be very vulnerable — if the coastal wetland systems retreat around those communities, it will leave some of them as islands.

And coastal wetlands are tremendously productive areas for fisheries, including things like shrimp, crab, and the majority of the wonderful sport fish that Floridians and a lot of visitors like to catch.

Finally, these coastal wetland systems help provide protection from storm surges. The marshes act like sponges — they can absorb some of the flooding that might otherwise ensue from a tropical storm, and they can also buffer the storm surge. If those wetlands disappear and become diminished, then the impacts from the storms to coastal communities would be greater.

Q. Sounds dire. So how should urban planners prepare?

A. In a couple of ways. First, it’s really important to maintain the freshwater flows into our systems, whether from rivers, overland flow, or aquifers. When you reduce those flows, your coastal wetlands retreat faster.

Second, development. It doesn’t make sense to build in areas to which coastal wetlands will need to transition. Understanding those transitions over time can help shape where you allow development or discourage it, or even help it retreat over time if that’s possible.

And third, keep our existing natural systems healthy. Transitioning of habitats in and of itself is not a bad thing, but if that change encourages a lot of invasive species that our natural species cannot access or utilize, then that could be a very bad thing. So proper land management — like prescribed fire and invasive control, along with preventing diking and ditching of our coastal wetlands to stop salt-water intrusion — are all really important.

Q. Are local communities on the Florida Gulf Coast listening to these messages?

A. We’re finding that, while some communities and local planners
are becoming aware of sea-level rise, so far a lot of communities aren’t really doing any planning. But we think they will. This research is very powerful. The information helps you understand how your whole coastal system is connected, and how the human system can be shaped to help protect natural systems, which in turn helps protect people. So The Nature Conservancy is trying to help educate local governments and regional planning councils about these types of changes and how patterns of building might change under this improved understanding.

Pistachios: What shell remain? Photo: Patterned

What won’t climate change affect? Well, cross trail mix and cherry pie off that ever-shrinking list. It turns out that crisp apples, chewy almonds, ripe plums, and a host of other nuts and stone fruits might become much more costly to grow — or not grown at all in some spots — because of rising winter temperatures, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS One.

The problem, say researchers: The trees that produce these goodies need a certain number of hours at cold temperatures — or “winter chill” — in order to blossom and produce maximally. And the author’s extensive climate change modeling shows achieving adequate winter chill will become increasingly more difficult in growing zones across the world, from South Africa to southern Australia to California’s Central Valley. (The U.S. fruit and nut industry generates about $93 billion in income annually.)

That could mean lower crop yields unless growers either take either costly measures to adapt to warmer winters or move their stocks northward — a forced migration that might not work in many cases, according to Nature Conservancy climate scientist Evan Girvetz, a coauthor on the study. I asked Girvetz to serve up the nutty details (look out, pistachio lovers!) and to talk about how he as a climate scientists deals with depressing studies like this coming out nearly every week.

Climate scientist Evan Girvetz.Q. What’s the issue here — that fruit and nut trees need lots of cold weather before they can flower properly?

A. Yes, many fruit and nut trees, such as cherries, apples, apricots, walnuts, and almonds, require cold weather during the winter and early springtime to cue the trees to flower and produce good yields of fruits and nuts. These trees have evolved in areas that freeze, and they go dormant during the winter to protect themselves from frost damage. In order to know when to come out of dormancy, they internally keep track of the amount of cold that has occurred over winter. Once a certain amount of chilling has occurred, the plants break dormancy and flower. When there is insufficient cold weather, the trees do not properly break dormancy, often causing reduced yields and even complete crop failures in some years.

Q. We hear a lot about oranges going bad in Florida freezes. But who knew nuts and stone fruits could be really vulnerable — to too much winter warmth?

A. Most species of stone and pome fruits, as well as most nuts we eat, originate from regions with very cold winters, such as Central Asia and the Middle East. Protection from frost has thus been vital during their evolutionary process — so vital that there has been little success in breeding cultivars without a chilling requirement.

Today, the major growing regions of these crops are in very different climatic zones, where winters are relatively warm, compared to the harsh conditions in the original ranges of the species. Many species are only marginally suited to where they are grown, and even small changes in temperature patterns can be a problem. Rising temperatures caused by climate change may reduce winter chill enough to cause serious problems for fruit and nut tree yields, especially those grown in the warmer growing regions, such as in California, Chile, the Middle East, China, Africa, and Australia.

Q. Any crops we should be especially worried about?

A. It depends upon where you are in the world, but in California, for example, I’d be worried about pistachios, walnuts, plums, and peaches, as it looks like there will not be suitable climate there for them by the end of this century. In Chile, from where we in the U.S. get fruit during the winter, peaches and cherries are projected to be impacted by climate change. The problem is that in every growing region of the world, tree species are selected to match the local temperature pattern. So it’s quite possible that all important growing areas will have to make some adjustments.

