DROUGHT AND THE BABOONS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Born during a drought: Bad news for baboons
Findings have implications for human health

The saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" may not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

After the plains of southern Kenya experienced a severe drought in 2009 that took a terrible toll on wildlife, researchers looked at how 50 wild baboons coped with the drought, and whether the conditions they faced in infancy played a role.

The semi-arid savanna of southern Kenya usually receives an average of 14 inches of rain a year--akin to much of Nebraska or Kansas--but in 2009 it fell to five inches, less than the Mojave Desert.

The year before wasn't much better: rainfall in 2008 dropped to half normal levels.

Grasslands withered

The grasslands the animals depend on for food dried up and watering holes disappeared, leaving many animals starving or weak from hunger.

"We lost 98 percent of the wildebeest population, 75 percent of the zebra population and 30 percent of the elephant population," said Susan Alberts, a biologist at Duke University. "It was impossible to go anywhere without smelling death."

Most baboons made it, but the drought left them underweight and many females stopped ovulating.

In a forthcoming paper in the journal American Naturalist, the researchers compared two groups of females--one group born during low rainfall years, the other born during normal rainfall years.

Born in a drought

All females in the study were adults by time of the 2009 drought, but those born in lean times fared worse in 2009 than those born in times of plenty, the researchers found.

"This study demonstrates lifetime fertility reductions for baboons born during stressful conditions or to low-ranking mothers," said George Gilchrist, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research along with NSF's Divisions of Integrative Organismal Systems and Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences.

"These 'disadvantaged' early life experiences are linked with less resilience to stressful conditions experienced as adults."

During the 2009 drought, baboons born during low rainfall years were 60 percent less likely to become pregnant, whereas pregnancy rates dipped by only 10 percent for females born during normal rainfall years.

Drought babies born to higher-status mothers were less affected by the 2009 event.

"It might be that baboons born to higher-ranked moms have better access to food, or suffer lower levels of social stress," Alberts said.

Implications for human health

The findings also help explain why people who are malnourished in early childhood go on to have higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease as adults.

Some researchers argue that human babies conceived or born in lean times are programmed for food shortages later in life.

They develop a "thrifty metabolism," aimed at storing fat and conserving energy in order to survive starvation.

Things go awry, the thinking goes, only when the environments they experienced as infants and as adults don't match, such as when a child conceived in famine grows up and eats an excess of cheeseburgers, said paper co-author Amanda Lea, a biologist at Duke.

But the baboon fertility study lends support to another idea, namely that kids who don't get enough to eat during their first year of life are simply less resilient as adults than their counterparts.

"The data suggest that early adversity carries lifelong costs," said co-author Jenny Tung, a biologist at Duke.

"It's bad to be born in bad times, but with the right social or economic environment, that can be mitigated," Alberts added.

Jeanne Altmann of Princeton University is also a co-author of the paper.

In addition to NSF, the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md.; Duke University; Princeton University; and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research supported the research.

-- Cheryl Dybas, NSF
-- Robin Ann Smith, Duke University
Investigators
Jenny Tung
Susan Alberts
Related Institutions/Organizations
Duke University

GLOBAL WARMING ACCELERATES DEOUGHT-INDUCED FOREST DEATH

SECRETARY KERRY'S REMARKS AT WORLD FOOD PRIZE CEREMONY

FROM:   U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT 

Remarks at the World Food Prize Ceremony

Remarks

John Kerry

Secretary of State

Dean Acheson Auditorium

Washington, DC

June 18, 2014

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Ken, thank you very, very much for reminding me of the years that have passed. (Laughter.) And first, let me begin with a profound apology to everybody here. I don’t make it a practice to run over your schedules; unfortunately the world is not cooperating with mine today. (Laughter.) So I was not able to get down here in time, and I’m going from here upstairs for the unveiling of former Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s portrait, which was supposed to start about half an hour ago. So you see what’s happening. This is sequential.

I’m very, very grateful to all of you, and I understand you had a young piano player – I just met him a few minutes ago who entertained you for a good period of time, and I think everybody should say – I don’t know where he is, but I’m looking for him. (Applause.) A profound thank you. There he is. I’ll just let you all know that in the brief time I had to say hello to him, he let me know he plans to be Secretary of State. So – (laughter) – good plans.

