For centuries the Great Lakes have been treated callously These five magnificent lakes—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario—located along the eastern half of the Canadian–U.S. border have served as a virtual sewer catching waste from industry, agriculture, commercial shipping, and households. Their natural barriers to other water systems have been breached, exposing indigenous ecosystems to aggressive invaders. They’ve been used as a highway for colossal ships that require deepened and broadened channels to crisscross the lakes, and that import exotic species along with their intended cargo. At times it could seem that this long-suffering water system will see no end of indignities. But recent renewed focus on the unique and tremendous value of this resource by governments and communities surrounding the lakes may turn the tide of neglect and abuse.According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Great Lakes contain 21% of the Earth’s and about 84% of United States’ surface freshwater. That’s about 22,000 cubic kilometers of water spread over 94,250 square miles. Each year the lakes provide more than 6.7 million cubic meters of water to municipalities and quadruple that to industry. They support a commercial fishery worth about $13 million as of 2002, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and a sport-fishing industry of nearly $1.3 billion as of 2001, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Today about 25% of Canadians and 10% of Americans—a total of more than 33 million people—live in the Great Lakes watershed.“The whole industrial expansion that took place during the ‘robber baron’ era [of the late nineteenth century] expanded along the shores of the Great Lakes,” says Deborah Swackhamer, a University of Minnesota professor of environmental chemistry. Soon ships were carrying iron ore, coal, and limestone from mines and quarries to steel mills and later steel to factories and products to markets. In addition to serving as a transportation system, the lakes provided a place to discharge manufacturing by-products.Unlike a sewer, however, whatever enters this lake system stays awhile. On average, less than 1% of the five lakes’ water turns over each year, which means that many pollutants stay in place. They settle in sediments, adhere to other surfaces, become suspended in water, and bioaccumulate in organisms. Similarly, with the exception of migratory birds, most wildlife in the basin spend their entire life cycle in or near the lakes.As a result of all these stressors, the lakes now house fish that are dangerous to eat, water that can be unsafe to drink, anoxic “dead zones”—areas in which virtually no plants or animals can survive—that appear each summer like clockwork, and an ever-growing population of unwanted species from other parts of the world.a]pyrene, hexachlorobenzene, furans, dioxins, and alkylated lead.According to the EPA, 362 contaminants have been identified in the Great Lakes system, only about a third of which have been evaluated for their effects on wildlife and human health. Two decades ago the International Joint Commission (IJC)—an organization that was formed by the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 to prevent and mediate boundary water disputes between Canada and the United States—identified 11 of these as “critical pollutants” that required immediate attention. The list includes polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT, dieldrin, toxaphene, mirex, mercury, benzo from two chloralkali plants that they had,” says Michael Gilbertson, who recently retired as a biologist and secretary of the Workgroup on Ecosystem Health with the IJC. The result, he says, has been an outbreak among a series of communities on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes of suspected mercury-related poisoning. Symptoms observed have included tremors, deafness, and blindness.in utero from exposure to methylmercury.In an unpublished dissertation, Gilbertson wrote that a review of Canadian hospitalization records reveals that in some communities near the lakes four times as many males are being admitted with cerebral palsy as in inland areas. Gilbertson says methylmercury is the only substance known to be associated with cerebral palsy, and males are more susceptible than females to neurological damage More recently developed pollutants also threaten Great Lakes fauna—possibly including humans. Some that are appearing in the environment in increasing quantities are the polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), which were introduced in the early 1970s as flame retardants in consumer products. “No one paid any attention to these compounds until the last couple of years,” says David Carpenter, a professor of environmental health and toxicology at The State University of New York at Albany’s Institute for Health and the Environment, “and now we’re just finding them everywhere.”Although PBDEs are mixed with plastic polymers during manufacturing, they don’t bind chemically with the plastic. As a result, they leach readily from products that contain them. Like PCBs, PBDEs concentrate in fats. That and their resistance to degradation combine to create a persistent chemical that bioaccumulates. “Their manufacture increased exponentially over the last decade or so, and we’re seeing them in fish and in sediments with that same increase,” Swackhamer says. “We can go back to the sediments since we didn’t measure them in the environment until a few years ago; we can actually use the sediments to go back and demonstrate the fact that they’ve increased exponentially all through the mid-eighties and into the nineties.”Environmental Science and Technology, Lake Michigan salmon (which are an introduced species managed for sport fisheries and sustained through stocking programs) contain PBDEs at levels above 100 parts per billion, one of the world’s highest concentrations for salmon in open waters. The authors also found PBDEs in some forage fish, such as alewife and smelt. Levels of PBDEs also appear to be increasing in human tissue, according to a review published in the May 2000 issue of EHP. Although the human health impacts of PBDEs aren’t well understood, these chemicals have been shown in animal studies to have effects similar to those of PCBs, including effects on brain development, learning, memory, thyroid levels, and reproduction.PBDEs have now been found in fish from all five of the lakes. According to a University of Wisconsin study published in the 1 March 2001 issue of The sources of PBDEs are ubiquitous. “PBDEs are used everywhere—in furniture, carpeting, computers, and vehicles,” says Sergei Chernyak, a research scientist in the University of Michigan School of Public Health. To gauge the contribution of domestic sources of PBDEs to the environment, Chernyak’s research team compared PBDE levels inside and outside homes. The levels inside a typical house were 70 times the levels just outside the building. “Although this was a pilot study, it seems that houses have strong sources of these contaminants, which is a public health concern,” Chernyak says.With such a diffuse source, stemming the flow of PBDEs to the Great Lakes poses a much more difficult problem than that of PCBs, whose original sources could be traced to large industrial sites, Chernyak says. “The source to the lake came not from water nor from the shore but probably from [the air],” he says.Environmental Science and Technology indicates that the introduction of dioxins and certain related PCB compounds to Lake Ontario in the 1950s spelled the end of lake trout, the lake’s top predator. “This was a finding that would contradict prevailing opinions in the Great Lakes, specifically that lake trout, which had declined to extirpation—in other words the population was gone by 1960—was due to other ecological factors, not chemical toxicity,” Cook says. Exotic species, overfishing, loss of habitat, and water quality reductions had all been blamed, he says, but “we think there is evidence to show that at least up until very recently this toxicity was a factor that impaired any success in trying to reintroduce the species.”Such pollutants can devastate wildlife in subtle and hard-to-detect ways, says Philip Cook, a research chemist for the U.S. EPA. For example, research by Cook and colleagues published in the 1 September 2003 issue of Twelfth Biennial Report on Great Lakes Water Quality, each year rainstorms send trillions of gallons of untreated human sewage into the lakes. In 2001, Lake Michigan alone absorbed 52 billion gallons of sewage and partially treated wastewater.Sewage poses still another threat to the lakes. According to the IJC’s September 2004 Cryptosporidium parasite and Escherichia coli, which can cause severe, and sometimes deadly, intestinal diseases.With the sewage come nitrates, which can cause gastric problems and methemo-globinemia if they find their way into drinking water in excessive amounts. It also brings any number of pathogens, including the Today most raw sewage contributions to the Great Lakes are inadvertent, and they most often come from overflowing sewer systems during storms. A smaller, but still significant, source of sewage is the thousands of privately owned septic systems on the farms, vacation homes, and other rural dwellings that ring the lakes, says Kathleen Halvorsen, an associate professor of natural resource policy at Michigan Technological University. Some 10–20% of these systems are failing, she says. Still, she adds, it’s the big cities that contribute the most untreated sewage.Almost as diverse as the pollutants that have found their ways into the Great Lakes are the plants and animals that now call the lakes home. The Great Lakes connect to the Atlantic through the Saint Lawrence River, which flows out of Lake Ontario. But until the early 1800s Niagara Falls, at the west end of Lake Ontario, prevented water and the animals that live in it from reaching the rest of the Great Lakes system. In the 1800s, however, two waterways—the Erie Canal and the Welland Canal—opened these lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. These new channels provided a foot in the door for invasive species, some traveling under their own power, others hitching rides aboard the ships that began plying the waters.Since the early 1900s, 170 or so nonnative species have found their way into the Great Lakes, says Edward Mills, a fish ecology professor at the Cornell Biological Field Station. Some, such as the zebra mussel, stowed away on oceangoing ships. Some, such as the rusty crayfish, escaped their fate as bait for anglers. Some, such as the banded mystery snail, were liberated from home aquariums. Some, such as garden loosestrife, were cultivated. Some, such as the orange-spotted sunfish, swam in through man-made canals. And some, such as the rainbow trout, were introduced intentionally as game fish.These newcomers can devastate their new homes. By 1947, for example, the sea lamprey—an eel-like fish that sucks bodily fluids from other fish—had invaded all of the lakes. The lamprey—which probably swam up the Hudson—has contributed to the collapse of whitefish and lake trout fisheries. A more recent and possibly more damaging invader, the zebra mussel, arrived in the ballast water of a transoceanic vessel. Since its first Great Lakes sighting in 1988, this fingernail-sized mollusk has found its way into seemingly every nook and cranny of the lake system.Zebra mussels and their fellow invaders, quagga mussels, are the only mollusks that can attach themselves firmly to solid objects. The solid objects they select for their colonies include cooling