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Pollutants found in spring water outside Kadena Air Base

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Pollutants found in spring water outside Kadena Air Base

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High concentrations of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, were found during two underground-water surveys in June and July.
They have been known to cause tumors, increases in body and organ weight and death in animals.“It is pretty certain that Kadena Air Base is causing the high PFOS by using firefighting foam containing PFOS at the flight line; however, we haven’t been able to investigate on their side to make a definitive determination,” the enterprise bureau spokesman said.

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CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa - Residents of a town near Kadena Air Base are being told to stay away from untreated spring water after high levels of a banned pollutant were detected last year.

High concentrations of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, were found during two underground-water surveys in June and July, according to an assessment released April 26 by the Okinawa Prefectural Enterprise Bureau, administrators of the island's water supply and quality.

"We talked to the neighborhood assemblies to tell their district people not to drink the water in these areas," a Kadena town spokesman told Stars and Stripes Tuesday. "In these spots, there are animals, like small fish, and local kids play in the water. We have asked the prefectural government to do further research to determine where these chemicals are coming from as well as study the effect on crops as there is a farming area nearby."

The spokesman discussed matters related to pollution on the Japanese customary condition of anonymity.

PFOS and PFOA are synthetic, fully fluorinated organic acids, which are virtually the same, though their concentrations differ depending on the product, Okinawan officials previously told Stars and Stripes. They are found in firefighting foam, aircraft grease, water-repellant materials and fluorine chemicals. They have been known to cause tumors, increases in body and organ weight and death in animals.

U.S. military officials in Japan say the source of the PFOS and PFOA pollution on Okinawa is not necessarily U.S. military facilities. They have also begun phasing out old aircraft firefighting foam with one featuring a new formulation.

Expanded testing

Japan has no guidelines on how much of the acids are safe, but health advisories in the United States are issued for drinking water at levels of 0.07 micrograms per liter and above. Their manufacture and importation have been prohibited in Japan since 2010.

Enterprise bureau officials on Okinawa periodically test for the pollutants at two sites not far from Kadena Air Base. Both are intake pumps for the Hija and Nagata rivers and are approximately a half-mile from the fence line, officials said.

However, in summer 2018, they expanded their testing to 19 sites surrounding the intake pumps because of past high levels. Some of the sites are about a half-mile from the fence line while others are closer.

Of the 19 spots tested, 13 exceeded safe U.S. drinking water standards, the enterprise bureau report states. Five sites exceeded the capacity of the bureau's testing equipment, which was designed to accurately test up to 1 microgram per liter for PFOS or PFOA.

On June 26, Yara Shiriga's PFOS level was 1.766 micrograms, Yara Ubuga was 2.821 and the lower Hija River pump intake area was 2.145. All of these sites are in Kadena town.

A month later they were 1.673, 3.128 and 1.337, respectively.

High levels of PFOS were also detected at Yara Hijaga, which was 3.085 on June 11 and 2.901 on June 26.

Prefectural officials have been reporting high levels of these pollutant compounds around U.S. military bases on the island for years. In response to these most recent tests, signs were posted to ensure locals stay away.

Drinking water on and off base is considered safe, a bureau spokesman added. The water on and off base - supplied to Kadena and the surrounding area by the Chatan Water Treatment Plant - averages 0.029 micrograms of PFOS and PFOA collectively per liter after being treated, though it has been clocked as high as 0.063.

The plant also provides water to Okinawa City, Ginowan, Urasoe, Naha, Chatan, Kitanakagusuku and Nakagusuku.

The 2018 average for water treatment plants in Ishikawa, Nago and Nishihara were all less than 0.01 micrograms per liter. These treatment plants are in southern, central and northern Okinawa and are not near any military air bases.

Placing blame

Okinawan officials said they believe the pollution is coming from Kadena Air Base; however, they cannot be sure because they don't have base access.

"It is pretty certain that Kadena Air Base is causing the high PFOS by using firefighting foam containing PFOS at the flight line; however, we haven't been able to investigate on their side to make a definitive determination," the enterprise bureau spokesman said. We "asked Okinawa Defense Bureau to demand Kadena stop using the firefighting foam containing PFOS and disclose the record of usage in January 2016."

Bureau officials said they were told in February 2016 the foam would be replaced with one not containing the pollutants.

There have been similar issues reported at nearby Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. Seven sites exceeded healthy U.S. drinking water standards in prefectural testing over the winter, an Okinawa Prefectural Government spokesman said Tuesday.

"High PFOS levels keep being detected in wells below the Futenma flight line," the spokesman said. "We can't go onto the base to test or investigate but the probability is pretty high that it comes from [aircraft] firefighting foam. We have asked Futenma to give us details on usage of the [foam] but we haven't had any luck."

During a lengthy interview with USFJ officials on the topic between January and March, spokesman Marine Capt. Michael Hopkins said the pollution could have come from a variety of sources.

He also said Japanese government officials have been allowed to investigate on Kadena Air Base per established bilateral agreements, and that they agree with this assessment.

"It would be inappropriate to speculate where the presence of PFOS and PFOA in off base waterways originated," Hopkins wrote to Stars and Stripes in January.

"The U.S. works diligently to comply with the Japan Environmental Governing Standards and Department of Defense instructions. The U.S. is and will continue to work with the Government of Japan in a methodical and tiered approach on the issue."

Foam phase-out

Kadena currently has the compounds in one active foam fire-suppression system, scheduled to be replaced in the near future, and two deactivated systems, which cannot be used, Hopkins said in March.

"Industry standard practice is for the [foam] concentrate to remain in the fire suppression system for extended periods," he said. "The Government of Japan recognizes the continued use of firefighting foam containing PFOS, as change out takes time."

The air base is transitioning to an aircraft firefighting foam that is PFOS free and contains only trace amounts of PFOA, Hopkins said. Foam containing the pollutants has already been "swapped out" of the air base's emergency vehicles.

The Marine Corps will be phasing out the foam over the next "several years," Hopkins said. Starting in March 2016, water has been used in all firefighting training at Futenma.

A sign posted by town officials to warn people not to drink nearby polluted spring water is pictured in Kadena, Okinawa, Friday, May 10, 2019.
CARLOS VAZQUEZ/STARS AND STRIPES

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Okinawa residents warned about pollutants in spring water outside Kadena Air Base

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CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa - Residents of a town near Kadena Air Base are being told to stay away from untreated spring water after high levels of a banned pollutant were detected last year.

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An EU palm oil ban, designed to protect tropical forests, might instead harm the livelihoods of farmers and increase forest loss if countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia switch to markets with fewer environmental checks and balances.

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Anyone lucky enough to visit Ghana could do worse than order a plate of boiled yam and red-red - a stew made with beans and tomato paste. A Sunday morning treat in Europe might be homemade crepes and hazelnut chocolate spread. Both of these meals - though part of very different cuisines and eaten in different places - contain palm oil, an edible vegetable oil extracted from the fruit of the oil palm ( Elaeis guineensis).

The link between palm oil production and deforestation in the tropical regions where it is grown is well known, but few people realise how prevalent palm oil is in items consumed every day, such as cleaning products and biodiesel.

Global production of palm oil has increased rapidly since the 1990s, with plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia supplying around 85% of the global trade.

Read more: Message to the EU: you have the chance to stop fuelling devastation in the Amazon

Many of these plantations have replaced natural forests and drained carbon-rich peatlands. In Indonesia alone, palm oil is cultivated by more than 4 million smallholder farmers, employing more than 7 million labourers throughout its supply chain, and in 2017 exports contributed over USD$23 billion to the country's economy.

The European Parliament issued a resolution in 2017 to phase out and eventually ban biofuels made from palm oil. The proposed ban could reduce demand for palm oil, but many, including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, aren't sure it will be effective in stemming deforestation. Malaysian farmers meanwhile argue it will harm their livelihoods..

A ban could even harm the environment by ending efforts to work with countries that are developing sustainable palm oil production that can also reduce poverty.

Ahmad Yusni/EPA

More harm than good?

Just under half of the EU's palm oil imports are used for biodiesel. Despite the importance of palm oil to Indonesia's economy, the impact of any EU ban would likely be small. Indonesia exports two thirds of its biodiesel production, but only around one fifth of that goes to EU countries.

Indonesia might compensate for lost sales in the EU by increasing sales to large importers such as India and China. An EU ban could set back Indonesia's efforts to manage its forests and palm oil trade more sustainably as these customers aren't currently committed to sustainable sourcing. Unintended consequences like these highlight why bans can be crude policy instruments.

The EU ruled that renewable fuels such as biodiesel must comprise 10% of transport fuel by 2020. This was intended as an implicit ban on fossil fuels comprising the final 10% of vehicle diesel, but banning particular crops like palm oil for biofuels and keeping a biofuel requirement simply diverts the problem. This is particularly so if the EU continues to meet the 10% requirement using "first generation" biofuels - those derived directly from food crops, such as soy or rapeseed.

Replacing food crops to meet increased demand for bio-ethanol production places pressure on land and could increase global food prices, hurting low-income households most.

Better approaches would target the interconnected problems of carbon emissions, deforestation and poverty. EU countries could support the sustainable cultivation of palm oil, breaking the link between oil palm expansion and deforestation in producer countries. One way to do this is planting on degraded land rather than replacing forest. This avoids the negative impact of a ban on the livelihoods of millions of farmers.

Demand for fossil fuels could be reduced more effectively by making public transport more accessible, affordable and reliable. Incentives for people to buy electric cars, through subsidy and a higher density of charging points, could also help.