Q. California’s Central Valley: some big potential impacts there. The paper says that the ecological niche of many fruits and nuts there could move northward, to northern California, Oregon, and Washington … but that it’s not as simple as just picking up and moving to a new state. Why not?

A. It certainly is not simple to move crops. First, the soils and lands in Oregon and Washington are inferior to those in California for growing these fruit and nut trees. Add to that, water limitations for agriculture in Oregon and Washington, which make it difficult to expand agriculture. And finally, it is a big economic cost to move a crop from one place to another — given land prices and the cost of starting a whole orchard from scratch, there is a huge up-front investment to move, especially given the often-small margin for profit in these agricultural industries.

Q. Where else might crop migration be difficult?

A. Migration of tree crops will be difficult everywhere. While farmers of annual crops can choose to grow something new every year or look for land elsewhere, tree crop growers are locked into their investments for several decades. The up-front costs of establishing an orchard must be recovered, and few growers will be ready to uproot their trees and start over elsewhere.

Besides, climate is only one factor that determines a region’s suitability for tree crops. They often require irrigation, they need certain soils, and processing infrastructure for fruits and nuts must be in place. We currently find highly efficient production systems in areas, where all these factors come together, such as in California’s Central Valley. For those reasons, it may be easier to find new crops for current growing regions than new growing regions for current crops.

Q. Now, growers of these crops have some ways to adapt, right? But what might the drawbacks of those methods be?

A. There are some things that growers can try to do to minimize the impacts of climate change on their crops, but all will cost money and they may not always work. There are chemicals that can be used to promote tree flowering, but too little is ineffective and too much damages the plants. Some of these chemicals are also quite toxic, and reliance on such materials may not be desirable. Agricultural management can help create cooler microclimates, but this is difficult and increases production costs. And certainly breeding of new tree cultivars can lower chilling requirements, but this takes a long time and lots of money for research and development with unknown results.

Q. So this could impact growers in a big way. What about consumers? Will we be seeing higher peach prices? More costly cashews?

A. There are certainly implications for consumers, but it is hard to say exactly what they are. I would say that this industry is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and in some places may already be feeling the effects. Given the complexity of economic systems, it is hard to project prices, but this research shows that climate change will likely play a role in the future economy for the fruit and nut industry. A crucial outcome of our work is, however, that changes can be anticipated and that based on such predictions, it may be possible to adapt, but that will cost money.

Q. Almost every climate study out today has some new, very depressing projection — it can make people feel fatalistic. As a climate scientist, you read lots of studies like this. How do you stay positive? What actions are you taking, and which do you recommend people take to feel at least a little empowered in the face of this kind of analysis?

A. There is a lot of doom and gloom out there about climate change, and good reason to be concerned about future impacts. But there is a lot we can do to minimize the impacts and help stop climate change. We are learning a huge amount about how humans are changing this planet, but we are also learning how we can help this planet. The innovation that is occurring out there right now is amazing — from clean energy systems and the protection of forests that capture carbon dioxide, to saving mangrove forests that protect people from sea-level rise. And these climate solutions can boost economies and create jobs.

I personally try to do my part by taking the bus and riding my bike to work, and choosing to buy energy-efficient products. But I know that this will take a bigger effort than just individual people, so I think that each person can become part of a larger community that helps our society understand how climate impacts all of our lives and help find innovative solutions to climate change.

The helpful Jerusalem cricket.Photo: Franco Folini

There are 1 billion bacteria in a single gram of soil. (Give or take a few million.)

But how can you get that army — and its insect friends, like the two-inch Jerusalem cricket pictured to the right — to help you grow bigger veggies and prettier flowers?

There’s nobody better to ask than Nature Conservancy soil ecologist Sophie Parker, who recently turned Grist on to the fascinating (and sometimes scary) world of soil organisms. I asked Sophie to give us some tips to make our gardens grow even better — through the power of microbes …

Q. How does this work? Why are microbes so important to good gardens?

A. Bacteria, fungi, and other tiny soil microbes have a variety of ways of making a living, and many of their activities enrich the soil.

First off, they are the Earth’s natural recyclers — decomposing complex substances into smaller compounds that can be used by plants. They do this by producing enzymes — special chemical juices that break things down. Some of these enzymes are like guided missiles with a very specific target. Others are more general and work like a wrecking ball to quickly dismantle large particles. Decomposition in soils is a highly sophisticated, active process, and bacteria and fungi control how it happens.