pipes at power plants, boat hulls, propellers, and docks, which—at mussel densities of up to 70,000 per square meter—quickly become clogged and fouled. They’re also radically altering the ecological balance of the lakes, Makarewicz says. The mussels are such effective filter feeders that they strip water of the various plankton that indigenous creatures eat. In the process their fatty tissues accumulate concentrations of PCBs, methylmercury, and other contaminants at about 10 times the density of native mussels, giving the fish and waterfowl that feed on them an extra shot of biomagnified poison.In not much more than a decade, Makarewicz says, the zebra and quagga mussels have undone years of work and at least $5 billion spent on Lake Erie alone to upgrade water quality by reducing phosphates from fertilizers, detergents, and industrial discharges. “There was major improvement in all of the basins of Erie,” he says. “The walleye populations that [fisheries] began stocking—which is a sport fish—came back in big numbers and things looked very good. And then the zebra mussels changed that.” Although phosphates are largely under control, he says, invasive mussles have re-degraded the quality of the water by overclarifying it.Clostridium botulinum bacteria to grow. The mussels also may concentrate C. botulinum, which is biomagnified when the mussels become meals for round goby. “We know gobies feed on mussels,” Mills says. “The gobies then get the Clostridium bacteria toxin. They die and then whatever eats them—it could be fish or birds feeding on them as they roll in on shore—then gets the toxin and dies.”Zebra mussels, quagga mussels, and a fish known as the round goby have been tagged as the most likely culprits in recent type E botulism outbreaks in Lake Erie. “The real mechanism has not been clearly distinguished yet,” Mills says, “but it does look like it’s some relationship between the mussels—mostly quagga mussels—and gobies.” The highly efficient mussels clarify the water so much that sunlight can reach normally shaded aquatic plants and promote their growth. When the unwonted proliferation of growth dies, its decay consumes oxygen, providing ideal conditions for the Microcystis. “It is at least a nuisance algae, if not a potential health problem,” he says. “The zebra mussels don’t like to eat Microcystis, so they suck all of the particles out of the water and they spit the Microcystis back out. At the same time they digest all the other stuff and spit it out as pseudofeces, which releases nutrients that feed the Microcystis. Zebra mussels are killing off the competition and fertilizing the Microcystis.”Similarly, says R. Peter Richards, a water quality hydrologist at Ohio’s Heidelberg College, zebra mussels may be the cause of recent increases in blooms of the toxic algae In spite of a 1993 rule that calls for oceangoing ships to flush their ballast tanks before entering the Great Lakes system, the influx of invasive species has actually increased. One reason may lie in the loophole that ships that are fully loaded with cargo, and so in theory are free of ballast water, aren’t required to flush their tanks. But even “empty” ballast tanks can contain up to 10 tons of sediment and trapped water, and species can be released into the lakes as the ships unload and reload cargo.Another reason may be the types of species that are coming in. Spiny water flea spores have been identified in ballast-tank residue, and it’s possible this is how this and other alien species have found their way into the lakes. In inhospital conditions, mating spiny water fleas produce “resting eggs” that are first carried in the females’ brood pouches and later released to sink to lake sediments, where they lie dormant until the water warms in spring or summer. The creature’s sharp spines make it impossible for all but the largest predators to eat them. Meanwhile, the spiny water flea itself competes aggressively for the plankton that so many native species depend on for food.Flushing ballast, even if made more effective, won’t control invaders that travel to the lakes through other routes, such as the Asian carp, which is knocking on the lake system’s southernmost door. In an attempt to stop the voracious fish, an electrified barrier has been strung across the Chicago River, which flows out of Lake Michigan. So far Asian carp—a term used for multiple species of carp used in Southern aquaculture—have not been found in the Great Lakes. But they are less than 50 miles away on the Illinois River, where in some stretches they have become the dominant species.Asian carp, which include bighead carp and silver carp, are thought to have escaped from U.S. fish farms during the Mississippi River floods more than 10 years ago. They are used for pet food because they quickly grow quite large. Bighead carp can weigh more than 100 pounds and because they can eat as much as 40 pounds of plankton per day, some ecologists warn that they could equal or even outdo zebra mussels in terms of how efficiently and quickly they ravage the ecosystems they invade.1 (thiamine) and contributes to mortality in the offspring of the alewife’s predators.In threatening native species, these invaders also reduce biodiversity, says Dora Passino-Reader, a USGS fishery research biologist. Zebra mussels, for example, reproduce so quickly, are so hardy, and (for a mussel) are so aggressive—as many as 10,000 have been found affixed to the shell of one native mussel—that they suppress native mussels’ movement, feeding, and reproductive behavior. To take another example, several species of cisco, which were already depressed by the mid twentieth century by overfishing, were then dealt the final blow by three exotic species—the parasitic sea lamprey, a predator, and the alewife and rainbow smelt, competitors. “Some of these species have disappeared,” says Passino-Reader. “[Ciscoes are] not located in the Great Lakes at all anymore. They aren’t able to live in the Great Lakes after the invasion of the alewife. The competition and predators have changed so much that these species have actually been lost.” Alewife are also high in the enzyme thiaminase, she says, which breaks down vitamin BAlthough programs to eliminate sources of known pollutants—notably PCBs, DDT, and mercury—have largely stemmed the flow of these substances into the lakes, foreign species have proven more stubborn, Mills says. “When these species get in, it’s pretty much irreversible,” he says. “From the chemical side of things, once you control a nasty chemical you have some hope that the system will respond, and usually it responds quite quickly. But on the biological side of things, very rarely does an invasive species go extinct. The system has to change very dramatically for that to happen.”Invasive species are not the only cause of the Great Lakes’ biodiversity woes, however. According to Lucinda Johnson, associate director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Water and the Environment, the Great Lakes system’s coastal marshes, sand dunes, rocky shorelines, prairies, savannas, and forests—and the creatures that live in them—are being displaced by human development. For example, coastal marshes, which house an estimated 30% of Great Lakes species, are also a frequent victim of development itself as well as the fallout from development: toxic runoff rich in road salt and sediment. As the large cities that ring the Great Lakes continue to grow, sprawl fallout such as subdivisions, roads, golf courses, and vacation homes poses an ever-increasing threat to Great Lakes ecosystems.Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. In recent years Lake Superior has been at its lowest level since 1926, Lake Erie hasn’t been as low since 1966, and Lakes Michigan and Huron are at their lowest levels since 1965.Recent weather trends over the Great Lakes have included decreased precipitation, higher-than-usual air temperatures, and less ice cover in winter. As a result of these influences, water levels in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron dropped faster from 1998 to 2002 than during any other recorded period, according to research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published in the August 2004 Some environmentalists have pointed to these alarmingly low water levels as evidence of global warming. But, says Douglas Wilcox, branch chief for coastal and wet-land ecology at the USGS Great Lakes Science Center, the current low levels are still within the realm of low lake levels on the upper lakes that have been seen through recorded and even prerecorded history. Wilcox says the long-term data suggest we could be entering a longer-term warming cycle with a naturally resulting long-term low lake level cycle. “On the other hand,” he says, “if you throw in anthropogenic warming on top of that natural cycle, maybe the low lake level that will occur seventy-five or a hundred years from now—when the low cycle occurs again—may be much lower than it would have been naturally if it had-n’t been for human impacts.”Low lake levels are necessary, Wilcox explains, for natural restoration of lake wetland ecosystems. During low water levels, sediments are exposed allowing other lake plants to germinate and grow. The resulting wetlands provide habitat for species such as frogs and wading birds. But for people who depend on the lakes for their livelihood, lower water means lower profits. In 2000, for example, lake carriers, which move such cargo as ore, coal, and grain within the lake system, had to reduce their loads by 5–8%, according to a 2004 NOAA brochure titled “Water Levels of the Great Lakes.” Sustained low water periods invariably bring with them political pressure to deepen shipping channels and harbors, says Emily Green, the Sierra Club’s Great Lakes program director. But dredging in these lakes can mean releasing pollutants that have settled into lake bed sediments.Hornbuckle says the Great Lakes’ infamous violent storms can resuspend PCBs and DDT compounds that have settled into sediments. And with climate change, Johnson says, have come more of the violent storms, and storms that are more violent than before. “There has been a doubling over the last century in the number and intensity of storm events, and those [trends] are expected to hold into the next century,” she says. “The prediction is that there will be an additional doubling of intense storm events.” The effects of these powerful storms, she says, will be magnified by increasing human development—with its destruction of wetlands and addition of impervious surfaces, such as roads and sidewalks—in the lakes’ watershed. This, she says, is a recipe for increased lakeshore erosion, water turbidity, and resuspension of sediments.R. Michael McKay, a biology professor at Bowling Green State University, says plummeting water levels would also worsen another ongoing problem: dead zones. Lake Erie, for example, has periodically suffered bouts of anoxia. Naturally occurring ridges, or “sills,” divide the lake into three basins. Many summers nearly all of the dissolved oxygen in the central basin is consumed, dooming those creatures that cannot escape to the west or east. “Because of thermal stratification in summer there is no way of getting new oxygen down into the bottom water,” McKay says.A number of programs are under way to address problems in the Great Lakes . Perhaps some stressors on the Great Lakes can be mitigated, but others are here for the long haul, Cook says. “Once you pollute the Great Lakes it takes a long, long time for these very persistent chemicals to clear from the system so that levels can return to presumably noneffect levels,” he says.


