CERF off to a Great Start and Some Thoughts on Biofuels

Last summer, the ERF membership overwhelmingly approved a new constitution, bylaws, and name for our organization. Your governing board followed up to make this happen and took the legal steps to make the new corporation real. We are now legally CERF! The complete change over from ERF to CERF will take some time, though, and probably another vote by the membership to transfer our financial resources, once the final approval from the IRS comes through. In the meanwhile, we are both ERF and CERF…… Bob Christian was a little premature when he wrote in a newsletter last fall that he was the last ERF president. I will have that honor.

CERF is off to a great start. We have a new editing structure for Estuaries & Coasts that gives our co-editor-in-chiefs Carlos Duarte and Jim Cloern much greater authority over the journal. They have made some wonderful additions to the editorial board, making it much more international in scope. Together with the change to co-publishing with Springer, the journal is in excellent shape, and we are well positioned to weather whatever bumps come our way in the next several years.

The first week of May, I was at a meeting with other presidents of scientific societies. Almost all are deeply worried about how to survive the combined publishing trends of free and immediate open access (which may be demanded by Congress), cuts in library budgets, and increased competition from new journals. Unlike almost any other society of our size, we now have a reasonable buffer from these influences, assuring that our journal will not only survive but flourish and grow in stature and influence. More details on Estuaries & Coasts can be found in the report from Carlos and Jim elsewhere in this newsletter.

We have established 3 committees to strengthen the activities of CERF in several areas. One of these committees, chaired by President-Elect Susan Williams, is exploring how CERF can more effectively participate in the policy arena. The second committee, chaired by Past-President Bob Christian, is strategizing over the best ways to increase our presence internationally and also how to best serve and maintain our membership. And the third committee, chaired by AERS President and CERF Board Member Leila Hamdan, is moving ahead with great energy and creativity to strengthen CERF’s educational activities. Look for significant improvements in our web site as part of these expanded educational activities. All of the CERF board members are serving on one of these committees, as are several other CERF members. I am delighted with the enthusiasm shown to date. If you have an interest in any of these areas, please let me, Susan, Bob, or Leila know of your ideas.

Some Thoughts on Biofuels

In addition to CERF business, much of my time since last fall has been spent on issues related to biofuels. Of interest to the CERF community, the expansion of ethanol production from corn in the US over the past 2-3 years probably has already had an impact on coastal water quality. More acreage has been planted to corn – including some land previously held in conservation reserves – and two recent papers have estimated that a substantial increase in nitrogen loads down the Mississippi River has already begun as a result (Donner & Kucharik. 2008, Corn-based ethanol production compromises goal of reducing nitrogen export by the Mississippi River. PNAS 105: 4513-4518; and Simpson, Sharpley, Howarth, Paerl, & Mankin. 2008. The new gold rush: Fueling ethanol production while protecting water quality. JEQ 37: 318-324). A December report from an EPA advisory panel (on which several CERF members served) warned that this increased production of ethanol from corn poses severe challenges to the national goal of reducing the size of the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone.

Massive expansion of ethanol from corn has other consequences as well, and may be responsible for much of the recent increase in world food prices, according to an April report from the World Bank. This puts great pressure on expansion of agricultural land globally, and is predicted to lead to deforestation in many parts of the tropics. The resulting loss of forest carbon stocks seems likely to more than overcome any savings in net greenhouse gas emissions that result from substituting ethanol for fossil fuels. Increased fluxes of N2O from the expanded use of fertilizer may also push the corn-ethanol system into having worse consequences on global warming that the use of oil. Other consequences of expanded biofuel production may include loss of biotic diversity, increased pressures on freshwater use, expansion of confined animal feeding operations based on wastes from ethanol plants, and degradation of local air quality.

The International Council of Science (ICSU) has established the International SCOPE Biofuels Project to evaluate the positive and negative consequences of various biofuel technologies on the environment, and I have been chair of this effort since December. We will have a “rapid assessment” workshop in Germany in the fall to take a comprehensive global look. We hope to follow up with more detailed regional assessments over the next few years. There was little if any objective analysis of the consequences of the expanded production of ethanol from corn before the US set out on the path 3 years ago. Our goal is to provide this analysis before society invests in other future biofuel paths such as the “second generation” production of ethanol from cellulose. Details about our project can be found at : http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/howarth/SCOPEBiofuels_home.html

The Council of Scientific Society Presidents (of which CERF is part) has also become interested in the biofuel issue. I am now chair of their Committee on Energy, Population, and Environment. Look for an upcoming position statement from this group in the fall.