Water, North and South
23/08/08 05:08
Roughly 30 hours ago, I was rushing to the Stockholm airport. As I boarded the plane, I passed a small window used when guiding the walkway between the plane and the gate. A little sign a few feet in front of the nose of the plane stated the airport name, the city, and the latitude and longitude. Fifty-nine degrees north latitude, I thought. That’s the farthest north I’ve ever stood, at least on the ground. Then I laughed: this flight would carry me in 10 hours to Chicago, where I’d catch an 11-hour flight to Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then a last plane headed to the southwest for two hours to Cuiaba, Brazil, near the Bolivian border. From there, I drive straight south several hours to roughly 25 degrees south latitude, the southern-most point of my life. In basically a day and a half, I’d be spanning 85 degrees of latitude and pushing the extremities of my experience.But the contrasts were not merely of hemisphere and geography. My time in Stockholm was largely spent at a 2,500-person conference where water was only visible on PowerPoint slides and drinking fountains, while the Pantanal is a wetland the size of England and Scotland filled with jaguars, hyacinth macaws, and capybaras. The night sky is bright with stars and is one of the few places with essentially no planes visible in the sky. It has a great deal of water and very few people.
Of course, it is water that mediates, connects, and divides Stockholm and the Pantanal. Some themes:
• Stockholm is a city that has seen active and intense human occupation for a long period. A Swedish movie showing on my SAS flight was set during a Danish invasion to the region in the 1200s. The city itself spans a (quite beautiful) group of islands and peninsulas, and water is almost always nearby. The Pantanal has been occupied by humans for a long time as well, but until the 1960s most of the inhabitants were native Americans, mostly hunter-gatherers. It is still considered one of the best places in the world to see a jaguar. Water-intensive row-crop agriculture began eating away at the edges of the Pantanal about 40 years ago. And now industrial agriculture is found in some regions, especially to the east, where biofuels are booming. Thus, most of the Pantanal is still quite remote and wild, but there is a moving frontier of development. And of course water does tend to flow, so impacts upstream (or on the groundwater) are not isolated to the developed sections.
• As a port city, Stockholm has seen significant amounts of shipping for centuries. There is a small harbor, and several medium and large ships stood waiting to load or unload containers and (for a cruise ship) people. Most of the “edges” of the aquatic ecosystems here have been “hardened” — turned into docks, channelized, or otherwise fixed. However, most of the really big industrial impacts probably date back from the 19th to the mid 20th century, and ecological conditions have probably stabilized or even improved in recent decades. The Pantanal has recently received a lot of attention across the region in developing one or more large navigation canals that would cut across the area — the equivalent of slicing open the Florida Everglades (which has already been done) or southern Africa’s Okavango. Recovery or “restoration” of a freshwater ecosystem once it has had its hydrology converted by channelization is limited, to say the least. Development is just beginning, but compared to the relatively slow evolution of the Swedish economy from agriculture, mixed industryl and agriculture, high industrial, and now post-industrial over a 200 year period, the Pantanal is seeing very rapid and high-impact growth. A lot of damage could be done very quickly. And probably has been done already. Regional and even global trade could profoundly alter the region.
• Climate projections for Stockholm (and Scandinavia generally) suggest high amounts of precip, with most of it coming as rain rather than snow. Air temperatures may be warming quite dramatically. And sea-level rise will of course be a big impact in the city itself. Impacts on the Pantanal are harder to predict. There may be a gradient of declining precipitation amounts in northeastern south America, with increases to the southwest. But determining where the line shifts from one to the other is very difficult. Impacts from increased climate variability (more floods and droughts) or changes in the timing of the highly seasonal precipitation are likely to be more important that absolute increases or decreases in mean precipitation, at least in the short run. Extended droughts, for instance, may alter fire regimes and increase erosion. More frequent or severe floods could lower the ability of the wetland itself to “store” water during the dry season.
Taking these (admittedly vague) trends and trying to apply them to each system as a whole to develop an adaptation plan is a challenging process. Stockholm will probably need to reconfigure its drinking water supply and may, with time, need to move upstream and/or build additional flood and sea-level rise protections. But it is a rich and powerful city in a wealthy nation, and it should weather climate change effectively. In fact, if it follows the model of other post-industrial nations, the ecosystem integrity and quality may actually improve relative to the past few decades. Like London and the Thames or Paris and the Seine, Stockholm and Sweden will try to make its long-troubled bodies of water healthier and cleaner.
The Pantanal in contrast is already in pretty good shape. The biggest challenges here are balancing agricultural intensification and infrastructure designed to promote hydropower and international trade with more frequent weather extremes. In effect, the goal may be to help an ecosystem in reasonably healthy condition today transition into a different state that is also healthy — maintaining integrity at a new, different equilibrium. This will be a serious challenge, especially with pressure from the growing biofuels market.
The story of these two extremes is, in some ways, typical of the disparities across north and south globally: one hemisphere, largely responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere to date but buffered by wealth, and the other hemisphere, striving to grow economically while exploding with new ideas and hopes, moving forward by making good use of its available natural resources but with lean climate-adaptation margins. They are the story of water, north and south.
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