Energy for Sustainable Development.As the world’s largest nation, China is drawing a lot of attention for its increased motorization rates. Although China’s rate of automobile ownership is low by the standards of the developed world, it is increasing at a very fast rate. Between the late 1970s and 2001, China’s overall fleet of motor vehicles other than two-wheelers increased 10-fold, according to an article in the 3 December 2003 issue of Along the way, the Chinese government decided it wanted to develop its own auto industry. In 2001 China identified auto manufacturing as one of seven “pillar industries” of the Chinese economy and announced a five-year plan to implement a primarily domestic industry that could offer a Chinese family car at a price that would encourage widespread ownership. Between 2000 and 2004, production of passenger cars in China jumped from 605,000 to 2.33 million. On 5 February 2005, the China Federation of Machinery Industry, an industry association, forecast 20% growth for 2005 to a level that would move China past Germany into third place globally for motor vehicle production. Most industry analysts believe that the industry will continue to expand in the 15% range annually for years to come. The government has also encouraged private investments in highways to fuel a highway-building program that was already well under way. In October 2004, China’s Ministry of Communication announced that the nation’s freeways had reached 30,000 kilometers, placing it behind only the United States. Up till now, a large portion of these roads had been toll roads.China may be getting the lion’s share of the attention, but people who follow international transportation issues say the trend in motorization is global. According to Daniel Sperling, a professor of engineering and environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis, and director of its Institute of Transportation Studies, motorization is soaring everywhere, with the fastest growth occurring in Asia and Latin America. He says that the number of motor vehicles other than two-wheelers in the world is expected to double in the next 15 years to 1.3 billion.“The reason motorization is spreading so rapidly is that people value mobility,” Sperling says. “But it’s also happening because a lot of regions are growing economically. We use the rule of thumb that motorization takes off when per capita incomes reach about $5,000. And many parts of the world—many cities in China, for instance—have reached that level.”Energy for Sustainable Development article, believes there’s another explanation. “Everybody, it seems to me, wants to follow the American model,” he says. “We’re held up as the country to emulate. It’s an image that people have. If you’re a modern country, you need to have lots of privately owned motor vehicles.”Michael P. Walsh, a transportation and environmental consultant to governments in China and other developing countries, and author of the Nobody doubts that there are benefits to increased mobility. But as Walsh points out, increasing numbers of automobiles and other motor vehicles in developing countries will result in deteriorating air quality, greater congestion, and poorer quality of life. It also means greater energy consumption—and for an enormously populated nation like China, which is moving rapidly and steadily toward a position of international power, the implications of growing reliance on foreign oil sources can’t be ignored.Halfway during a recent talk on the current state of urban transportation in developing countries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology urban planning professor Ralph Gakenheimer turned to a series of slides to illustrate a point. “I’m about to tell you how to ride a bicycle in Shanghai when you’re making a left turn,” he told his audience. “This is only for the courageous listener.”The slides showed extremely heavy traffic on a two-way Shanghai street divided into four lanes. Motorized vehicles occupied the inner lanes, bumper to bumper, while a dense throng of bicyclists filled the outer lanes. The Chinese system of segregating vehicles into lanes shared by similar machines is sensible to a point, Gakenheimer told the audience, but what happens if you’re a bicyclist in the outer lane and you want to take a left at the next intersection?His series of slides provided the answer. When the traffic halts at a red light, left-turning bicyclists insinuate themselves in front of the automobiles traveling in the same direction so that when the light turns green they can dart diagonally across the intersection to their assigned lane, cutting off the automobiles coming from the opposite direction—until the automobiles force their way into the intersection to halt the bicyclists.Similar mêlées occur throughout China, Gakenheimer says, because the numbers of cars and other motor vehicles on the nation’s roadways have been skyrocketing in recent years with no slowdown in sight. And as cars have come into repeated conflict with bicycles, increasing numbers of cities in China are taking a step that many environmentalists find troubling. “All over China, municipal governments have begun to suppress or prohibit the use of bicycles in certain places,” Gakenheimer says. “As you might imagine, this is a big controversy. Many [environmentalists] are outraged that anyone would trammel on something so affordable and environmentally sustainable as bicycles.”The impact of increased motorization on Chinese urban air quality is still difficult to determine, Walsh says. Chinese cities have tended to have poor air quality for years, so the appearance of more motor vehicles isn’t exactly creating a new pollution problem. Instead, he says, Chinese cities are undergoing a shift from industrial pollution to motor vehicle pollution. At the same time that motor vehicles have begun to clog city thoroughfares, industry has been moving out to urban peripheries. This shift means that sulfur dioxide levels have been going down in Chinese city air, but they are being replaced by vehicle emissions including carbon monoxide and ozone-forming nitrogen oxides.While China has greatly tightened requirements for new vehicles, the older cars on the nation’s roadways create serious pollution problems. According to the Energy Foundation, a partnership of Chinese and U.S. foundations interested in sustainable energy, recent testing shows that emission levels of Chinese autos are similar to those of cars used in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s; these cars emit 10–20 times more pollution than cars currently used in Western countries. According to the foundation, 40% of autos and 70% of taxis in Beijing fail to meet the most basic Western emission standards.Increased motorization in the developing world is having social and cultural impacts on poorer societies as well. At the same time that people from rural areas continue to flood into already densely populated cities to find jobs, people whose incomes have risen to the point where they can buy cars are fleeing to the cities’ outskirts in a manner not unlike the suburbanization of American cities following World War II. The upper middle class in China already sees the car as a way to provide them more mobility, says Lee Schipper, director of research at the World Resources Institute’s Center for Transport and the Environment (EMBARQ) in Washington, D.C. “But the resulting congestion when [just] twenty percent of the daily journeys are in cars—the case in Mexico City or São Paulo today—means that nobody has more mobility.”EHP 112:A628–A631 (2004).]“It’s not that cars and two-wheelers are bad,” Schipper adds. “The problem is that they’re being put on the crowded streets so fast, everywhere, and authorities aren’t doing anything about it. There are too many of them, too soon. You can’t keep up.” In addition to rising air pollution, the glut of traffic means accident rates are high, with pedestrians and cyclists the most common victims. [For more information on the growing problem of traffic-related fatalities, see “Vehicular Manslaughter: The Global Epidemic of Traffic Deaths,” Gakenheimer notes a further pernicious effect on the individual. Public transit is the form of transportation most impacted by congestion; autos can take circuitous routes or select more accessible destinations, whereas city buses are confined to predetermined routes. And the greater the congestion, the more tempting it is to get a car. So there is what he calls a “tragedy of the commons” effect.Access magazine. They pointed out that increased motorization also includes an explosion in two-wheel motorized vehicles in many countries, pulling riders and revenue away from public-transit systems . As a result, wrote Claussen and Sperling, “In nearly all cities worldwide, public transit is losing market share.”The effects of motorization on public transit was one of the topics covered in an article by Sperling and Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, published in the spring 2004 issue of The outcome in poor, densely populated cities with limited roadways for motor vehicles has been “far worse traffic congestion and pollution than exist in the United States,” wrote Sperling and Claussen, despite the fact that these cities have a fraction of the car ownership of the United States. They pointed out that the challenge of building roadways is more than just a question of economics and financing. “Only a small minority of people in the developing world own cars and benefit from massive road-building budgets,” they wrote. “In contrast, the vast majority suffer from increasing traffic congestion, noise, and pollution.” Perhaps worse, says Gakenheimer, is that this majority suffers from the separation of destinations available only to auto users—a general fragmentation of society and destination opportunities.In China, a bastion of orthodox socialism not that long ago, the transition is especially jarring. In the old, purely socialist days, says Gakenheimer, the emphasis was on clustering workers, jobs, and services closely together. People lived close to their work, with commercial and business services nearby. But with the liberalization of the land market since the 1980s, that all changed.For example, Gakenheimer says, people realized that making bicycles in the commercial center of the city had become a poor use of land, so they moved those facilities to urban