Ken, thank you. It really is special for me to be able to be here with Ken Quinn – Ambassador Quinn. All the way back to Ken’s six years working as a rural development advisor in the Mekong Delta – six years – he has really understood how closely food security is connected to peace and to stability. And last year, Ken and I had an opportunity to reminisce a little bit about the time we did spend together, 45 years ago now, in a beautiful, beautiful community called Sa Dac. It’s a little hamlet on the Mekong River, where we were both serving during that period of time – the difficult time in Southeast Asia. And our friendship has endured and I’m so happy to see that he, like the energy bunny, is just still at it. He never stops. So thank you, Ken, very, very much.

I want to thank Assistant Secretary Charlie Rivkin, also the son of a Foreign Service officer, a former ambassador, for bringing this remarkable group of diplomats and development professionals together – people from all over the world who are committed to the fight against hunger and to the fight to lift men and women out of poverty – and I’m delighted that they are here. And your excellencies, our various ambassadors, and distinguished guests, thank you for being here with us.

I particularly want to single out my friend Tom Harkin, who is here. Tom and I came to the United States Senate together – the class of 1984, elected in ’84, sworn in ’85. We came with a couple of guys named Al Gore, Mitch McConnell, Paul Simon – a great class, and Tom and I took our maiden voyages as freshman senators overseas to Central America in 1985. And in between Tom’s accomplishments as chairman of the agriculture committee and his efforts to support innovation and research, not just for Iowa but across the world, he will leave an extraordinary legacy in the Senate – the Americans with Disabilities Act – and also really the leader in the Senate on the issue of food security. So Tom, we thank you for your incredible service in the United States Senate. (Applause.)

And Barbara Grassley, thank you for being here, indeed, and making this a bipartisan affair, which is great, and that’s in the Iowa best tradition. I want you all to know, I grew incredibly fond of Iowa. I spent a lot of time – (laughter) – lot of time in Iowa. Loved it. I celebrated New Year’s Eve way back in 2003, 2004 with my 300 best friends in Sioux City, and we had a great time. We had a great time. I actually learned to measure my life by the height of the corn while I was there. (Laughter.) It was a lot of fun.

There is no group of people more committed, obviously, to the challenge of food security than all of you who are here in this room today. So this an opportune, appropriate moment for me to make an announcement of my own about the person who will be leading our food security efforts here at the State Department going forward. She’s someone that I turned to 18 years ago when AIDS in Africa was an issue that very few people talked about – very few people dared to talk about. And no one had really constructed a policy. She was the person who led my efforts, who worked with me and Bill Frist on the first AIDS bill that passed the Senate. We went to Jesse Helms, actually got his support, managed to pass this bill at a different point of time of the United States Senate, unanimously in the United States Senate. And I’m proud that this bill ultimately became PEPFAR as we know it today.

When I first sat down with President Obama to talk about being Secretary of State, he told me then that food security was one of these looming, emerging issues that he really wanted to make a mark on, that he wanted to address. He felt compelled to for a lot of different reasons. And Nancy Stetson was the first person that I thought of to lead that effort at the State Department, so I want you all to welcome with me my new Special Representative for Global Food Security Dr. Nancy Stetson, who is right here in the front row. Thank you. (Applause.)
Actually, it’s a little bit of irony here playing out today – serendipity. Both Nancy and Ken have actually crossed paths before, which is great in terms of working on this, because they were both absolutely pivotal in our efforts to ultimately make peace with Vietnam. And by that I mean to really put to bed the residual issues of that war, which were encapsulated in the issue of POW/MIA and the fact that we still had an embargo. And Nancy did unbelievable work in that effort. I saw so many of the benefits of that work and how closely we worked together when I visited Vietnam for the first time as Secretary. I’ve seen the product of that.

And on that visit I had a chance to go down the Mekong again, where 45 years ago the threats on the Mekong, as Ken has alluded to, came from snipers and came out of spider holes and ambushes. Today it’s a place where there’s a very different kind of threat and a very different kind of atmosphere. For farmers and fishermen along that river, threats from climate change are not a gathering storm, they’re here. The consequences are already being felt. They’re threatening food supplies and they’re threatening the way of life for millions of people.
I just want you to think about what’s happening here. This is a waterway, the Mekong, that has been the lifeblood of an entire region for thousands of years, one of the great rivers of the planet. Today its ability to supply food to the millions who depend on it is under serious strain; could conceivably be eliminated, depending on what we choose to do. And what I saw along the Mekong River recently is not too different from what we see in our rivers, in our lakes, in our oceans. We just had a two-day conference here on the oceans. The vitality of these ecosystems and their ability to be able to provide food to billions across the planet is under stress like never before. With our ocean conference, we brought leaders from across the world to discuss how we meet these challenges, especially threats to food supplies. We have billions of people who depend on their protein – about half of the world, really, of today’s population, depends on significant source of protein from the fish that they can catch.

