This week, Woodwell hosted the second of three virtual events in conjunction with the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General and NYU State Energy and Environment Impact Center. The “Seeing the Dangers Ahead” series convenes climate, finance, and policy experts for discussions about how regulators and advocates can better understand the physical risks of climate change, and use that knowledge to propel decision making.
The first event “Understanding and Harnessing the Latest Climate Physical Risk Data and Tools” delved into the practicalities of climate risk assessments— who is generating them, how we generate them, and what cutting-edge tools can help refine our calculations.
“We’re seeing the impacts of the climate emergency every day in our communities with high tides swamping our waterfront, extreme storms damaging our infrastructure, and heat waves killing our residents – especially people of color and those in low-income communities,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy, who provided a keynote address to kick off the first event of the series earlier this month. “We must act now, and need the best science and analysis to do so, which is why my office is proud to partner with NYU Law School’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center and Woodwell Climate Research Center on this important series. Together, we are committed to putting what we learn into action, to help us protect people, our communities, and our future.”
Tuesday’s event, “How Regulators and Advocates Can Harness Physical and Financial Risk Data to Tackle the Climate Emergency”, focused on providing advocates and regulators with an understanding of the tools and data needed to assess climate risk and integrate it into decision making as the impacts of climate change hit communities across the nation and the world. Panelists discussed questions around the United States Securities and Exchanges Commission’s proposed ruling on corporate disclosure of climate risk.
“Because the United States is still catching up to the world and the market on this subject, getting this right is crucial,” said Robert Jackson, Professor of Law at New York University. “The nature of the American government is that you might not get more than one try at this, so I am certainly hopeful that the proposal the SEC comes out with will stimulate a robust discussion among panels like this one.”
The final upcoming event in the series will be held March 1 at 1PM ET, and the conversation will focus on how climate risk information can enable vulnerable communities in developing greater preparedness and resilience. Factoring climate risk data into infrastructure and planning decisions can help ensure communities are able to adapt to a warmer world.
Speakers at that final event will include former congressman Joe Kennedy III, Heather McTeer Toney, VP of community engagement at the Environmental Defense Fund, Robin Bronen, executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice, Joyce Coffee, founder and president of Climate Resilience Consulting, Jennifer Jurado, chief resilience officer for Broward County Florida and Effie Turnbull-Sanders, environmental justice commissioner for California Coastal Commission. The discussions will be moderated by Woodwell’s chief communications officer, Dr. Heather Goldstone.
Though droughts and bad harvest years are occasional risks for farmers, modern agriculture is built on the assumption of a predictable and stable climate. Rising temperatures are breaking down that assumption, leaving the future of food uncertain. Two new studies put the increasing risks in sharp relief.
Seventy-two percent of today’s staple crops—maize, wheat, soybeans and rice—are grown in just 5 countries, in regions of the world known as breadbaskets. From the plains of North America to the river valleys of India and China, these regions earned their distinction for supporting hundreds of years of agricultural production with their climatic suitability.
“These regions have developed this way for centuries in the same way that human settlements have developed around water, because that’s where the resource was,” says Woodwell Research Assistant, Monica Caparas.
Caparas works on agricultural risk models. Last year, she led an analysis of crop failures in global breadbaskets, projecting the likelihood of declining yields in the upcoming decades. Her results conjured a world where these centuries-old food producing regions may no longer be so reliable. By 2030, crop yield failures will be 4.5 times higher. By 2050, the likelihood shoots up to 25 times current rates.
By mid-century, the world could be facing a rice or wheat failure every other year, with the probability of soybean and maize failures even higher. A synchronized failure across all four crops becomes a possibility every 11 years.
If that sounds like rapid, drastic change, that’s because it is. The immediacy of increasing failures surprised even Caparas.
“The fact that by 2050—which we are almost halfway to already— there could be a wheat failure every year. It’s startling.”
One major component of crop failure predictions is water scarcity. In a warmer world, water is a critical resource. Climate change will shift precipitation patterns, drying out some regions and inundating others. Most of the world’s breadbaskets are headed in the drier direction.