Karnizz/Shutterstock

Indonesia and the EU have already worked together on this issue with some success. A voluntary partnership agreement between the two in 2003 helped Indonesia reduce illegal logging and export timber to the EU. But given that most of Indonesia's palm oil exports go to countries outside of the EU, a global approach is needed.

The UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre investigates the sustainable trade in forest products. It hopes to understand how incentives for supplier and producer countries can ensure trade improves livelihoods, prosperity and the natural environment.

In an increasingly interconnected world, seemingly sensible decisions made in one place can have unintended consequences elsewhere. An EU palm oil ban, designed to protect tropical forests, might instead harm the livelihoods of farmers and increase forest loss if countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia switch to markets with fewer environmental checks and balances.
This article was amended on May 9 2019 to make clearer that an EU ban has not yet been enacted.

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Palm oil: an EU ban won't save Asian rainforests, but here's what might help

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Anyone lucky enough to visit Ghana could do worse than order a plate of boiled yam and red-red - a stew made with beans and tomato paste. A Sunday morning treat in Europe might be homemade crepes and hazelnut chocolate spread.

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Sustainable Palm Oil Replacement Found in Coffee

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Sustainable Palm Oil Replacement Found in Coffee

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Former coffee shop workers believe they can extract sustainable oil from used coffee grounds, potentially reducing palm oil deforestation and food waste.

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Senior Editor, UK | Contactable via charlotte@livekindly.co

Two entrepreneurs have found a potential palm oil replacement in coffee waste.

Former coffee shop workers Scott Kennedy and Fergus Moore - both from Scotland - believe they can extract oil from used coffee grounds.

The idea could potentially help reduce palm oil deforestation and food waste simultaneously.

Moore told BBC Scotland, "about 60% of a cafe's waste is about coffee grounds. In Scotland, that amounts to about 40,000 tonnes a year - across the UK, more than half a million tonnes." He added, "coffee grounds are so heavy that it takes their waste bill through the roof."

Despite a lack of background in engineering, Kennedy and Moore have started their own sustainable oil company called Revive Eco.

The pair have already received £235,000 in funding from the Zero Waste Scotland agency. They will be in the running for around £776,000 when they compete against 19 other global companies in the Chivas Venture competition.

"The most exciting part for us is that [the coffee grounds] have all the same components as palm," continued Moore. "Palm oil's in the news for all the wrong reasons. It's really exciting for us that we could potentially provide a local and more sustainable alternative to all the industries that are currently using palm oil."

The Palm Oil Problem

Palm oil is a vegetable oil taken from the fruit on the African oil palm tree - despite its name, the tree can be found in Africa, Asia, South America, and North America. It's added to everything, from food, to fuel, to cosmetics, to cleaning products.

According to Rainforest Rescue, this demand for the oil has led to deforestation, a loss of biodiversity, and the displacement of indigenous peoples.

The organization notes that more than half of palm oil imported to the EU is used for fuel. It explains, "Only 70,000 orangutans still roam the forests of Southeast Asia, yet the EU's biofuels policy is pushing them to the brink of extinction. Every new plantation on Borneo is destroying a further piece of their habitat."

In December 2018, Norway became the first country to ban palm oil-based biofuel. Some companies, like Virgin Atlantic and UK supermarket chain Iceland, have also chosen to boycott palm oil in favor of alternatives.

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Sustainable Palm Oil Replacement Found in Coffee

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Senior Editor, UK | Contactable via charlotte@livekindly.co Two entrepreneurs have found a potential palm oil replacement in coffee waste. Former coffee shop workers Scott Kennedy and Fergus Moore - both from Scotland - believe they can extract oil from used coffee grounds. The idea could potentially help reduce palm oil deforestation and food waste simultaneously.

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Our plastic footprint sinks, right to the bottom of the sea

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Our plastic footprint sinks, right to the bottom of the sea

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Both macro plastics and micro plastics rain down into the deep ocean, and that’s how plastic gets in places like the Mariana Trench. Plastic has toxins in it — things like PCBs, BPA, and phthalates.  They stick around in a process called bio magnification, higher-level predators, like us, tend to build up higher and more dangerous concentrations.

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All that trash breaks down into tiny particles, practically invisible to the naked eye, called microplastics. In the past decade or so, scientists have started finding plastics and microplastics in every part of the ocean they've visited.

Microplastics are suspended all through the ocean, at every depth, and buried in the seafloor, too, Rotjan said. They are more like flecks of spice and seasoning distributed through a bowl of soup than spots of fat you can skim off the surface.

Though Rotjan spends a lot of her time studying plastics, she doesn't particularly want to be a plastics researcher.

"I don't really have a choice," she said. "Plastic keeps showing up in all of our samples. Every sample we've looked at, in any ecosystem that we've looked at across the globe, plastic has been part of the story, and it's been impossible to ignore."

Plastic entrenched

Even there, in a protected area, in one of the most remote places on Earth, scientists finds plastics enmeshed in samples they take from the sea's surface.

"And those are all typically microplastics that are floating in a place that's so far away, that the closest people to us when we're out there are on the International Space Station," Rotjan said.

Rotjan and other researchers are starting to suspect that there's no part of the ocean left untouched by plastic. Recently, a study found, for the first time, that tiny deep-sea creatures living in the Pacific's Mariana Trench are eating staggering amounts of plastic.

The Mariana Trench is 36,000 feet below sea level. It's a zone where the ocean floor is sinking into the interior of the Earth, going deeper and deeper until it melts. If you were to take Mount Everest and drop it in the deepest part of the trench, you'd still have more than a mile of water above it.

Even in that abyss, there's life. Specifically, little shrimplike creatures called amphipods, about the size of the pull-tab on a soda can.

Journey to the sea

To understand how plastic ends up in the deep sea, we have to look to land.

Every year, "8 million tons of plastic leave land, down drains, streams, rivers, and waterways flowing into the ocean," said , the co-founder of eXXpedition , a group that runs all-women sailing voyages around the world to raise awareness about plastic pollution.

That's equal to dumping a garbage truck full of plastic into the ocean every minute.

All that garbage is considered macroplastic, which ends up in the ocean. It's worn down by the sun's UV rays, waves, and wind action, and eventually becomes microplastic.

There are also a couple big, direct sources of microplastics: as your car tires wear down, little fibers come off and go down storm drains. Then there are the fibers that come off the synthetic fabrics we wash in our washing machines. Think of all the stuff in your dryer lint, draining into the ocean.

Of the 8 million tons of plastic that leave land every year, researchers estimate only a quarter-million ton is floating on the ocean's surface. So the big question is: Where is the rest of it?

"What we expect is happening is that it's actually sinking," Penn said. "Particularly when it gets out to these deep parts of the world, and it gets coated in algae, it gets barnacles that grow on it -and then that makes that plastic heavier than water and it sinks to bottom."

Both macroplastics and microplastics rain down into the deep ocean, and that's how plastic gets in places like the Mariana Trench - and ends up in our deep-sea friends, the amphipods. Rotjan, the marine ecologist, said plastic in these little guys' guts is a big deal.

"It has the potential to crash food webs, right?" she said. "Their bellies are full, but they have no nutrition because they're full of microplastics instead of food. I mean, that just doesn't bode well for the continuation of healthy marine ecosystems."

Plastic and us

Those plastics could come back to us. After all, we're at the top of those food webs.

For Angelo Villagomez, who grew up in Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, plastic and PCB pollution in the Mariana Trench isn't some distant problem.

"I don't think of it as this far off place. I think of it as there's plastic and pollution in my backyard. And this is the backyard where we're catching our dinner - that's where we got most of our food," said Villagomez, who now works for the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy Project, based in Washington, D.C., fighting for the creation of marine protected areas.

The possibility that plastics are entering wild food chains particularly affects indigenous communities, Villagomez added. His own family is Chamorro, the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands.

"Indigenous people as a whole, our diets consist of wild animals more than other folks'," he said. "So if these poisons are leaching into the food that we're eating, those poisons are then leaching into us."

When we eat seafood, we're not directly eating much plastic, because most of us don't eat the stomachs of fish. But the concern is all these toxins are seeping from the guts of marine animals into the rest of their bodies, and making their way up the food web.

It might be decades before scientists have proof of cause and effect. Plastic is hard to study in humans for a couple reasons. First, it's impossible to find a control group of people not exposed to plastics - we're all exposed - all the time. And second, many of the problems that might be linked to plastic - like cancer or reproductive problems - can take a long time to develop.

But Penn, of eXXpedition, feels there's enough cause for concern that countries need to come together to tackle the ocean plastic problem now.

The fact that the deep sea may be the largest reservoir of plastic waste on the planet makes cleanup really tricky, she said. "It goes from what was already a hard challenge - cleaning up on the surface of the ocean - to a near impossible challenge, when we talk about cleaning up plastic on the seabed, which might be five miles down."

So our best bet, Penn said, is to reduce the amount of plastic we're using on land. Since our lives are so intertwined with plastic, advocates say, it's going to take a multipronged effort to change things.

They say the big polluters in industry have a responsibility to reduce their plastic footprints and come up with solutions, such as compostable materials, or new ways to reuse discarded plastics. In addition, governments should incentivize and support these shifts. A good first step would be standardizing the plastic we use to just the few types that can be recycled, and implementing a deposit return scheme. That could do a lot to increase recycling rates, Penn said.

Lastly, advocates recommend that consumers try to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives - particularly single-use plastics, like that styrofoam cup you use one time and throw away. Because plastic is a material that's designed to last forever, using it one time doesn't make much sense.

The good news is, the ocean is resilient and generous.

"If we can just work out our little piece here on land," Penn said, "we can enjoy the benefits that the ocean brings us - the oxygen in the air that we breathe, the water we drink, the foods that we eat - for many more generations."