peripheries where land was cheaper and they’d have more room. Then they sold the former space to buyers who used it for commercial and office use more appropriate to a modern central business district. “What this does is enormously increase the journey to work of the bicycle makers and also tends to create a central business district where there really wasn’t one before,” he says. “And the new central business district creates enormous radial commuting trip requirements.”Another factor accelerating the pace of urban decentralization in China, Gakenheimer says, is the fact that private land ownership doesn’t exist there. Land in China is owned either by the state or by collectives, and the government has constitutionally backed power to “requisition” any land whenever it sees fit. As a result, Gakenheimer says, the suburbia that characterizes the United States is sprouting quickly in China. And as the new China begins to resemble the United States and Europe in many ways, its leaders perceive the private motor vehicle as an integral commodity. Moreover, he says, Chinese cities collect the revenue from urbanization only at the beginning of long leases. As a result, they must continue to induce urbanization to have a continual revenue stream.But to characterize the Chinese government as being blind to the dangers of rapid motorization is inaccurate. In 2000, China banned leaded gasoline and adopted the Euro I emission standards that were enacted in Europe in the early 1990s for all new cars and trucks. Last year, the Chinese adopted the Euro II standards enacted in Europe in the mid-1990s. Some cities are going further. Walsh says that Beijing, for example, will soon require the Euro III standards, which were adopted in 2001 in Europe.Meanwhile, China has created its first fuel economy standards for new cars, which go into effect in July 2005. In the United States, cars are required to achieve at least 27.2 miles per gallon (mpg) while SUVs and light trucks are counted under a different system (and different agency) and meet a far more lenient standard. In China, the new standards place an absolute floor on fuel economy for cars according to their weight class (there are 15 classes in China). The average weight of cars sold in China in 2003 was more than 3,000 pounds, large by developing country standards. The Chinese standards cannot prevent overall mileage from deteriorating if weight increases, Schipper says, but they may discourage manufacturers from making heavier cars that cannot meet standards for their weight classes.Schipper says that while the speed with which China has implemented fuel standards is laudable, even more noteworthy is the fact that China is aspiring to Western standards even though its economy, on a per capita basis, is still far from Western levels. “But the question is whether these measures will be swamped by the overall increase in motorization,” he says. “And I don’t have the answer to that.”Sperling says the escalation of motor vehicles in developing countries will only continue unless the governments in those countries intervene to halt—or at least slow down—the march to a U.S.-style transportation system featuring many personal vehicles. “The market forces are such that unless government intervenes, countries will follow that path because the elites buy the cars, the elites run the government and industry, so there’s a lot of pressure to build more roads,” he says. “It creates a spiral of more and more motorization, and it takes tremendous political leadership not to follow that path.”Mobility 2030: Meeting the Challenges to Sustainability, which detailed recommendations for achieving “sustainable mobility” on a global scale. The report defines sustainable mobility as the ability to meet the needs of society to move freely, gain access, communicate, trade, and establish relationships without sacrificing other essential human or ecological values today or in the future.In 2004, a group of international automotive and energy companies known as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development issued a report called Martin Wachs, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, served as a reviewer on the project and came away from it struck by the sense of responsibility that the companies seem to hold toward auto growth in developing countries: “They acknowledged that worldwide adoption of the automobile is an environmental threat, and they are considering collectively what industries might do to create a sustainable transition to a more ‘automobilized’ world,” he says.Wachs doesn’t believe that the report succeeds in making a convincing case for global automotive sustainability. What’s significant, though, is that it took place at all, he says. “What it represents,” he says, “is an awakening of industries, which just a few years ago might have said, ‘This isn’t our responsibility; our responsibility is to our shareholders.’ But now they’re saying that they do have responsibilities and they should be thinking in terms of fuel cells and other more energy-efficient forms of powering automobiles. So I think that’s reason to have a little bit of optimism.”Mobility 2030 outlines seven goals that the council believes must be met in order to achieve automotive sustainability: (1) reduce conventional vehicle emissions “so that they do not constitute a significant public health concern anywhere in the world”; (2) limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels by moving toward hydrogen and bio-based fuels; (3) significantly reduce the number of traffic-related deaths and injuries worldwide; (4) reduce traffic noise; (5) reduce traffic congestion; (6) narrow “mobility divides” between rich and poor people within countries, as well as between rich and poor countries, by improving access to transportation for poor people in rural areas; and (7) improve mobility opportunities for the general population so that people don’t need to rely on privately owned vehicles.Sperling agrees that automakers seeking to take advantage of expanding markets in the developing world have a responsibility to ease the impacts of their products on poor societies. He also believes that private investment can be a strong tool in developing innovative transportation strategies in developing countries. Private investment, he says, and not government, accounts for most of the resources that flow from industrial to developing countries. He suggested that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a development agency created by the U.S. government in 1971, might create a public–private investment fund specifically targeting transportation needs in developing countries.Mobility 2030 report. “They were more than willing to play ball on the clean air side,” he says. “But no individual company sees an upper limit on the number of cars that can circulate. The reality, though, is that there isn’t going to be a car in every garage because there isn’t going to be room for the garage—or the car.”Schipper recently attended the 2004 Challenge Bibendum in Shanghai. This yearly meeting is attended by all the major car manufacturers and sponsored by Michelin. Schipper says he noticed the same kind of attention to the problem of global motorization that the World Business Council of Sustainable Development recognized in its Not all of the news about the invasion of cars and other motorized vehicles into the developing world is dire. In fact, there are several examples of strong governmental leadership taking action to soften the blow of motorization.The island nation of Singapore has made auto ownership prohibitively expensive through the imposition of various fees, including one that must be paid just to enter an auction for a limited number of auto stickers. People who win the stickers at auction must then pay for the vehicle itself. Singapore also has an extensive public transportation system that provides access to almost everywhere on the island.Bogotá, Colombia, has built an extremely successful bus rapid transit (BRT) system, Transmilenio, which employs large, modern buses on a dedicated thoroughfare that cuts directly through the middle of the city. According to Schipper, 5–10% of Transmilenio’s passengers are former auto users—a huge number in any new public transit system, he says.The success of Bogotá’s BRT system and an earlier one, the pioneering BRT system in Curitiba, Brazil, in the 1970s, has drawn significant attention around the world, including the developed world. Cities that have adopted such systems include Kunming, Delhi, Los Angeles, Dublin, Paris, and most large cities in Latin America. Shanghai is currently building a BRT system and an extensive subway system with help in part from EMBARQ. And Shanghai has long imposed disincentives and restrictions on auto use, such as stiff registration fees.Still another tactic being contemplated to reduce auto congestion in developing countries actually originated in the developed world, in the city of London, England, which pioneered the concept of “congestion pricing.” In 2003, London initiated a congestion-pricing program in which drivers had to pay a fee of £5 (about US$8) to cross a clearly marked boundary in the center city. The effect has been reduced congestion and increased public transit ridership. The fee will rise soon, says Schipper, and the area where it is payable will expand.Luis Gutierrez, who oversees EMBARQ’s Latin American programs, says he has been talking about a congestion pricing program with officials in São Paolo, one of three Latin American cities in which EMBARQ is working to create public–private partnerships for sustainable transportation. “These kinds of policies are very simple for people to understand,” he says. “You have limited public space and a lot of demand.”He says the idea enjoys growing public support, and city officials like it, too, because it could provide an additional source of revenue. There’s just one problem, he says: the people who own the cars—and who want to drive anywhere for as little cost as possible—are middle class, and the middle is politically powerful.Gutierrez also says the idea of BRT systems modeled after Bogotá has become extremely popular. In 10 years, he says, Latin America will have 99 cities with populations of at least 750,000 and a total of 8,000 kilometers of heavily traveled corridors suitable for BRT systems.Gutierrez says the problem of rapidly