Caparas factored water availability into her analysis, finding the likelihood of crop failure much higher in water scarce sections of breadbaskets. Wheat is especially water dependent, particularly in India where 97% of wheat crops are growing in areas already experiencing water stress. Irrigation could make up for some lack of rain, but groundwater stores are already overdrawn in many places.
Farms beginning to feel the impacts of climate change in Brazil
In Brazil, agriculture is already showing signs of declining productivity from changing precipitation. Woodwell Assistant Scientist Dr. Ludmila Rattis works in Mato Grosso, where she researches the impacts of agriculture and deforestation on the regional climate. Central Brazil is a major breadbasket for soybeans and maize—as well as cattle— and as crop demand increases, farms and ranches have advanced into the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado, the Brazilian Savanna.
Clearing and burning forests not only releases carbon that contributes to rising global temperatures, it can also have drying effects on the local watershed. In recent years, farmers in Mato Grosso and the Cerrado have reported issues with dry spells, though they would not attribute it to climate change. Dr. Rattis wanted to quantify these anecdotes to show that they were connected.
“I was trying to see why they were denying the climate changing at the same time they were feeling the climate changing. Were they feeling that in their pockets? Was it affecting the finance of their business?”
Dr. Rattis modeled temperature and precipitation changes along Brazil’s Amazon-Cerrado frontier. Her results not only predicted that by 2060, 74% of the region’s agricultural land would fall outside of the ideal range of suitability for rainfed agriculture, they showed that nearly a third of farms already did.
The changes are affecting crop productivity. When the temperature gets warmer, plants grow faster, releasing more water vapor into the air from their leaves as a byproduct of photosynthesis. If there isn’t a steady supply of soil moisture available to replace the lost water, plant growth is stunted. Rainy seasons are also starting later, limiting the possibility for planting two rounds of crops in a single season, which cuts into farmer’s profits and encourages further expansion via land clearing.
Ideal climate for agriculture migrating north
Caparas notes that increasing crop failure doesn’t necessarily mean we are headed for a world without maize or soybean. But it does mean a drastically different agricultural system— one where hard decisions have to be made about land use.
“Increasing crop failures doesn’t mean that these crops won’t ever be able to grow in these areas again, or that they should be abandoned, just that it’s going to be much harder for them to be as productive,” Capraras says. “There might be a certain threshold of losses that would lead people to leave these croplands.”
There is some potential for migration of the most productive lands as northern latitudes begin to warm. Caparas’s projections showed the greatest likelihood of breadbasket migration from the United States into Canada.
However, just because the climate suitability is migrating, doesn’t mean agricultural production will shift along with it. Other factors including soil fertility or existing land uses could limit the practicality of moving to new regions, especially if it jeopardizes existing climate solutions as the case in Brazil has shown. Clearing forests is only accelerating warming, drought and declining productivity.
Future of food depends on drought resilience
Shoring up food security in a changing climate will require system-wide changes to our current agricultural system. Part of that starts with adjusting farming strategies to mitigate the effects of the warming that’s already unavoidable. Dr. Rattis has begun outreach to the farmers whose land she collected data on, giving them a picture of what their farms will look like if nothing changes.
“We need to make them feel that they’re part of the research, because they are. If we do, once we get the results, the probability of them using those results to adapt the way that they produce food will increase,” Dr. Rattis says. “They can see themselves in the historic part of the graphic and then I show them where, climatically speaking, their farm is going,”
She’s hoping these conversations will open Brazil’s farmers up to practices that leave more native vegetation on the landscape, which would help stabilize the local climate and keep the natural watershed intact.
Caparas takes hope from the fact that the outcomes of her models are not set in stone. In the planet-wide experiment of climate change, we can affect the results.
“These projections are due to changes in climate. They don’t account for adaptation strategies. The agricultural technology industry is fast-growing and so I think that there is hope, as long as adaptation techniques are implemented equitably,” Caparas says.