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How do plastics get to the bottom of the sea?

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All that trash breaks down into tiny particles, practically invisible to the naked eye, called microplastics. In the past decade or so, scientists have started finding plastics and microplastics in every part of the ocean they've visited. Microplastics are suspended all through the ocean, at every depth, and buried in the seafloor, too, Rotjan said.

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How the food industry can help slow biodiversity loss

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How the food industry can help slow biodiversity loss

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More consumers are becoming aware of the companies they are purchasing from, causing organic farming to become a trend. Organic farming is more beneficial to conventional farming methods and is lowering the risk of biodiversity loss.

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Most Europeans are concerned about the loss of biodiversity, according to a Eurobarometer survey on the topic ​. Of the more than 27,000 people interviewed, over 70% said that they were aware of issues around biodiversity - a marked increase from previous years.

The vast majority of citizens, 96%, believe we have a responsibility to look after nature. But beyond this, people are coming to recognise the importance of biodiversity for production and economic growth: 91% agree that biodiversity is "indispensable" ​ for the production of food and 92% state it is necessary for long-term economic development.

According to European authorities, pollution, man-made disasters and climate change are perceived as the "biggest threats" ​ to biodiversity. The report noted the link between food production systems and biodiversity loss are also more understood by consumers today than at the time of the last Eurobarometer survey in 2015.

"Intensive farming, intensive forestry and over-fishing - by far the most important drivers of biodiversity loss - are increasingly but not yet fully recognised as major threats to biodiversity," ​ the report stated.

Almost every second European citizen considers intensive farming, intensive forestry and over-fishing as a threat to biodiversity.

The release of the survey was timed to coincide with new research from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). In a hard-hitting warning, IPBES spoke of the "unprecedented"​ and "dangerous" ​ decline of biodiversity as species extinction rates accelerate.

IPBES chair, Sir Robert Watson, said the global assessment presents an " ominous picture ​" with around one million animal and plant species threatened with extinction.

"The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide," ​ he said.

Nevertheless, Watson said, it is "not too late" ​.

"Through 'transformative change', nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably - this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values. ​

"By its very nature, transformative change can expect opposition from those with interests vested in the status quo, but also that such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good." ​

Consumer concern a catalyst for change?

Echoing the trends identified by the Eurobarometer study, the Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT) also identified increasing consumer awareness of biodiversity.

Since 2009, the UEBT has surveyed 68,000 consumers across 16 countries.

"The results show that awareness and understanding of biodiversity around the world grow year after year," ​ Rik Kutsch Lojenga, UEBT executive director, told FoodNavigator.

"Young consumers are particularly well informed and biodiversity is slowly becoming a mainstream concept for consumers. 'Gen Next' and millennials have the highest awareness of biodiversity, can identify brands that respect biodiversity and are most demanding of companies." ​

Significantly, consumers increasingly associate biodiversity conservation with their personal wellbeing - as well as that of future generations. This means they want to "personally contribute"​ to the conversation and most respect food makers who "walk the walk", ​Lojenga observed.​

As in other areas of sustainable development, rising consumer awareness is likely to have important consequences for consumption patterns, the environmental economics expert suggested. "We found that respecting people and biodiversity in purchases is a growing concern, as consumers understand their potential to make a positive contribution to society - this makes them feel good." ​

Catherine Thompson, head of innovation at UK NGO Fairtrade, agreed that biodiversity "should be an incredibly important consumer issue ​". However, she added, while consumers expect brands to tackle sustainability challenges generally, it can be difficult to convey the complexity of the problem.

"Recent research carried out by Fairtrade and 20 partners as part of a three-year project called Trade Fair, Live Fair found that regardless of age, income or gender, consumers do consistently think it's important for food brands to take action on key sustainability issues, including tackling global poverty, climate change and environmental protection. 88% of the surveyed consumers said they want brands to take action on environmental protection. It is incredibly difficult, however, for consumers to understand and meaningfully respond to complex systemic challenges within global supply chains such as a drastic reduction in biodiversity," ​ she said.

The business case: 'A matter of long-term survival'

It is nevertheless incumbent upon the food industry to take action to mitigate the impact of food production on biodiversity.

The basis of a healthy and resilient farming system is a high level of genetic biodiversity both in the environment and on the farm. The preservation of biodiversity is crucial for food security and therefore the long-term health of food businesses.

And there is evidence that business is increasingly acknowledging the need to act. As part of its Biodiversity Barometer, UEBT assesses each year the reporting of the 100 food companies. From 2009 to 2019 the number of companies mentioning biodiversity in their supply chains went up from 53% to 76%.

"Biodiversity is rapidly becoming an issue of key importance for the food industry," ​ UEBT's Lojenga asserted.

"The links between biodiversity and the food sector are multiple: pollination, maintaining genetic variety to combat diseases, access to raw materials for sourcing. Attention to biodiversity is matter of long-term survival for the food industry." ​

What should be done?

First and foremost, Lojenga believes that transparency and traceability in supply chains is a must. "Traceability is a must, and cultivation practices need to include measures to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity in sourcing areas. Some companies are already doing this, but it is not mainstream practice yet," ​ he noted.

Fairtrade's Thompson also stressed that farmers need to be empowered to act on biodiversity by receiving a fair price for their products.

"We believe that farmers are best-positioned to address local environmental problems, including biodiversity, when their livelihoods are secure and sustainable. When farmers are assured of decent prices for their products and are given the opportunity to make investments to protect their local environment, farmers do work towards sustainable agriculture practices and make investments in protecting their local environment," ​ she told FoodNavigator.

"For many years, Fairtrade's standards have included an entire section devoted to biodiversity and environmental protection which all Fairtrade certified producer organisations are required to meet, and there are lots of examples of projects that producers have done to further support biodiversity in their local community." ​

Fairtrade recently launched an app that aims to provide farmers with information on pesticides usage. The Pesticides and Alternatives app delivers scientific knowledge directly to the phones of farmers so they can identify the least toxic pest control methods for their crop and typical pests. It contains information on non-chemical pest control alternatives from agricultural knowledge resource CABI for 2700 pests and diseases.

While Thompson believes that access to this kind of data can facilitate more sustainable practices, she said that this kind of solution in isolation is not enough. "This new Pesticides and Alternatives app is important to support farmers to access the information they need in order to move to more sustainable agricultural practices, but food tech innovations such as this are not enough alone to deliver transformative change. ​

"We need to think and act systemically to fundamentally change our food systems and consumption in order to safeguard the future of our ecosystem in a way that protects the human rights of people across the globe." ​

Agricultural practices and biodiversity

The use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers is a major driver of biodiversity loss - and this means that organic farming is beneficial for biodiversity compared to conventional production methods, according to organic body IFOAM-EU.

"Specialised and high-input industrial farming practices going hand in hand with the abundant use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides lead to uniform landscapes and a severe loss of biodiversity. Organic agriculture is a holistic farming system working with living ecological systems and cycles," ​ a spokesperson told FoodNavigator.

"The low price of food comes at a cost: society bears the costs of pesticides' and fertilisers' negative impact on the environment." ​

Indeed, according to one study ​, organic farms increase pollination and host 30% more animal species and 50% more fauna than conventional farms.

This is also achieved by the conservation of hedgerows and ponds and planting of cover crops. It is also important that on-farm diversity is promoted and investments are made in breeding programmes, the spokesperson suggested. "More genetic diversity on farms is essential for the adaptability of plants and animals to local farming conditions. It makes plants more resilient to changes in weather patterns and forms the basis for natural disease and pest resistance." ​

Conventional farming is also adopting practices that favour biodiversity. For instance, in Ireland as part of Bord Bia's Origin Green programme over 10,000km of hedgerows have been planted.

It isn't just how we produce and price food that should be re-evaluated, IFOAM-EU said. It is also what we eat.

Globally, there are more than 50,000 edible plants - but we only eat around 150 of them and, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), just three species - rice, maize and wheat - account for 60% of the world's energy intake.

"The food sector should celebrate diversity and offer a variety of species to consumers rather than limit itself to producing and buying only a few species of plants and animals," ​the IFOAM-EU spokesperson argued.

"Bringing diversity into the food systems starts on the field. Farmers should have better access to local and adapted varieties, while supply chain actors and consumers should be involved in supplying and demanding a more diverse range of products. We should make people work together to develop new marketing strategies for biodiverse products." ​

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How the food industry can help slow biodiversity loss

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Most Europeans are concerned about the loss of biodiversity, according to a Eurobarometer survey on the topic ​. Of the more than 27,000 people interviewed, over 70% said that they were aware of issues around biodiversity - a marked increase from previous years.

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In alarming discovery, scientists find plastic in the stomachs of baby fish off Hawaii

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In alarming discovery, scientists find plastic in the stomachs of baby fish off Hawaii

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The scientists said plastic was everywhere in the nurseries.A NOAA oceanographer, said this is the first time that scientists have confirmed that larval (or just hatched) fish from tropical ecosystems are ingesting plastics.

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Scientists have discovered plastic in the stomachs of baby fish off the Big Island ― an alarming find that could have significant ramifications for the entire food web.

The discovery was made during a large NOAA project aimed at studying fish nurseries off Hawaii Island. Researchers wanted to look at what type of fish live in the nurseries ― and what they eat.

Turns out, they're eating microplastics, and there's concern that could kill them.

The scientists said plastic was everywhere in the nurseries. Most of it was tiny ― in pieces no bigger than a fraction of an inch. Some of it was so small it could only be seen with a microscope.

"A lot of the time, we found more plastic than fish," said NOAA biologist Jonathan Whitney. With dissections, they found "little tiny bits" of plastic in the gullets of all types of baby fish.

