Integrated global assessment of the natural forest carbon potential.

Forests are a substantial terrestrial carbon sink, but anthropogenic changes in land use and climate have considerably reduced the scale of this system1. Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests2-5 are characterized by considerable uncertainty and we lack a comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation to benchmark these estimates. Here we combine several ground-sourced6 and satellite-derived approaches2,7,8 to evaluate the scale of the global forest carbon potential outside agricultural and urban lands. Despite regional variation, the predictions demonstrated remarkable consistency at a global scale, with only a 12% difference between the ground-sourced and satellite-derived estimates. At present, global forest carbon storage is markedly under the natural potential, with a total deficit of 226 Gt (model range = 151-363 Gt) in areas with low human footprint. Most (61%, 139 Gt C) of this potential is in areas with existing forests, in which ecosystem protection can allow forests to recover to maturity. The remaining 39% (87 Gt C) of potential lies in regions in which forests have been removed or fragmented. Although forests cannot be a substitute for emissions reductions, our results support the idea2,3,9 that the conservation, restoration and sustainable management of diverse forests offer valuable contributions to meeting global climate and biodiversity targets.

Long-term assessment of ecosystem services at ecological restoration sites using Landsat time series.

Reversing ecological degradation through restoration activities is a key societal challenge of the upcoming decade. However, lack of evidence on the effectiveness of restoration interventions leads to inconsistent, delayed, or poorly informed statements of success, hindering the wise allocation of resources, representing a missed opportunity to learn from previous experiences. This study contributes to a better understanding of spatial and temporal dynamics of ecosystem services at ecological restoration sites. We developed a method using Landsat satellite images combined with a Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) design, and applied this to an arid rural landscape, the Baviaanskloof in South Africa. Since 1990, various restoration projects have been implemented to halt and reverse degradation. We applied the BACI approach at pixel-level comparing the conditions of each intervened pixel (impact) with 20 similar control pixels. By evaluating the conditions before and after the restoration intervention, we assessed the effectiveness of long-term restoration interventions distinguishing their impact from environmental temporal changes. The BACI approach was implemented with Landsat images that cover a 30-year period at a spatial resolution of 30 meter. We evaluated the impact of three interventions (revegetation, livestock exclusion, and the combination of both) on three ecosystem services; forage provision, erosion prevention, and presence of iconic vegetation. We also evaluated whether terrain characteristics could partially explain the variation in impact of interventions. The resulting maps showed spatial patterns of positive and negative effects of interventions on ecosystem services. Intervention effectiveness differed across vegetation conditions, terrain aspect, and soil parent material. Our method allows for spatially explicit quantification of the long-term restoration impact on ecosystem service supply, and for the detailed visualization of impact across an area. This pixel-level analysis is specifically suited for heterogeneous landscapes, where restoration impact not only varies between but also within restoration sites.

Global priority areas for ecosystem restoration.

Extensive ecosystem restoration is increasingly seen as being central to conserving biodiversity1 and stabilizing the climate of the Earth2. Although ambitious national and global targets have been set, global priority areas that account for spatial variation in benefits and costs have yet to be identified. Here we develop and apply a multicriteria optimization approach that identifies priority areas for restoration across all terrestrial biomes, and estimates their benefits and costs. We find that restoring 15% of converted lands in priority areas could avoid 60% of expected extinctions while sequestering 299 gigatonnes of CO2-30% of the total CO2 increase in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. The inclusion of several biomes is key to achieving multiple benefits. Cost effectiveness can increase up to 13-fold when spatial allocation is optimized using our multicriteria approach, which highlights the importance of spatial planning. Our results confirm the vast potential contributions of restoration to addressing global challenges, while underscoring the necessity of pursuing these goals synergistically.

Strengthening social-environmental management at contaminated sites to bolster Green and Sustainable Remediation via a survey.

The Green and Sustainable Remediation (GSR) movement demands informed, integrated, and holistic management of contaminated sites. As such, GSR may become increasingly relevant in developing countries such as China, where vast areas of contaminated land require clean-up. Among other efforts, the World Bank together with China's Foreign Economic Cooperation Office is facilitating GSR adoption through the development of a guideline on social-environmental management. However, there are no existing studies that have considered how the established remediation industry perceives its effectiveness in addressing the various social-environmental management aspects, or how certain aspects have rooted. Without this information, it may be difficult to guide social-environmental practice forward, or introduce GSR into developing remediation markets with any precision. Therefore, a questionnaire survey of remediation participators was undertaken with principal component analysis (PCA) applied to the data to help group the various aspects. The PCA extracted two components for environmental management, ascribed to: (1) on-site/local impacts; and, (2) widespread impacts, and three social management components, ascribed to: (1) community inclusion; (2) economic gain; and, (3) health, safety, and welfare. It was found that the aspects the industry are most familiar with historically are generally dealt with more effectively than those that have only recently been introduced by the GSR movement. In particular, bolstering the management of widespread environmental impacts and giving greater regard to the economic gain of remediation, may be beneficial. In developing countries, public engagement is often very limited, necessitating improvement in remediation policy and guidance.