Much of the innovation, Caparas says, will have to involve developing drought resistant crop varieties and less water intensive agricultural processes. In the long term however, securing a productive agricultural future for the Earth’s nearly 10 billion people by 2050 will depend on securing a stable climate.
“First and foremost it always has to be getting climate change in check,” says Caparas.
Tune in to PBS NOVA on February 2 to watch Arctic Sinkholes, an original documentary that explores the hidden dynamics of thawing permafrost and the emissions it releases. The documentary features Woodwell Arctic Program Director, Dr. Sue Natali, alongside other prominent climate scientists working to better understand how climate change is impacting the Arctic.
The film centers on the 2014 discovery of methane craters in the Arctic. These features of the landscape are formed as permafrost thaws, and trapped greenhouse gasses expand, pushing the soil up. When the pressure becomes too great, these bubbles of earth can explode suddenly, creating massive craters on the Arctic landscape and releasing a burst of atmosphere-warming gasses.
“There’s a lot of discussion about carbon dioxide and its relationship to climate, but the impact of
methane coming out of the Arctic is potentially enormous,” says NOVA Co-Executive Producer Julia Cort. “Making accurate predictions about the future depends on good data, and Arctic Sinkholes reveals what scientists have to do to get that data, as they try to measure an invisible, odorless gas that’s underground in some of the most remote and challenging environments in the world.”
To better understand the extent and significance of these craters, Dr. Natali and Woodwell Senior Geospatial Analyst, Greg Fiske, devised a method of mining satellite imagery data for key characteristics that would indicate a recent explosion. A sudden shift from vegetation to water, for example — often, craters quickly fill up with rain, becoming lakes that obscure their own origins.
Outgassing from the craters themselves represents only a small subset of the larger potential emissions from permafrost thaw. Current estimates show that thawing permafrost could contribute as much to warming this century as continued annual emissions from the United States.
Methane craters make evident the speed at which the Arctic is warming, and the changes permafrost thaw is causing on the landscape. In their research, Dr. Natali and Fiske uncovered other impacts of permafrost thaw— slumping ground, sinkholes, and coastal erosion are destabilizing the ground on which many Arctic communities are built.
“These abrupt changes that are occurring in this once-frozen ground are happening faster than we expected,” said Dr. Natali. “And that is not only going to accelerate warming, but also affect the lives of millions who make their home in the Arctic.”
Future research will work towards more precise estimates of permafrost thaw emissions and a better understanding of the changing Arctic.
Arctic Sinkholes premieres Wednesday, February 2, 2022 at 9pm ET/8C on PBS and will be available for streaming online at pbs.org/nova and on the PBS video app.
Woodwell earns Platinum Seal of Transparency
This year, GuideStar, an organization that provides trusted information on non-profits for donors, updated their rating of Woodwell Climate Research Center from a Gold Seal to a Platinum Seal of Transparency.
This is the organization’s highest award, granted to non-profits that are exemplary in transparency surrounding their goals, strategies, and indicators of success and are the most widely used symbol of transparency for non-profits in the U.S. Woodwell had previously earned a Gold Seal in 2019.
This honor certifies Woodwell as an organization with a strong commitment to accountability and a proven track record of achieving our organizational goals. The Platinum Seal means that donors can be confident that their donations are affecting positive change, directly contributing to Woodwell’s mission of combating climate change.
“As donors weigh where to invest their philanthropic dollars to solve the climate emergency, they want to be sure that they are supporting a well-run organization with sound finances and governance. Woodwell Climate’s Platinum Seal of Transparency with GuideStar, combined with our 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, provide that assurance, “ said Woodwell’s Acting President and Executive Director Dr. Max Holmes.
To contribute to Woodwell Climate Research Center, visit woodwellclimate.org/give. Other options include incorporating Woodwell Climate in your will or estate plans, contributing from your IRA tax-free, and gifts of securities or real estate. To discuss those or other options, contact Leslie Kolterman, Chief Development Officer, at 508-444-1584 or lkolterman@woodwellclimate.org.