Another important thing that some bacteria do is pull nitrogen out of the air and convert it into a form that plants can use. This is known as “nitrogen fixation.” Because nitrogen is an essential nutrient that plants need for growth, bacterially driven nitrogen fixation can play an important role in determining how productive soil will be.

Q. So, it’s time to grow vegetables and flowers. What kinds of organisms do we want in our gardens to make sure everything grows huge and beautiful?

A. A garden is an excellent place to see a wide array of organisms at work. Each scoop of earth you turn over with your garden trowel is literally crawling with critters! The majority of these are too small to see without a microscope, but some of the larger soil dwellers are very familiar to gardeners. Earthworms, mites, springtails, and spiders are all important members of the soil food web. They aerate the soil, decompose dead material, and serve as natural biocontrol. Seeing these creatures in your yard is a sign of a healthy ecosystem and good quality soil, which is the foundation of a productive garden.

Pocket gopher — not so helpful.Photo: Ken-ichi UedaQ. And which soil critters don’t we want?

A. Well, gardeners wage all kinds of battles with pests large and small. It stands to reason that the juicy, plump, and luscious fruits and veggies that grow in backyard gardens are attractive not only to people, but to a variety of other animals as well.

One soil dweller that gardeners often complain about in my community is actually not a microorganism: it’s the pocket gopher. I’ve seen a single gopher send calm, gentle gardeners into fits of rodenticidal rage. But beyond gophers, many of the flying and crawling insects that eat our growing plants spend one or more of their life stages (egg, larvae, pupa, or adult) in the soil. Cutworms are a good example of this: these are the caterpillars of moths that hide in the soil by day and chew through the stems of plants at night. However, trying to attack soil-dwelling organisms to control the pests in your garden is much like searching for a very tiny needle in a huge haystack.

Q. We’re organic gardeners, it goes without saying. So what can we do organically to promote lots of good ones and make the bad ones go away?

A. There are many steps a gardener can take to promote a healthy garden without using toxic pesticides. Local botanical gardens and arboretums can typically provide a wealth of information on this topic, but the first step is to start viewing your garden holistically, as the fully functioning, biodiverse ecosystem that it is. All organisms are on the hunt for food and space, and you can use this knowledge to your advantage to control pests and weeds:

• By varying up the foods and flowers you grow, you reduce the chance that your entire garden will fall victim to being eaten, as many pest organisms are specialist herbivores.
• If an insect is eating your plants, try to figure out what species of insect it is and what might eat it or dissuade it. Some of the best controllers of insects are other insects (i.e. think of how effective ladybugs are at controlling aphids), so using a broad-spectrum, chemically-based insecticide can actually make pest problems worse. Mechanical removal of some species is effective; just pick them off plants (or, if possible, get some chickens to do it for you). Removing small infestations before they become big problems is an effective tactic.
• Altering the soil surface by adding mulch (to prevent weed growth) or egg shells (to deter slugs) can really influence which species enter your garden in the first place. Some natural pest control tactics can also be a lot of fun. Invite some friends over one evening to bait slug traps (pour a little beer into shallow containers at ground level), and your vegetable garden could become an impromptu Biergarten.

Scientist Sophie Parker delivers the real dirt.Q. I’m in. What about fertilizer — does that help or hurt the beneficial microorganisms?

A. Synthetic chemical fertilizers can promote some microorganisms while inhibiting others, but the specifics of this relationship will vary from garden to garden, depending on a variety of factors such as the starting condition of the soil. The composition of the soil microbial community will change if fertilizers are applied; some bacteria will benefit and multiply, and others will lose out. This can cause a cascade through the soil food chain, favoring certain amoeba that eat the newly-favored bacteria, the soil mites that eat the amoebae, and the larger insects that eat the mites. Right now, researchers are actively studying these complex soil food webs to understand how the addition of nutrients to soils influences the soil community.

Another thing about synthetic chemical fertilizers: They can require a good deal of fossil fuel to produce. Gardeners interested in minimizing their carbon footprint should begin a compost pile and harness the power of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms to decompose their way towards independence from store-bought fertilizers. Composting not only transforms kitchen scraps and yard waste into valuable plant food, it also diverts waste from landfills. And the rich, earthy smell of a healthy compost pile is its own reward.

Q. Mmmmm … good. So what are some of the coolest of these soil critters in gardens? Can we see them?

A. One of my personal backyard favorites is the Jerusalem cricket (Stenopelmatus sp.), which is also known as the potato bug or niña de la tierra (child of the earth). These insects are up to two inches long, tan-colored, bulbous-headed, cricket look-alikes with a striped brown abdomen. (See photo above.) They feed primarily on decomposing material in the soil, but when they come to the surface their odd appearance can startle the uninitiated. Jerusalem crickets often venture out at night, where they become a favorite food of Pallid Bats (Antrozous pallidus).