increasing motorization is the same everywhere, and that governments in Latin America are responding to privately owned cars in much the same way that Asian governments are. They see them as contributors to economic development—or at least as a sign of it.But Gutierrez senses that pressure is building from a public that is growing tired of increased congestion, rising air pollution, and too many traffic accidents. Furthermore, he believes another change may be occurring. “I think that the middle class, who think having a car is equivalent to freedom, are having to modify their thoughts,” he says. “They’re finding the reality is that having a private car doesn’t mean they have the freedom to move from one place to another very fast.”But increasing traffic congestion itself is a testament to the strength of demand for ownership of one’s own car, just like in the United States. Sperling says that developing countries and cities often lack the money, expertise, and political will to tackle the problem. “There are a lot of tools available—BRT, car sharing, even congestion pricing,” he says. “But they’re all difficult to implement. You have pricing, land use management, different ways of organizing public transport. But none of them are easy to do.”Access article, they presented the case for stronger U.S. action to help developing countries achieve sustainable transportation strategies through various kinds of loans, foundation support for sending U.S. experts to assist governments in developing countries, educational programs, and the involvement of the automotive and energy industries, who have significant stakes in the long-term outcome of global motorization. They argued that the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol has undermined American credibility that the nation is serious about the issue of greenhouse gases. And while the United States can do a great deal to foster sound sustainable transportation programs in other countries, they suggested that it could exert far more global influence by pushing for laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in U.S. cars, because, they wrote, the United States “to a large degree drives the pace and direction of technology development worldwide.”In Sperling and Claussen’s They concluded their article by sounding an alarm: “(T)here can be no doubt that the developing world is racing to repeat the developed world’s transportation history. There can be no doubt that the undesirable effects associated with that history will mitigate the many associated benefits.”As motor vehicles proliferate in the developing world, the challenge of achieving an acceptable trade-off between economic benefits and environmental impacts is formidable. “There’s reason to be hopeful,” says Wachs. “But as the automobile becomes much more standard in places like India and China, the threat to a sustainable environment is substantial.”


Just weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to newspapers and television stations in New York and to two U.S. senators on Capitol Hill. Although only a few letters were sent, 22 people were infected and 5 died. More importantly, the bioterror attacks fueled fears that future attacks might be more extensive. Now researchers at the University of Central Florida are helping to prepare for the possibility of anthrax attacks by developing a new technique that can quickly produce hundreds of millions of doses of a potentially safer anthrax vaccine.Bacillus anthracis. The microbe’s toxin is made up of three key parts: edema factor (EF), lethal factor (LF), and protective antigen (PA). EF causes fluid to build up in the area of infection, while LF kills cells or prevents them from working. However, both of these factors require PA to create a passageway into the cells—the PA bonds to protein receptors, creating a new complex to which the other two factors attach.Since the 1960s American microbiologists have produced a vaccine for anthrax from the very microbe itself, According to Stephen Leppla, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), anthrax bacteria that don’t have PA cannot cause an infection. “In essence,” he says, “they are inactivated and become much less virulent.” The current anthrax vaccine works on this very antibodies are created. PA introduced in the event of a future anthrax exposure would be inactivated by these antibodies, stopping the infection in its tracks.But obtaining large quantities of PA has been a problem. Only one company—BioPort of Lansing, Michigan—is licensed by the FDA to produce the vaccine in the United States, and it can produce only 8 million doses each year through a fermentation process, according to BioPort spokeswoman Kimberly Brenne Root. That’s enough to fill the company’s contracts with the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Health and Human Services, which stockpile the vaccine and administer it to military personnel, but not enough to vaccinate a large civilian population in the event of a widespread attack.In 2004, in an attempt to procure more doses of vaccine, the U.S. government awarded an $877.5-million contract to VaxGen of Brisbane, California, to produce 75 million doses by the end of 2006. Setbacks have resulted in major delays, however; on 10 May 2006, company officials confirmed that the first shipments of the vaccine won’t be delivered before late 2007 at the very soonest.As well, there have been concerns that the vaccine produced by BioPort was not safe. Several Gulf War service members reported health problems after being vaccinated. Anecdotal reports suggest the vaccine may contribute to heart problems, cardiovascular illness, seizures, Gulf War syndrome, even death. Documented side effects include pain and swelling at the injection site, inflammation, flu-like symptoms, malaise, rash, joint pain, and headache. The BioPort vaccine can be contaminated with small amounts of LF and EF, which may contribute to the adverse effects associated with it.To overcome these problems, Henry Daniell, a professor of molecular biology and microbiology at the University of Central Florida, has been on the hunt for a way to produce large quantities of “clean” PA, free of EF and LF. Now he thinks he has finally found it.B. anthracis. Then they inserted the gene into tobacco plants. “There are a lot of advantages to tobacco plants,” says Daniell. “They produce a lot of biomass. . . . Also, we didn’t want to produce a vaccine in a food crop in case there was cross-contamination or some package got mixed up on some truck somewhere.”  Furthermore, Daniell says, “[Tobaccco plants] are very easy to genetically manipulate.”Daniell and his team began by isolating the gene for PA from Daniell’s team chose to insert the gene into the chloroplast rather than the cell nucleus since they could get far more copies of the PA protein that way. After harvesting the tobacco plants, Daniell’s team found that each plant produced about 150 milligrams of anthrax PA. That adds up to 360 million doses’ worth of PA from one acre of tobacco plants. And because only PA is produced, the resulting vaccine will be cleaner than one produced through fermentation.Infection and Immunity.When the PA was introduced into mice, the rodents responded by producing very high levels of anti-PA antibodies. The immunized mice were sent to the NIAID, where they underwent anthrax toxin challenge. There, Leppla injected the mice with 150 micrograms of anthrax toxin, 1.5 times the amount needed to kill a mouse. Yet, the mice survived, proving that the new technique could produce an effective vaccine. These findings were published in the December 2005 issue of Rakesh Bhatnagar, chairman of the Centre for Biotechnology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, has researched plant-based anthrax vaccines, and has signed a commercial agreement to produce larger quantities of anthrax PA than BioPort while still using a fermentation system. He believes Daniell’s research is significant because it shows that PA produced in plants can protect animals from anthrax. Yet he also believes plant-based vaccines still belong to the future.“At this point in the road [plant-based vaccine researchers] have only expressed the protein in a few plants and only tested on small animals,” says Bhatnagar. “Plant vaccines are a long way off, because industry wants higher levels of productivity to be successful. Plus, everything requires approval from government regulators, so it all takes time. But, if I had to estimate, it might be ten years down the road.”Daniell disagrees with this assessment, however. He says that vaccines against agents of bioterrorism are now on fast-track approval, and approval should come much sooner than 10 years.A DOD spokesperson, who asked to remain anonymous, says that a plant-based anthrax vaccine would be of interest but that such a vaccine would have to be approved by the FDA. Also, says the spokesperson, “At present, the DOD has sufficient FDA-licensed anthrax vaccine to fulfill its policy. If the supply of anthrax vaccine was suddenly expanded, it might be that civilian purchasers of the vaccine would be less constrained than at present.”Meanwhile, Daniell and his team aren’t content with producing 360 million doses of anthrax vaccine. Rather, they consider this a preliminary step towards an even greater goal: vaccines that are actually grown in and consumed along with a piece of fruit.The idea of putting vaccines in plants or fruits was pioneered in 1992 by Charles Arntzen, currently codirector of the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccinology at Arizona State University, after he observed a mother feeding her child a banana during a research trip to Thailand. Arntzen’s idea was simple: what if we could cut through the obstacles to vaccination by simply growing vaccines in fruit?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they conclude that a plant-based oral vaccine against hepatitis B, as delivered via potato, “should be considered as a viable component of a global immunization program.”Many vaccines are hard to produce because of expensive fermenters, hard to ship because they often need to be kept refrigerated, and hard to distribute widely because it can take a trained health professional to administer the vaccine. All these factors make it particularly difficult to vaccinate populations in developing countries. Arntzen and his colleagues have continued exploring this line of thinking, and in the 1 March 2005 issue of However, before we can eat bananas or potatoes for our booster shots, researchers need to figure out a few key problems.First, there needs to be a way to standardize the vaccine’s dose. “Other vaccines are very exact on the dosages,” says Bhatnagar, “but with plant-based vaccines, what are you going to say? In the plant, levels might vary widely.”The other major problem is that it takes months for a crop to grow, even a quick-growing one like tobacco, whereas the bacteria used in a fermentation system take only days or even hours. On the other hand, a crop system could be cheaper and produce more vaccine, compared to a fermentation system.Despite the remaining hurdles, Daniell believes that his developments in tobacco plants will lead to an anthrax vaccine someday in the future. His team is also working on growing vaccine antigens against other diseases such as cholera, amebiasis, plague, and hepatitis C in tobacco plants.“If a vaccine was produced in a plant cell, dried cells could be put in a capsule and delivered because the plant cell wall protects the protein already,” says Daniell. “Different delivery methods still need approval, but the cost of vaccines could drop from [up to] a hundred dollars to a few cents since basically all you are doing is powdering the plant and putting it in a capsule. For that reason, it is worth every regulatory hurdle, because it will pay off big time.”


