KANSAS CITY, Kansas, December 3, 2008 (ENS) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded six grants, totaling $1,174,834, for wetland protection and management projects in Region 7, which encompasses the states of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.

“Protecting our nation’s wetlands is a top priority for EPA,” said Region 7 Administrator John Askew. “These funds will help to achieve environmental improvements in our local watersheds.”

Initiated in 1990, the Wetland Program Development Grants provide state, tribal and local governments an opportunity to conduct projects that promote the coordination of research to prevent, reduce and eliminate water pollution.

In the latest round of grants, Dr. Jason Hubbart of the University of Missouri-Columbia will receive $399,995 for a project that will demonstrate the benefit of riparian buffers for aquatic resource health. It will assess buffer width and establish connectivity of the stream to the adjacent wetland.

Wetland in the Squaw Creek National Wildlife
Refuge near Mound City, Missouri (Photo by
Tim Kiser)

This study will investigate the degree to which buffers modulate stream temperature, quantify the movement of water and nutrients from the stream to the adjacent riparian wetland, assess the influence of buffer width on water quality, and establish connectivity of headwater streams to the adjacent wetland.

This will be accomplished by establishing an intensive monitoring network on two second order streams, and a climate reference site.

Monitoring will be conducted for three water years to establish seasonal and annual nutrient transport and temperature and water quality fluctuations.

This new information will be used to improve understanding and management of these complex systems, and for future modeling which will allow managers to predict alterations to the stream and wetland under contemporary land-use and future climate scenarios.

Dr. Wei Ji of the University of Missouri-Kansas City will receive $80,600 for a project that will detect, map and assess vulnerable wetlands in relation to impervious surface impact in major watersheds in the Kansas City metropolitan area based on satellite remote sensing and geographic information systems analysis.

The Kansas Water Office in Topeka will receive $177,400 for a project to develop a comprehensive standardized process for identifying, assessing and prioritizing wetland and vulnerable aquatic resources in the state of Kansas.

Innovative approaches to wetland, stream, and riparian area management and planning are expected to emerge from this process.

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources in Jefferson City will receive $266,600 to build a wetlands nutrient monitoring program and develop biologically-based nutrient enrichment assessment tools.

The Mid-America Regional Council based in Kansas City, Missouri will receive $135,000 to provide a three-year training and policy development initiative in the Kansas City area on watershed planning and wetland conservation with an emphasis on the role of green infrastructure and wetland mitigation strategies in planning for regional sustainability.

This project will include technical workshops facilitated by national experts, as well as policy and planning seminars, networking opportunities and local field trips.

Finally, Oklahoma State University at Stillwater will receive $115,239 for a project that will evaluate the degree of pesticide contamination in the High Plains wetlands of the Rainwater Basin in Nebraska and Kansas. The researchers will assess the effects of land use practices, such as cropland agriculture, native grassland and the Conservation Reserve Program, to prevent pesticide contamination.

The result of this project will help assess wetland condition and protect wetlands by demonstrating whether pesticide contamination is or is not of high importance for High Plains wetlands in Nebraska and Kansas.

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KINGSTON, Jamaica, April 9, 2008 (ENS) – Regional scientists are calling on Caribbean governments to help develop an emerging research and action agenda that will prepare the islands for the effects of climate change.

A preliminary agenda was reached after three teams of scientists carried out extensive research on climate change scenarios and modeling, coastal, marine and terrestrial biodiversity in the region.

Fined tuned at a two-day workshop hosted by the Trinidad-based Caribbean Natural Resource Institute at the University of the West Indies, Mona, the agenda identifies gaps in existing capacity in the region to deal with the effects of climate change and outlines measures to correct those deficiencies.

Dr. John Agard, chairman of the Environmental Management Authority of Trinidad and Tobago, says the agenda is long overdue.

“At the climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia last December, the Caribbean had no defined position,” he declared. “Other countries had positions, and we, named as the primary targets that are likely to be most affected by climate change, had no regional positions on what we wanted to achieve, while other people were busy lobbying for what they wanted.”

“That is absurd and embarrassing and we must not do that again!” said Dr. Agard.

The preliminary agenda urges action on:

* Facilitating community involvement in the research process
* Fostering linkages between biodiversity conservation and traditional use
* Researching how to establish a regional system of protected areas that facilitate effective biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods under climate change/variability
* Research that moves from generating climate scenarios to projected impact on ecosystem services including socio-economic valuations
* Developing protocols and agreements for data sharing and access
* Developing a Caribbean climate atlas
* Investigating how key species will respond to changes in temperature
* Research on how to strengthen the resilience of regional ecosystems to adapt to climate change

Building capacity is a detailed action point within the agenda that would create opportunities for postgraduate training and research with emphasis on Caribbean Climate Change and variability and cross disciplinary research. Equipment and software could be obtained to support climate research including modern data storage devices and online techniques.

Dr. Agard says all is not lost. The region’s leaders will get a another chance to make their demands at a followup meeting to the Bali conference which will be convened in 18 months.

Extreme weather events such as hurricanes
are forecast to increase as the Earth
warms. Here, a Category 5 Hurricane
Dean blasts across Mexico’s Yucatan
peninsula after brushing Jamaica.
August 2007 (Photo courtesy
Peggy Penner)

He advises that before then Caribbean governments should meet to develop a regional policy on climate change, saying, “They should have had a similar meeting before Bali, but that did not happen.”

“Caribbean governments must meet to define a common position, an agenda for action, because they are among the major victims of climate change. They have to demand action from amongst countries in the developed world who are the major contributors to the causes of climate change,” he stressed.

Small Island Developing States of the Caribbean are most vulnerable to climate variability and long term climate change even though they contribute less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

In contrast, developed countries, including the United States, are responsible for about 50 percent of the harmful emissions that cause the Earth’s temperature to rise.

The study that informed the research agenda was funded by the U.S. based McArthur Foundation. Dr. Agard said the foundation insisted that the results of the studies should guide action towards coping with the effects of climate change in the Caribbean because in the past, a lot of fragmented studies have been funded, the results of which have not been fully utilized.

“There has been a lack of communication, with every island doing its own thing, which has resulted in repetition,” he said.

He said the research agenda will be communicated via the CARICOM Climate Change Center, located in Belize.

Dr. Agard insisted that the money to fund the climate change research must be found. “A lot will be expected from regional governments in terms of financing,” he stressed.

“I don’t think the full reality of the impact of climate change has dawned on regional governments yet,” he said. “We are now getting a bit of publicity and now getting a bit of urgency.”

“The Caribbean is earmarked to take the blunt of climate change effects,” Dr. Agard warned. “Regional infrastructure, such as airports will be severely affected, look what happened in Grenada during Hurricane Ivan in 2004! We could literally, in a few hours, lose several years of Gross Domestic Product, GDP, due to hurricane devastation.”

{This article is produced by The Panos Institute of the Caribbean, online at: [url]htt[://www.panoscaribbean.org[/url].

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