Word: absorbability
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...back for a progressive emissions policy while blaming global warming for the wacky weather--a connection that is debatable when it comes down to any specific calamity. What experts do agree on is that industrial farming, deforestation and the loss of meadows have reduced the ground's ability to absorb water, which probably contributed to the severity of the floods...
CARBON CREDIT OFFSETS Under the Kyoto treaty to combat global warming, Western Europe and Japan must reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. (The U.S. has refused to ratify the treaty.) One way to reach the target involves paying poorer countries to keep their land under forests, which absorb carbon from the atmosphere. For example, Japan could pay Peru not to log rain forest. The amount of carbon absorbed by those trees would then be counted as a credit on Japan's carbon-emission balance sheet. "This would reverse a trend in human history," says Irvin. "Suddenly land is more valuable...
...results were predictably disastrous. The surrounding countryside lost its ability to absorb water from the Yangtze as it flowed from the Tibetan plateau to Shanghai, passing 400 million people along the way. The government tried building dikes and sluices; its ultimate solution, the Three Gorges Dam, is now under construction upriver in Sichuan province. Yet even that grand ambition?turning the upper Yangtze into the world's biggest reservoir?probably won't stop downstream flooding in Hunan, which has four major rivers of its own that often overflow their banks...
...effect, to go with the flow. The government will move millions of people out of the flood plain around Dongting Lake. Many will give up rice farming for other businesses. Where their homes once stood will be a chain of shallow lakes and wetlands that can absorb the water that surges down the Yangtze and other rivers. Already 1.8 million people have moved, with another million expected to pack up over the coming year. That's roughly twice the number the government is forcibly relocating to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A trip along the lake's southwest...
...Giulia region of Italy. The river is 170 km long and up to 2 km wide in places. Although it often floods owing to heavy rainfall, it rarely rises more than 2 m above its average level because it's flanked on either side by meadows and forests that absorb excess water. Problems arise only along a 20-km stretch where the river banks have been built up and the water flow has been regulated by dams. In contrast, the Danube used to be surrounded by 26,000 sq km of meadows that acted as a buffer for flooding waters...