In fact, of the nine different types of baby fish they looked at, eight had plastic in their stomachs.

The findings, outlined in an article in the most recent issue of National Geographic magazine and under review by a scientific journal, underscore the scale of the plastics problem in the world's oceans.

Jamison Gove, a NOAA oceanographer, said this is the first time that scientists have confirmed that larval (or just hatched) fish from tropical ecosystems are ingesting plastics.

The discovery is particularly troubling because baby fish are at a vulnerable stage, and researchers don't yet know what consuming microplastics could mean for their chances of survival.

If plastic kills baby fish at high rates, it could have widespread impacts on Hawaii fisheries.

Another unknown question: How are the microplastics that baby fish consume affecting the food chain, and could they accumulate in bigger prey?

Gove said the research "adds to a growing body of evidence that shows plastics are really harmful to animals and to people."

"Plastics are this insidious issue," he said. "They really are getting into all facets of our life. The more science we can put out there, the greater the public awareness."

Those nurseries that Whitney and Gove are focusing their research on are actually naturally-occurring sea surface slicks ― they look like oil slicks by air ― that can be found off Hawaiian islands.

Researchers believe that baby fish actively seek out the slicks in search of food and protection. But currents also pull debris into the slicks and today, that debris includes lots of plastics.

One of the next steps in the research: Expanding the research to include baby fish that live in sea surface slicks off Oahu, Maui and other Hawaiian islands.

For more on the research, click here.
Copyright 2019 KHNL via Gray Television Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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scientists find plastic in the stomachs of baby fish off hawaii

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In alarming discovery, scientists find plastic in the stomachs of baby fish off Hawaii

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Scientists have discovered plastic in the stomachs of baby fish off the Big Island ― an alarming find that could have significant ramifications for the entire food web. The discovery was made during a large NOAA project aimed at studying fish nurseries off Hawaii Island.

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How India is solving its cooling challenge

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How India is solving its cooling challenge

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Especially for the most vulnerable members of society, cooling access is a climate justice and equality issue. The direct and indirect emissions from room ACs alone could contribute to as much as a 0.5 degree Celsius increase in global warming by 2100.To promote the adoption of more energy-efficient ACs, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency defines the minimum energy performance standards for ACs and has been raising this efficiency performance requirement at nearly 3% every year.

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How India is solving its cooling challenge

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As the planet heats up, societies are looking for a way to cool the most vulnerable without adding to climate change. Nowhere is this double-headed problem more severe than India.

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Revealed: air pollution may be damaging ‘every organ in the body’

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Revealed: air pollution may be damaging ‘every organ in the body’

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The research shows head-to-toe harm, from heart and lung disease to diabetes and dementia, and from liver problems and bladder cancer to brittle bones and damaged skin. Fertility, foetuses and children are also affected by toxic air, the review found.

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Revealed: air pollution may be damaging ‘every organ in the body’

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Exclusive: Comprehensive analysis finds harm from head to toe, including dementia, heart and lung disease, fertility problems and reduced intelligence

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The Evidence Is Strong: Air Pollution Seems to Cause Dementia

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The Evidence Is Strong: Air Pollution Seems to Cause Dementia

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“air pollution is just as bad as cigarette smoke.” This evidence arrives alongside the alarming news that air quality is actually worsening for many cities.Those exposed to higher levels of air pollutants, particularly nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter released by fossil fuel combustion, were significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease

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A few years ago I stood in a cramped trailer beside the busy 110 freeway in Los Angeles as researchers at the University of Southern California gathered soot thrown off by vehicles pounding by just a few yards from their instruments, which rattled whenever a heavy truck passed. I was there to learn about how scientists were beginning to link air pollution-from power plants, motor vehicles, forest fires, you name it-to one of the least understood and most frightening of illnesses: dementia.

At that time, as I reported in Mother Jones, the research implicating air pollution as one factor that can contribute to dementia was alarming, consistent, and, ultimately, "suggestive." Since then scientists have published a wave of studies that reveal that air pollution is much worse for us than we had previously imagined. The evidence is so compelling, in fact, that many leading researchers now believe it's conclusive. "I have no hesitation whatsoever to say that air pollution causes dementia," says Caleb Finch, gerontologist and the leader of USC's Air Pollution and Brain Disease research network, which has completed many of these new studies. In terms of its effects on our health and welfare, Finch says, "air pollution is just as bad as cigarette smoke." This evidence arrives alongside the alarming news that air quality is actually worsening for many cities in the United States, while the Trump administration continues its effort to delay or roll back environmental safeguards.

What makes Finch-and the half dozen other researchers I talked to-so sure? Of all the new research, three studies in particular paint a stark picture of the extent to which the quality of our air can determine whether we will age with our minds intact. In one from 2018, researchers followed 130,000 older adults living in London for several years. Those exposed to higher levels of air pollutants, particularly nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter released by fossil fuel combustion, were significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease-the most common kind of dementia-than their otherwise demographically matched peers. In total, Londoners exposed to the highest levels of air pollution were about one and a half times more likely to develop Alzheimer's across the study period than their neighbors exposed to the lowest levels-a replication of previous findings from Taiwan, where air pollution levels are much higher.

A 2017 study published in The Lancet followed all adults living in Ontario (roughly 6.5 million people) for over a decade and found that those who lived closer to major high-traffic roads were significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease across the study period, regardless of their health at baseline or socioeconomic status. Both of these studies estimated that around 6 to 7 percent of all dementia cases in their samples could be attributed to air pollution exposures.

Those studies from the UK and Canada are certainly intriguing, but the most compelling, and least reported on, study comes from the United States. It was also, incidentally, inspired by our previous reporting.

Following our early report on the link between air pollution and dementia, three economists at Arizona State University-Kelly Bishop, Nicolai Kuminoff, and Jonathan Ketcham-decided to pursue a large-scale investigation of the issue. "We found the Mother Jones article compelling," Ketcham says. "It was informative about the plausible pathways and the need for more rigorous studies that could test causality."

Ultimately, Bishop, Kuminoff, and Ketcham decided to link EPA air quality data to 15 years of Medicare records for 6.9 million Americans over the age of 65. Rather than simply ask if Americans exposed to more air pollution developed dementia at higher rates, the team identified a quasi-natural experiment that arbitrarily separated Americans into higher and lower air pollution exposure groups. In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency targeted 132 counties in 21 states for increased regulation because they were found to be in violation of new air quality standards for fine particulate matter pollution. Residents of those counties consequently saw their air quality improve at a faster rate than their demographically matched peers living in other counties who, initially, had equal exposures but lived in counties with pollution levels that just barely fell below the new air quality standards.

This quirk of different standards across the country allowed the researchers to ask if a manipulated decrease in air pollution exposure actually led to fewer cases of dementia, from Alzheimer's or other dementing diseases, like strokes. This overcame a significant limitation of the other existing studies, which could only compare differences in exposure and disease arising "naturally" among people who lived in different places rather than by a planned intervention. "If people who have lower levels of education, who are less wealthy, and who are less healthy for reasons that we can't observe end up living in more polluted areas," says Ketcham, "it's difficult to say which of those factors could have led to disease."

As they reported in the National Bureau of Economic Research last year, Bishop, Kuminoff, and Ketcham determined that air pollution could indeed cause dementia, specifically Alzheimer's dementia. In counties that had to quickly comply with the new air quality standards, older people developed Alzheimer's at lower rates than their peers in counties where the new rules didn't apply. Annual exposure to an average of one more microgram of fine particle pollution per cubic meter of air (an amount well within the range of difference you could see if you moved from a clean neighborhood to a more polluted neighborhood) raised the typical US elder's risk of dementia as if they had aged 2.7 additional years. The authors estimated that the size of this elevated risk approached that of other well-known dementia drivers, including hypertension and heart disease.

All told, Ketcham says, enforcing the EPA's stricter air quality standard likely resulted in 140,000 fewer people living with dementia by 2014. He places the economic value of that avoided disease burden at around $163 billion.

Researchers now better understand what happens in the brain when you breathe polluted air-and how that can lead to neurodegeneration years later. When you inhale pollutants, the smallest particles, emitted by cars, power plants, and other places where fuel is burned, lodge in your lungs' sensitive tissue or pass into your bloodstream. In those places they trigger an immune response that seeks to trap, contain, and remove the invading particles. In time that response generalizes to what we call systemic inflammation, or an overactive, overly excited immune response across the body.

Systemic inflammation appears to be the primary way that air pollution harms the brain, says Caleb Finch. In early 2017 Finch and his colleagues showed that inflammation following air pollution exposure leads to the formation of Alzheimer's plaques in the brains of mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's pathology. "That was impressive," says George Martin, director emeritus of the University of Washington's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, who was not involved in the study. Because of that study, and others like it, Martin now believes that air pollution could be one potential cause of dementia, although he wants more evidence on the mechanisms, "and, ideally, on a specific component or components of air pollution."

In the coming years, these new findings could shape scientists' understanding of neurodegenerative disease. Because of these new studies, George Perry, chief scientist of the Brain Health Consortium at the University of Texas at San Antonio and editor in chief of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, says his "view of Alzheimer's is changing, and I think the field is changing with it." Perry now believes that air pollution is a potential risk factor for dementia, and his Alzheimer's journal will soon run a special issue devoted to the link between the two. Motivated, in part, by the new evidence, Perry also increasingly sees dementia as a disease like cancer, where multiple factors could lead to pathology. "People develop cancer without smoking or being exposed to air pollution," he says, "but each of those will raise your risk."

