The climate changes the planet is currently undergoing, and the threats posed by greenhouse gases, all interlink with the entire planet's ecosystems which have been carefully balanced for millennia. Since the industrial age, this has changed, and the way we now exploit the Earth's resources affect everything in the chain. Forests, wetlands and oceans have absorbed carbon forever - now with mining, eradicating forests for agriculture etc., these gasses are building in the atmosphere and can endure there for a century permitting ever-increasing rises in temperature, which in turn leads to ice-melt and rising sea-levels. While world governments and individuals confront how to reduce energy levels which result in CO2 emissions, the ecosystems also need to be considered. Deforestation alone can add more of a threat to global warming than all the cars on the planet's roads. It's unfortunately a very complex subject, difficult to summarize in a few short paragraphs. It has been necessary for us, then, to give more attention to each of the major ecosystem issues where we can learn what went wrong, and what must be done to mitigate a looming crisis.   

            The four links below each lead to a page for further reading

Jan. 20 2012: If our ecosystem were a valued commodity. Some of the world's poorest people would be half a trillion dollars a year better off if the services they provide to the rest of the planet indirectly – through conserving natural habitats – was given an economic value, a new study has found. Many of the valuable habitats and species preserved in some of the world's key biodiversity hotspots are under threat. But the people who live in these areas lack the means to improve their conservation efforts according to a new study in the journal BioScience. If poor people were paid for the services they provide in they could reap $500bn. There are some fledgling schemes that could help to raise this cash, for instance, the United Nations-backed system called Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), which uses carbon trading to generate cash to preserve trees, but so far they are small in scale. link   

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July 2011: Between 1850 and 1970 agriculture contributed most CO2. Over the past 150 years, between 50% and 80% of organic carbon in the topsoil has vanished into the air, and seven tons of carbon-banking topsoil have been lost for every ton of grain produced. On close inspection, it seems that the problem isn't the carbon itself, it's that there's too much in the air and not enough in the ground. When we consider our CO2 predicament, we tend to fault our love affair with the car and the fruits of industry. But the greater culprit has been agriculture: since about 1850, twice as much atmospheric CO2 has derived from farming practices as from the burning of fossil fuels (the roles crossed around 1970). So, how do we get that carbon out of the air and back into the soil? Some suggest placing calcium carbonate or charcoal (aka "biochar") directly into agricultural soil. But a growing number of soil and agricultural scientists are also discussing a low-tech, counterintuitive approach to the problem that depends on a group of unlikely heroes: cows. The catalyst for reducing CO2 and restoring soil function and fertility, they say, is bringing back the roving, grazing animals that used to wander the world's grasslands. The natural processes that take place in the digestive system and under the hooves of ruminants might be the key to turning deserts back into grasslands and reversing climate change. In other words, a climate-friendly future might look less like a geo-engineered landscape and more like, well, "Home on the Range." link

April 2011: New estimates on ecosystem's ability to sequester carbon. A research group has concluded that forests and other terrestrial ecosystems in the lower 48 states can sequester up to 40% of the nation's fossil fuel carbon emissions, a larger amount than previously estimated. That's substantially higher than some previous estimates, which indicated these ecosystems could take up the equivalent of only about 30% of emissions or less. There's still some uncertainty in these data, but it does appear that the terrestrial carbon sink is higher than believed in earlier studies. However, the scientists cautioned that major disturbances, such as droughts, wildfires and hurricanes, can all affect the amount of carbon sequestered in a given year. Large droughts that happened twice in the U.S. in the past decade reduced the carbon sink about 20%, compared to a normal year. link

July 2011: Jellyfish shut down nuclear plants.       A nuclear power station in Israel is shut down by jellyfish, a day after a nuclear facility in Scotland was closed in a similar incident, amid claims that climate change is causing a population surge among the species. Scientists say the number of jellyfish is on the rise due to the increasing acidity of the world’s oceans driving away the blubbery creatures' natural predators. Ocean acidification is an often overlooked side effect of burning fossil fuel. Studies have shown that higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t just trigger climate change but can make the oceans more acidic. Since the start of the industrial revolution, acidity levels of the oceans have gone up 30%. link

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January 2011:Amount of carbon absorbed by ecosystem grossly overstated.  According to a new paper published in Science, current carbon accounting methods significantly overstate the amount of carbon that can be absorbed by forests, plains, and other terrestrial ecosystems. That is because most current carbon accounting methods do not consider the methane and carbon dioxide released naturally by rivers, streams, and lakes. link

July 2010: Biodiversity loss poses a greater business risk than climate change. A long-anticipated UN-backed report warns that the vast majority of firms are ignoring risks associated with biodiversity loss and environmental degradation, despite the fact that they pose a serious and growing threat to their operations. link

May 2010: Two UN bodies find massive loss of biodiversity threatened ecosystems. Unless "radical and creative action" is taken quickly to conserve the variety of life on Earth, natural systems that support lives and livelihoods are at risk of collapsing, finds a new biodiversity report released today by two United Nations environmental bodies. The Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 warns that massive further loss of biodiversity is becoming increasingly likely, and with it, the loss of many essential services to human societies as several "tipping points" are approached, in which ecosystems shift to less productive states from which it may be difficult or impossible to recover. link

Soils contain two thirds of the world’s terrestrial carbon reserves, far more than the forests which sit atop the soils, and their accelerating degradation is releasing CO2 into the atmosphere in a process that could spiral out of control. Scientists call this process desertification.
The soils in Bolivia provide a stark case of this advancing problem: almost half the soil in the nation is being affected. The soils in Bolivia provide a stark case of this advancing problem: almost half the soil in the nation is being affected. The Bolivian Science and Technology Ministry recently announced that “desertification… affects 41% of the national territory, 439,432 square kilometers, where 77% of the population lives, some 6.4 million people.” Over 89% of them are poor, following a well-established pattern in which environmental degradation damages those least able to adapt to it. Many of the factors that have made the Bolivian soil desertify, such as deforestation, changes in rain patterns, or a general lack of water, are indirectly or directly related to climate change. Desertification occurs as a land-mass dries up, the vegetation on top the soil withers away, the microbes in the soil die, the resulting soil erodes, and its carbon migrates into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. link