No abstract

T he United Nations Development Programme this month released its annual league table of countries judged according to their state of development. Who leads this ranking? The usual suspects: the United States, Canada and Australia are all among the top six. My own nation, Mongolia, languishes in 110th place. The UN goes out of its way to promote sustainable development, yet the Human Development Index (HDI) mostly ignores sustainability. Worse still, the index celebrates gas-guzzling developed nations. It is time that this failure-hidden in plain sight-was exposed and corrected. The HDI has set straightforward benchmarks for countries and international organizations for more than 20 years. Its success and influence owes much to its simplicity. The index brilliantly summarizes development and quality of life in a given country using health, education and income levels. Yet it fails to cover an increasingly crucial question: how responsible is that development? With Earth's human population reaching 7 billion in the past month, it is reasonable to question the UN's true commitment to sustainability. In the current HDI, developed nations and oilrich countries are placed highly without regard to how much their development paths cost the planet and imperil humanity's future development. There is an assumption that natural resources are unlimited, and little regard is given to the fundamental changes to Earth's biological, physical and chemical processes that result from development. Either we have unbridled optimism that a miracle will occur, or our scepticism about our ability to overcome this massive challenge is so paralysing that we do not even bother to try. In 1992, the first UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, defined the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social and environ mental growth. Globally, humanity has had remarkable success with the first two of these. But we have failed to tackle all three dimensions simultaneously, owing to reductionism, fragmentation, division and territoriality. The HDI is emblematic of this fragmented approach. As the UN prepares to return to Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit 2012, it must lead by example. From next year, it should change the way it calculates the HDI. The revised index should include each nation's per capita carbon emissions, and so become a Human Sustainable Development Index (HSDI). Per capita emissions are a simple, available and quantifiable indicator, and this month's report announcing the HDI did include some important analysis of them. Emissions are positively and strongly correlated with income; less so with the HDI; and not at all with health and education. And in general, the

No abstract

Lake area is an important indicator for climate change and its relationship with climatic factors is critical for understanding the mechanisms that control lake level changes. In this study, lake area changes and their relations to precipitation were investigated using multi-temporal Landsat Thermatic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thermatic Mapper plus (ETM+) images collected from 10 different regions of Mongolia since the late 1980s. A linear-regression analysis was applied to examine the relationship between precipitation and lake area change for each region and across different regions of Mongolia. The relationships were interpreted in terms of regional climate regime and hydromorphological characteristics. A total of 165 lakes with areas greater than 10 hm 2 were identified from the Landsat images, which were aggregated for each region to estimate the regional lake area. Temporal lake area variability was larger in the Gobi regions, where small lakes are densely distributed. The regression analyses indicated that the regional patterns of precipitation-driven lake area changes varied considerably (R 2 =0.028-0.950), depending on regional climate regime and hydromorphological characteristics. Generally, the lake area change in the hot-and-dry Gobi regions showed higher correlations with precipitation change. The precedent two-month precipitation was the best determining factor of lake area change across Mongolia. Our results indicate the usefulness of regression analysis based on satellite-derived multi-temporal lake area data to identify regions where factors other than precipitation might play important roles in determining lake area change.

No abstract