Unlike with smoking, we can't always know when we are being exposed to dirty air, and we can't decide when to quit. Yet Arizona State's Kuminoff firmly believes that we could avoid more dementia by strengthening our existing air pollution standards. If there is a safe level of exposure, he says, "we haven't gotten there yet."

More Great WIRED Stories

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The Evidence Is Strong: Air Pollution Seems to Cause Dementia

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A few years ago I stood in a cramped trailer beside the busy 110 freeway in Los Angeles as researchers at the University of Southern California gathered soot thrown off by vehicles pounding by just a few yards from their instruments, which rattled whenever a heavy truck passed.

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Drink craft beer, eat ancient grains and other ways to respond to the planet’s loss of biodiversity

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Drink craft beer, eat ancient grains and other ways to respond to the planet’s loss of biodiversity

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The refrain we hear, time and again, is that the only way we can feed our hungry planet is by cultivating vast monocultures of a handful of high-yielding plants (and animals). But when we shrink our diet to just a few select crops, we might be more efficient in the short run, but we increase long-term risks. One pest or disease, coupled with the volatility of a changing climate, can endanger them all.

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May 10
The headlines are, in a word, terrifying.

On Monday, the most comprehensive report on biodiversity to date - written by 455 experts representing 50 countries - revealed that one-eighth of the world's plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, a dramatic rupture in the rich diversity that underpins the very existence of life on Earth.

But this information should not come as a surprise. The report follows a landmark assessment released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in February that looked at biodiversity in food and agriculture. Researchers found that of the roughly 6,000 plant species used for food, only nine account for two-thirds of the world's crop production. One-third of global fish stocks are overfished. Most of our milk, meat and eggs comes from just a handful of animal species, and more than one-fourth of 8,000 local breeds of livestock are at risk of extinction.
[Why we're losing foods we love, why it matters, and how we can stop it]
Once lost, the report cautioned, agricultural biodiversity can't be recovered. That analysis was preceded by an earlier study reporting a "hyper-alarming" loss of insect biodiversity in the Americas - a shift one conservationist interviewed by The Washington Post described as "one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read."

The steady drumbeat of loss has become deafening.

From soil to seed to pollinator, plant to fish to animal, species that support and sustain us are in peril. This loss has (and will) impact our health, the quality of air and water, and the experiences we have in nature. But the place where we engage with it most directly - and have the greatest opportunity to affect change - is on our plates.

Pollution, overexploitation and overharvesting of agricultural resources, climate change, urbanization and changing diets have all played a role in the loss of agricultural biodiversity. But the biggest driver of change, according to the recent report, is how we use and manage our land and water. This shift is driven by industrialized agriculture, a system that emphasizes scale over sustainability. The way we grow and raise food now is compromising what we will be able to eat in the future.
['Hyperalarming' study shows massive insect loss]
The FAO report says that conservationists, breeders, farmers and many others are actively working to solve this challenge through practices such as organic agriculture, integrated pest management, sustainable soil management, ecosystem restoration and diversified approaches to fisheries and farm management.

But how can we, the eaters, take part?

We can start by looking at the bigger system. The refrain we hear, time and again, is that the only way we can feed our hungry planet is by cultivating vast monocultures of a handful of high-yielding plants (and animals). But when we shrink our diet to just a few select crops, we might be more efficient in the short run, but we increase long-term risks. One pest or disease, coupled with the volatility of a changing climate, can endanger them all.

While industries push for homogenization in the name of feeding people, the data show something different: Global agriculture produces more calories per person now than it did 60 years ago. We produce enough food but are falling short on access. Some of the lowest-paid people in the world work in food and agriculture: subsistence farmers, migrant laborers and fast-food workers who are not able to afford what they grow, raise and serve.

This is where our work begins - on a systemic level. The demand for increased amounts of cheap food is not the solution. We need to cultivate greater justice and more economic prosperity, fighting for not simply a minimum wage, but a living wage that allows all of us to feed ourselves well.

Food is more than fuel for our bodies. Nourishment is revealed through nutrient counts, for sure, but also through flavor, communion and the long stories of how food binds us together - and tears us apart.

Once you realize that, you can pursue a more biodiverse diet. Here's how to start:

Reconsider what, on the outside, looks like diversity at the grocery store. Scientists who analyzed 50 years of data on what 98 percent of the world eats found that, through globalization, we now have access to diverse foods from all over the world: mangoes in Michigan, Nordic salmon in New York and so on. But the global trend, they discovered, is toward the same types - and same amounts - of wheat, rice, corn, soybeans and palm oil.

Flip over any processed food and look at the ingredient list. Or take a walk down the produce or dairy aisle. Ninety percent of our dairy products come from one breed of cow. The world grows 1,000 varieties of bananas, but we see one - the Cavendish, a banana that is succumbing to a different strain of the same fungus that wiped out its predecessors.

Reach for the foods that extend beyond that small list of commodity crops. That was the simple response when I asked the lead researcher of the study how to respond to this challenge. Olive oil, craft beer and ancient grains are a good - and delicious - start.

Be curious. We save biodiverse plant and animal material in stored collections, in wild places and on farms. But farmers can't grow what we won't eat.

Seek out farmers markets and try new varieties. At farmers markets, you're more likely to find local and seasonal varieties of food. Look for what you may not find in your local grocery store: the mottled heirloom tomato, the multicolored farm eggs, the vegetable you have never seen before.

Take one bite, and then another and another. Psychologists have found that the way to get over our fears or aversions to certain foods is by understanding and experiencing more of them. Keep exploring. Our food choices matter. They shape and reshape our food system.

Savor what you have, whatever it is. Know where it comes from - and the kind of impact it has.

"Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance," philosopher and farmer Wendell Berry writes, "is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world." No country is self-sustaining when it comes to the resources required for food security. Seed by seed, meal by meal. We need each other - and we feed each other.

Sethi is the author of "Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love," a book exploring the loss of agricultural biodiversity through the lens of flavor and stories of bread, wine, coffee, chocolate and beer.
More from Food: Have questions about cooking? Join our live chat Wednesdays at 12.

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Perspective | Drink craft beer, eat ancient grains and other ways to respond to the planet's loss of biodiversity

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May 10 The headlines are, in a word, terrifying. On Monday, the most comprehensive report on biodiversity to date - written by 455 experts representing 50 countries - revealed that one-eighth of the world's plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, a dramatic rupture in the rich diversity that underpins the very existence of life on Earth.

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The UK’s corned beef comes from a company charged with Amazon deforestation

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The UK’s corned beef comes from a company charged with Amazon deforestation

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Cattle ranching is responsible for as much as 80% of the ongoing deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, as trees are felled to create grazing pasture.In 2017, JBS was fined nearly $8 million for buying cattle that they knew was raised on illegally deforested Amazon land.

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If you live in the UK, you might be taking a little piece of the Amazon rainforest home from your local supermarket-in the form of a can of tinned corned beef.

A report published this month by the nonprofit research group Earthsight connects a Brazilian beeffirm that has long faced corruption and illegal deforestation charges to several brands of tinned beef in UK supermarkets. Cattle ranching is responsible for as much as 80% of the ongoing deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, as trees are felled to create grazing pasture. (The soybean industry, meanwhile, is responsible for much of the rest of Amazon deforestation, and destruction of the nearby Brazilian savanna.)

Tropical rainforests are critical storage sites for carbon dioxide, keeping the greenhouse gas in its solid carbon state, locked away in soils and trees. The Amazon is the world's largest tropical rainforest, making its protection critical to preventing runaway climate change.

Tinned corned beef found in UK supermarket Morrisons was sourced from scandal-plagued Brazilian meat company JBS.

The UK imported 28,550 metric tons of corned beef in 2018, according to Earthsight. Of that, 95% came from Brazil, and nearly half came from JBS, the largest Brazilian beef exporter and one of the world's largest food companies. UK markets purchased $54 million worth of JBS corned beef in 2018-nearly 25% more than it bought the previous year, when JBS was mired in scandal.

UK chains Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, and Lidl all carry JBS-sourced corned beef. At Morrisons and Lidl, the JBS beef is labeled as store-brand. At Sainsbury's and Asda, it is found under the brands Princes and Exeter.

Newgate corned beef, stocked at Lidl supermarkets, is sourced from JBS.

According to Earthsight, JBS beef is also used in Simmenthal, an Italian tinned beef brand stocked by "all major supermarkets" in Italy, including Carrefour, the French multinational that is one of the largest supermarket chains in the world. Simmenthal tinned beef is also sold at Carrefour stores in Belgium, according to the report.

Sainsbury's and Asda supermarkets stock Princes corned beef, which is sourced from JBS beef.

In 2017, JBS was fined nearly $8 million for buying cattle that they knew was raised on illegally deforested Amazon land. The same year, JBS's then-chairman (and current controlling shareholder) admitted to paying to $150 million in bribes to 2,000 politicians, and a Brazilian police investigation found that Brazilian meat companies, including JBS, paid inspectors to ignore the adulteration of processed foods and change expiration dates. (The US suspended imports of fresh Brazilian beef following that report but it continues to import processed beef products. US imports now amount to half of all revenue of the two biggest meat companies in Brazil, JBS and competitor Marfrig, according to the Financial Times.)

Also in 2017, a Guardian investigation found that JBS bought cattle from a farm linked to modern slavery. Following the report, JBS ceased purchasing animals from the farm, and UK supermarket chain Waitrose ceased stocking tinned corned beef linked to JBS. In 2018, the controlling shareholder of JBS was arrested in connection with a probe into an illegal campaign finance scheme linked to the agriculture ministry in Brazil.

Demand for JBS beef is still strong

In 2018, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain bought nearly 90% of JBS's 55,000 metric tons of European beef exports, according to the Earthsight report.