So I was proud to announce yesterday an initiative that will make all seafood sold in the United States traceable, allowing all consumers to see that the fish that have been caught was caught sustainably, that they know where it came from, how it came to the market, and how long ago it came to the market. That is how we are going to use the size of our market to drive changes and attitudes and behavior around the world. And it’s just one step. But for the more than three billion people across the world who depend on fish for protein, we are committed to doing whatever we can to preserve their access to it.

Now, as all of you know, there is a lot of work left to be done. Just last month, the Chicago council released a study showing how hotter temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and more intense weather events could slow food production by 2 percent a decade for the rest of the century. That report came on top of findings from an elite group of retired U.S. military leaders who said that because of frequent drought and depleted crop yields, climate change is already, now, a catalyst of global conflict. People fighting over water; it’s already happening. In some parts of Africa you can find tribes that fight over water, and this will grow worse if that water supply grows – diminishes.

Now, frankly, we shouldn’t need to be told what happens when food becomes scarce and food prices spike. It obviously can plunge millions of people into poverty. It can feed vicious cycles of desperation and violence. And that is why the struggle for food is truly the struggle for life itself. Because when access to food is limited, so is what we can achieve by investing in public health, which we try to do. So is what we can accomplish by investing in schools or in infrastructure or in conflict prevention. That’s why the work to promote food security is, in fact, so vital to every single thing that we try to do here at the State Department and at USAID.
Everyone in this room knows, and Ken alluded to it, when Norman Borlaug accomplished to spark a Green Revolution. By inventing hardier crops and new species, he was able to save – that effort saved nearly one billion lives on our planet. And when you do the math, when our planet needs to support two billion more people in the next three decades, it’s not hard to figure out that this is the time for a second green revolution.

That’s why Dr. Sanjaya Rajaram is being honored now with the World Food Prize, and we’re grateful for the hundreds of new species of wheat that Dr. Rajaram has developed. These will deliver more than 200 million more tons of grain to global markets each year. And Dr. Rajaram has helped to feed millions of people across the world through his lifetime of research and innovation.

That’s what President Obama’s feed the food initiative – Feed the Future Initiative is all about: bringing the full force of American research and innovation to the global food markets; funding research at universities like Kansas State and Washington State to make crops more resilient to climate change, to climate shocks; supporting scientists and students at Michigan State who are connecting farmers to markets and strengthening global food chains.

This research is really a small piece of how Feed the Future is working to fight global hunger and to promote food security across 11 different U.S. Government agencies. These efforts were born out of the President’s commitment at the 2009 G8 Summit, when a commitment was made to mobilize at least 3.5 billion in public funding for global food security which leveraged more than 18 billion from other donors.

Last month, I had the pleasure and the privilege of being in Ethiopia, and I visited one of these partnerships at work. Working with DuPont and 35,000 small farmers in that country, we’ve been able to increase maize productivity by 60 percent. Feed the Future is also improving access to nutritious food where it’s needed most, where pregnant women and their children are at the risk of not getting proper nutrition. Feed the Future emphasizes nutrition during the thousand days from a woman’s pregnancy to her child’s second birthday. And the science shows us exactly how critical, how important that outcome is. When children don’t receive the nutrition that they need during that critical period, their chance of success at school is dramatically reduced. That’s proven. And as adults, if that happens, you wind up with a chronic deficiency through your life. You never make up for it, and it’s harder, then, to compete for fair participation in society to compete for a good job.

That’s why targeted investments in prenatal and early childhood nutrition are in fact a moral imperative. That’s why we invested more that 12.5 – we invested to provide more than 12.5[i] children with nutritional support and higher quality food options for 2013. And when we know that agriculture is often the most effective way to pull people out of poverty, investing in food security is obviously also then an economic imperative.

The growth of food supplies means the growth of the middle class. That means larger markets for American products, more jobs, and ultimately that means a stronger middle class right here at home in the United States.

At the G8 Summit two years ago, President Obama announced a new effort to grow the world’s middle class by supporting agriculture in Africa. It’s called the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, and here is how it works – let me just take a moment to share it with you. Partners from the private sector outline plans to make responsible investments in agriculture within African nations. The nations themselves commit to making reforms that attract private investment. And by bringing these partners together and attracting support from global donors, the New Alliance aims to lift 50 million people out of poverty by 2022. The New Alliance has already attracted $7 billion in pledges, and from the private sector another 700 – 970[ii] million was invested last year alone.

