Topic: watersheds

Greening the Urban Rooftop

The rooftop at 10 G Street is about to get a lot greener—3,000 square feet to be exact. In real estate-scarce cities, commercial property owners nationwide are turning roof space into green space.

Latin American Leader Roberto Artavia Elected to WRI Board

The World Resources Institute (WRI) has elected Roberto Artavia to its board of directors. Artavia is a distinguished leader in business education, conservation of marine resources, and sustainable development in Latin America.

Building a Rooftop Garden

APA and WRI installing a rooftop garden that will provide ecological and psychological benefits.

Ironically, Flood Control is Flooding New Orleans

Man-made flood-control systems—such as levees, upstream dams, and canals—continue to be responsible for widespread damage to the New Orleans and Louisiana landscapes.

Eutrophication—the overenrichment of water by nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus—has emerged as a leading water quality problem. This report identifies over 415 areas worldwide that are experiencing eutrophication symptoms, and there are significant information gaps in many regions.

Agriculture, though important to economic development and food security, is a source of increased sediment, nutrient, and pesticide runoff.

Immigration Linked to Degraded Ecosystem

Border security is not typically recognized as being tied to environmental changes, but in this recent article by The New York Times, the links are clear. It details how declining fish catches in northwest Africa are fueling immigration to Europe.

Choking Coastal Waters

My team at WRI, together with Dr. Bob Diaz at the Virginia Marine Institute, has identified and mapped 415 eutrophic and hypoxic coastal systems worldwide through an extensive literature review. Of these, 169 are documented hypoxic areas, 233 are areas of concern and 13 are systems in recovery.

Raising awareness of threats to coral reefs and providing information and tools to manage coastal habitats more effectively.

How can the estimation of environmental outcomes be used to effectively allocate conservation funding, and what additional steps are needed to improve this process?

Explains how reverse auctions can be used as a cost-effective method for allocating funding in US Farm Bill Conservation Programs.

Watershed Analysis for the Mesoamerican Reef

This analysis quantifies and maps the origins of sediment and nutrient runoff that threatens the Mesoamerican Reef. With it, WRI seeks to inform land-use planning, agriculture, conservation and threat mitigation efforts.

Watershed Workshop Proceedings, Belize 2006

Proceedings from Workshop on Watershed Management, Land Cover Change Analysis, and Modeling of Land-based Sources of Pollution and Sediment Discharge to the MAR – San Ignacio, Belize, August 15-18, 2006

Outlines economic and “fairness” reasons why supporting the sale of the cost-share portion of agricultural nutrient and sediment reductions is not the most appropriate policy for the USDA and other government agencies to adopt.

Land-based Sources of Threat to Coral Reefs in the US Virgin Islands

This atlas, developed by WRI and NOAA, provides a series of spatial indicators of watershed-based sources of threat to coral reefs in the US Virgin Islands.