Seed Grants

February, 2008

Guidelines and Review Methods for seed grants are located at the following links:

Seed Grants Guidelines MSWord     Seed Grants Guidelines PDF

Seed Grants Review Methods MSWord     Seed Grants Review Methods PDF

Please feel free to email Doug Alsdorf if you would like to know the budgets of the following seed grants. All budgets will be available to affiliates via a login procedure, which we expect to install by the end of March.

Led by Jay Martin in collaboration with Kendra McSweeney

Summary

Carbon sequestration credits are a rapidly expanding mechanism for mitigating climate change, increasing forest cover, maintaining water quality, and improving the livelihoods of rural land managers. Despite its promise as a win-win solution for the global climate and local land users, early experiences with carbon credits have encountered a number of political and methodological difficulties. Carbon credits are often associated with large-scale tree plantations that contribute little to local biodiversity or social benefits for the rural poor; meanwhile, the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol have resulted in a number of unresolved technical challenges in implementing carbon projects locally. The objectives of the proposed research are to understand how these issues are addressed in the creation of carbon credits among small-scale farmers, and the effects of carbon credits on local agrarian livelihoods. Specifically, this proposal investigates a carbon credit project in Costa Rica's Talamanca Indigenous Reserve, where indigenous farmers are receiving carbon payments for practicing sustainable agroforestry. This carbon credit project results in three benefits related to Carbon, Water and Climate: (1) it creates a local market for carbon storage (2) encourages land-use changes (i.e. reforestation) that improve local water quality and (3) reduces greenhouse gases through carbon storage.

This proposal will focus on how global scientific and development institutions incorporated local land users into global carbon markets, and the ways in which carbon credits have transformed the local socio-economic dynamics of land use and livelihoods in this region. Employing household surveys, in-depth interviews, and document archives, this research explores how climate change policies are formed locally and evaluates the long-term sustainability of carbon credits as a conservation mechanism.

led by Jay Martin

Summary

Wastewater from livestock results in contamination of waterways and the release of methane, which is a greenhouse gas with 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. When properly harnessed in a low-tech digester, however, animal waste can be transformed into an environmental and economic benefit. A digester provides an optimal environment for microorganisms, which produce methane from the carbon and nutrients in the wastewater. The digestion process results in three benefits related to Carbon, Water and Climate: (1) renewable energy is produced from the transformation of organic matter to methane, (2) water pollution is sharply reduced, and (3) greenhouse gases are sharply reduced. In addition, small-scale agricultural digesters are inexpensive and easy to build, which makes them an appropriate technology to enhance the environment and livelihoods of farmers. Currently, there are over 5 million existing small-scale digesters in India and China alone. Unfortunately, research and development in digestion technology has focused on large-scale, capital-intensive systems, which are appropriate for industrial-scale farms, but are largely inaccessible to the small farmer. In order to address this research gap, this international project will determine methods to optimize the ability of small-scale digesters to produce methane, treat wastewater, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, we will test the impacts of codigesting grease and fats with animal manure in field-scale and full-scale digesters. By performing systematic research on low-tech digesters this research will advance the field of digestion technology and provide methods to improve digester performance. The global impact is underscored by the millions of users of low-tech digesters who could benefit from the results of this research.

led by Richard Moore

Summary

The long-term goal of research in the Sugar Creek Watershed of Ohio is to improve the quality of fresh water resources through ecologically sound restorative processes involving management schemes that integrate natural and social capital so that the productivity and economic viability of local communities is maintained. Headwaters and related participatory research in the Sugar Creek Watershed is dependent on accurate flow measurements in the eight sub-watersheds. Stream flow monitors will be installed to enhance our ability to secure future funding from NSF, USDA, and EPA, particularly in regard to long-term ecological research that links social and natural systems. Related graduate student research will bridge our present headwater research with the international component of our NSF GK-12 grant (proposed $100 grant from NSF) and will focus on ecological indicator species and related ecotourism.

