Heat In Our Time

They came, they jawed, they Accorded. The 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference ("COP15") is now history. When I was in Copenhagen recently, both the pride of the Danish in hosting COP15 and their high hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough to tackle climate change were tangible. For example, the spirit was festive in the Kongens Nytorv, a major public square in the city's center, despite its being filled with dozens of large globes representing different interpretations of climate change's perils and a large exhibition of human-sized photos depicting habitats and inhabitants from around the world endangered by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. Danes I spoke to seemed to believe a meaningful treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was likely.

It is early days yet, but there are some worrying signs that Hopenhaven may instead have become Nopenhaven. Discord between less and more developed countries was immediately a dominant theme, and at one point a number of delegates from African countries actually brought official proceedings to a halt to protest perceived intransigence and injustice by "rich" developed countries. Connie Hedegaard resigned her post as COP15's president partway through the conference. Most significantly, the conference ended without a draft - let alone signed - treaty. Instead, the world was left with a consolation prize of uncertain vitality: the "Copenhagen Accord" that COP15 made a rather hollow "decision to note".

The New York Times lamented that

Despite two years of advance work, the meeting failed to convert a rare gathering of world leaders into an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Financial Times' editorial page pronounced a more lacerating judgment: "Dismal outcome at Copenhagen fiasco". Finally, environmental groups from around the world came to their own coincidental "Copenhagen Accord" with the market for trading carbon emissions, where the European Union’s December 2010 carbon contract declined 8% today to €12.41 per tonne after declining by a similar amount last week. Talk may be cheap, but so, in wake of COP15, is emitting carbon.

REDD Financing

AP reports that talks over REDD are faltering because developed countries are not willing to finance developing country readiness for the program. This is not surprising since financing disputes have repeatedly limited the development of international environmental law. The significance of financing disputes are nowhere more apparent than in the history of efforts to secure a binding international agreement to slow deforestation (which, after over 16 years of on-and-off efforts, is not even close to realization).

However, REDD promises a way to overcome the issues that have derailed prior efforts to secure tropical forest protection. Among other things, it offers developed countries an opportunity to buy carbon credits for less than the cost of reducing their domestic emissions, while giving developed countries a chance to sell credits for more than the costs of avoiding deforestation . . . if they can establish the necessary verification and monitoring systems to demonstrate avoided deforestation.

I've offered an option for incentivizing protection of biodiversity through a voluntary certification option within REDD in a recent article. I think that a similar approach could offer a way around the current financing disputes as well. REDD could be a two-tier system that offers a choice for developing countries to develop either relatively streamlined mitigation projects without international financing, or more elaborate adaptation-oriented REDD projects with certification for biodiversity and socio-economic co-benefits that is underwritten by international assistance. I am currently working on an article to develop this concept, but it certainly won't be ready by the time negotiations wrap up later this week. :-)

Cross-posted here.

U.S. Food Safety System In Serious Disrepair

More than 50% of food manufacturers are unaware of their legal obligation to provide the FDA with updated contact information that the FDA relies on to deal with emergencies, such as Salmonella or other forms of food contamination. According to a Report released yesterday by The Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, federal auditors found that approximately 48% of surveyed manufacturers failed to provide the FDA with accurate contact information and approximately 25% provided no emergency contact information at all.

The GAO Report explains:

Each year, more than 300,000 Americans are hospitalized and 5,000 die after consuming contaminated foods and beverages. In the event of an outbreak of a foodborne illness, FDA is responsible for finding the source of the contamination and helping to remove the contaminated food products from the food supply chain. Recent outbreaks of foodborne illness involving peanut butter, peppers, and spinach have raised serious questions about FDA’s ability to protect the Nation’s food supply.

The Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 requires certain food facilities to register with FDA. The purpose of registration is to provide FDA with sufficient and reliable information about food facilities. This information enables FDA to quickly locate facilities during an outbreak of foodborne illness and to locate these facilities for inspection.

