Planet Earths' debt ceiling

You may have not noticed it amid all the news on the economy, but on Tuesday we've gone into ecological debt for the year. 27 September was this year's Earth Overshoot Day (via Discover), the day when human consumption and waste emission for the year has exceeded the Earth's annual productivity and ability to absorb waste. The organization responsible for this announcement is the NGO Global Footprint Network, which seeks to raise awareness of environmental sustainability. They've issued a media packet explaining the concept here (pdf). The idea was originally mooted by the UK-based new economics foundation (they do their name in lowercase) in the 1980s as Ecological Debt Day.

From Global Footprint Network website

It sounds like a straightforward calculation of income minus expenditure, but the reality of course is quite complicated. Most of the parameters, such as crop productivity and human greenhouse gas emissions, have to be estimated, so the date is not an exact one. Despite the uncertainties, the calculated date is actually be on the more generous (to humans) end of the scale.

What's scarier is that the date has been moving forward every year: from sometime in early November in 2001, to late September now, about 3 days a year. Even scarier, this ignores the cumulative effect of previous times when we've gone into debt. This crisis mirrors the financial one: in some heavily indebted countries, politicians are happy to report when they've simply slowed down the rate of debt increase.

This is a good way of getting people's attention, because of all the headlines that the poor economy has been grabbing lately. Even non-economists, like myself, have become acquainted with concepts like debt ceilings, defaults, and bailouts (though what a "tranche" is still remains opaque to me). Environmentalists and sustainability scientists are also working on figuring out how to put an economic price on ecosystems and the environment, to make the importance of preserving the environment more "real" to those who think in dollars and cents, such as policymakers and industry. Examples include factoring in the cost of ecosystem services into environmental impact assessments, or selling carbon credits, or swapping habitat protection for debt forgiveness. All of these schemes have their critics, but I like to think of them as experiments in progress, as people try to figure out what's a workable way to account for the environmental impact of our economic decisions.

"Moving Planet" event in Singapore, 24-25 Sep

Keen on cycling? "Moving Planet" is a "world-wide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis". The campaign is coming to Singapore, where organizers aim to encourage cycling to reduce the use of fossil fuels. It's on this weekend in Singapore (24th and 25th September), from 10 am to 10 pm at Youth Park in Orchard, and includes music performances and film screenings. The event is organized by local NGOs ECO Singapore and Xpose.

Mr Brown's take on the Singapore oil spill

"... and also, there is a minor side effect of some nature things will die." link

More seriously:

BP "doesn't want pictures of dead animals" from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico making their way to the media. BP is facing a groundswell of public anger and hostility as the oil continues to flow into the ocean, and coastal communities on the Gulf Coast of the US face the prospect of severe damage to their homes and livelihoods. The US government has announced its intention to launch a criminal investigation into BP's conduct even as the company struggles to stem the flow of oil.

Latest reports say that the riser pipe of the well has been successfully cut, a key step before the company can lower a containment dome over it. However, this means that the flow rate will increase until the dome is in place. Some 'armchair engineers' have suggested using a nuclear bomb to shut off the well, but no one is seriously considering that as anything more than idle speculation.

The degree of public anger seems to be of the same magnitude as that directed against Wall Street when news of the financial crisis broke, if not greater, because the public sees this as yet one more example of big business and big money trading the well-being of the common man for profits. But merely condemning the company, or having the government seize its assets, as some have called for, cannot be the solution, because the oil company is the one with the expertise to clean up its mess. The head of the US government's response to the spill has commented that the government is not as well-placed to handle the plugging of the oil well as BP is.

Bacteria aiding breakdown of Gulf oil spill

Naturally-occurring bacteria are able to break down the oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and their abundance is already increasing in samples of oil-laden water. Researchers suggest how this knowledge might help us: adding fertilizer to the water can encourage their growth, for example. Yet among the bacterial species that are feasting on the oil is the genus Vibrio, many of which (like the cholera agent) are human and animal pathogens, so we have to be aware and wary. The bacterial communities, like other organisms, will be 'reshuffled' by the spill, and their metabolism will also lower oxygen levels in the water as they break down the chemicals in the oil.

Great clean energy ad

That's all I can say without giving too much of a spoiler to this video.



(Thanks to Keru for sending this along.)

Cleaning Oil-Slick Birds

More than just a scrub with soap is needed to save birds affected by oil spill. The deadly Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster on 22 April is spreading a huge oil slick over the Gulf of Mexico, which may soon reach land.


Oil slick at bottom right (Picture source: BBC)

Cleaning oiled birds is a complicated process, and this Popular Mechanics article describes how. One important step is when they are dried after washing; rescuers have to make sure that their feathers are all aligned, the way that birds normally do when they preen themselves, so that they can remain water proof.

More information on wildlife impact from the BBC.

(Via Arts and Letters Daily)

Singapore Ranked #1 in the World for....

... the wrong reason. Corey Bradshaw (Adelaide), Navjot Sodhi (NUS) and Giam Xingli (Princeton, formerly at NUS) have published a ranking of countries by environmental impact in PLoS ONE. When scaled for resource availability, Singapore comes out tops:

"The proportional index ranked Singapore, Korea, Qatar, Kuwait, Japan, Thailand, Bahrain, Malaysia, Philippines and Netherlands as having the highest proportional environmental impact, whereas Brazil, USA, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia and Peru had the highest absolute impact (i.e., total resource use, emissions and species threatened)."

(Figure source: PLoS ONE. Upper panel - proportional impact, lower panel - absolute impact.)

They claim that this study is robust, quantifiable, and looks only at the environmental impact, unlike previous rankings and data compilations.

More details from Bradshaw's personal blog, and the original paper.

(Thanks to Hann for heads-up)

HOME - Yann Arthus-Bertrand

HOME is a beautiful one and a half hour documentary by Yanns Arthus-Bertrand. Narrated by Glen Close, the story of how life began and how humans changed the environment as civilisation progress is beautifully told.

You can also watch it on YouTube.

'Gender-bending' chemicals in the environment

Males of wildlife vertebrate species are becoming more female, yikes!

Chemicals from common household products that enter the environment are feminising male wildlife from fish to mammals and suggests potential harm to human beings as well.

See the Chem Trust report, "Effects of pollutants on the reproductive health of male vertebrate wildlife - Males under threat," 07 Dec 2008.

This was widely reported in the media in articles such as: "It's official: Men really are the weaker sex," by Geoffrey Lean. The Independent, 07 Dec 2008:

"Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety information on 85 per cent of them.

Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" - or gender-benders - because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides."

From the report highlights:

"All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one vertebrate wildlife species, may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans.

Indeed, given the widespread presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, effects are likely to be occurring in more species than those currently reported."

For a local flavour, see Bayen et al., 2005. Persistent organic pollutants in mangrove food webs in Singapore. Chemosphere 61(3). doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2005.02.097