Who would believe that a butterfly, by flapping its wings in Peru, could set off a chain of events leading to a monsoon thousands of miles away? This familiar notion from chaos theory may seem absurd even as it raises a worthy point: Everything around us is intimately connected. And by studying how broad forces in nature interact, we can construct predictions that offer great benefits to society.in situ or ground-based sensors into a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). By uniting these systems, scientists hope to take the pulse of the planet, and in so doing, generate a range of environmental, economic, and health benefits.Now a global effort is under way to revolutionize our understanding of the Earth as an interconnected whole. The effort aims to integrate Earth observing capabilities based on satellites and For instance, should the effort yield even a 1°F improvement in weather forecasting, power utilities can plan their daily output needs more accurately, resulting in an annual $1 billion electricity savings for consumers in the United States alone, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Likewise, improved monitoring of air pollution, or better satellite mapping of habitats that harbor malaria, cholera, or West Nile virus, could save many lives by establishing warning systems for at-risk populations that might reduce exposure.A total of 54 countries, the European Union, and 33 international organizations have joined the GEOSS thus far, providing a welcome boost to the environmental reputation of its sponsor: the United States. The project is also the first project of its kind to get such high-level support, says Steve Goodman, chief of the Earth and Planetary Science Branch at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Marshall Space Flight Center.“I’ve never seen a program move at a pace like this with such a sustained effort,” says Gary Foley, who is director of the EPA National Exposure Research Laboratory. “It seems to be the right thing at the right time with the right leadership. It was what everyone seemed to be looking for.”The pioneering force behind the 15-agency U.S. effort is Conrad C. Lautenbacher, a retired Navy vice admiral who currently heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Lautenbacher’s efforts to promote Earth observations date back to his days with the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education, a Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group that he directed until arriving at NOAA in 2001.Lautenbacher’s initial goal with the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education was to improve studies of climate change, which he says are severely limited by data gaps and inconsistencies in ocean monitoring. Lautenbacher attributed the data shortages to what he calls a “principal investigator mentality” in ocean research. “You have research by scientists who compete for grants, publish their results, and move on,” he says. “There’s no sustainable component to it, nothing to tell you what’s going on over the long term. That’s what’s essential for climate research.”The best way to bolster ocean monitoring, Lautenbacher reasoned, was with a sustained and globally integrated research effort based on satellites and sensing devices in the ocean that would generate continuous data streams. Such an approach, he says, would clarify the role of the oceans in climate and provide immediate benefits in coastal management.At NOAA, Lautenbacher continued to push for an ocean observing system, but his views on the technology had begun to expand. While attending the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in September 2002, he was exposed to other uses for Earth observations in areas such as agriculture, forestry, and public health. Many scientists at Johannesburg were convinced that Earth observations are necessary to promote sustainable development across the spectrum of human activities.When he returned to the United States, Lautenbacher and his cochairs on the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Environmental Natural Resources convened an interagency task force and charged it with organizing a global summit on Earth observations. When the Earth Observation Summit was held in Washington on 31 July 2003, it was on a scale that few of its organizers might have anticipated—five U.S. cabinet members and ministers from 33 countries and the European Union were in attendance. U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell launched the meeting, saying in his opening presentation, “We need to be able to see, hear, taste, smell, and measure the blue orb we have been given and that we call Earth.”Participants at the summit adopted a declaration calling for a comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained Earth observation “system of systems.” Among the goals laid out in the declaration are improved coordination of Earth observing strategies and systems, the free-flowing exchange of observational data, and coordinated efforts to promote the access of developing countries to the technology. The ad hoc Group on Earth Observations (GEO) was formed and charged with creating a 10-year implementation plan to realize these goals. The cochairs of the ad hoc group now include Lautenbacher; Akio Yuki, the Japanese deputy minister of education, culture, sports, science, and technology; Achilleas Mitsos, director-general of research with the European Commission; and Robert Adam, South Africa’s director-general of science and technology.A framework for GEOSS’s 10-year implementation plan was adopted at the second Earth Observation Summit, held in Tokyo on 25 April 2004. The completed 10-year plan will be adopted by ministers at a third summit, to be held in Brussels on 16 February 2005.So, what exactly is an “Earth observing system”? In general, the term describes any collection of tools used to take measurements of air, water, and land. These tools can be as simple as a pH sensor or as complex as a constellation of satellites in space. Both simple and complex tools are necessary; orbiting satellites cover broad sections of the planet with limited resolution whereas ground-based tools cover more limited regions with high resolution. When combined, these technologies provide the data needed to understand how physical and biological forces control the biosphere.A total of 73 Ear th observing satellites are in orbit now, of which 25 are owned by the United States. Of these, most are deployed by NASA, with the remainder operated by NOAA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and a few private firms. A growing number of countries—among them the European Union countries, India, Russia, China, Brazil, Japan, and Canada—also have Earth observing satellites.de facto signature. Computer algorithms convert these signatures into measures of forest cover, soil moisture, cloud cover, ocean chlorophyll content, and many other useful parameters.Satellites gather data by remote sensing, a process that generates measurements of Earth surface features and the atmosphere according to how they reflect visible or infrared radiation. Every object—down to a single molecule—reflects radiation according to a specific wavelength, which becomes the object’s own Remote sensing is an especially powerful capability when it is incorporated into a geographic information system. These systems integrate satellite and other geophysical data with socioeconomic data such as population demographics. What results are maps that allow researchers to “see” their parameter of interest in relation to their geographic position.in situ tools, such as weather balloons, aircraft, pollution sampling devices, and buoys that take physical measurements of the atmosphere, ocean, and land.Although some satellite sensors can view the Earth’s surface through cloud cover, experts say that spatial and temporal resolution are still inadequate, and there is no way to image what lies underwater. Thus, it’s still necessary to use a range of additional Fixed buoys, which are moored to the sea floor, float on the ocean surface and transmit ocean and weather data. Of the roughly 100 fixed buoys now in existence, most are found in equatorial waters. So-called Argos buoys function in a different way. These buoys sink to a depth of 2,000 meters and then drift for 10 days. Upon rising to the surface, they transmit water temperature and salinity data into space, where it is received by satellites that beam it back to scientists and weather agencies on Earth.A total of 1,500 Argos buoys are now at work throughout the world; a global consortium responsible for the effort plans to deploy 1,500 more over the next several years.The problem with current Earth observing systems, experts say, is that they operate in isolation without “speaking” to each other. GEOSS members often describe the systems as “research stovepipes,” with limited flexibility and focused