Governance, wealth, and scientific capacity all affect a country’s ability to deal with biodiversity issues. This study analyzes how developing countries often lack the scientific capacity to study their biodiversity. Another correlation established in this paper argues that biodiverse developing countries in Africa have a trend of low governance and high wealth. The nexus between biodiversity and the institutional factors will help illustrate how the financial insecurities suffered by developing countries trickle into environmental impacts.

To study the relationship between these variables, the authors created five indices to measure each factor in relation to its country. This paper defines biodiversity as the number of species on land in a country and leaves marine biodiversity as an afterthought. After measuring each variable through an index, the indices were all plotted against each other on graphs to calculate Pearson’s coefficient for each one. The data analysis determined that biodiversity correlates positively with scientific capacity and wealth (although the correlation with wealth is insignificant), and negatively with governance, just as explained earlier. Both the unit of observation and the unit of analysis were countries because the indices reflected measurements of certain countries and examining countries still analyzed the results. The conclusion details that the indices yielded very complicated answers; despite the discovery of some correlations, the implications of the cause are too vague to define. Improving the scale resolution or changing the makeup of the indices would improve the analysis in replications of this study. Including marine species in the definition of biodiversity would also improve the study because a lot of countries with well-managed fisheries have higher incomes. Since this paper seeks to find the connection between wealth and biodiversity, marine biodiversity would fit incorporate more aspects of the economy into the research.

Kim, Tae-Woo, et al. 2017. “Convergence Technique Study on Red Tide Prediction in the Littoral Sea.” Journal of Coastal Research, 2017, 79: 254–258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44289518. (Kim et al.  2017)

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the ocean cause “red tide”, which impairs the functionality of desalination plants because the microbial matter produces a lot of harmful chemicals that can continue to exist in water post-desalination. This research aims to discover how to reduce the impact of red tide on desalination plants by utilizing a convergence technique. In order to do so, reports of events must be collected, like tidal movements and concentrations of HABs. Most of this data is a combination of remote sensing, monitoring, and modeling, and it must be collected through public or private records, considering that much of that information is available from research by institutes like NOAA. Instead of relying solely on satellite imaging to determine where the HABs are, GIS specialists have started to superimpose the distributions of HABs on top of tidal prediction maps in order to track when and where desalination plants are at high risk of being affected by red tide. The data analysis in this study is the key difference to many research methods in the past, because the convergence of spatio-temporal techniques provides new insight into how to present the distributions of red tide in a new way. The greatest limitation of this technique was relying on satellite imagery in cloudy conditions, in which case it would be more difficult to accurately track the flow of red tide. Regardless, people that manage operations and maintenance of desalination plants will be able to use this technique to make clearer and more informed decisions about the desalination plant and be able to prepare for the impact of HABs in the future.

Schewe J, Heinke J, Gerten D, Haddeland I, Arnell NW, Clark DB, Dankers R, Eisner S, Fekete BM, Colón-González FJ, et al. March 2014. “Multimodel Assessment of Water Scarcity under Climate Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 9 (2014): 3245-3250. (Schewe J, et al. 2014) http://www.jstor.org/stable/23770677.

Water scarcity can be defined as the universally-understood struggle to overcome barriers to accessing clean, potable water for the purposes of sustaining life. Many factors can influence water scarcity, but the question narrows our focus down to the issue of climate change and its correlation to increasing levels of water scarcity. The relationship between climate change and water is well-established, but the magnitude in which climate change exacerbates water scarcity continues to be muddled by inconsistent findings and reports among the scientific community. Even though climate change models agree on the global average change, they do not focus on individual communities and their changes at smaller scales. Thus, comparing spatial models of different global communities and their levels of water scarcity to measures of population increase, global mean warming, and estimates of people living in places facing a change in water resources will reveal the underlying details of the correlation between climate change and water scarcity. This study reveals some very key issues about the preexisting way to measure global water scarcity; if one country happened to overcome water scarcity issues on a large-scale, and a much smaller location started facing very threatening water scarcity issues, the net measurement of global water scarcity would remain at zero change. Therefore, the way that water scarcity was measured would conceal some serious issues in smaller regions. Overall, the uncertainty found in global hydrological models (GHM) contributed to the spread of water scarcity and unchecked issues in more specific locations. The examination of these GHMs shed light on how to streamline the analysis of them in order to improve projections for water scarcity in the future.

