Dryland Degradation and Expansion: Implications for Mexican Policies from the Earth System Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Gabriel Lopez Porras
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Land Degradation ◽  
Water Scarcity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Sustainable Land Management ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
The Earth

Despite international efforts to stop dryland degradation and expansion, current dryland pathways are predicted to result in large-scale migration, growing poverty and famine, and increasing climate change, land degradation, conflicts and water scarcity. Earth system science has played a key role in analysing dryland problems, and has been even incorporated in global assessments such as the ones made by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. However, policies addressing dryland degradation, like the ‘Mexican programme for the promotion of sustainable land management’, do not embrace an Earth system perspective, so they do not consider the complexity and non-linearity that underlie dryland problems. By exploring how this Mexican programme could integrate the Earth system perspective, this paper discusses how ’Earth system’ policies could better address dryland degradation and expansion in the Anthropocene.

Time to wake up to climate change and the accelerating phosphorus cycle

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Haygarth
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Rock Phosphate ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Phosphorus Cycle ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Related Quality ◽  
Quality Water ◽  
Phosphorus Loads

<p>We urgently need to wake up to the role that climate change will be playing in the phosphorus cycle.  The paper will attempt to address the complexities, controversies and uncertainties of estimating the effects that climate change is having on the phosphorus cycle.  Citing an example from three UK catchments, the effect of climate change on average winter phosphorus loads is predicted to increase by up to 30% by the 2050s, and these effects will only be off-set by large-scale agricultural changes (e.g. a 20–80% reduction in phosphorus inputs).  Achieving phosphorus-related quality water in diverse and productive agricultural landscapes under a changing climate is going to be a massive challenge.  It is less than a century since we started mining rock phosphate, but in the context of a 4.5-billion-year-old earth and the acceleration due to climate, we are living through a switching point for phosphorus in the earth system.</p>

Evolution and Future Architecture for the Earth System Grid Federation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Kershaw ◽  
Ghaleb Abdulla ◽  
Sasha Ames ◽  
Ben Evans ◽  
Tom Landry ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Earth Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Data Storage ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
European Space Agency ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
The Earth

<p>The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a globally distributed e-infrastructure for the hosting and dissemination of climate-related data.  ESGF was originally developed to support the community in the analysis of CMIP5 (5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) data in support of the 5th Assessment report made by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).  Recognising the challenge of the large volumes of data concerned and the international nature of the work, a federated system was developed linking together a network of collaborating data providers around the world. This enables users to discover, download and access data through a single unified system such that they can seamlessly pull data from these multiple hosting centres via a common set of APIs.  ESGF has grown to support over 16000 registered users and besides the CMIPs, supports a range of other projects such as the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, Obs4MIPS, CORDEX and the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative Open Data Portal.</p><p>Over the course of its evolution, ESGF has pioneered technologies and operational practice for distributed systems including solutions for federated search, metadata modelling and capture, identity management and large scale replication of data.  Now in its tenth year of operation, a major review of the system architecture is underway. For this next generation system, we will be drawing from our experience and lessons learnt running an operational e-infrastructure but also considering other similar systems and initiatives.  These include for example, ESA’s Earth Observation Exploitation Platform Common Architecture, outputs from recent OGC Testbeds and Pangeo (https://pangeo.io/), a community and software stack for the geosciences.   Drawing from our own recent pilot work, we look at the role of cloud computing with its impact on deployment practice and hosting architecture but also new paradigms for massively parallel data storage and access, such as object store. The cloud also offers a potential point of entry for scientists without access to large-scale computing, analysis, and network resources.  As trusted international repositories, the major national computing centres that host and replicate large corpuses of ESGF have increasingly been supporting a broader range of domains and communities in the Earth sciences. We explore the critical role of standards for connecting data and the application of FAIR data principles to ensure free and open access and interoperability with other similar systems in the Earth Sciences.</p>

Envisaged transfer projects: New technologies in the water sustainability

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naseer Ahmed Abbasi ◽  
Xiangzhou Xu
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Water Scarcity ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Water Shortage ◽  
Environmental Aspects ◽  
Water Shortages ◽  
The World

<p><strong>Abstracts:</strong> Influenced by global climate change, water shortages and other extreme weather, water scarcity in the world is an alarming sign. This article provides evidences regarding the Tunnel and Tianhe project’s feasibility and their technical, financial, political, socioeconomic and environmental aspects. Such as how to utilize the water vapour in the air and to build a 1000 km long tunnel project to fulfill the goal of solving water shortage in China. The projects are promising to solve the problem of water, food and drought in the country. In addition, the telecoupling framework helps to effectively understand and manage ecosystem services, as well as the different challenges associated with them. Such efforts can help find the ways for proper utilization of water resources and means of regulation.</p><p><strong>Key words: </strong>Sustainability; water shortage; transfer project</p>

Preliminary monthly gravity field models from kinematic orbits of SWARM Satellites

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xingfu Zhang ◽  
Qiujie Chen ◽  
Yunzhong Shen
Keyword(s):  
Gravity Field ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Swarm Satellites ◽  
Variable Gravity ◽  
Data Gap ◽  
One Year ◽  
Gravity Recovery ◽  
Gravity Field Models