application to particular needs. “For instance, some weather satellite instruments look only at cloud temperatures, but these same instruments, if tuned differently, could provide better detection of wildfires,” explains Helen Wood, senior advisor for systems and services in NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, and director of the GEO Secretariat, the forum through which GEOSS members will organize their work. One of the GEOSS’s main goals, she says, is simply to get researchers talking to each other and to end users about what they do. Just by discussing mutual needs, researchers might be prompted to design enhanced instruments that can be used for multiple purposes, she says.Another important GEOSS goal, Wood adds, is to establish a coordinated system of data sharing that is freely accessible to users throughout the globe. Achieving this aim won’t be easy—many countries differ with respect to data standards, formats, and their own commercial views on the technology. For instance, the United States provides much of its satellite data for free, but the European Space Agency often charges for its data to recoup investment costs. Lautenbacher emphasizes that the need for consensus on business models for data sharing is critical and will likely take years to sort out.Just the fact that GEOSS members agreed in principle to full and open data sharing with minimal time delays (as described in the 2003 declaration) was a big step forward, says Rick Ohlemacher, manager of environmental systems at Northrop Grumman Space Technology. “That in and of itself was a huge political milestone,” he says. “For several decades, no one was able to get beyond that, so now the door is open.” Northrop Grumman is one of the founding members of the Alliance for Earth Observations, an industry group established to support the GEOSS vision. The company is also the prime contractor for the future National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, which Ohlemacher says will be a key component to the satellite backbone of the GEOSS.What the GEOSS provides, Ohlemacher says, is an enabling landscape where members can discuss how to expand global use of Earth observing technology. Ideally, the GEOSS would serve Earth observations in much the same way that the World Meteorological Organization serves weather forecasting, many experts suggest. The latter organization is an optimal model for the GEOSS for several reasons, Lautenbacher explains. It has a relatively long history (dating back to 1950), an effective governance structure, a permanent secretariat, and a mechanism for building and maintaining agreements. It also provides nations a way to manage technical issues while respecting each other’s sovereignty. “There’s no hint of language that says ‘we’re going to come into your country and tell you what to do,’” Lautenbacher says. “But you can go anywhere in the world and get a weather forecast.”To achieve similar value, the GEOSS must not only stimulate dialogue and open access, but also must find a way to bring poorer nations into the technology loop and get the developing world actively engaged in the system. Most developing countries lack the resources needed to use Earth observations effectively. Moreover, Ohlemacher says, it can be hard for scientists in these countries to communicate the benefits of Earth observations to more traditional populations, who might not understand how information derived from space could be useful or even desirable.The lack of developing country resources also extends to coverage; indeed, much of the developing world is a blind spot for Earth observations, says Goodman. “We have geostationary weather satellites ringing the planet,” says Goodman, “but what we need is greater temporal sampling from [higher-resolution] lower-orbiting satellites that pass over a point on Earth much less frequently —two to four times per day—to achieve the needed global coverage.” Goodman says the gaps in surface measurements are significant in the developing world—where there is less Earth-based monitoring—compared to European nations and the United States.”The gaps are problematic because without surface observations, scientists can’t adequately validate measurements made from space. Furthermore, some parameters are not well observed from space. One example is rainfall volume, which satellites are not yet able to measure directly. In Europe and North America, thousands of simple “tipping buckets” measure minutely to hourly rainfall, which is combined with satellite remote sensing to model weather patterns and local hydrology. But tipping buckets are rare in developing countries, as are more sophisticated instruments like weather radar, which detects clouds and precipitation. “There are possibly as few as three weather radar in the entire African continent,” Goodman says. “Here, every state has one, and TV stations tend to also have their own.”Global blind spots have numerous consequences. Obviously, without sufficient coverage, developing nations don’t have access to global observation data that might be useful to them .But the consequences also extend to developed countries and the Earth as a whole. Goodman points out that long-term weather forecasts in North America are less accurate than they could be thanks to a lack of data from the oceans as well as from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, studies of long-term trends such as climate change depend on knowledge of events taking place throughout the biosphere. If scientists can’t quantify the effects of, say, carbon fluxes in the Amazon basin, they will be unable to generate the more comprehensive climate models they desire.Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera. “If we can sort out the role of these variables, then we might be able to predict epidemics months before they occur,” he says. “That’s the ultimate goal, but it’s a long way off.”And yet, scientists interviewed for this article unanimously agree that Earth observations are useful now, and are becoming more so. Michael Emch, a spatial epidemiologist at Columbia University, has spent years using remote sensing to study tropical disease epidemiology. Much of his work is devoted to studies of cholera in the coastal nations of Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Mozambique. Using remote sensing data from NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites—which are both components of the agency’s Earth Observing System program—Emch has correlated cholera incidence with sea surface height, sea surface temperature, and ocean chlorophyll content. These parameters are all potentially linked to the generation of plankton blooms that harbor V. cholerae. Greater image resolution is also needed to quantify and monitor environmental changes, he says.Emch concedes there is an ever-growing need for new instrumentation. For instance, satellites are unable to detect the salinity levels that are key to the survival of EHP 111:A458 (2003)].The multichannel remote sensing device carried by the Terra and Aqua satellites, which is known as the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, measures ocean chlorophyll levels in spatial increments of 1,000 meters and land boundary changes at increments of 250 meters  gives us the ability to be in the environment continuously,” Delaney says. “To really understand the ocean we have to be in the environment all the time and be flexible enough to adapt, observe, quantify, and sample.” Lautenbacher describes NEPTUNE as being on the cutting edge of research. “It’s where we will develop new sensors and ways to measure things we can now only dream of,” he says.In the years to come, GEOSS stakeholders will be focused on a number of priorities. According to Lautenbacher, these include the creation of a governance structure for the organization, the resolution of technical issues related to data sharing, and an inventory of Earth observing capacity needs.Meanwhile, many of the countries working toward the GEOSS are also pursuing systems integration efforts at home. The United States, for instance, has convened an Interagency Working Group on Earth Observations, which is cochaired by representatives from NASA, NOAA, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.Strategic Plan for the U.S. Integrated Earth Observation System. The report lays out a framework for U.S. participation in the GEOSS and describes opportunities in nine “societal benefits areas” where the technology can advance environmental goals.On 8 September 2004, the group released a draft version of its Mary Gant, a program analyst at the NIEHS and a member of the interagency working group, says Earth observations will be broadly useful for environmental health, and for exposure assessment in particular. “One of the most difficult problems with which the health communities must cope is the accuracy of exposure assessment,” she says. “The data and data products from an enhanced, integrated Earth observation system should greatly increase our ability to do exposure assessment.”Other countries are also proceeding with their own domestic and regional programs, albeit inconsistently, Lautenbacher says. In terms of countries that could propel the GEOSS, those represented by the European Union are perhaps best prepared, he suggests. The European Union has a Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative, which has created partnerships among the European Space Agency, the European Environment Agency, and other institutions. The initiative lays out a process for ensuring that Earth observing data needs are met in both the near and long terms.Initiative members are now establishing a uniform architecture for integrating space, terrestrial, seaborne, and airborne monitoring platforms. Thus, the initiative may provide a model for technical integration throughout the GEOSS, Lautenbacher says.Earth observations could do much to improve our views and our understanding of the world around us. Many challenges remain for GEOSS, not just in terms of technical barriers but also cultural and institutional ones. But this growing network of sensors and satellites may represent the best opportunity to discover and quantify the fundamental drivers of the biosphere. Just as satellites and space exploration programs turn our attention outward, similar tools focus our attention inward, toward the unifying forces that hold life in a balance.


