Soil warming accelerates biogeochemical silica cycling in a temperate forest.

© The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Gewirtzman, J., Tang, J., Melillo, J. M., Werner, W. J., Kurtz, A. C., Fulweiler, R. W., & Carey, J. C. Soil warming accelerates biogeochemical silica cycling in a temperate forest. Frontiers in Plant Science, 10, (2019): 1097, doi:10.3389/fpls.2019.01097.Biological cycling of silica plays an important role in terrestrial primary production. Soil warming stemming from climate change can alter the cycling of elements, such as carbon and nitrogen, in forested ecosystems. However, the effects of soil warming on the biogeochemical cycle of silica in forested ecosystems remain unexplored. Here we examine long-term forest silica cycling under ambient and warmed conditions over a 15-year period of experimental soil warming at Harvard Forest (Petersham, MA). Specifically, we measured silica concentrations in organic and mineral soils, and in the foliage and litter of two dominant species (Acer rubrum and Quercus rubra), in a large (30 × 30 m) heated plot and an adjacent control plot (30 × 30 m). In 2016, we also examined effects of heating on dissolved silica in the soil solution, and conducted a litter decomposition experiment using four tree species (Acer rubrum, Quercus rubra, Betula lenta, Tsuga canadensis) to examine effects of warming on the release of biogenic silica (BSi) from plants to soils. We find that tree foliage maintained constant silica concentrations in the control and warmed plots, which, coupled with productivity enhancements under warming, led to an increase in total plant silica uptake. We also find that warming drove an acceleration in the release of silica from decaying litter in three of the four species we examined, and a substantial increase in the silica dissolved in soil solution. However, we observe no changes in soil BSi stocks with warming. Together, our data indicate that warming increases the magnitude of silica uptake by vegetation and accelerates the internal cycling of silica in in temperate forests, with possible, and yet unresolved, effects on the delivery of silica from terrestrial to marine systems.This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF PLR-1417763 to JT), the Geological Society of America (Stephen G. Pollock Undergraduate Research Grant to JG), the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. Sample analysis and Fulweiler’s involvement were supported by Boston University and a Bullard Fellowship from Harvard University. The soil warming experiment was supported by the National Science Foundation (DEB-0620443) and Department of Energy (DE-FC02-06-ER641577 and DE-SC0005421)

Assessing developed countries’ compliance toward UNFCCC climate finance transparency requirements

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How will we pay for loss and damage?

The devotion of a full article in the Paris Agreement to loss and damage was a major breakthrough for the world’s most vulnerable nations seeing to gain support for climate impacts beyond what can be adapted to. But how will loss and damage be paid for, and who will pay it? Will ethics be part of this decision? Here we ask what are the possible means of raising predictable and adequate levels of funding to address loss and damage? Utilizing a framework developed by Marco Grasso (2009, 2010), we argue that making the ethical connections between addressing climate impacts and finance mechanisms could significantly enhance their likelihood of being adopted. We briefly review insurance mechanisms and catastrophe bonds, and then move on to six “innovative finance” approaches to funding loss and damage. We utilize six criteria in assessing them: adequacy, predictability, technical feasibility, fairness, and indirect effects, and whether each has a clear link to loss and damage. Several mechanisms for gathering funds emerged as most promising. Three of the six financial mechanisms we reviewed to raise funding involved airline transport: clearly, there is a huge opportunity to tax this sector in one form or another, in recognition of airline emissions’ role in creating losses and damages in vulnerable nations from sea level rise, droughts, floods or hurricanes. Funding loss and damage response is a contentious issue that will get only more unwieldy if Parties’ conceptions of loss and damage are at odds: a common definition of loss and damage needs to be agreed upon under the UNFCCC. Most immediately, to meet any equity criteria, wealthy countries should do more to support the premiums of those who cannot afford insurance.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Financing options for loss and damage: A review and roadmap