Across Africa, agricultural productivity remains unnecessarily low, while hunger and under-nutrition remain dismally high. In partnering with African countries, Feed the Future and the New Alliance obviously have incredible potential. Harnessing that potential – especially in the face of climate change – will be a critical part of President Obama’s African Leaders Summit this summer, in the early part of August, first week of August. We will have more than 40 African leaders coming here to the State Department for a two-day summit – very, very, critical, and this will be one of the major subjects that we will broach.

So when it comes to food security, make no mistake: Our challenges are great, yes. But so is our capacity to meet them. When I think of what is required to strengthen global food security, I do think back to what I saw years ago in the Mekong Delta and what I saw last winter, the differential. But I also think about a Vietnamese proverb that Ambassador Quinn may know quite well – and he speaks Vietnamese fluently; I don’t, but I can get by with this. It’s: Cai kho lo cai khon. It means that adversity breeds creativity; the necessity, the mother of invention. And what that really means for all of us is actually quite simple: Innovation and invention are the way forward and the way that we can face the challenges of food security and climate.

When it comes to climate change, when it comes to food security, we are literally facing a moment of adversity – perhaps even dire necessity. It’s hard to convince people – hard to convince people of a challenge that isn’t immediately tangible to everybody particularly. But it is clear to at least 98, 99 percent of all the scientists in our country that to confront these challenges, we must invent and we must innovate, and most of all, we need to work together and we need to get to work. I have every confidence that we can do that. That is our mission. It’s our call to conscience as citizens of this fragile planet, and I am convinced that with people like Ken and all of you and the others who committed to this effort to feed people on this planet and to strengthen our unity as a consequence of those efforts, we can and will make the difference.
Thank you all very, very much. (Applause.)

[i] 12.5 million

[ii] For 2013, companies reported making $970 million worth of investments

NSF REPORTS DROUGHT, FIRE IN AMAZON LEADS TO MORE DEAD TREES

Photo:  Amazon Forest.  Credit:  Wikimedia.  

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Drought and fire in the Amazon lead to sharp increases in forest tree mortality

Deforestation and fragmentation of forests help create tinderbox conditions

Ongoing deforestation and fragmentation of forests in the Amazon help create tinderbox conditions for wildfires, contributing to rapid and widespread forest loss during drought years, according to a team of researchers.

Their findings show that forests in the Amazon could reach a "tipping point" when severe droughts coupled with forest fires lead to large-scale loss of trees, making recovery more difficult, said Jennifer Balch, a geographer at Penn State University.

"We documented one of the highest tree mortality rates witnessed in Amazon forests," Balch said. "Over the course of our experiment, 60 percent of the trees died with combined drought and repeated fire.

"Our results suggest that a perfect firestorm, caused by drought conditions and previous fire disturbance, crossed a threshold in forest resistance."

The researchers conclude in today's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that "efforts to end deforestation in the Amazon must be accompanied by programs and policies that reduce the accidental spread of land management fires into neighboring forests--and effectively control forest fires when started."

Balch noted that climate change is expected to warm the air in the Amazon region by several degrees and substantially reduce regional precipitation, making understanding the interactions between droughts and fires even more important.

"However, before any prediction of Amazon climate warming occurs, our study demonstrates that drought and fire are already driving forest dieback," she said.

The eight-year study is the largest and longest-running fire experiment in tropical forests. The researchers burned 50-hectare forest plots in the Southeastern Amazon, a region prone to the effects of climate change.

"If drought and wildfires happen in the same time-frame, there are far-reaching consequences for the health of Amazon forests," said Henry Gholz, a program director in the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research. "When climate change becomes part of the mix, questions for these forests loom yet larger."

The plots were burned every year, every three years, or not at all. The timeframe for the study included 2007, a year of severe drought.

By comparing the tree deaths for the plots each year, the researchers could assess the effect of drought on fire intensity and tree deaths.

"Drought causes more intense and widespread fires," said lead PNAS paper author Paulo Brando of the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia, Carnegie Institution for Science, and Woods Hole Research Center.

"Four times more adult trees were killed by fire during a drought year, which means that there was also more carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere, more tree species loss and a greater likelihood of grasses invading the forest."

The researchers found that fragmented forests are more susceptible to the effects of drought and fire, and that drought leads to an increase in fuel such as leaves and branches.

The findings are key, in part, because most climate change models have not included the effects of fires on Amazon forests.