Carrefour, Sainsbury's and Morrison's did not return requests for comment. Lidl and Asda referred to a statement from the British Retail Consortium but declined to say whether they would continue to stock the tinned beef products.

"The [consortium] and our members regard any form of labour abuse and illegal deforestation as completely unacceptable," the industry group wrote. "Whilst it is recognised that Brazil has significant challenges, the country has led efforts to tackle modern slavery through a mix of laws and enforcement. However, recent legislative developments may be putting that progress at risk and this example demonstrates how vital it is for effective laws and enforcement to protect people and the environment from exploitation. We urge the Brazilian government to take swift action to address this issue throughout the supply chains."

JBS denies the Earthsight allegations

In an emailed statement, JBS said it "does not acquire animals from farms involved with deforestation of native forests, invasion of indigenous lands or environmental conservation areas," adding it "will not work with suppliers involved in rural violence or land conflicts, or who utilize slave or child labor." JBS wrote that its internal policies include "strict" vetting to ensure responsible meat sourcing and that the results of the vetting "reveal that in the last three years over than 99.9% of JBS cattle purchases complied with the company's social and environmental criteria."

Earthsight director Sam Lawson sees it differently. "This is a company that can't be trusted," Lawson told Mongabay. "Every time someone calls them out on illegal deforestation, the assumption is that JBS is a trustworthy corporate entity who has accidentally done something wrong and will change. If you look at the bigger picture it shows you the intention is different."

As of last year, deforestation of the Amazon was at its highest level in 10 years. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro might be the biggest single-person threat the Amazon rainforest has seen in a generation. He took office in January promising to support the agriculture industry and slash Amazon conservation policies, including ones that demarcate indigenous reserves in the rainforest, where deforestation for things like industrial-scale cattle ranching then becomes illegal.

In March, Bolsonaro met with Donald Trump to discuss the US resuming Brazilian beef imports.

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UK corned beef comes from company tied to Amazon deforestation

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If you live in the UK, you might be taking a little piece of the Amazon rainforest home from your local supermarket-in the form of a can of tinned corned beef. A report published this month by the nonprofit research group Earthsight connects a Brazilian beeffirm that has long faced corruption and illegal deforestation charges to several brands of tinned beef in UK supermarkets.

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Huge rubber plantation in Cameroon halts deforestation following rebuke

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Huge rubber plantation in Cameroon halts deforestation following rebuke

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Halcyon Agri Corp, the world’s largest rubber processor, is taking steps toward a more sustainable and transparent natural rubber supply chain following vocal public outcries from environmental NGOs last year.

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Huge rubber plantation in Cameroon halts deforestation following rebuke

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Halcyon Agri Corp, the world's largest rubber processor, is taking steps toward a more sustainable and transparent natural rubber supply chain following vocal public outcries from environmental NGOs last year. Organizations like Greenpeace, Mighty Earth, and Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK) have put a spotlight on unsustainable practices in Halcyon's two Cameroon plantations - Sudcam and [...]

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Mexico City's residents are engulfed in a thick haze of air pollution

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Mexico City's residents are engulfed in a thick haze of air pollution

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Though the fires are on the outskirts of the capital, they’ve caused a decline in air quality in the city by emitting dangerous particles. For more than 48 hours, residents were exposed to PM2.5 particles

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MEXICO CITY - Residents in Mexico's capital are walking around with surgical masks on as their eyes water and they struggle to breathe.

Tuesday was the fourth straight day that the capital, which sits on a valley, has been engulfed in a thick haze of air pollution as forest fires rage across the country.

Authorities declared emergencies in 11 municipalities in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca due to fires on Saturday, but there were also reports of fires in Valle de Bravo, Tepoztlán and Jalisco, according to The Associated Press.

Mexico City's fire department reported 23 forest fires in total on Sunday.

Though the fires are on the outskirts of the capital, they've caused a decline in air quality in the city by emitting dangerous particles. For more than 48 hours, residents were exposed to PM2.5 particles, which have a similar structure to aerosols and can diminish a person's ability to breathe as well as curtail the development of the respiratory system in children.

The heightened levels of air pollution have prompted the Megalópolis Environmental Commission (CAME), a Mexican government agency, to issue a warning for residents to remain indoors.

⚠⚠ ATENCIÓN
Toma en cuenta estas acciones para hacer frente a la contaminación del aire ocasionada por los incendios 👉 https://t.co/Xv56XYYFjw
🔸 Evita actividades al aire libre.
🔸Se recomienda que grupos vulnerables permanezcan en hogares.
- CAMegalópolis (@CAMegalopolis) May 13, 2019

"In recent days the rates of contamination by fine particles have increased in the Valley of Mexico due to the influence of fires that are active in this atmospheric basin and its surroundings," read a press release on CAME's website. "The Environmental Commission of the Megalopolis has decided to apply an environmental alert in order to reduce the probability of affecting the health of the population, mainly of the groups most vulnerable to the effects of air pollution (infants, the elderly and patients with respiratory and cardiovascular diseases)."

The warning instructed residents to avoid spending time outdoors, cooking with firewood and coal, smoking and lighting candles, as such actions could put them at risk and exacerbate overall air quality.

The agency also suggested placing wet towels under doors and by the windows of homes near fire zones to prevent the fires from spreading.

On Tuesday, the Mexican agency that monitors pollution levels recorded that the risk of the city's air quality was a 10 - the most dangerous it can receive on its scale.

Mexico City has experienced 73 days of above average temperatures so far this year, and the heat and current conditions have contributed to more than 770 forest fires, according to Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper. The National Forest Commission says more than 100,000 acres of forest were destroyed by fire this year through March alone.

"The climate works against Mexico City and the area has a baseline of poor air quality from urban sources," said Kevin Cromar, the director of the Air Quality Program and an associate professor at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, which works with Mexican agencies on air quality and research.

"The particles travel deep into the lungs, which could cause respiratory difficulty and an increased risk of lung cancer," Cromar told NBC News.

NASA satellite imagery that reveals dozens of hot spots with thick smoke across Mexico has been shared widely by social and local media. The images, which show the smoke billowing in Central America, confirm that the effects of the fire could be even more far-reaching.

Research published by AGU Journals in 2015 looked at how smoke from fires in Mexico and Central America in April 2011 helped influence a major tornado outbreak that killed 313 people in the U.S.

"Air pollution doesn't recognize jurisdictional boundaries," Cromar said. "There's no question that these fires will impact Central America, and if the wind is blowing upward, the United States as well."
Mary Murray reported from Mexico City, and Gwen Aviles from New York.
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Mexico City's residents are engulfed in a thick haze of air pollution

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MEXICO CITY - Residents in Mexico's capital are walking around with surgical masks on as their eyes water and they struggle to breathe. Tuesday was the fourth straight day that the capital, which sits on a valley, has been engulfed in a thick haze of air pollution as forest fires rage across the country.

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Cooking 'may turn homes into toxic boxes of air pollution'

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Cooking 'may turn homes into toxic boxes of air pollution'

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In London, the peak indoor pollution resulted from frying sausages and steaks.Research published in February found that cooking a Sunday roast on a gas hob can drive small particle pollution in homes far above the levels found in the most polluted cities on Earth for an hour or two.

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Cooking 'may turn homes into toxic boxes of air pollution'

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Fry-ups and woodburners can cause high levels of particle pollution, campaigners warn

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Carbon Dioxide Soars to Record-Breaking Levels Not Seen in at Least 800,000 Years

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Carbon Dioxide Soars to Record-Breaking Levels Not Seen in at Least 800,000 Years

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But every story has its villains: Humans are burning fossil fuels, causing the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which are adding an extra blanket on an already feverish planet.

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Credit: Shutterstock

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for 800,000 years - since before our species evolved.

On Saturday (May 11), the levels of the greenhouse gas reached 415 parts per million (ppm), as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Scientists at the observatory have been measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1958. But because of other kinds of analysis, such as those done on ancient air bubbles trapped in ice cores, they have data on levels reaching back 800,000 years. [ 8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

During the ice ages, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were around 200 ppm. And during the interglacial periods - the planet is currently in an interglacial period - levels were around 280 ppm, according to NASA.

But every story has its villains: Humans are burning fossil fuels, causing the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which are adding an extra blanket on an already feverish planet. So far, global temperatures have risen by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) since the 19th century or pre-industrial times, according to a special report released last year by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Every year, the Earth sees about 3 ppm more carbon dioxide in the air, said Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State University. "If you do the math, well, it's pretty sobering," he said. "We'll cross 450 ppm in just over a decade."

The subsequent warming is already causing changes to the planet - shrinking glaciers, bleaching coral reefs and intensifying heat waves and storms, among other impacts. And carbon dioxide levels higher than 450 ppm "are likely to lock in dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate," Mann told Live Science.

"CO2 levels will continue to increase for at least the next decade and likely much longer, because not enough is being done worldwide," said Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The long-term increase is due to human-related emissions, especially the emissions of our burning of fossil fuels."

However, he noted that the annual peak in carbon dioxide, which fluctuates throughout the year as plants change their breathing rhythms, occurs right now. The annual average value will be more like 410 to 412 ppm, he said. Which ... is still very high.

"We keep breaking records, but what makes the current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere most troubling is that we are now well into the 'danger zone' where large tipping points in the Earth's climate could be crossed," said Jonathan Overpeck, the dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. "This is particularly true when you factor in the additional warming potential of the other greenhouse gases, including methane, that are now in the atmosphere."

The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were this high, way before Homo sapiens walked the planet, the Antarctic Ice Sheet was much smaller and sea levels were up to 65 feet (20 meters) higher than they are today, Overpeck told Live Science.

