Brazil likely to challenge the US on ethanol imports

http://ictsd.net/i/trade-and-sustainable-development-agenda/27614/

Far more land use in Brazil than is allowed by forest reserve law

http://www.mnp.org.br/index.php?pag=ver_noticia&id=435808

A new study by the Brazilian Agricultural Corporation (EMBRAPA) has tallied all land legally available for all rural and urban land uses in Brazil. The findings sharply diverge from observed land use and suggest the impracticalities of enforcing environmental laws requiring legal reserves. The article's headline says that by environmental law only 7% of the Amazonian biome is available for any land use.  The most surprising finding is that just 33% of the country as a whole is available for land use by law, approximately the area now occupied by cattle ranching.  "What about already occupied agricultural areas, cities, mines, industry, and infrastructure,"asks the study's author Evarista de Miranda.

MNP - Movimento Nacional de Produtores: "03/09/2008
Fonte: Tribuna da Imprensa Online
Embrapa: 7% do Bioma Amaz�nia s�o pass�veis de ocupa�o
Um estudo da unidade de monitoramento por sat�lite da Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecu�ria (Embrapa), de Campinas (SP), mostra que o aumento significativo das �reas destinadas �prote�o ambiental e ao uso exclusivo de algumas popula�es reduziu de forma significativa as �reas pass�veis de ocupa�o econ�mica urbana, industrial e agr�cola. De acordo com o estudo, em termos legais, apenas 7% do bioma Amaz�nia e 33% do pa�s seriam pass�veis de ocupa�o."

"conservativeness"in response to scientific uncertainty and incompleteness: REDD vs. LUC

I recently read a new article from the journal Environmental Research Letters called "Applying the Conservativeness Principle to REDD..." 

The authors argue for a "conservativeness principle" to construct and monitor schemes to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).  They argue that it's best to make conservative estimates of the emissions reduced by interventions to avoid deforestation because data on the subject are frequently incomplete and/or uncertain.  That way: 

-it's unlikely that the payments will be wasted

-there is incentive for tropically forested countries to prove that the default estimates are conservative

-such programs will then engage tropically forested countries in international climate change governance

I think one can conceptualize REDD emissions reductions as a function of carbon pool*intervention*persistence of intervention.  Therefore, by the conservativeness principle, argue the authors, it is best to conservatively estimate all three of these values.  They note, moreover that, "it is likely that the most typical and important example of incomplete estimates will arise from the lack of reliable data for a carbon pool." As a result, they argue that conservativeness in estimating the size of the carbon pool is the most prudent approach to REDD monitoring.

 It's worth noting, however,that with respect to broader LUC governance this is the opposite of conservative.  With respect to numerous other LUC issues (like say calculating the biofuels ILUC adder) overestimating the carbon stocks more closely falls under the "conservativeness principle".  An overestimate of forest carbon stocks increases the cost of deforestation and puts the burden of proof on industry to advance the carbon accounting science.  Such carbon footprint overestimates are used as default values in the Renewable Transportation Fuels Obligation (RTFO).  

I think I like the premise of the conservativeness principle, but maybe it is best applied to measuring and monitoring the influences of the policies themselves, not the environmental systems/stocks/flows on which they are intended to act.  Otherwise, there is a risk of some strange compartmentalization in the regulatory science.  Thoughts?

FYI, the article also features a decent survey of the scientific literature on carbon flux from tropical forest conversion.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/3/3/035005/erl8_3_035005.html

Collaborative data visualization

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html?_r=1&sq=visualization&st=cse&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=1220403636-o+vZh2VCFn66m095iI8+nw

Novelties

Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data

By ANNE EISENBERG

Published: August 30, 2008

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

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Above shows occurrences of names in the New Testament.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another's work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. "When analyzing information, no single person knows it all," he said. "When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions."

The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. Dr. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals in academia, business and government. "We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience," he said — to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.

"The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database," he said.

The Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are among the popular tools.

Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for visualizing numerical data. "The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload blog posts, and entire books," Dr. Viégas said, so the site added techniques for unstructured text. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, President Bush's State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003.

Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an image, Dr. Wattenberg said.

Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. "It's great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats" on their blogs, Dr. Viégas said. "So why not a visual that gives you some insight into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone else, something completely different, and that's where the conversation starts."

