U43C-0071
The Influence of Historical and Potential Future Deforestation on the Stream Flow of the Amazon River -- Land Surface Processes and Atmospheric Feedbacks
Global economic and regional population and development pressures have resulted in high rates of deforestation in the Amazon River basin, mostly in the eastern and southern portion of the basin. Recent deforestation rates reflect the global demand for Brazilian free-range beef and soybeans with about 22,000 km2 deforested each year between 2000 and 2004 and 7000 km2 deforested in the final months of 2007. Land cover and land use changes influence the quantity of surface water resources by changing how incoming precipitation and radiation are partitioned among sensible and latent heat fluxes, runoff, and river discharge and altering regional and continental scale precipitation patterns. Results from coupled land surface and global climate model simulations clarify a few important points about the impact of deforestation on the Amazon River: 1) The local evapotranspiration decrease and subsequent discharge increase can be a significant fraction of the water balance when greater than 50% of a watershed is deforested. 2) The atmospheric feedbacks from large-scale deforestation may be of the same order of magnitude as the changes to local land surface processes, but of opposite sign and are not limited to those basins where deforestation has occurred. 3) Changes to discharge and aquatic environments with future deforestation of the Amazon will likely be a complex function of how much vegetation has been removed from a particular watershed and how much has been removed from the entire Amazon Basin.
U43C-0072
Carbon and Nitrogen Stable Isotopes in Fastfood: Signatures of Corn and Confinement
Americans spend more than one hundred billion dollars on restaurant fastfood each year; fastfood meals comprise a disproportionate amount of both meat and calories within the U.S. diet. Frustrated by futile attempts to gain information about the origin and production of fastfood from the companies themselves, we used carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes to infer the source of feed to meat animals, the source of fat within fries, and the extent of fertilization and confinement inherent to production. We sampled food from McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's chains, purchasing more than 480 servings of hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and fries within geographically-distributed U.S. cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Boston and Baltimore. From the entire sample set of beef and chicken, only 12 servings of beef had δ13C < -21 ‰; for these animals only was a food source other than corn possible. We observed remarkably invariant values of δ15N in both beef and chicken, reflecting uniform confinement and exposure to heavily fertilized feed for all animals. The δ13C value of fries differed significantly among restaurants indicating that the chains employed different protocols for deep- frying: Wendy's clearly employed only corn oil, while McDonald's and Burger King favored other vegetable oils; this differed from ingredient reports. Our results highlighted the overwhelming importance of corn agriculture within virtually every aspect of fastfood manufacture.
U43C-0073
Vegetation change, malnutrition and violence in the Horn of Africa
In certain circumstances, climate change in association with a broad range of social factors may increase the risk of famines and subsequently, violent conflict. The impacts of climate change on society will be experienced both through changes in mean conditions over long time periods and through increases in extreme events. Recent studies have shown the historical effects of long term climate change on societies and the importance of short term climatic triggers on armed conflict. However, most of these studies are at the state level ignoring local conditions. Here we use detailed information extracted from wide-swath satellite data (MODIS) to analyze the impact of climate variability change on malnutrition and violent conflict. More specifically, we perform multivariate logistic regression analysis in order to explain the geographical distribution of malnutrition and conflict in the Horn of Africa on a sub-national level. This region, constituted by several unstable and poor states, has been affected by droughts, floods, famines, and violence in the past few years. Three commonly used nutrition and mortality indicators are used to characterize the health situation (CE-DAT database). To map violence we use the georeferenced Armed Conflicts dataset developed by the Center for the Study of Civil War. Explanatory variables include several socio-economic variables and environmental variables characterizing land degradation, vegetation activity, and interannual variability in land-surface conditions. First results show that interannual variability in land-surface conditions is associated with malnutrition but not with armed conflict. Furthermore, land degradation seems not to be associated with either malnutrition or armed conflict.
U43C-0074
Food Security Through the Eyes of AVHRR: Changes and Variability of African Food Production
Food security is defined by FAO as a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Despite globalization and food trade, access to food remains a major problem for an important part of Africa's population. As a contribution to the food security analysis we identify at a coarse scale where trends and high interannual variability of food production occur within Africa. We use the 8-km resolution AVHRR NDVI 15-day composites of the GIMMS group (1981-2006). Two methods were applied to extract phenology indicators from the dataset. The indicators are start of season, length of season, time of maximum NDVI, maximum NDVI, and cumulated NDVI over the season. To focus the analysis on food production we spatially aggregate the annual indicators at sub-national level using a general crop mask. Persistent changes during the 26-year period were assessed using trend analysis on the yearly aggregated indicators. These trends may indicate changes in production, and consequent potential increases of food insecurity. We evaluate then where strong interannual variability of phenology indicators occurs. This relates to regular shortages of food availability. For Africa, field information on phenology or accurate time series of production figures at the sub-national scale are scarce. Validating the outcome of the AVHRR analysis is consequently difficult. We propose to use crop-specific national FAOSTAT yield statistics. For this purpose, we aggregate phenology outputs per country using specific masks for the major staple food crops. Although data quality and scale issues influence results, for several countries and crops significant positive correlations between indicators and crop production exist. We conclude that AVHRR-derived phenology information can provide useful inputs to food security analysis.
