Jonathan A. Foley’s research while affiliated with California Academy of Sciences and other places

The climate crisis threatens to exacerbate numerous climate-sensitive health risks, including heatwave mortality, malnutrition from reduced crop yields, water- and vector-borne infectious diseases, and respiratory illness from smog, ozone, allergenic pollen, and wildfires. Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stress the urgent need for action to mitigate climate change, underscoring the need for more scientific assessment of the benefits of climate action for health and wellbeing. Project Drawdown has analyzed more than 80 solutions to address climate change, building on existing technologies and practices, that could be scaled to collectively limit warming to between 1.5° and 2 °C above preindustrial levels. The solutions span nine major sectors and are aggregated into three groups: reducing the sources of emissions, maintaining and enhancing carbon sinks, and addressing social inequities. Here we present an overview of how climate solutions in these three areas can benefit human health through improved air quality, increased physical activity, healthier diets, reduced risk of infectious disease, and improved sexual and reproductive health, and universal education. We find that the health benefits of a low-carbon society are more substantial and more numerous than previously realized and should be central to policies addressing climate change. Much of the existing literature focuses on health effects in high-income countries, however, and more research is needed on health and equity implications of climate solutions, especially in the Global South. We conclude that adding the myriad health benefits across multiple climate change solutions can likely add impetus to move climate policies faster and further.

The VINCERA (Vulnerability and Impacts of North American Forests to Climate Change: Ecosystem Response and Adaptation) project was a collaborative effort between vegetation modeling teams from the UK, Canada, and the US to investigate possible impacts of climate change and increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration on the key attributes of forests and other natural ecosystems. In many ways, the VINCERA project was intended to be a continental scale extension of the US-focused Vegetation/Ecosystem Modeling and Analysis Project (VEMAP; VEMAP members, 1995; http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/vemap/) carried out by a large group of researchers in the late 1990s. Two dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) (MC1 and SDGVM) were compared, each driven by the same suite of six scenarios of future climate taken from the projections simulated by three state-of-the-art global climate models (CSIRO, CGCM2, HadCM3). A continental soils dataset was also constructed from available data to ensure as much consistency as possible in the forcing datasets. Results showed that differences in the results of the two vegetation models resulting from their different treatments of the CO2 fertilization effect (moderate enhancement of water use efficiency in MC1, large effect in SDGVM) and their simulation of wildfires (fixed annual burn rate in SDVM, climate-and fuel-type-driven fire events in MC1) were larger than differences in their responses to climate futures and emission scenarios. Uncertainty in soil properties also affected the robustness of the projections of drought stress in the future. © 2015 by the American Geophysical Union, 2000 Florida Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009. All rights reserved.

An age-old conflict around a seemingly simple question has resurfaced: why do we conserve nature? Contention around this issue has come and gone many times, but in the past several years we believe that it has reappeared as an increasingly acrimonious debate between, in essence, those who argue that nature should be protected for its own sake (intrinsic value)1, 2 and those who argue that we must also save nature to help ourselves (instrumental value)3, 4, 5. Champions of instrumental value contend, among other things, that protecting nature for its own sake alone has failed to stem the tide of species extinction, that conservation should be open to partnering with business to effect the greatest change and that conservation support will be broadened by more directly considering other social objectives (such as food security or clean water). By contrast, advocates of intrinsic value assert that ethical arguments for conservation should be sufficient, that partnering with business is selling out to those who create the problem and that social considerations are already central to conservation.

Background/Question/Methods The Amazon is a key frontier where agricultural expansion to meet growing global demand for agricultural commodities competes with the preservation of natural systems that provide globally important ecosystem services. Thus, identifying land-use strategies that accommodate increasing agricultural production while also maintaining crucial ecosystem services is essential. Here, we use data from a combination of remote sensing, species distribution models, land-surface model output, and geostatistical datasets to compare the geographic distribution of four important ecosystem services: agricultural production, carbon stored in vegetation and soil, habitat for biodiversity, and regional climate regulation (i.e., the effect of ecosystems on local atmospheric temperature and moisture, which are disrupted after deforestation). To detect locations where preventing deforestation would secure multiple environmental benefits, we identify areas across Amazonia that are most effective at storing carbon, providing species-rich habitat, and regulating regional climate. We explore tradeoffs between agriculture and the environment by experimentally modeling the doubling Amazonia's agricultural lands while minimizing the loss of individual services. Given the dual pressures on Amazonia to provide increased agricultural production and maintain ecosystem services, determining how to balance multiple human benefits on its land resources is of critical importance to conservation practitioners, decision-makers, and stakeholders across the globe. Results/Conclusions Our results suggest that the spatial misalignment between carbon, habitat for biodiversity and climate regulation leads to inherent tensions among environmental goals in the face of expanding agriculture in the Amazon. Top performing areas for the delivery of each ecosystem service are not geographically aligned: protecting western Amazonia is most important if the conservation priority is maintaining biodiversity (1026 ± 560 mean relative species diversity per grid cell), while protecting eastern Amazonia is most important for regulating regional climate (post-deforestation mean annual regional atmospheric warming of 0.33 ± 0.29˚C and mean regional atmospheric drying of 0.84 ± 0.31 mm H2O exported per day). Consequently, there are limited opportunities to simultaneously protect both. Minimizing carbon emissions (214.0 ± 98.0 mean MgC released per hectare deforested) provides some opportunity for cobenefit protection, with key areas of carbon storage covering a swath from western to eastern Amazonia. We further find that even if agricultural lands were increased via a “least harm” pathway, the particular environmental harm humans seek to avoid can result in large and differential effects on the earth system. Thus, combining complementary conservation strategies targeting different regions of Amazonia will be essential to achieve multiple environmental outcomes.