Rich Hoeg, a technology manager who lives in New Hope, Minn., and has a blog at econtent.typepad.com, was so taken with the possibilities for group collaboration that he wrote a tutorial on using Many Eyes as part of his series called "NorthStar Nerd Tutorials."

"Many Eyes is unusual, because it takes advantage of the collective intelligence of a group to get more out of a data set," he said. For the tutorial, Mr. Hoeg exported enrollment data for graduate engineering students to the site, then used one of the tools there to display the information in various ways.

"I wanted people to understand that you can take the same data and have it tell lots of different stories," he said.

Dr. Wattenberg noted an example from the site. In charting a particular topic — deaths resulting from human violence in the 20th century — one user originally presented a bubble graph in which the size of the circles represented the number of casualties tied to an event — for instance, World War I or World War II. After discussion on the site about the substantial growth in population during the 20th century, the originator offered two new time-based visualizations of the data, one a line graph and the other a stack graph — plotting the number of casualties against this growing population.

"You could see a new downward trend emerge," Dr. Wattenberg said. "Violent deaths declined in the latter decades of the century. It's a slightly more optimistic view."

Ben Shneiderman, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a pioneer in information visualization, says sites like Many Eyes are helping to democratize the tools of visualization. "The gift of the Internet is that everyone can participate, and the tools can be brought to a much wider audience," he said.

Presenting results in a static spreadsheet or table may do the job. "But sometimes it's like driving with your eyes closed," he said. "With visualization, it might be possible to open your eyes and see something that will help you" — for instance, patterns, clusters, gaps or outliers in the data.

"The great fun of information visualization," he said, "is that it gives you answers to questions you didn't know you had."

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com. 

Sources on How Biofuels are Influencing Food Prices

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/4/163717/0989
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/8/1761/56481
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2008/jul/10/exclusivethebiofuelsreport

Correction to RTFO co-product allocation post

Thanks to Phillip for posting the following correction in the comments section of the blog:

The version of the RTFO Carbon Reporting Methodology you are referring to is out of date. This was a version consulted on in the middle of last year and has since been updated.

In particular, the co-product treatment procedures were updated. The recommendation to use allocation by energy content for energy co-products was withdrawn. During the consultation exercise many stakeholders highlighted the fact that use of the energy allocation method could lead to perverse incentives (e.g. little or no reward for installing an efficient CHP system at a biofuel plant, which would have significant GHG savings).

Energy coproducts are now treated by system expansion / substitution. The rest of your post is accurate.

Please see the following link for the final version of the Carbon Reporting Methodology:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/rfa/_db/_documents/080227_Final_Carbon_Reporting_Methodology.pdf

Re: Indirect land use change in Version Zero of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels

Interesting the acknowledgement that there is no “broadly accepted methodology” to determine indirect land use change, and the decision that “RSB will work with key international and national agencies and experts to try to provide a methodology to measure the indirect impacts of biofuels production for inclusion in the assessment of compliance with this standard, and to give guidance to producers”.  Perhaps a window of opportunity for the Berkeley biofuels project to contribute to debates and policy at the international level?  Brent


On 8/13/08 12:16 PM, "Avery Cohn" <avery.cohn@gmail.com> wrote:

3.e looks like a placeholder as yet, but it has some curious parts - i.e. does the use of "previously cleared land" really minimize ILUC?  

3.e        GHG emissions from indirect land use change, i.e. that arise through macroeconomic effects of biofuels production, shall be minimized. There is no broadly-accepted methodology to determine them. Practical steps that shall be taken to minimize these indirect effects will include:
o        Maximising use of waste and residues as feedstocks; marginal, degraded or previously cleared land; improvements to yields; and efficient crops;
o        International collaboration to prevent detrimental land use changes; and
o        Avoiding the use of land or crops that are likely to induce land conversions resulting in emissions of stored carbon.
Key guidance: The use of residues and waste shall not violate Principle 8 on Soil. Careful definitions and guidelines for identifying preferred land (marginal, degraded, underutilized, etc.) will be needed. The RSB will work with key international and national agencies and experts to try to provide a methodology to measure the indirect impacts of biofuels production for inclusion in the assessment of compliance with this standard, and to give guidance to producers.