led by Roger Williams

Summary

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) is North America's only greenhouse gas (GHG) emission registry and trading system for all six greenhouse gases (GHGs). CCX is a self-regulating, rules based exchange designed and governed by CCX Members. Members make a voluntary but legally binding commitment to reduce GHG emissions. Even though the US has yet to sign the Kyoto Treaty, the CCX provides an avenue for entities (public or private) to develop carbon offset projects yielding credits that can be sold on the exchange to carbon emitting entities. A key element of this process is the carbon accounting protocol of the entity wishing to sell credits through an offset project. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), Division of Forestry, has a desire to become an active player in any future US carbon bank and to develop carbon offset projects that would permit them to sell carbon surpluses. There is no doubt that site factors, such as aspect, slope position and steepness will affect the amount of total carbon storage and sequestration rates by Ohio forests. The extent and significance of these impacts are currently unknown. Their determination will be critical for understanding forest carbon dynamics and for developing carbon models for quantification and monitoring purposes. The specific objectives of this project are to:

1) Quantify the amount of belowground and aboveground carbon in representative oak-hickory forests;

2) Determine the impact of site conditions on carbon storage and sequestration rates;

3) Determine the rate of carbon sequestration in these forests using existing modeling techniques;

4) Develop equations and conversion factors that can be used and applied in standard forest inventories to determine forest carbon stocks in these forest types;

5) Develop appropriate protocols to determine forest carbon stocks within the Division of Forestry standard forest inventory framework.

led by David Kraybill

Summary

The objective of this research is to link OSU's ongoing work in glaciology and hydrology in the Kilimanjaro region with analysis and concepts from natural resource economics. The departure point is that the Kilimanjaro region is already experiencing significant changes in water availability. These changes result from a combination of changing temperatures, forestry practices, fire dynamics, and the retreat of the volcano's glaciers.

In 2007, OSU researchers will expand their existing water sampling program to wells and springs around the base of the mountain. The samples will be collected during the wet season and will be analyzed for tritium, carbon-14, major anions and cations (chemistry) and stable isotopic ratios of oxygen and hydrogen. Samples will be collected from selected wells and springs for tritium and carbon-14 dating to determine the age of the water currently consumed in order to assess the impact that the loss of the Kilimanjaro ice fields over the next 15 years will have on regional water supplies. The ultimate goal is to produce a regional hydrological model that can be used to predict how the current rapid climate change will affect water resources upon which the growing population at the base of Kilimanjaro is so dependent. The proposed policy work will use the regional hydrological model as a basic input to look at a range of policies and institutions to manage changes in water availability. We will link the hydrological model with an economic model of the livelihoods of Kilimanjaro residents.

Led by Andy Keeler in collaboration with Brent Sohngen

Summary

The value of soil and biomass sequestration of carbon in mitigating anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations has been established and documented beyond doubt. Policies to actually achieve net increases in sequestration, or to at least reverse losses of sequestered carbon, have been considerably more problematic. Issues of the permanence, leakage, additionality, and measurement of carbon sequestration are universal but are particularly critical in Latin America where available financial resources for policy implementation are constrained and are likely to depend on meeting international standards for policy verification. Human resources are also likely to be constrained. In addition, sequestration policies must be approached as part of the general process of economic development rather than simply as environmental policies or they are highly likely to fail. This research will use the tools of economics and public policy analysis to will examine existing and new policies in a field setting and pay explicit attention to local institutions that affect the environmental and economic effectiveness of sequestration activities in a Latin American field setting. Economic modeling of the supply of sequestration services to price incentives will be adapted to take account of measurement uncertainty, a range of transactions costs, and strategies for ensuring permanence or accounting for sequestration losses.

Led by Brent Sohngen

Summary

It is widely recognized that methane emissions form agriculture, and deforestation are two of the leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Currently, researchers in AEDE have funding from the US Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop a detailed land-use model that accounts for the competition between agriculture and forest for the same land, building on the extensive research already conducted by AEDE researchers on the role of forests to mitigate climate change. The model assesses (1) The implications of technical change in the agricultural and forest sectors on greenhouse gas emissions from land use (e.g., CO2 emissions from deforestation; Nitrous and methane emissions from the crop and livestock sectors); (2) the costs of greenhouse gas mitigation in the ruminant, non-ruminant, and crop sectors (e.g., methane abatement and soil carbon sequestration); (3) the implications of changing productivity due to carbon fertilization and climate change on the demand for agricultural land. This model will be completed soon. However, additional questions have arisen. These include the need to develop estimates of uncertainty associated with carbon sequestration policies, and the need to incorporate biofuels as an additional competing use of land. The proposed research will be conducted to:

(1) Develop Monte Carlo simulation methods to assess the uncertainty associated with carbon sequestration costs in forestry and agriculture.