Venkataraman B. January 2018. The Paradox of Water and the Flint Crisis. Environment Magazine. 60(1): 4-17. (Venkataraman 2018)

Bhawani Venkataraman cites a statistic reported by the United Nations Joint Monitoring Program claiming that of the 42 countries in the world that provide 100% of its citizens access to clean water, the United States is not one of them. In fact, the United States denies about 2.5 million people the right to access clean water. A large amount of these people were victims of the Flint Water Crisis. This article seeks to answer the question of what lead to the Flint Crisis and how to avoid crises like this in the future, and it does so by means of reports and retrospective analysis.
The issue of water crises like what occurred in Flint lies in the inherent paradox of water; the same properties that make water essential to providing and sustaining life make it vulnerable to contamination and spreading waterborne diseases. Awareness of this paradox calls political institutions to realize how easy it is for water to be contaminated. Ignorance of this paradox allowed the governor of Michigan to appoint an emergency manager to oversee the budgetary appropriations in 2011, and this emergency manager took it upon himself to lower deficit by curtailing the water budget. Instead of using the Detroit Water and Sewage Department as the primary provider of water for the citizens, the emergency manager switched to other unprepared sources as the Flint River was getting contaminated. The disorganization of this fiasco snowballed into the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis which left the entire city defenseless against unsafe drinking water.
In order to determine the main causes of this crisis, the failures of the Flint Water Service Center (FWSC) was assessed from monthly operating reports, reports from an engineering company, and water quality reports from Flint, Michigan. These records uncovered a great lack of attention to the fact that the necessary chemicals for treating water (like chlorine) were missing in great amounts in the Flint water. Upon conducting retrospective analysis of these records, parameters used to treat the water and determine its cleanliness and safety were completely inaccurate. While these mistakes lead up to the crisis, in the midst of the crisis the plant personnel were not well trained and understaffed, which lead them to address the issue with trial and error solutions that simply did not work.
One of the most harrowing conclusions drawn from this testimony is that this crisis can be labeled as an environmental crime. Flint, Michigan has a history of low-income communities and people, as well as comparatively high percentages of minorities. Many scholars contend that the reason this crisis receives so little attention is because of the fact that if wealthier people more representative of majority demographics lived here, the crisis would be treated a lot faster and with greater care. Environmental injustice plagues our nation as people all over the United States struggle to find access to clean water, and Flint, Michigan is just one example of how our political institutions actively neglect these people and their right to live.

Skyllberg, Ulf, et al. “Elevated Concentrations of Methyl Mercury in Streams after Forest Clear-Cut: A Consequence of Mobilization from Soil or New Methylation?” Environmental Science & Technology, vol. 43, no. 22, 15 Oct. 2009, pp. 8535–8541., doi:10.1021/es900996z.

A prominent area of concern for environmental scientists is water, and how modern advancements in technology and the culture surrounding it have contributed to polluting our water sources. The inherency of this subject leads many scientists to examine the origins of chemicals in water and determine how to best reduce the amount of pollutants that make it into the water source. This journal, titled “Elevated Concentrations of Methyl Mercury in Streams After Forest Clear-Cut: A Consequence of Mobilization from Soil or New Methylation?” written by Swedish scholars Ulf Skyllberg, Mattias Bjorkman Westin, Markus Meili, and Erik Bjorn, analyzes the reason for an increased concentration of mercury in streams. It is normal for organisms to become “methylated”, meaning that they absorb mercury from their environment (most likely emitted from fossil fuel combustion), but recently, areas with younger clear-cuts have been found with higher concentrations of methylated mercury than their older counterparts. Thus, this experiment seeks to find the difference in mercury based on the age of the clear-cuts in the path. There are a lot of important variables to control for in this experiment, one of the most important being measuring clear-cuts above and below the highest postglacial coastline (HC). In addition, if the site experiences any runoff from other sources, the effect of the runoff must be negligible to allow for the final results to be as accurate as possible. This journal conclusively decided that concentrations of methylated mercury were significantly higher in streams draining off of the younger clear-cuts, leading the authors to assume that the mobilization of mercury from soil is the primary cause for the polluted streams. However, there is also cause to believe that sulfur deposits in the stream allowed for greater solubility of mercury in the streams, and therefore increases the concentration of the mercury. In the grand scheme of things, pollution from fossil fuels has affected our waterways and will continue to affect us in ways that are not entirely visible to the naked eye.