Winter is Coming - Deforestation in the Chilean Patagonia
As the Fulbright project begins to take shape, I've been doing as much listening, observing, and learning as possible to understand what types of environmental problems exist in the Chilean Patagonia, so that our modeling can provide some useful or impactful information. (Maybe not a great way to do 'science' but I can't seem to separate myself from the emotional attachment to nature).
The most obvious issue in Coyhaique, Chile is air pollution, as the World Health Organization has identified.
As I speak to more Chileans, I have come to realize that this is not an isolated problem. The poor air quality is a symptom of a much larger political/economic dynamic: in neoliberal Chile, energy from diesel, gas, and electricity is 4, 5, and 6 times as expensive as energy from wood, respectively (Schueftan & Gonzalez, 2013), whereas in generally leftist Argentina, heavy subsidies make natural gas 10–20, 5-10, and 10-20 times cheaper than diesel, firewood, and electricity, respectively (González, 2013). This economic factor is inextricably linked to an environmental problem: deforestation in the Chilean Patagonia.
In the minimal traveling I have done so far in Aysén, I cannot help but notice the devastation: large tracts of land with gnarled stumps, reminiscent of a scene from Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. The carretera is packed with trucks loaded with freshly cut wood from old growth forests in the countryside to sell to the ~60,000 residents of Coyhaique. To complicate the issue, the Chileans are not manufacturing thneads, but are simply cooking and heating their homes in a country where burning wood is the cheapest form of energy. Thus, there is no evil corporation on the other end that we can blame for this issue.
Since the wood comes from private property, which accounts for most of the Chilean Patagonia outside of reservas nacionales, this loss of native forest is 100% unregulated, with all the unquantified negative externalities that come with it. Deforestation is often associated with increased erosion and sedimentation of rivers, reducing water quality. Regarding water quantity, the literature generally disagrees about how deforestation alters evapotranspiration: some suggest that reductions in transpiration due to loss of forests tend to increase surface water discharges, while others suggest that increased soil evaporation due to higher wind speeds on deforested slopes renders the overall energy and water balance unchanged.
I'm no expert in the hydrologic models that are used to analyze forest disturbance, but I have certainly coded up the Penman-Monteith and Priestley-Taylor equations for evapotranspiration on forested hill slopes. So if I can get my hands on the right datasets (or create them with our two weather stations -- one on a forested slope, one on a nearby deforested slope), maybe we can run a simple hill slope model to demonstrate how changes in deforestation may change the seasonality of subsurface and surface flows, in a way that could be communicated succinctly to the Dirección General de Aguas, or another governmental organization in Chile.
Schueftan A, González AD. Reduction of firewood consumption by households in southcentral Chile associated with energy efficiency programs. Energy Policy 2013;63: 823–33.
González AD. Management of disaster risks derived from very large fuel subsidies to natural gas in Argentina. In: Leal W, editor. Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, Part 3. Berlin: Springer-Verlag; 2013. p. 463–73. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-642-31110-9_30. [http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3- 642-31110-9_30#page-1 Accessed March 2018].
The most obvious issue in Coyhaique, Chile is air pollution, as the World Health Organization has identified.
As I speak to more Chileans, I have come to realize that this is not an isolated problem. The poor air quality is a symptom of a much larger political/economic dynamic: in neoliberal Chile, energy from diesel, gas, and electricity is 4, 5, and 6 times as expensive as energy from wood, respectively (Schueftan & Gonzalez, 2013), whereas in generally leftist Argentina, heavy subsidies make natural gas 10–20, 5-10, and 10-20 times cheaper than diesel, firewood, and electricity, respectively (González, 2013). This economic factor is inextricably linked to an environmental problem: deforestation in the Chilean Patagonia.
In the minimal traveling I have done so far in Aysén, I cannot help but notice the devastation: large tracts of land with gnarled stumps, reminiscent of a scene from Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. The carretera is packed with trucks loaded with freshly cut wood from old growth forests in the countryside to sell to the ~60,000 residents of Coyhaique. To complicate the issue, the Chileans are not manufacturing thneads, but are simply cooking and heating their homes in a country where burning wood is the cheapest form of energy. Thus, there is no evil corporation on the other end that we can blame for this issue.
Since the wood comes from private property, which accounts for most of the Chilean Patagonia outside of reservas nacionales, this loss of native forest is 100% unregulated, with all the unquantified negative externalities that come with it. Deforestation is often associated with increased erosion and sedimentation of rivers, reducing water quality. Regarding water quantity, the literature generally disagrees about how deforestation alters evapotranspiration: some suggest that reductions in transpiration due to loss of forests tend to increase surface water discharges, while others suggest that increased soil evaporation due to higher wind speeds on deforested slopes renders the overall energy and water balance unchanged.
I'm no expert in the hydrologic models that are used to analyze forest disturbance, but I have certainly coded up the Penman-Monteith and Priestley-Taylor equations for evapotranspiration on forested hill slopes. So if I can get my hands on the right datasets (or create them with our two weather stations -- one on a forested slope, one on a nearby deforested slope), maybe we can run a simple hill slope model to demonstrate how changes in deforestation may change the seasonality of subsurface and surface flows, in a way that could be communicated succinctly to the Dirección General de Aguas, or another governmental organization in Chile.
Schueftan A, González AD. Reduction of firewood consumption by households in southcentral Chile associated with energy efficiency programs. Energy Policy 2013;63: 823–33.
González AD. Management of disaster risks derived from very large fuel subsidies to natural gas in Argentina. In: Leal W, editor. Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, Part 3. Berlin: Springer-Verlag; 2013. p. 463–73. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-642-31110-9_30. [http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3- 642-31110-9_30#page-1 Accessed March 2018].
Comments
Post a Comment