Pressure to support responses to loss and damage under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has intensified in recent years. Loss and damage – an issue gaining prominence largely due to shortfalls of mitigation action and adaptation support – has never been officially defined under the UNFCCC. Here, the term “loss and damage” refers to irreversible losses (e.g. loss of life, species, land) and costly damages (e.g. destroyed infrastructure) caused, at least in part, by climate change.Although loss and damage has been a subject of debate among Parties to the UNFCCC for years, the agreement reached in Paris was the first to devote a full article to loss and damage. In that article, Parties agreed to enhance “understanding, action and support” for loss and damage and to strengthen the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change (WIM) (UNFCCC, 2015, Art. 8). In coming years, as climate change advances and Parties work to implement this and other directions from the Paris Agreement, it will prove more crucial than ever to support loss and damage response, especially should efforts to sufficiently scale up mitigation commitments and adaptation capacity fall short. Given mounting pressure to finance effective loss and damage response efforts, understanding of the Warsaw International Mechanism’s activities must be strengthened, and the question of how funding for loss and damage response might be raised and allocated must be widely considered. To these ends, this paper endeavours to answer two questions at the core of the emergent drive to fund efforts to address loss and damage.First, what do we mean by financing loss and damage response? We examine language relevant to financing efforts in the initial two-year workplan of the Executive Committee (ExCom) of the WIM to answer this question, reviewing the workplan’s listed financing options.Second, what are some possible means for raising predictable funding that will prove adequate to finance loss and damage response? We discuss a number of innovative fundraising mechanisms that have been proposed and assess their adequacy, predictability, technical feasibility, fairness (whether polluters or the most vulnerable pay), indirect effects and link to loss and damage. These criteria provide a framework to evaluate the concepts that underlie each mechanism (such as fairness and links to loss and damage), to assess whether each mechanism can be implemented and become a sufficient, stable source of support for loss and damage response (using criteria of feasibility, adequacy and predictability), and to judge what tangential impacts use of each mechanism might produce (by examining potential indirect effects).We conclude that there are a number of viable proposals for both gathering and effectively using funds to support loss and damage response. Two proposals stand out: a levy on airline travel and risk transfer approaches. However, we also identify a number of outstanding issues in funding loss and damage response, including the ambiguity of relevant UNFCCC texts; the shortfalls of proposed mechanisms in terms of providing for slow onset or high-certainty events and non-economic loss and damage; the lack of an agreed definition of loss and damage under the UNFCCC; developed countries’ disproportionate (and inadequate) support for risk transfer over other approaches; the large gap that exists between funding made available and funding needed; and the inevitable contention surrounding the question of how finance should be distributed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Financing loss and damage: Reviewing options under the Warsaw International Mechanism

After decades of pressure from vulnerable developing countries, the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage (the WIM) was established at the nineteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 19) in 2013 to address costly damages from climate change. However, little progress has been made towards establishing a mechanism to fund loss and damage. The WIM’s Executive Committee issued its first two-year workplan the following year at COP 20 which offered, among other things, a range of approaches to financing loss and damage programmes, which we review here. We provide brief overviews of each mechanism proposed by the WIM ExCom, describe their current applications, their statuses under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), some of their advantages and disadvantages, and their current or potential application to loss and damage. We find that several of these mechanisms may be useful in supporting loss and damage programmes, but identify some key gaps. First, most of the mechanisms identified by the WIM ExCom are insurance schemes subsidized with voluntary contributions, which may not be adequate or reliable over time. Second, none were devised to apply to slow-onset events, or to non-economic losses and damages. That is, if harms are inflicted on parts of a society or its ecosystems that have no price, or if they occur gradually, they would probably not be covered by these mechanisms. Finally, the lack of a dedicated and adequate flow of finance to address the real loss and damage being experienced by vulnerable nations will require the use of innovative financial tools beyond those mentioned in the WIM ExCom workplan.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Clinical guidelines for the recognition of melanoma of the foot and nail unit

Malignant melanoma is a life threatening skin tumour which may arise on the foot. The prognosis for the condition is good when lesions are diagnosed and treated early. However, lesions arising on the soles and within the nail unit can be difficult to recognise leading to delays in diagnosis. These guidelines have been drafted to alert health care practitioners to the early signs of the disease so an early diagnosis can be sought<br/

Multi-scale observations of mangrove blue carbon ecosystem fluxes: The NASA Carbon Monitoring System BlueFlux field campaign

The BlueFlux field campaign, supported by NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, will develop prototype blue carbon products to inform coastal carbon management. While blue carbon has been suggested as a nature-based climate solution (NBS) to remove carbon dioxide (CO _2 ) from the atmosphere, these ecosystems also release additional greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as methane (CH _4 ) and are sensitive to disturbances including hurricanes and sea-level rise. To understand blue carbon as an NBS, BlueFlux is conducting multi-scale measurements of CO _2 and CH _4 fluxes across coastal landscapes, combined with long-term carbon burial, in Southern Florida using chambers, flux towers, and aircraft combined with remote-sensing observations for regional upscaling. During the first deployment in April 2022, CO _2 uptake and CH _4 emissions across the Everglades National Park averaged −4.9 ± 4.7 μ mol CO _2 m ^−2 s ^−1 and 19.8 ± 41.1 nmol CH _4 m ^−2 s ^−1 , respectively. When scaled to the region, mangrove CH _4 emissions offset the mangrove CO _2 uptake by about 5% (assuming a 100 year CH _4 global warming potential of 28), leading to total net uptake of 31.8 Tg CO _2 -eq y ^−1 . Subsequent field campaigns will measure diurnal and seasonal changes in emissions and integrate measurements of long-term carbon burial to develop comprehensive annual and long-term GHG budgets to inform blue carbon as a climate solution