Significance We assess how to meet growing demand for agricultural production to minimize impact on the environment. Higher levels of population and affluence may require expanding land in agriculture by converting grasslands and forests to cropland. Such conversions often reduce valuable ecosystem services. Our research identifies where are the best places to expand agricultural production that minimize the loss of one ecosystem service, carbon storage. We show that selectively choosing where to expand agriculture saves over $1 trillion (2012 US dollars) worth of carbon storage relative to a proportional expansion.

Nitrogen fertilizer use across the world's croplands enables high-yielding agricultural production, but does so at considerable environmental cost. Imbalances between nitrogen applied and nitrogen used by crops contributes to excess nitrogen in the environment, with negative consequences for water quality, air quality, and climate change. Here we utilize crop input-yield models to investigate how to minimize nitrogen application while achieving crop production targets. We construct a tradeoff frontier that estimates the minimum nitrogen fertilizer needed to produce a range of maize, wheat, and rice production levels. Additionally, we explore potential environmental consequences by calculating excess nitrogen along the frontier using a soil surface nitrogen balance model. We find considerable opportunity to achieve greater production and decrease both nitrogen application and post-harvest excess nitrogen. Our results suggest that current (circa 2000) levels of cereal production could be achieved with ~50% less nitrogen application and ~60% less excess nitrogen. If current global nitrogen application were held constant but spatially redistributed, production could increase ~30%. If current excess nitrogen were held constant, production could increase ~40%. Efficient spatial patterns of nitrogen use on the frontier involve substantial reductions in many high-use areas and moderate increases in many low-use areas. Such changes may be difficult to achieve in practice due to infrastructure, economic, or political constraints. Increases in agronomic efficiency would expand the frontier to allow greater production and environmental gains.

Increasing population, rising affluence, changing diets, and increasing consumption are placing unprecedented demands on the world's agriculture and natural resources. Today, approximately a billion people are chronically malnourished while our agricultural systems are concurrently degrading land, water, biodiversity and climate across regional and global scales. To meet the worlds future food security and sustainability needs, food production systems must grow substantially while, at the same time, agricultures environmental footprint must shrink dramatically. In this presentation, we will discuss potential solutions to this multi-faceted dilemma, showing that tremendous progress could be made by targeting key strategic levers linked to deforestation, yield gaps, efficiency, diets, biofuels and food waste.

Expansion of agricultural lands and inherent variability of climate can influence the water cycle in the Amazon basin, impacting numerous ecosystem services. However, these two influences do not work independently of each other. With two once-in-a-century-level droughts occurring in the Amazon in the past decade, it is vital to understand the feedbacks that contribute to altering the water cycle. The biogeophysical impacts of land cover change within the Amazon basin were examined under drought and pluvial conditions to investigate how land cover and drought jointly may have enhanced or diminished recent precipitation extremes by altering patterns and intensity. Using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model coupled to the Noah land surface model, a series of April-September simulations representing drought, normal, and pluvial years were completed to assess how land cover change impacts precipitation and how these impacts change under varied rainfall regimes. Evaporative sources of water vapor that precipitate across the region were developed with a quasi-isentropic back-trajectory algorithm to delineate the extent and variability that terrestrial evaporation contributes to regional precipitation. A decrease in dry season latent heat flux and other impacts of deforestation on surface conditions were increased by drought conditions. Coupled with increases in dry season moisture recycling over the Amazon basin by similar to 7% during drought years, land cover change is capable of reducing precipitation and increasing the amplitude of droughts in the region.