FDA requires each domestic food facility to provide information for the registry, including (1) contact information (i.e., name, full address, telephone number, and all trade names under which the facility conducts business); (2) contact information for the parent company; (3) contact information for the owner or operator of the facility; and (4) an emergency contact telephone number. If there is a change in a facility’s information, such as a new name or address, the facility must provide FDA with the updated information within 60 days. The information provided by facilities is stored in a database called the FDA Unified Registration and Listing System .....

Hat tip: Bill Marler at Marler Blog.

Biodiversity Loss Can Increase Infectious Diseases in Humans

Queensland's Daintree Rainforest, said to be 135 million yeras old, containing more rare and endangered plant and animal species than any other area

Fifty years ago, improved public health measures, the development of antibiotics, better vaccines, insecticides and advancements in surveillance resulted in a decline of infectious disease. However, an upturn in infectious diseases around the world, both emergence and reemergence, has been apparent since the late twentieth century. This increase marks the fourth major alteration in human-microbe relationships since the introduction of agriculture over 10,000 years ago.

This “epidemiologic transition” has triggered the development of new infectious diseases. Approximately 30 new diseases have been identified and old diseases have reemerged with a vengeance, like tuberculosis, malaria and cholera. These new diseases include human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), Legionnaires’ disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)/variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), hepatitis C, Nipah virus, new hemorrhagic fevers as well as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and avian influenza.

Various changes in human ecology have contributed to this new era of infectious disease:

∙ rural-to-urban migration resulting in high density peri-urban slums;
∙ increasing long-distance mobility and trade;
∙ the social disruption of war and conflict;
∙ changes in personal behavior; and,
∙ the use and misuse of medical technology (e.g. the creation of drug resistant microbes).

Weiss, R., McMichael, A.J., Social and Environmental Risk Factors In The Emergence of Infectious Disease, 10 Nature Med. Supp. 570 (December, 2004).

Recently, more attention has been paid to the role of human-induced global changes in the increase in infectious disease, including widespread forest clearance and climate change. In a newly released study, “Biodiversity Loss Affects Global Disease Ecology,” which will be appearing in the December 2009 issue of BioScience, the authors review and combine a broad group of studies addressing this issue and conclude that there is an association between the current epidemiologic transition and biodiversity change, decline and extinction. As reported in ScienceDaily

‘Habitat destruction and biodiversity loss,’ -- driven by the replacement of local species by exotic ones, deforestation, global transportation, encroaching cities, and other environmental changes – ‘can increase the incidence and distribution of infectious diseases in humans,’ write University of Vermont biologist Joe Roman, EPA scientist Montira Pongsiri, and seven co-authors in BioScience.

According to ScienceDaily, Roman explains that "people have been working on this in individual diseases but no one has put all the studies together to compare them."

In 2006, he and Pongsiri gathered a group of scientists and policy analysts with expertise in a range of the new diseases being observed -- including West Nile virus as well as malaria, the African parasitic disease schistosomiasis, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, and several others. From that meeting, the forthcoming BioScience study developed.

'We've reviewed all those studies and show that emergence or reemergence of many diseases is related to loss of biodiversity,’ says Pongsiri. 'We've taken a broad look at this problem to say that it's not just case-study specific. Something is happening at a global scale.’

‘We're not saying that biodiversity loss is the primary driver for all of these emerging diseases,’ says Roman, ‘but it appears to be playing an important role.

'We're trying to make the case that all of these environmental changes we're making, because they are anthropogenic, can be managed, can be controlled,’ says Pongsiri. ‘We may be able to actually reduce or prevent these diseases by managing for biodiversity from the genetic level to the habitat level.’

This new study is part of growing body of work in an area being referred to as Eco-epidemiology. This relatively new field of study brings epidemiology and ecology together to examine the relationship between biodiversity and public health. Among other issues, Eco-epidemiologists examine disease prevention in terms of habitat structure, promoting genetic diversity in non-human species and the protection of animal predators as ecosystem regulators.