This year in climate, 2021
A look back at a turning point year for climate change
As another year passes with mounting emissions, we take stock of the big moments for climate change in 2021, from extreme weather events to steps forward on policy. Here’s is a look back at a potentially pivotal year for climate change:
Climate change is now front and center due to deadly weather
This year, the clear repercussions of climate change were impossible to ignore. Climate change worsens extreme weather, making Earth’s formerly reliable systems much more unpredictable. Widespread extreme weather events in 2021 had deadly consequences for the people caught in their paths.
In February, Texas experienced a cold snap that killed 210 people across the state and left millions without power for several days. The freeze was exacerbated by the stretching of the stratospheric polar vortex—a pool of cold air high over the poles that is usually hemmed in by strong westerly winds. When the polar vortex is disrupted from its typically circular shape, it can cause the jetstream to waver and plunge farther south, which can bring unusually cold temperatures farther south. Research has connected rapid warming and sea-ice loss in the Arctic north of western Russia with more frequent warping of the polar vortex, which could mean more of these extreme events in the northern hemisphere.
In the summer, temperatures swung in the extreme opposite direction as a heat wave settled over the Pacific Northwest, breaking records. Temperatures neared 120 degrees Fahrenheit, melting power cables, buckling brick roads, and causing sudden deaths to spike across the region. This phenomenon was also caused by a wavering jetstream that allowed an intense and persistent high-pressure system to trap the heat over the Northwest.
Hotter than average weather also led to record fires this year. In Siberia, the return of the fire season to the boreal forests brought with it blazes larger than concurrent fires in Greece, Turkey, Italy, the U.S. and Canada combined. Drought in Brazil, paired with rising deforestation rates, led to increased fires in the Amazon.
And finally, just this month the Midwestern U.S. was hit by a devastating string of tornadoes, more severe than usual for this time of year, marking the deadliest December tornado outbreak in history. Tornados are tricky to study, so an understanding of how their prevalence will fluctuate with climate change is not yet clear, but the conditions fostered by a warmer atmosphere are amenable for tornado formation.
Increased awareness has led to increased momentum
The undeniable severity of the climate impacts of 2021 has enforced the urgency of cutting emissions. This year, climate action began building the momentum it should have had two decades ago, with more than half of Americans concerned or alarmed about the issue, and governments and private sector organizations across the globe stepping up their commitments to tackling it.
In November, Glasgow, Scotland hosted the 26th annual COP—hailed by some as our “last, best, hope” for successful international cooperation on Climate Change. Although the larger negotiations were not as ambitious as necessary to confidently limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, several steps still pushed the world forward. The conference opened with a pledge from 141 nations to end deforestation by 2030, accompanied by $19 million from governments and private sector groups—a large portion of which was dedicated to supporting Indigenous groups.
Earlier in the year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made a request for public comments on a potential requirement for companies to disclose climate risk to their investors. With the impacts of climate change becoming more immediate, the demand for greater certainty around personal risk has grown. The SEC’s inclusion of climate risk in its regulations indicates a broader acknowledgement of the need to prepare for the changes to come. The new presidential administration in the U.S. also signaled its intent to address climate in its first 100 days, staffing up with science and policy advisers and calling an Earth Day summit with leaders from 40 nations.
What to watch for in 2022
So what can we expect as we enter another year?
As long as emissions continue at their current pace, so too will warming and its consequences. Storms, fires, and extreme temperature swings will become a more frequent fixture next year and into the future.
On the international stage, next year’s COP will be one to watch. Nations are expected to return with even more ambitious targets than agreed upon this year. The timelines for formal climate action will accelerate. In the U.S. we can expect to see a ruling from the SEC in early next year.
To match demand for more information on climate risk, Woodwell will be spearheading a collaborative climate risk coalition. The goal of the coalition is to produce an annual climate risk assessment for policymakers to aid future decision-making. Woodwell is also continuing its work conducting risk analyses for climate-related heat, flooding, and fire at the municipality level in several new cities. In 2022, Woodwell will be leading the push for more, transparent climate risk analyses.
