East Anglia environment in a global context

 This follows on blogposts about East Anglia in general here. The last post on infrastructure affected by sea level rise is here. Let's talk now about risk of flooding, peatlands and carbon capture in a global context. This comes from a new Esri Living Atlas release of World Resource Institute (WRI) Aqueduct 4.0 here & here (HT Dan Pisut, LinkedIn here).

The local context is Natural England's Natural Capital Atlases: Mapping Indicators for County and City Regions here. Also the index of deprivation and settlement vulnerability to flooding & sea level rise for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority: based on Environment Agency Survey,  Office for National Statistics Geoportal and Ordnance Survey Open Zoomstack data; detailed in the afore-mentioned last blogpost here. 

click to enlarge, original here

Environment Agency & World Resource Institute

Also detailed in that post is Environment Agency Dec. 2019 Risk of Flooding from River & from Sea. I post it here against WRI Aqueduct 4.0 here: I used Available Blue Water (the total amount of renewable freshwater - surface water and groundwater - available to a sub-basin with upstream consumption removed), & Gross Water Demand (the total water withdrawals across all sectors within a sub-basin, including: domestic, agricultural, industrial, power generation, and livestock).

click to enlarge, original here

The first thing you'll notice is the granularity of the local vs. the global parcelled by hydrologic basin in a consistent framework detailed here. It does however distinguish the Norfolk Suffolk 'uplands' to the southeast with more available water and the lowlands with higher water demand risk. That dividing line largely matches the bisector lines, if you squint at the index of deprivation and settlement vulnerability maps in the intro. 

Natural England and World Resource Institute

I also reviewed peatlands here on how to mitigate GHG emissions (greenhouse gas) by returning peatlands to being carbon sinks rather than emitters at present here (apologies for missing story maps explained per indented paragraph here): 

In East Anglia, peatlands are net carbon emitters having been drained, and work is afoot by local rural conservation efforts such Fens Biosphere, Great Fen and Future Fens, to reflood & make them carbon sinks again.  This helps conservation efforts and fights climate change literally at the grassroots level.

I also looked the Irrecoverable Carbon also from WRI, that was  news to me and explained fully here:

Irreplaceable carbon, also termed irrecoverable carbon, refers to ecosystem carbon stocks vulnerable to human-induced loss that cannot be restored within 30 years, critical for staying within 1.5–2°C warming limits

My curiosity was piqued by University of Cambridge physical geographer Andrew Freund's lectures over 5 yrs. ago, where he quipped in another context here:

It’s known that 1/3 of the sink exists on land, but the mechanisms are not fully understood. It is the sink of anthropogenic carbon emissions, which has to be a combination of the atmosphere, oceans, and land. The land sink helps reduce the long-term (decadal) build up of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, and thereby mitigates climate change.

 

click to enlarge, original here

 You will see that peatland carbon and irrecoverable carbon distribution are broadly complements, or negative spaces to each other. That underscores my point that peatlands need restoring as part of the areas needing protection in the Nature Sustainability article above:

These risks can be reduced through proactive protection and adaptive management. Currently, 23.0% of irrecoverable carbon is within protected areas and 33.6% is managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities. Half of Earth’s irrecoverable carbon is concentrated on just 3.3% of its land, highlighting opportunities for targeted efforts to increase global climate security.