<p>      Although the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE FO) satellite missions play an important role in monitoring global mass changes within the Earth system, there is a data gap of about one year spanning July 2017 to May 2018, which leads to discontinuous gravity observations for monitoring global mass changes. As an alternative mission, the SWARM satellites can provide gravity observations to close this data gap. In this paper, we are dedicated to developing alternative monthly time-variable gravity field solutions from SWARM data. Using kinematic orbits of SWARM from ITSG for the period January 2015 to September 2020, we have generated a preliminary time series of monthly gravity field models named Tongji-Swarm2019 up to degree and order 60. The comparisons between Tongji-Swarm2019 and GRACE/GRACE-FO monthly solutions show that Tongji-Swarm2019 solutions agree with GRACE/GRACE-FO models in terms of large-scale mass change signals over amazon, Greenland and other regions. We can conclude that Tongji-Swarm2019 monthly gravity field models are able to close the gap between GRACE and GRACE FO.</p>

scholarly journals Politics of Strata

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 211-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Clark
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Earth Science ◽  
Power Source ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
The Third ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways.

scholarly journals Organizing in the Anthropocene

Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wright ◽  
Daniel Nyberg ◽  
Lauren Rickards ◽  
James Freund
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Exponential Growth ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Introductory Article

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.

scholarly journals Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) v2.0 – an extended set of large-scale diagnostics for quasi-operational and comprehensive evaluation of Earth system models in CMIP

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3383-3438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronika Eyring ◽  
Lisa Bock ◽  
Axel Lauer ◽  
Mattia Righi ◽  
Manuel Schlund ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Model Evaluation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Performance Metrics ◽  
Earth System Model ◽  
System Model ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Evaluation Tool ◽  
The Earth ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Earth System Models

Abstract. The Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) is a community diagnostics and performance metrics tool designed to improve comprehensive and routine evaluation of Earth system models (ESMs) participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). It has undergone rapid development since the first release in 2016 and is now a well-tested tool that provides end-to-end provenance tracking to ensure reproducibility. It consists of (1) an easy-to-install, well-documented Python package providing the core functionalities (ESMValCore) that performs common preprocessing operations and (2) a diagnostic part that includes tailored diagnostics and performance metrics for specific scientific applications. Here we describe large-scale diagnostics of the second major release of the tool that supports the evaluation of ESMs participating in CMIP Phase 6 (CMIP6). ESMValTool v2.0 includes a large collection of diagnostics and performance metrics for atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial variables for the mean state, trends, and variability. ESMValTool v2.0 also successfully reproduces figures from the evaluation and projections chapters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and incorporates updates from targeted analysis packages, such as the NCAR Climate Variability Diagnostics Package for the evaluation of modes of variability, the Thermodynamic Diagnostic Tool (TheDiaTo) to evaluate the energetics of the climate system, as well as parts of AutoAssess that contains a mix of top–down performance metrics. The tool has been fully integrated into the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) infrastructure at the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ) to provide evaluation results from CMIP6 model simulations shortly after the output is published to the CMIP archive. A result browser has been implemented that enables advanced monitoring of the evaluation results by a broad user community at much faster timescales than what was possible in CMIP5.

scholarly journals A Thought Experiment on Sustainable Management of the Earth System

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Heitzig ◽  
Wolfram Barfuss ◽  
Jonathan F. Donges
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Game Theory ◽  
Optimal Control ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Right ◽  
Safe Operating ◽  
Qualitative Decision

We introduce and analyse a simple formal thought experiment designed to reflect a qualitative decision dilemma humanity might currently face in view of climate change. In it, each generation can choose between just two options, either setting humanity on a pathway to certain high wellbeing after one generation of suffering, or leaving the next generation in the same state as this one with the same options, but facing a continuous risk of permanent collapse. We analyse this abstract setup regarding the question of what the right choice would be both in a rationality-based framework including optimal control, welfare economics and game theory, and by means of other approaches based on the notions of responsibility, safe operating spaces, and sustainability paradigms. Despite the simplicity of the setup, we find a large diversity and disagreement of assessments both between and within these different approaches.

1. Making Sense of Earth’s Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Biodiversity Loss ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
Wilderness Preservation ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Environmental Discourses ◽  
Nature Preservation

This chapter introduces the politics of the Earth, which has featured a large and ever-growing range of concerns, such as pollution, wilderness preservation, population growth, depletion of natural resources, climate change, biodiversity loss, and destabilization of the Earth system. It explains how the issues of Earth’s politics are interlaced with a range of questions about human livelihood, social justice, public attitudes, and proper relation to one other and other entities on the planet. It also discusses the consequences of discourses for politics and policies. The chapter clarifies how environmental issues like ecological limits, nature preservation, climate change, biodiversity, rainforest protection, environmental justice, and pollution are interconnected in all kinds of ways. It develops an environmental discourse analysis approach and shows how this approach will be applied in subsequent chapters, beginning with the positioning of environmental discourses in relation to the long dominant of discourse of industrialism.

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