2022 will also be a year of expanded research into the impacts of climate change, particularly the rapidly warming Arctic. Woodwell projects will expand our understanding of emissions from thawing permafrost and the behavior of Arctic fires, as well as impacts on extreme weather events. Researchers will also be working closely alongside Indigenous communities to both understand how climate change is impacting vulnerable communities, and support them to take part in climate solutions.
Arctic communities and infrastructure under threat from thawing permafrost
The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the globe in the last two decades. In this region where the ground in some places is literally made of ice, rapid warming poses a serious threat to the lives, livelihoods and infrastructure of Arctic communities. A new review led by Dr. Gabriel Wolken from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and Woodwell Associate Scientist Dr. Anna Liljedahl details the biggest hazards that could result—and in some cases already have—from permafrost and glacial thaw.
The paper was released as a special addition to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card, an annual report on the status of the Arctic region. In it, the authors outline what we know, and the much larger gaps in our knowledge, about how thawing permafrost and melting glaciers are impacting Arctic communities.
Ice holds the Arctic together. An estimated 23 million square miles of land in the Northern hemisphere is permafrost, soil that traditionally stayed frozen solid year-round. When it begins to thaw, the land slumps, which can cause sinkholes, erosions, and landslides. Retreating glaciers can also destabilize mountain slopes. When collapsing glaciers or mountainsides fall into a nearby water body, they can set off a chain of cascading hazards, including outburst floods, debris flow, and even tsunamis.
Events like these have already been documented, with serious impacts on Arctic residents, yet research and monitoring of these hazards have been lacking.
“Houses are already collapsing, communities are already being impacted by permafrost thaw and having to adapt, including in some cases, to relocate. That’s been happening for a decade, at least, and it’s not getting the attention it should be,” says Woodwell Arctic Program Director Dr. Sue Natali, who also contributed to the Report Card.
And there is vast potential for unstable Arctic ground to have far-reaching global impacts. The collapse of an oil tank in Norilsk, Russia was partly attributed to the extremely warm conditions of 2020. Roads, pipelines, and shipping lanes are all at risk from thaw-related hazards.
“It’s not only affecting someone living near a glacier or on permafrost, it also extends farther than that,” Dr. Liljedahl says. “It includes national security. And we do not have broad-scale hazard identification and detection across the Arctic, or near real-time tracking of permafrost thaw and unstable slopes. We can do a lot more in utilizing the vast amounts of remote sensing imagery and observations made by people living in permafrost and glacier-affected landscapes.”
What’s desperately needed, Dr. Liljedahl says, are early warning systems that can alert residents of imminent threats, especially ones designed in tandem with the communities being affected. But, without more research and widespread monitoring of permafrost and unstable slopes, building such a system would be nearly impossible—akin to taking precautions against a volcanic eruption without knowing where the volcano is.
The behavior and rate of thaw is also likely to change as climate change progresses. Permafrost itself releases emissions when it thaws and that accelerates the warming process, increasing the urgency for the necessary systems to be put into place.
“The rate of hazard formation and the combined effects of these hazards is much higher than it has been in the past, which will make it more challenging to respond to without accelerated efforts to monitor and map these hazards, and develop cohesive response plans,” says Dr. Natali.
New documentary explores the feedback loops amplifying global warming
Earth Emergency, narrated by Richard Gere, premieres Wednesday, December 29 on PBS
While climate change is now a broadly recognized phenomenon, the environmental feedback loops that are amplifying and accelerating the process are less well understood. Earth Emergency, a new documentary to air on PBS, explains how warming caused by human activity is setting in motion
Earth’s own natural warming mechanisms, releasing additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and further heating up the planet.
Originating from a conversation between Woodwell Distinguished Visiting Scientist Dr. William Moomaw and the film’s producers, Earth Emergency features several Woodwell Scientists including founder Dr. George Woodwell, Arctic Program Director Dr. Sue Natali, Tropics Program Director Dr. Mike Coe, and President Dr. Philip Duffy.