The more time you spend outside in your garden, the more chances you will have to see the amazing diversity of soil-dwelling creatures it contains. Happy gardening!

Photo: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service — Pacific Region

Here’s why: Coral already provides the elemental compounds for a growing number of crucial medicines and health products — ranging from antiviral drugs like Ara-A and AZT to anti-inflammatories, painkillers, and even sunblocks. But science is in a race against time: We’ve just started to plumb the depths of coral’s potential to attack the world’s health issues … only to have many reefs on the brink of disaster from threats like warming oceans and overfishing.

So who better than two doctors to make the case for coral as a life preserver? Bruce Chabner, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Cancer Center, and Daniel Gruenberg, oncologist at Northwest Cancer Specialists in Portland, Ore., sat down with my Nature Conservancy colleagues Kerry Crisley and Jen Newlin to find out what makes coral so valuable for the medical community — and how we can act to help reefs keep healing us.

Q. What is it about the ocean — and coral reefs in particular — that make it a valuable source of medical research?

A. Chabner: There’s an enormous amount of life in our oceans, particularly in coral reefs. Where you have high concentrations of different organisms living together in one place, you have a treasure trove of unique microorganisms — and compounds produced by those organisms — not found elsewhere on Earth.

Q. This recent report by the World Resources Institute — which says that 75 percent of the world’s coral reefs are in trouble — how much does that worry you?

A. Chabner: First, I firmly believe that coral reefs should be protected in their own right so we can be good stewards of our natural habitat. But we have only scratched the surface of what the reefs can offer medically. The sea could very well hold the building blocks of drugs that could treat, or even cure, cancer. We don’t know. But if we lose the reefs, we’ll never find out.

Gruenberg: We think a lot about nature in our anti-cancer strategy. In the oceans, when we trawl in ways that carve up the ocean bottoms, we’re removing organisms we didn’t even know existed that could be valuable for treating cancer, not to mention things like heart disease or diabetes.

One other thing we should think more about is indigenous cultures. These societies have ways of treatment that we don’t fully understand — rich histories in natural healing strategies that may be relatable to other communities. Who knows what can be found in prairie grasses, for instance, that’s beneficial? There are so many natural opportunities we know nothing about. And we don’t have a lot of time to figure it out.

Q. With cancer drugs — how many do we get from nature? And how did science figure out the connection?

A. Gruenberg: More than 90 percent are derived from natural sources. Actually, even drugs like Cytoxan come from nitrogen mustard, as in the gas used in World War I. How did they figure out it had anti-cancer properties? From autopsies at that time, they saw that lymph nodes shrank. Of course it killed a lot of other cells, too. But it’s become important in the treatment of cancers like lymphoma. So I’d actually revise that to say that 99.9 percent of our drugs are naturally derived.

The oncology field has changed so much in 20 years, considering all that we’ve learned about cell division and the immune system. Not only do I see improved survivorship and outcomes, but there’s less toxicity to medications we use. And there are more supportive medicines and natural medicines because of natural sources and better understanding of natural processes. It’s remarkable.

Q. How does getting it from sea to pill work? How does one go from looking at, say, a sea squirt to creating a new drug?

A. Chabner: We start by studying the organism. How does it grow? How does it defend itself? How does it survive in its surroundings? When we’ve found the specific compounds that contribute to its survival we can see where it might be effective in treating certain types of cancers. The drug Ara-C, for example, is the backbone of chemotherapy for leukemia and lymphoma. That was derived from a sea sponge in the Caribbean.

Q. Do we have to keep harvesting the reefs to maintain supplies of these medicines?

A. Chabner: That’s the best part; in most cases, no. Once the compound has been isolated it can often be synthesized and created in the lab. What’s important is that we discover it while it’s still there in our oceans.

Q. Alzheimer’s disease and strokes — there are other marine-based drugs being tested that show tremendous promise in the treatment of these conditions. What else? Are there new drugs in the works?

A. Chabner: Yes. Several new medicines for the treatment of lymphoma and ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers have gone through their clinical trial phases and are close to receiving FDA approval. And — equally exciting — other marine-based medicines are showing tremendous promise in the treatment of strokes and Alzheimer’s disease.

Q. Bring it down to a personal level. Give us one thing that anyone could do to keep the nature-medicine connection a healthy one.

A. Gruenberg: One simple thing is to eat local. It’s good for our bodies. There’s less transport so less pollution and use of fossil fuels. There’s less disturbance to the natural environment and indigenous cultures. You know the agricultural source and it’s local to you and your system and environment.

Q. Do you follow your own advice?

A. Gruenberg: As much as possible. And I try not to eat anything out of season.