(2) Develop biomass energy production functions and demand functions for the regions in the model. The model does not currently incorporate demand or production functions for bio-energy crops. Bio-energy crops have been identified elsewhere as a major potential source of greenhouse gas abatement as well as a major source of competition for food crops. The researchers propose to extend the model to assess how carbon policies and energy prices influence land use, with full consideration of the following land using sectors: food crops, energy crops, livestock, and forestry. Given widespread concern about the influence of recent energy price changes on crop rotations and land use in the Midwestern U.S., specific attention will be paid to the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes Basin.

Led by Brent Sohngen

Summary

The value of soil and biomass sequestration of carbon in mitigating anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations has been established and documented beyond doubt. Policies to actually achieve net increases in sequestration, or to at least reverse losses of sequestered carbon, have been considerably more problematic. Issues of the permanence, leakage, additionality, and measurement of carbon sequestration are universal but are particularly critical in Latin America where available financial resources for policy implementation are constrained and are likely to depend on meeting international standards for policy verification. Human resources are also likely to be constrained. In addition, sequestration policies must be approached as part of the general process of economic development rather than simply as environmental policies or they are highly likely to fail. This research will use the tools of economics and public policy analysis to will examine existing and new policies in a field setting and pay explicit attention to local institutions that affect the environmental and economic effectiveness of sequestration activities in a Latin American field setting. Economic modeling of the supply of sequestration services to price incentives will be adapted to take account of measurement uncertainty, a range of transactions costs, and strategies for ensuring permanence or accounting for sequestration losses.

Led by Brent Sohngen

Summary

Tropical deforestation is a significant contributor to accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. Previous estimates of GHG emissions from tropical deforestation have been in the range of 1-2 Pg C yr-1 during the 1990s, equivalent to 15% to 30% of global annual GHG emissions from fossil fuels. Currently, forestry activities under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol are limited to afforestation and reforestation on areas that were not forested in 1990, excluding actions to avoid deforestation. In 2005, Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica proposed to the UNFCCC that carbon credits be provided to protect existing native forests. One important recent study by Soares-Filho and others (Science, 2006), suggests that protecting around 130 million hectares of land from deforestation in the Amazon could reduce global carbon emissions by 17 GtC over the next 50 years. There are currently only a few estimates of the costs of reducing deforestation in the tropics, and none of these estimates have accounted for important economic factors like leakage and opportunity costs of land. The objective of this research will be to develop global models capable of assessing the potential implications of policies intended to reduce deforestation. Because most deforestation is currently used for grazing and cropland, changes in the deforestation rates due to climate policy will influence land markets and food prices globally. Furthermore, if the landscape becomes more widely used for biofuels due to climate policy, competition between forests, land for food, and land for fuel will become more fierce in the future. The proposed research will provide tools necessary to evaluate the economic efficiency of international policy regimes that support reductions in deforestation as a carbon mitigation tool.

Led by Alan Randall in collaboration with Mario Miranda

Summary

The potential for future climate change will create new risk challenges for private land managers and managers of public goods (e.g., infrastructure related to transportation and water resources). In addition, carbon sequestration policies and the technologies in the agricultural sector that these policies promote will have unknown effects on the risk structure of farming. For example, it is widely recognized that crop yield insurance encounters serious incentive problems (moral hazard and adverse selection). The "area yield" insurance model developed by Mario Miranda in AEDE has been widely adapted in the crop yield insurance area, and has contributed to the development of futures and options contracts. Both climate change and policies to mitigate it (e.g., carbon markets) could influence the risk profile that farmers face, thus seriously influencing the efficiency of the market. Models or market incentives that fail to account for these risk profiles could be inefficient.

Beyond the effect of the risk profiles caused by climate change and carbon markets on private landowners, public infrastructure managers will have to develop new methods for evaluating investments in a world with climate change. Already, there is strong evidence that transportation networks throughout the Midwest are being re-routed to account for rising corn prices reflecting strong incentives for ethanol production. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of storm events in the Ohio and elsewhere, challenging our infrastructure for water supply, drainage, and flood control. In addition, climate change will continue to change the productivity of the landscape (through carbon fertilization, changes in temperate and precipitation, altered storm frequency, etc.). For these reasons and more, climate change will face managers of public infrastructure with new and complex questions about optimal public investments. The objective of this research will be to bring together public goods economists, public choice experts, decision analysts, risk management experts, and climate-change-impact modelers to develop models and empirical studies to examine public choice and public investment issues related to climate change.