"Thus, we could soon be at the point where comparable reductions in ice sheet size, and corresponding increases in sea level, are both inevitable and irreversible over the next few centuries," he said. Smaller ice sheets, in turn, might reduce the reflectivity of the planet and potentially accelerate the warming even more, he added.

"It's like we're playing with a loaded gun and don't know how it works."

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Carbon Dioxide Soars to Record-Breaking Levels Not Seen in at Least 800,000 Years

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There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for 800,000 years - since before our species evolved. On Saturday (May 11), the levels of the greenhouse gas reached 415 parts per million (ppm), as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

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How banning plastic bags could help New York mitigate climate change

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How banning plastic bags could help New York mitigate climate change

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Plastic bags do contribute to global warming. Plastic needs anywhere from decades up to 1,000 years to decompose, and recent research shows that plastic can release methane and ethylene early on in the decomposition process if it's exposed to ultraviolet light.

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How banning plastic bags could help New York mitigate climate change

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New Yorkers use a lot of plastic bags. The city of 8 million goes through 23 billion plastic bags annually. It's a stat that would've seemed unbelievable to me before I moved here until I walked out of a C-Town grocery store ...

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How bacteria build an enzyme that destroys climate-changing laughing gas

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How bacteria build an enzyme that destroys climate-changing laughing gas

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New research reveals how soil bacteria build the only known enzyme for the destruction of the potent global warming and ozone-depleting gas nitrous oxide. Alongside carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O), commonly known as 'laughing gas', is now a cause for great concern, and there is much international focus on reducing emissions. It is hoped that the findings will help pave the way for strategies to mitigate the damaging effects of N2O.

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New research from the University of East Anglia reveals how soil bacteria build the only known enzyme for the destruction of the potent global warming and ozone-depleting gas nitrous oxide.

Alongside carbon dioxide (CO ₂) and methane, the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N ₂ O), commonly known as 'laughing gas', is now a cause for great concern, and there is much international focus on reducing emissions.

It is hoped that the findings, published today in the journal Chemical Science, will help pave the way for strategies to mitigate the damaging effects of this climate changing gas.

N ₂O has around 300 times the global warming potential of CO ₂ and stays in the atmosphere for about 120 years, where it accounts for around nine per cent of total greenhouse gas.

It also destroys the ozone layer with similar potency to the now banned chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Atmospheric levels of N ₂ O are rising year on year as microorganisms break down synthetic nitrogen fertilisers which are added to agricultural soil, to satisfy the food supply demands of an ever-increasing global population.

Prof Nick Le Brun from UEA's School of Chemistry, said: "It is well known that some bacteria can 'breathe' N ₂ O in environments where oxygen (O2) is limited.

"This ability is entirely dependent on an enzyme called 'nitrous oxide reductase', which is the only enzyme known to destroy N ₂ O. It is therefore very important for controlling levels of this climate-changing gas.

"We wanted to find out more about how soil bacteria use this enzyme to destroy nitrous oxide."

The part of the enzyme where N ₂ O is consumed (called the 'active site') is unique in biology, consisting of a complex arrangement of copper and sulfur (a copper-sulfide cluster). Until now, knowledge of how this unusual active site is built by bacteria has been lacking.

The UEA team discovered a protein called NosL, which is required for the assembly of the copper-sulfide cluster active site and makes the enzyme active.

They found that bacteria lacking NosL still produced the enzyme but it contained less of the copper-sulfide active site. Furthermore, when the same bacteria were grown with copper in short supply, the active site was completely absent from the enzyme.

The team also showed that NosL is a copper-binding protein, indicating that it functions directly in supplying copper for the assembly of the copper-sulfide cluster active site.

Prof Le Brun said: "The discovery of the function of NosL is the first step towards understanding how the unique active site of nitrous oxide reductase is assembled. This is key information because when assembly goes wrong, inactive enzyme leads to release of N ₂ O into the atmosphere."

The UEA team was led by Prof Nick Le Brun and Dr Andy Gates from UEA's School of Biological Sciences, and included the University's Vice Chancellor Prof David Richardson -- also from the School of Biological Sciences. They are part of international EU network focussed on understanding different aspects of N ₂ O and the nitrogen cycle.

Dr Gates said: "Society is generally well aware of the need to address carbon dioxide emissions, but nitrous oxide is now emerging as a pressing global concern and requires researchers with different skill sets to work together to prevent further damaging effects of climate change.

"With increasing understanding of the enzymes that make and destroy N ₂ O, we move closer to being able to develop strategies to mitigate the damaging effects of this climate changing gas on the earth's environment."

'NosL is a dedicated copper chaperone for assembly of the Cuz center of nitrous oxide reductase' is published in Chemical Science, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, on April 18, 2019.

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biology; bacteria; extreme survival; organic chemistry; biochemistry; chemistry; global warming; environmental issues; climate

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How bacteria build an enzyme that destroys climate-changing laughing gas

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New research reveals how soil bacteria build the only known enzyme for the destruction of the potent global warming and ozone-depleting gas nitrous oxide. Alongside carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O), commonly known as 'laughing gas', is now a cause for great concern, and there is much international focus on reducing emissions.

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Replanting oil palm may be driving a second wave of biodiversity loss

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Replanting oil palm may be driving a second wave of biodiversity loss

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What many people may not know, however, is that oil palm trees – the fruit of which is used to create palm oil – have a limited commercial lifespan of 25 years. Once this period has ended, the plantation is cut down and replanted, as older trees start to become less productive and are difficult to harvest.

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The environmental impact of palm oil production has been well publicised. Found in everything from food to cosmetics, the deforestation, ecosystem decline and biodiversity loss associated with its use is a serious cause for concern.

What many people may not know, however, is that oil palm trees - the fruit of which is used to create palm oil - have a limited commercial lifespan of 25 years. Once this period has ended, the plantation is cut down and replanted, as older trees start to become less productive and are difficult to harvest. Our research has now found that this replanting might be causing a second wave of biodiversity loss, further damaging the environment where these plantations have been created.

© Muhammad Syafiq Yahya, Author provided (No reuse)

An often overlooked fact is that oil palm plantations actually have higher levels of biodiversity compared to some other crops. More species of forest butterflies would be lost if a forest were converted to a rubber plantation, than if it were converted to oil palm, for example. One reason for this is that oil palm plantations provide a habitat that is more similar to tropical forest than other forms of agriculture (such as soybean production). The vegetation growing beneath the oil palm canopy (called understory vegetation) also provides food and a habitat for many different species, allowing them to thrive. Lizard abundance typically increases when primary forests are converted to oil palm, for example.

Read more: Palm oil boycott could actually increase deforestation - sustainable products are the solution

This does not mean oil palm plantations are good for the environment. In South-East Asia, where 85% of palm oil is produced, the conversion of forest to oil palm plantations has caused declines in the number of several charismatic animals, including orangutans, sun bears and hornbills. Globally, palm oil production affects at least 193 threatened species, and further expansion could affect 54% of threatened mammals and 64% of threatened birds.

Second crisis

Banning palm oil would likely only displace, not halt this biodiversity loss. Several large brands and retailers are already producing products using sustainably certified palm oil, as consumers reassess the impact of their purchasing. But as it is such an ubiquitous ingredient, if it were outlawed companies would need an alternative to keep producing products which include it, and developing countries would need to find something else to contribute to their economies. Production would shift to the cultivation of other oil crops elsewhere, such as rapeseed, sunflower or soybean, in order to meet global demand. In fact, since oil palm produces the highest yields per hectare - up to nine times more oil than any other vegetable oil crop - it could be argued that cultivating oil palm minimises deforestation.

That's not to say further deforestation should be encouraged to create plantations though. It is preferable to replace plantations in situ, replanting each site so that land already allocated for palm oil production can be reused. This replanting is no small undertaking - 13m hectares of palm oil plantations are to be uprooted by the year 2030, an area nearly twice the size of Scotland. However, our study reveals that much more needs to be done in the management and processes around this replanting, in order to maximise productivity and protect biodiversity in plantations.

Read more: Palm oil: scourge of the earth, or wonder crop?

© Adham Ashton-Butts, Author provided (No reuse)

We found significant declines in the biodiversity and abundance of soil organisms as a consequence of palm replanting. While there was some recovery over the seven years it takes the new crop to establish, the samples we took still had nearly 20% less diversity of invertebrates (such as ants, earthworms, millipedes and spiders) than oil palm converted directly from forest.

We also found that second-wave mature oil palm trees had 59% fewer animals than the previous crop. This drastic change could have severe repercussions for soil health and the overall agro-ecosystem sustainability. Without healthy, well-functioning soil, crop production suffers.

© Adham Ashton-Butts, Author provided (No reuse)

It is likely that replanting drives these declines. Prior to replanting, heavy machinery is used to uproot old palms. This severely disrupts the soil, making upper layers vulnerable to erosion and compaction, reducing its capacity to hold water. This is likely to have a negative impact on biodiversity, which is then further reduced due to the heavy use of pesticides.

Read more: How Indonesia's election puts global biodiversity at stake with an impending war on palm oil

Without change to these management practices, soil degradation is likely to continue, causing decreases in future biodiversity, as well as the productivity of the plantation.

Ultimately, palm oil appears to be a necessary food product for growing populations. However, now that we have identified some of the detrimental consequences of replanting practices, it is clear that long-term production of palm oil comes at a higher cost than previously thought. The world needs to push for more sustainable palm oil, and those in the industry must explore more biodiversity-friendly replanting practices in order to lessen the long-term impacts of intensive oil palm cultivation.