"Basically, none of the models used to evaluate future Amazon forest health includes fire, so most of these predictions underestimate the amount of tree death and overestimate overall forest health," said Michael Coe, a scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center.

Fire as a forest management tool can contribute to an increase in severe fires because the resulting thinner canopy leads to drier forest conditions.

This lack of humidity does not dampen fires but does encourage airflow between fields and forests. Fragmented forests also have more edge space, which is susceptible to both fire and invasive grasses, another potential fuel.

"These forests are tough and can take a lot, but if drought reaches a certain level, big trees begin to die," said Daniel Nepstad of the Earth Innovation Institute, who also co-led the project. "We now know that severe drought makes fires more intense, creating a second tree mortality threshold."

The results are important because large portions of the Amazon forest already experience droughts and are susceptible to fire--they are broken into smaller blocks by agriculture and are close to human settlements, the predominant source of fire in the Amazon.

The researchers analyzed NASA satellite data to provide regional context for results from the experimental burns.

"In 2007, fires in Southeast Amazonia burned 10 times more forest than in an average climate year -- an area equivalent to a million soccer fields," said scientist Douglas Morton of NASA.

"These smaller forest fragments have more edges than large blocks of forest, which expose them to the hotter, drier conditions in the surrounding landscape and make them more vulnerable to escaped fires," said researcher Marcia Macedo of the Woods Hole Research Center.

By 2011, about eight percent of Southeast Amazonia's forests were less than 328 feet from an agricultural or pasture clearing. This lattice-like network of degraded forest edges is now very susceptible to future fires.

The research was also funded by the Packard Foundation, NASA and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry.

-NSF-

U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE CLINTON'S REMARKS ON WATER SECURITY

Photo:  Desert In Libya.  Credit:  CIA World Factbook 

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Roundtable on Water Security
Remarks
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
United Nations
New York City

September 25, 2012
Thank you very, very much, Maria, and I am delighted to be able to join you for this meeting. Sometimes when you look at the busy schedule of the UN General Assembly, you see only the headlines, the problems, the hotspots, the conflicts, the challenges, and all of those are certainly important. But you also have to look at the trend lines, and you’re here because you know that water is an issue that cuts across borders and affects every human being.

You know better than any that water management and resource issues are both a moral imperative and a strategic investment, and I want to thank everyone who has participated in this, because whether you’re talking about economic development or improving global health, whether you focus on promoting food security or building peace or coping with climate change or providing sustainable energy, access to clean water is critical. And the problems that are already coming to the forefront around the world will only intensify as populations grow and demands increase.

Now, this year alone in the United States, we’ve experienced extreme drought conditions in some parts of our country and devastating floods in others. We are well aware that Europe, Asia, and Africa have all experienced similar challenges. Now, you’ve already heard about our Intelligence Community Assessment on Global Water Security, and I hope that you will have if you didn’t today have a chance to really study it, because water scarcity could have profound implications for security. The report found that dwindling supplies and poor management of water resources will certainly affect millions of people as food and crops grow scarcer and access to water more difficult to obtain. In fact, in some places, the water tables are already more depleted than we thought and wells are drying up.

In other parts of the world, water resources could become a real source of manipulation and increasing instability. And we want to get ahead of what those potential problems might be. We can’t wait until we already have a crisis. So I think water should be a priority in every nation’s foreign policy and domestic agenda, and we need to work together to advance cooperation on shared waters. Here at the UN, we have to work in our continuing efforts to ensure no child dies of a water-related disease and certainly no war is ever fought over water.

Now, to give just one example of what we need to be doing, the United States is working with the UN Development Program and other partners from not only governments but the business world, civil society, philanthropy, and academia on the shared waters partnership to help build really robust institutions. And also, as part of that, we will be looking for ways to establish online platforms to facilitate cooperation and to facilitate regional dialogues. All of us are here today because we understand the urgency. It is for me a critical issue that we have to start asking ourselves what are we going to do today and tomorrow to address.

Many of you are already working on developing practical solutions. How can we better connect and share what you’ve already learned? How can we build more effective institutions for managing shared water resources? And how do we bring safe drinking water and sanitation to all the world’s people? I’m sure it’s been said many times already today, but there are countries where there are more cell phones than toilets. How do we look for every possible creative, innovative approach to safe drinking water and sanitation? I’m excited, because I think this is now getting the attention that it so richly deserves. I thank Under Secretary Otero for leading our efforts inside the United States Government, and I look forward to hearing the results of your deliberations and working with you to try to implement your very practical solutions. Thank you all. (Applause.)