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December 10, 2013

ECONOTES 2013-12-10: Environmental Headlines for the Houston Region

Featured

  1. HARC helps Houston plan for climate-change impacts on municipal operations (HARC News, 11/21/2013)
    What should Houston’s city government do to get municipal infrastructure, policies and personnel ready – to plan and implement “adaption” measures in the parlance of climate-change discussions – because of projections of increased incidence and/or greater severity of such weather extremes? That’s a complex question that HARC’s Jennifer Ronk, program director for environmental science and energy efficiency, is helping city officials to answer. With funding from a U.S. Department of Energy grant to the city, Ronk has been preparing a preliminary analysis of the adaptation issue as it pertains to Houston’s municipal operations, framing it in terms of major problems that Houston could confront in a changing climate and noting some of the responses that have been identified in other cities that have prepared adaptation plans.
    http://harcresearch.org/
  2. New method of restoring wetlands successful along Gulf Coast (Kathleen Phillips – Focus Daily News, 12/9/2013)
    More than 135 acres of prairie wetland habitat have been restored near Houston with a new method that may help additional acreages be recovered, according to experts with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. The method, called “Sheldon-Sipocz,” uses high-tech, precision equipment to dig added soil out of an area until the original soils are exposed. These hydric soils are more conducive to the growth of plants that thrive in shallow water.
    http://focusdailynews.com/
  3. Here’s What Climate Change and Urban Sprawl Look Like in Texas (Michael Marks – StateImpact, 12/6/2013)
    The climate is changing, and Texas is growing. For a bird’s eye view of these developments, NASA has put together a ‘State of Flux‘ image gallery that shows how climate change, urbanization, and natural disasters have changed certain geographic features in Texas, and across the world. The gallery puts two satellite images side-by-side to show the changes. View seven side-by-side comparisons that show the effects of drought and urbanization on the state. While not every weather and wildfire event below was directly caused by climate change, scientists say climate change has made them worse.
    http://stateimpact.npr.org/

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