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Replanting oil palm may be driving a second wave of biodiversity loss

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The environmental impact of palm oil production has been well publicised. Found in everything from food to cosmetics, the deforestation, ecosystem decline and biodiversity loss associated with its use is a serious cause for concern.

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This U.N. biodiversity report has me super bummed. What can I do?

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This U.N. biodiversity report has me super bummed. What can I do?

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Earth could lose a lot of species and humans would still be fine — but that’s not a reason to allow biodiversity to collapse. Rich, healthy ecosystems should be allowed to exist for reasons independent of their economic value to humans.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

I was sad to see a distressingly long list at the Woodland Park Zoo of extinct tiger species. (I'm not sure why I like tigers so much-maybe because, for me, they're nature's most awesome and menacing achievement. Or maybe because some are orange and striped!) I was even more saddened to see the news about biodiversity loss. I want to contribute resources to very endangered wildlife. What is the most impactful way to contribute?

- Really Over Animal Repression

I think this question is on the minds of millions of people this week - maybe not for tigers specifically, but certainly for animals and plants and bugs and fish all over the world. If it's not, well, maybe they should follow your lead and take a gander at the truly alarming report that the United Nations just released on the prognosis for biodiversity on Earth.

In short, it's not looking good: One million species of flora and fauna are threatened by human activities. The primary threats are habitat loss due to agriculture expansion, direct exploitation from poaching and overfishing, and, of course, our constant nemesis climate change.

The report largely frames this impending loss of biodiversity in terms of the impact it will have on humans, such as the disappearance of medicines, fuels, and crucial crops. Andrew Deutz, director of international government relations for The Nature Conservancy, contends that we got to this point because "our economic model doesn't value the things nature provides for free, even though they're essential for life."

But land use expert Linus Blomqvist, of the Breakthrough Institute, argues that keeping consequences human-centered can be a limitation in assessing the value of various species. "I think it would be hard to argue that we'd materially suffer if there were no tigers, at least in any substantial way," he said. "But society still finds lots of reasons to conserve tigers - for cultural and ecological reasons, and spiritual and aesthetic appreciation of wildlife."

In other words, Earth could lose a lot of species and humans would still be fine - but that's not a reason to allow biodiversity to collapse. Rich, healthy ecosystems should be allowed to exist for reasons independent of their economic value to humans. It sounds like you tend to agree with that. I've never heard anyone describe tigers as "nature's most awesome and menacing achievement," and clearly your fondness for them has nothing to do with human markets.

But just to give so-called "unnecessary" species their fair due, some animals' ecological value becomes clearer after they're actively protected, because they're considered an "umbrella species." Tigers, for example, need huge, untouched spaces to thrive - as many as tens of thousands of square kilometers of forest and grassland and what have you - and therefore efforts to protect them can end up conserving the many other living things within those vast habitats.

"When you're protecting them, you're protecting the other species in that area, and vast areas of forest," says John Goodrich, chief scientist and tiger program director for Panthera.

So now that we've established your love for tigers is not necessarily a waste of time or resources, let's address your question about how best to help them. First, we need to pause and understand why tigers are so threatened in the first place: Basically, they're worth more to the communities that live around them - in countries across southern and eastern Asia - dead than alive. Poachers can make bank hunting tigers because because their bones, blood, and organs are considered powerful ingredients in several traditional medicines.

And tigers may be seen as incidental to the valuable resources of their habitats. In parts of India, for example, the timber in forests sustains the people that live around them, supplying wood for the stoves that power homes. Other communities clear forests so that land can be used for agriculture.

I have a friend who's also a huge tiger fan, and he suggests the punishment for poaching should be putting the poacher in a cage fight with a tiger, but (a) I don't see this getting a lot of political support, and (b) it ignores the fact that solving environmental problems often requires us to care about other justice issues, like poverty. How can you tell a person that they have to stop trying to live off the land around them because the tigers have to live? How would you convince a poacher that it's fair they'll be jailed or shot for pursuing a means to feed their family?

And in any event, punitive measures to protect tigers only go so far. Amping up punishment of deforestation or poaching or wood-collecting without doing anything to provide alternatives to the human needs driving those things is ineffective and ethically questionable. Fighting biodiversity die-off likely means also working on social welfare, better fuels, and increased agricultural productivity, Blomqvist says, adding that the benefits "are so much wider than the effects on conservation."

So what might that look like? Governments and NGOs can invest in productivity-increasing measures for farmers so that they can increase how much they grow without having to expand their land into forested territory. Organizations can invest in getting more and more households onto electrical grids so that they're not taking wood from the forest.

Additionally, policies that support indigenous land rights in regions where endangered species live can help preserve biodiversity. Indigenous tribes' knowledge of the natural resources around them spans generations and tends to be stronger than that of government organizations. (Indigenous land management is also ranked as a crucial practice to bring down carbon emissions by Project Drawdown, a research collective that studies the most effective ways to mitigate climate change.)

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"There are lots and lots of studies that show that land managed by indigenous communities ends up with better biodiversity outcomes than land managed by national parks," says Deutz, noting that indigenous groups are crucial allies in conservation. "If we help them with their land rights aspirations, we'll get conservation as a benefit because they're better land-restorers than governments."

All of these are excellent measures to prevent deforestation (a primary driver of habitat loss and climate change), which threatens billions of species (including humans!) that are not tigers. In fact, preserving tropical forests - home to tigers! - is one of the most cost-effective ways to try and limit global warming to less than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

Back to how all this relates to you: You can use these standards to vet the conservation organizations you want to give your money to. Ask questions about how organizations help invest in communities around important tiger habitats to ensure that their protections actually work.

But I also have to warn you that conservation organizations can only do so much. If you care about preserving biodiversity, you have to prioritize that value in your spending and your voting. Support candidates that prioritize climate change and understand the value of ecosystems. Don't buy from companies that stake their operations on palm oil and other drivers of deforestation.

And also, keep loving tigers for more than what they can contribute to you! I think that's just the best! More selfless love for animals! But also, try to extend that compassion to the humans who live around those animals, because they deserve it too.

Fuzzily,

Umbra

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This U.N. biodiversity report has me super bummed. What can I do?

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Q. Dear Umbra, I was sad to see a distressingly long list at the Woodland Park Zoo of extinct tiger species. (I'm not sure why I like tigers so much-maybe because, for me, they're nature's most awesome and menacing achievement. Or maybe because some are orange and striped!)

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Mountainous regions suffer biodiversity loss

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Mountainous regions suffer biodiversity loss

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“Our data suggest that more-severe changes in ecosystem functioning occur in the arid lowlands and the cold montane zone,” says the study published in Nature last month (27 March).  “Our study reveals that climate can modulate the effects of land use on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and points to a lowered resistance of ecosystems in climatically challenging environments to continuing land-use changes in tropical mountainous regions.”

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[DAR ES SALAAM] Climatic changes and human activities such as land tilling on dry lowlands of tropical mountains have caused huge losses of plant and animal species, a study says.

According to a team of 50 researchers who conducted the study, the combined effect of climatic changes and activities emanating from human settlements on biodiversity in mountainous regions is less known. Given that people living in such regions depend on nature for their livelihoods, the researchers say that they were motivated to assess the biodiversity and ecosystem functions of Africa's largest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

"Our data suggest that more-severe changes in ecosystem functioning occur in the arid lowlands and the cold montane zone," says the study published in Nature last month (27 March). "Our study reveals that climate can modulate the effects of land use on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and points to a lowered resistance of ecosystems in climatically challenging environments to continuing land-use changes in tropical mountainous regions."

"In order to preserve vital soil, plant and animal functions on their land, farmers should always try land use practices to a level which is sustainable."

Marcell Peters, University of Würzburg

Marcell Peters, lead author of the study and an associate professor at the Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, -University of Würzburg, Germany, tells SciDev.Net that the use of land significantly damages ecological processes with extreme climate conditions such as the hot and dry savanna zones at the base of Kilimanjaro.

According to Peters, the problem has been aggravated by human activities such as overharvesting, increase of field sizes and a reduction in semi-natural habitats including trees and hedgerows.

"In order to preserve vital soil, plant and animal functions on their land, farmers should always try land use practices to a level which is sustainable and preserves a rich biodiversity,'' Peters tells SciDev.Net. "In the long run, this will be much more profitable than large-scale intensified agriculture.''

The researchers established 60 study sites from low to high elevations in the southern part of Mountain Kilimanjaro, which they regularly visited to take measurements, including monitoring and identifying plants, insects, birds and mammals. Data collection occurred from January 2011 to December 2016.

Few species were lost at the mid-elevations of the mountain where there is high snow but warm temperatures. The farmers grow coffee and banana using traditional cultivation methods in these regions, Peters explained.

However, researchers observed much negative impact in hot and dry savanna zones at the base of Kilimanjaro where maize is widely cultivated.

According to the researchers, the data obtained from this study could be used to develop and implement strategies for a sustainable use of the ecosystems on Mountain Kilimanjaro.

Padili James, a consultant geo-environmentalist based in Tanzania, tells SciDev.Net, "With the growing demand for food and cash crop across the neighboring regions of Kilimanjaro and the unsustainable agricultural practices exercised over time, it is with no doubt that the study holds much validity."

"Based on my regular interactions with the locals in Moshi, Kilimanjaro region, energy demands and farmland activities are prime reasons to the loss of plant and animal species in the lowlands," James adds.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net's Sub-Saharan Africa English desk.

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Mountainous regions suffer biodiversity loss

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DAR ES SALAAM] Climatic changes and human activities such as land tilling on dry lowlands of tropical mountains have caused huge losses of plant and animal species, a study says. According to a team of 50 researchers who conducted the study, the combined effect of climatic changes and activities emanating from human settlements on biodiversity in mountainous regions is less known.

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