Led by Tom Koontz

Summary

Collaborative, cross-jurisdictional, multi-media policies are an important trend in environmental policy. Many of the behaviors required to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and to adapt to a changing climate, are at the individual level. As such, they are not amenable to traditional command-and-control regulatory approaches. An emerging field of inquiry examines collaborative efforts among policy makers, managers, scientists, and citizens to address climate change and water issues. This research will examine collaborative problem-solving forums for watershed and estuary management. The research will investigate coastal watershed and estuary management programs in North Carolina to understand collaborative policy making processes and outcomes across issues that impact water resources, carbon emission reductions (particularly through wetland and estuary protection and restoration), and potential effects on the coast from global climate change.

Led by Rattan Lal

Summary

Urban areas in Ohio are projected to increase significantly in the future, but the attendant effects on terrestrial carbon (C) dynamics and climate change are uncertain. Cities are major sources of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and better management of urbanized areas could have a major impact on soil organic carbon (SOC) storage. Storing large amounts of CO2 in stable SOC pools (i.e., rich in recalcitrant compounds with long turnover times), and favoring certain vegetation types (e.g., deep and extensively rooted plants) in urban areas could improve environmental quality and mitigate climate change. However, scientific knowledge on the potential of functionally important plant species to transfer atmospheric CO2 into stable SOC pools in disturbed, urban soils is scanty.

While large areas in Ohio are being used for agricultural and forest biomass production, reclaimed mine soils (RMSs) are seldom managed as a productive resource. Like disturbed urban soils, RMSs have a large potential to sequester SOC and to off-set emissions of CO2 associated with fossil fuel combustion, especially when used for the production of feedstock for C-neutral biofuels. In contrast to soils disturbed centuries ago, recently disturbed minesoils are not in equilibrium but in a transient state because of the slow rate of accretion of the SOC pool. Scientific information about the impact of various reclamation techniques, post-reclamation land use, and soil and vegetation management on the ecosystem C budget of RMSs is scanty. Such information is essential to develop sustainable methods of managing these drastically disturbed ecosystems.

Thus, the proposed study is aimed at: (i) identifying functionally important plant species, species mixtures and land uses for SOC sequestration in urban and suburban areas in Ohio, and (ii) identifying appropriate reclamation techniques, land use and management systems for sustainable management and C sequestration in RMSs in Ohio.

Led by Bryan Mark in collaboration with C.K. Shum

Summary

Tropical Andean glacier recession is an example of a global climate change phenomenon with profound local consequences for water resources. To evaluate the hydrological storage and climatic implications of glacier recession, the actual mass of ice involved is a critical but problematic variable. With consideration of average ice density, the mass of water involved in the phase changes of glacier ice can be computed from volume, facilitating the appropriate equations of thermodynamic mass and energy fluxes (i.e. Paterson, 1994; Oerlemans, 1994). Moreover, to accurately forecast the impact of glacier recession on hydrological resources, equivalent water volumes from ice loss must be quantified. Relatively few glaciers, especially in the remote tropical highlands, feature mass balance monitoring and systematic mapping efforts are rare. Yet satellite and airborne altimetry, including ALSM, provide the opportunity to investigate the volume and spatial nature of Andean glacier recession with high resolution digital elevation data (Hopkinson et al., 2001).

Led by Heather Allen in collaboration with Radu Herbei and Catherine Calder

Summary

Remote sensing methods have emerged as powerful tools in the efforts to understand the carbon and water cycles, as well as the distributions and concentrations of both abundant and trace gas species in the atmosphere. Among these techniques is multi-axis differential optical absorption spectroscopy, or MAX-DOAS. MAX-DOAS entails the collection of solar radiation spectra using a telescope coupled to an ultraviolet-visible spectrometer. By changing the angle of the telescope line of sight relative to the horizon, different regions of the atmosphere can be probed. As the majority of scattering events occur within the lowest 5 to 10 km of the atmosphere, the technique is sensitive to tropospheric constituents.