Possible adverse health effects due to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from cellular phones and base stations present a major public health issue across Europe. Because scientists cannot exclude that EMFs may cause health problems, the application of the precautionary principle is debated heavily. By considering precautionary measures, political decision makers hope to cope with public fears about EMFs. We present results from two experimental studies that indicate that precautionary measures may trigger concerns, amplify EMF-related risk perceptions, and lower trust in public health protection. Such impacts, questioning common expectations, should be considered in decisions about precautionary measures. The public debate about possible adverse health effects from exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from cellular phones and base stations is one of the risk issues that occupies many political decision makers across Europe . BecauseEssentially, the precautionary principle recommends that action should be taken to prevent serious potential harm, regardless of scientific uncertainty as to the likelihood, magnitude, or cause of that harm. By considering precautionary measures, political decision makers hope to cope with these public fears about EMFs. Various courses of action are taken into consideration, including health-related measures such as exposure minimization strategies or stricter exposure limits, process-related measures such as better risk communication and enhancing public participation in base station siting decisions, and research-related measures . In variAlthough the theoretical status and rationality of the precautionary principle have been discussed in many papers  and confWhether public risk perception should be a stimulus for invoking precautionary measures in risk management is a sensitive question . OpponenProponents argue that public risk perception should be taken into account in decisions about risk management: When the public is concerned about a risk, risk managers should address these concerns by invoking additional protective measures. Furthermore, they underline that societal values and public willingness to accept a risk are key factors in determining a society’s level of protection. Thus, public risk perception must be recognized as a factor in the decision to apply precautionary measures. That is, in addition to scientific data, knowledge gained from the practical experience of professionals and risk perceptions of lay people are seen as a valid basis for making decisions about when to invoke precautionary measures e.g., .Several studies have investigated the impact of risk communication on risk perception e.g., . HoweverIn this article we focus on the issue of how people react to the implementation of the pre-cautionary principle. The key is the impact of precautionary measures on risk perceptions. Two opposing hypotheses can be derived from the current available literature. First, pre-cautionary measures will increase trust in risk management, and, in turn, increased trust in risk management will be associated with lower risk perceptions. Second, the alternative hypothesis points to the possibility that pre-cautionary measures will be considered a cue that the risk might be real. Here, perceived risk should be amplified.As discussed above, the reason for invoking the precautionary principle is scientific uncertainty. Thus, it would be of interest to see whether emphasizing the uncertainty in scientific knowledge about EMF risks will affect risk perception. We conducted two experiments to address these questions. In the first experiment, health-related precautionary measures served as stimuli; in the second experiment, a process-related precautionary measure was used: public participation.a) health-related precautionary measures and b) experts’ uncertainty about the sufficiency of health protection. Two dependent variables were used: perceived risk of electrosmog and the perceived quality of scientific knowledge about health risks from electrosmog.The first experiment focused on the effect of two independent variables: These questions were investigated in an experimental study using 4 × 2 factorial design. The first factor was composed of a basic text and three different precautionary measures see . In the The second factor varied the emphasis of uncertainty. In the “uncertainty” condition, a sentence that pointed to scientific uncertainty about the sufficiency of current protection measures was included in the basic text. In the “no uncertainty” condition, this sentence was missing see .An Austrian ad hoc sample of 246 subjects 18–81 years of age, with a median age of 24 years , answered a questionnaire that included one of the eight texts from the experimental conditions. Sampling occurred in October 2003 among students and employees of the University of Innsbruck, and subjects were randomly assigned to the experimental conditions. Risk perceptions and perceived quality of scientific knowledge were collected with a 7-point rating scale asking, “All in all, how threatened do you feel about electrosmog?”  and, “How do you rate the scientific knowledge about the health risks of electrosmog?” . Subjects were explicitly instructed to answer the questions from their own subjective perspective, that is, referring to their beliefs.At the beginning of the questionnaire, all participants were asked to indicate their risk perceptions for the following items : bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), nuclear power, smoking, genetically engineered foodstuffs, climate change, and crime. Because these risk judgments were made before the introduction of the experimental manipulations, they can serve as an additional check whether—despite the random assignment of the subjects to the experimental conditions—there were any differences in risk perceptions among the experimental groups that might confound the results of this experiment.F3,238 = 3.954; p = 0.009) and a statistically insignificant main effect for the uncertainty factor . There was no statistically significant interaction between the two factors . For risk perception, a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) yielded a statistically significant main effect for the pre-cautionary measures factor (p < 0.05) from “special protection of sensitive areas” and “precautionary limits,” and marginally statistically different (p = 0.074) from “exposure minimization.” The three “precautionary measures” conditions do not differ significantly from each other.A separate analysis by means of a post hoc test (Tukey HSD) confirms this visual impression. It is the “no precaution” condition that is statistically different  for the other risk items appraised before the experimental variation  as dependent variables. None of these six ANOVAs yielded a statistically significant effect. This supports the notion that it was in fact the experimental manipulation that produced the differences in risk perception, and not some chance effect.For the second dependent variable, the perceived quality of scientific knowledge about potential health risks of electrosmog, we found no statistically significant effect.The second experiment focused on the impact of a process-related precautionary measure on perceived risk of electrosmog, perceived quality of scientific knowledge and—as an additional variable—trust in public health protection. As in the first experiment, we also varied the experts’ uncertainty about the sufficiency of health protection.In this experiment we used a 2 × 2 factorial design. The first factor was composed of a basic text  and the “public participation” precautionary measure . In the Three 7-point rating scales were used to collect the ratings for the dependent variables . The wording of the scales was as follows: Risk assessment: “All in all, how threatened do you feel about electrosmog?” ; trust: “How much do you trust that the health protection of the public is ensured?” ; state of the scientific knowledge: “How do you rate the knowledge about the health effects of electrosmog?” .Eighty-four Austrian subjects, recruited in March 2004 among students and employees of the University of Innsbruck, participated in this experiment. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions . Each subject received a sheet showing the respective text of the experimental condition and the three response scales on risk perception, scientific knowledge, and trust. Subjects were asked to read the text and then to give their ratings on the three scales. Again, subjects were explicitly instructed to answer the questions from their own subjective perspective, that is, referring to their beliefs.F1,80 = 5.533; p = 0.021).For each of the three dependent variables, we conducted a separate two-way ANOVA. For both “risk perception” and “perceived quality of scientific knowledge,” we found no statistically significant main effect for the precautionary measures factor. However, for “trust in health protection,” the ANOVA yielded a statistically significant main effect for the precautionary measure factor , the results are in the same direction: Under the “precaution” condition, the mean ratings for “feeling threatened” were higher than under the “no precaution” condition—however, the difference did not reach statistical significance.The second experiment indicates that “public participation” precautionary measures do not increase trust in public health protection. This result speaks against the first hypothesis, which states that precautionary measures will increase trust in risk management, and, in turn, that increased trust in risk management will be associated with lower risk perceptions.One may argue that, although statistically significant, the reported effects are small and thus may not be of practical relevance. But no matter how small the effects are, they are contrary to the expectations of policy makers who hope to calm public fears about EMFs by implementing precautionary measures.The second variable manipulated in the two experiments was the scientific uncertainty about the sufficiency of current protection measures. This manipulation did not affect any of the dependent variables . This is surprising because it is this uncertainty that actually provides the reason for applying the precautionary principle. So one would have expected an effect—at least for the “scientific knowledge” variable. One can only speculate why this was the case. Perhaps the experimental manipulation was simply not strong enough.Precautionary measures implemented with the intention of reassuring the public about EMF risk potentials seem to produce the opposite effect. They may amplify EMF-related risk perceptions and trigger concerns. Referring to the WHO definition of health , it seeThe results of the two experiments support the warnings in the WHO background document  on cautiOf course, these results need to be confirmed in further experiments before drawing practical conclusions for cautionary policies. They also pose a number of questions for further research. For instance, why did the uncertainty condition  have no effect on risk perception, trust, or scientific knowledge? And even more important, are there any conditions under which application of precautionary measures will increase trust in risk management, which in turn will result in lower risk perceptions?