U43C-0075
Integrating the Technosocial Dimensions of Food and Biomass Energy Systems under Climate Change
The increasing complexity of global-change issues calls for both interdisciplinary approaches and modeling tools able to integrate information across different knowledge domains (environment, food security, climate change, social conditions, technology, and national security). Here we use results from three models (the integrated assessment model MiniCAM, the biophysical model EPIC, and the vulnerability model VRIM) as well as other physical and social data to develop a model prototype in STELLA® for evaluating issues of food and biofuel production, land competition, population growth, and nutrition. Our initial focus is on the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), a rapid developing region with recognized issues with regards to vulnerability to climate change, environmental conditions, food production and nutrition, energy production, and national security. The model prototype for India consists of three major domains: land and crop production, food and biofuels production, and population growth and nutrition. FAO and UNDP data are to used to develop the historical background while profit indices and nutrition status are used to examine land use competition and food policies.
U43C-0076
Land Conservation in an Evolving Agricultural Industry: Trade-offs to Consider
This study analyzes the interactions of land conservation policy with biofuel expansion using an economic model of the U.S. forest and agricultural sectors. The world agricultural industry is changing rapidly under emerging market and policy-based pressures. An important driver in the U.S. is the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), which mandates significant expansion in biofuels production (up to 36 billion gallons/year by 2022). Traditional land conservation practices such as the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) are at risk in this changing agricultural climate, as the opportunity costs of reverting to cropland continue to rise. Large- scale reversion of CRP acreage is likely to lead to substantial losses in soil carbon, biodiversity, soil erosion protection, and water quality. However, given the increased competition for land resources, continued efforts to maintain the CRP could induce land use change (LUC) and agricultural development from even more sensitive ecosystems, including native grasslands and forests. This study uses economic modeling to study CRP reversion and LUC under multiple scenarios, including: 1) Baseline assumptions of growth in world agricultural demand and energy prices, with and without CRP reversion; 2) Implementation of the RFS while maintaining the CRP; and 3) RFS with CRP reversion allowed. The study is done using the FASOMGHG model (Lee, McCarl et al, 2008), which is well suited for this analysis as it: 1) Depicts land use competition between crops, pasture, CRP, and forestry over a 100 year period 2) Contains comprehensive GHG accounting across the sectors, 3) Allows land in the CRP to revert to cultivation at an economically optimal rate as land values increase, and 4) Extensively models biofuel and conventional agricultural production possibilities. Results generated to date show significant reversion to cultivation, even under the baseline (36% of the total CRP stock by 2020). Implementing the RFS further pressures conservation practices (exhibiting a 53.4% reversion rate). This reversion is a logical, low cost extensification of crop land; higher reversion rates are observed where agricultural land is most valuable, such as in Iowa and Illinois. Forecasted CRP re-cultivation accompanies environmental degradation in the form of increased chemical applications, irrigation water use and soil erosion relative to the baseline. However, if the CRP is maintained at current levels then this would shift LUC to other conversions, including a greater loss of forest amounting to 6.3 million acres relative to a case where land in CRP freely reverts. This increase in deforestation is likely to spill over into other countries as well. The net carbon loss of deforested land negates the carbon benefits of maintaining the CRP in its current state. Thus, while the environmental impacts of re-cultivating conservation lands are potentially serious, maintaining the CRP in its current form could induce LUC and even greater GHG and environmental emissions. The study concludes by discussing the environmental and economic trade-offs of land conservation under the aforementioned scenarios, and offers policy recommendations for future land conservation initiatives.
U43C-0077
Effort Optimization in Minimizing Food Related Greenhouse Gas Emissions, a look at "Organic" and "Local"
The adverse environmental effects, especially energy use and resultant GHG emissions, of food production and consumption are becoming more widely appreciated and increasingly well documented. Our insights into the thorny problem of how to mitigate some of those effects, however, are far less evolved. Two of the most commonly advocated strategies are "organic" and "local", referring, respectively, to growing food without major inputs of fossil fuel based synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and to food consumption near its agricultural origin. Indeed, both agrochemical manufacture and transportation of produce to market make up a significant percentage of energy use in agriculture. While there can be unique environmental benefits to each strategy, "organic" and "local" each may potentially result in energy and emissions savings relative to conventionally grown produce. Here, we quantify the potential energy and greenhouse gas emissions savings associated with "organic" and "local". We take note of energy use and actual GHG costs of the major synthetic fertilizers and transportation by various modes routinely employed in agricultural distribution chains, and compare them for ~35 frequently consumed nutritional mainstays. We present new, current, lower-bound energy and greenhouse gas efficiency estimates for these items and compare energy consumption and GHG emissions incurred during producing those food items to consumption and emissions resulting from transporting them, considering travel distances ranging from local to continental and transportation modes ranging from (most efficient) rail to (least efficient) air. In performing those calculations, we demonstrate the environmental superiority of either local or organic over conventional foods, and illuminate the complexities involved in entertaining the timely yet currently unanswered, and previously unanswerable, question of "Which is Environmentally Superior, Organic or Local?". More broadly, we put forth a database that amounts to a general blueprint for rigorous comparative evaluation of any competing diets.