The film uses captivating illustrations and graphics, stunning footage, and interviews with leading scientists to examine the crucial role feedback loops play in climate change. It conveys the urgency of stopping these cycles, letting natural systems remove carbon and preserving the delicate balance necessary to maintain Earth’s temperature. Narrated by Richard Gere and featuring the Dalai Lama and Greta Thunberg, Earth Emergency premieres on Wednesday, December 29, at 8:00 p.m. ET.
“Most people I know or encounter haven’t even heard of feedback loops or tipping points,” says Greta Thunberg. “But they are so crucial to understanding how the world works. We have such lack of respect for nature and for the environment. We just think that things will work out in the end. But we cannot solve the climate emergency without taking these feedback loops into account and without really understanding them. So that is a crucial step.”
Earth Emergency focuses on four feedback loops—explaining how warming in forests, permafrost, the atmosphere, and the poles work together to accelerate dangerous, amplifying cycles. The film was presented recently to the Members of the UK House of Parliament, and as part of HRH Prince of Wales’ Terra Carta Action Forum in Glasgow during COP26. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History also held a summer film and discussion series based on the film.
Earth Emergency will stream simultaneously with broadcast and be available on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS Video app, available on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV and Chromecast. The film will also be made available to astronauts on the International Space Station. For more information, check local listings on PBS.org and the PBS Video app.
After the premiere, it’s free to stream on PBS.org and the PBS Video app through January 28. After that, it’s be available with a PBS Passport membership or on Amazon with a PBS Documentaries subscription.
Introducing the Open Soil Spectral Library
On this World Soils Day, the Soil Spectroscopy for the Global Good Coordinated Innovation Network, founded by Woodwell Climate, Opengeohub Foundation and University of Florida, announced the release of the Open Soil Spectral Library (OSSL).
Soil Spectroscopy Made Universally Accessible
The need for high-quality soil data has grown exponentially to support natural resource assessments, sustainable food production, and climate mitigation goals. Soil scientists have been struggling to meet this demand because measurement of soil still largely relies on shovels and benchtop analytical methods.
Reflectance spectroscopy, the measurement of light absorption at different wavelengths, has emerged as an important, rapid, and low-cost complement to traditional wet chemical analyses. However, a bottleneck to more widespread adoption of soil spectroscopy is the need for large reference training datasets and complex data analyses. To bridge this gap and enable hundreds of research soil and agronomy groups to collect more affordable soil data, Soil Spectroscopy for the Greater Good has created an open source and open data project.
The OSSL consists of multiple interrelated components. The first is a large database consisting of several continental and national collections of spectral data in both the visible-near infrared (VNIR) and mid infrared (MIR) regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as traditionally measured soil properties. These data can be accessed and visualized through the OSSL Explorer or directly worked with through an API or by downloading a snapshot of the entire database.
The second main component is the OSSL Engine, where users can upload spectra collected on their own instruments to estimate a set of soil properties using an ensemble of machine learning models.
Open and FAIR science is the heart of the OSSL. All compiled data and software is available here (under MIT license) and a versioned back-up copy of the data is also available via Zenodo (under CC-BY license), to allow users to extend, build upon, and even construct commercial businesses on top of the data and code.
Soil Spectroscopy for the Global Good is a Coordinated Innovation Network that brings together soil scientists, spectroscopists, informaticians, data scientists and software engineers to overcome some of the current bottlenecks preventing wider and more efficient use of soil spectroscopy. Datasets have been contributed by the USDA NRCS National Soil Survey Center – Kellogg Soil Survey Laboratory, ICRAF-World Agroforestry, ISRIC-World Soil Information, the Africa Soil Information Service funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Soil Data Centre, the National Ecological Observatory Network, and ETH Zurich.
Both the OSSL Explorer and OSSL Engine are currently still beta models and the project is accepting feedback for improvements here. Please contribute to this project and help us make better tools for measuring and monitoring our soils and land.