Emerging Technologies for Environmental Remediation: Integrating Data and Judgment.

Emerging technologies present significant challenges to researchers, decision-makers, industry professionals, and other stakeholder groups due to the lack of quantitative risk, benefit, and cost data associated with their use. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) can support early decisions for emerging technologies when data is too sparse or uncertain for traditional risk assessment. It does this by integrating expert judgment with available quantitative and qualitative inputs across multiple criteria to provide relative technology scores. Here, an MCDA framework provides preliminary insights on the suitability of emerging technologies for environmental remediation by comparing nanotechnology and synthetic biology to conventional remediation methods. Subject matter experts provided judgments regarding the importance of criteria used in the evaluations and scored the technologies with respect to those criteria. The results indicate that synthetic biology may be preferred over nanotechnology and conventional methods for high expected benefits and low deployment costs but that conventional technology may be preferred over emerging technologies for reduced risks and development costs. In the absence of field data regarding the risks, benefits, and costs of emerging technologies, structuring evidence-based expert judgment through a weighted hierarchy of topical questions may be helpful to inform preliminary risk governance and guide emerging technology development and policy.

Public perception of an ecological rehabilitation project in inland river basins in northern China: Success or failure.

The need for environmental protection challenges societies to deal with difficult problems because strategies designed by scientists to protect the environment often create negative effects on impoverished local residents. We investigated the effects of China's national and regional policies related to environmental protection and rehabilitation projects in inland river basins, by studying the effect of projects in the Heihe and Shiyang river basins, in northwest China. Interviews and surveys were conducted at 30 sites in the lower reaches of these two arid basins, an area that has experienced severe ecological degradation. The survey results show the ecological rehabilitation projects adversely affected the livelihoods of 70.35% of foresters, 64.89% of farmers and 62.24% of herders in the Minqing region in the lower Shiyang River Basin; also, the projects negatively affected 51.9% of residents in the Ejin Qi in the lower Heihe River Basin. This caused 16.33% of foresters, 39.90% of farmers and 45.32% of herders in the Minqing region to not support the project and 37.5% of residents in the Ejin Qi region said they will deforest and graze again after the project ends. The negative impacts of the policies connected to the projects cause these attitudes. The projects prohibit felling and grazing and require residents to give up groundwater mining; this results in a great amount of uncompensated economic loss to them. Extensive survey data document the concerns of local residents, concerns that are supported by the calculation of actual incomes. In addition, the surveys results show poorer interviewees believe the projects greatly affected their livelihoods. While citizens in this region support environment protection work, the poor require considerable assistance if one expects them to support this type of work. Governmental assistance can greatly improve their living conditions, and hence encourage them to participate in and support the implementation of the projects within and outside the districts where they live.

Responding to biological incidents--what are the current issues in remediation of the contaminated environment?

Since 2000 there have been a number of biological incidents resulting in environmental contamination with Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax. These incidents include the US anthrax attacks in 2001, the US and UK drumming incidents in 2006-2008 and more recently, anthrax contamination of heroin in 2009/2010 and 2012/2013. Remediation techniques used to return environments to normal have varied between incidents, with different decontamination technologies being employed. Many factors need to be considered before a remediation strategy or recovery option can be implemented, including; cost, time (length of application), public perception of risk, and sampling strategies (and results) to name a few. These incidents have demonstrated that consolidated guidance for remediating biologically contaminated environments in the aftermath of a biological incident was required. The UK Recovery Handbook for Biological Incidents (UKRHBI) is a project led by Public Health England (PHE), formerly the Health Protection Agency (HPA) to provide guidance and advice on how to remediate the environment following a biological incident or outbreak of infection, and is expected to be published in 2015.

Evaluation and selection of indicators for land degradation and desertification monitoring: methodological approach.

An approach to derive relationships for defining land degradation and desertification risk and developing appropriate tools for assessing the effectiveness of the various land management practices using indicators is presented in the present paper. In order to investigate which indicators are most effective in assessing the level of desertification risk, a total of 70 candidate indicators was selected providing information for the biophysical environment, socio-economic conditions, and land management characteristics. The indicators were defined in 1,672 field sites located in 17 study areas in the Mediterranean region, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Based on an existing geo-referenced database, classes were designated for each indicator and a sensitivity score to desertification was assigned to each class based on existing research. The obtained data were analyzed for the various processes of land degradation at farm level. The derived methodology was assessed using independent indicators, such as the measured soil erosion rate, and the organic matter content of the soil. Based on regression analyses, the collected indicator set can be reduced to a number of effective indicators ranging from 8 to 17 in the various processes of land degradation. Among the most important indicators identified as affecting land degradation and desertification risk were rain seasonality, slope gradient, plant cover, rate of land abandonment, land-use intensity, and the level of policy implementation.

Evaluation and selection of indicators for land degradation and desertification monitoring: types of degradation, causes, and implications for management.

Indicator-based approaches are often used to monitor land degradation and desertification from the global to the very local scale. However, there is still little agreement on which indicators may best reflect both status and trends of these phenomena. In this study, various processes of land degradation and desertification have been analyzed in 17 study sites around the world using a wide set of biophysical and socioeconomic indicators. The database described earlier in this issue by Kosmas and others (Environ Manage, 2013) for defining desertification risk was further analyzed to define the most important indicators related to the following degradation processes: water erosion in various land uses, tillage erosion, soil salinization, water stress, forest fires, and overgrazing. A correlation analysis was applied to the selected indicators in order to identify the most important variables contributing to each land degradation process. The analysis indicates that the most important indicators are: (i) rain seasonality affecting water erosion, water stress, and forest fires, (ii) slope gradient affecting water erosion, tillage erosion and water stress, and (iii) water scarcity soil salinization, water stress, and forest fires. Implementation of existing regulations or policies concerned with resources development and environmental sustainability was identified as the most important indicator of land protection.

Participatory evaluation of monitoring and modeling of sustainable land management technologies in areas prone to land degradation.

Examples of sustainable land management (SLM) exist throughout the world. In many cases, SLM has largely evolved through local traditional practices and incremental experimentation rather than being adopted on the basis of scientific evidence. This means that SLM technologies are often only adopted across small areas. The DESIRE (DESertIfication mitigation and REmediation of degraded land) project combined local traditional knowledge on SLM with empirical evaluation of SLM technologies. The purpose of this was to evaluate and select options for dissemination in 16 sites across 12 countries. It involved (i) an initial workshop to evaluate stakeholder priorities (reported elsewhere), (ii) field trials/empirical modeling, and then, (iii) further stakeholder evaluation workshops. This paper focuses on workshops in which stakeholders evaluated the performance of SLM technologies based on the scientific monitoring and modeling results from 15 study sites. It analyses workshop outcomes to evaluate how scientific results affected stakeholders' perceptions of local SLM technologies. It also assessed the potential of this participatory approach in facilitating wider acceptance and implementation of SLM. In several sites, stakeholder preferences for SLM technologies changed as a consequence of empirical measurements and modeling assessments of each technology. Two workshop examples are presented in depth to: (a) explore the scientific results that triggered stakeholders to change their views; and (b) discuss stakeholders' suggestions on how the adoption of SLM technologies could be up-scaled. The overall multi-stakeholder participatory approach taken is then evaluated. It is concluded that to facilitate broad-scale adoption of SLM technologies, de-contextualized, scientific generalisations must be given local context; scientific findings must be viewed alongside traditional beliefs and both scrutinized with equal rigor; and the knowledge of all kinds of experts must be recognised and considered in decision-making about SLM, whether it has been formally codified or not. The approach presented in this paper provided this opportunity and received positive feedback from stakeholders.

International cooperation and support in environmental remediation - is there any room for improvement?

The challenges faced by states seeking to implement Environmental Remediation works are many. To this end, the International Atomic Energy Agency attempts to provide assistance and guidance to Member States wherever possible. This review article provides a brief overview of these challenges and highlights the international sources of financial and implementation support discussed at an international conference on the topic in Astana, Kazakhstan in 2009. The conference concluded the importance of institutional structures as a pre-requisite for remediation work, recognized privatization as a useful but limited financing tool for remediation and illustrated the need for better coordination between international funding organizations to reduce overlap and optimization of resources to secure the best outcomes.

The essential toxin: the changing perception of selenium in environmental sciences.

During the last decades, the perception of selenium has undergone substantial changes. While its toxic effects were recognized causing hair and hoof loss in animals during the 1930s, its essential role in microbial, animal and human metabolism has been recognized later, i.e. with the discovery of selenium deficiency causing "white muscle disease" in feedstock in the 1950s. Nowadays, the positive effect of systematic selenium supplementation is discussed in manifold topics such as cancer or diabetes prevention and avian influenza susceptibility. Treatment of selenium containing waste streams poses a notable challenge to environmental engineers, and to date no ultimate solution has been found for e.g. the selenium contamination in agricultural areas of the western USA. For the future, selenium contamination carries an imminent danger, if the increasing energy demand is covered by fossil fuel combustion, which will lead to major selenium emission and toxicity. This review presents current knowledge of selenium's role in environmental sciences and outlines potentially feasible treatment options targeting a variety of selenium contaminated waste streams.