A major port in Manaus, Brazil has hit its lowest water level since records began in 1902 as a long drought continues in the region. The new low surpassed the last lowest recording from 2010.
Manaus, Brazil is a connecting point for the Rio Negro and the Amazon River. As of Oct. 16, the Rio Negro level was 13.59 meters. When records began in 1902, the level was at 16.78 meters, and its lowest point since then was 13.63 meters, recorded on Oct. 24, 2010, according to the port website.
An ongoing drought may cause further declines, as this new record low was hit after the river lost 10 centimeters from Oct. 15 to Oct. 16.
“We have gone three months without rain here in our community,” Pedro Mendonca, who lives near Manaus in Santa Helena do Ingles, told Reuters. “It is much hotter than past droughts.”
The drought is expected to continue at least through December, according to Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Reuters reported. El Niño conditions could be making the drought worse.
Aside from the depleting river level, the extreme weather has been causing many significant problems in the region. Over 100 Amazon river dolphins were found dead in early October, and although the exact cause is under investigation, experts suspect the drought and extreme heat could be connected to the deaths.
As of Oct. 13, Manaus had some of the worst air quality globally because of wildfires. The Associated Press reported that Brazil’s Amazonas state recorded over 2,700 wildfires in just the first 11 days of the month. October is typically considered the start of rainy season, which lasts through April.
“It has been very painful both physically and emotionally to wake up with the city covered in smoke, experience extreme temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), and follow the news that the river waters are disappearing,” Mônica Vasconcelos, a climate perception researcher at Amazonas State University, told The Associated Press.
Reuters reported that the current ongoing drought has affected at least 481,000 people, threatening drinking water and access to food for communities around Manaus. Food, water, medications, and other supplies are typically transported throughout the region by the river. The depleted levels have also made locals concerned about the water quality.
Luciana Valentin, who lives in Santa Helena do Ingles, told Reuters, “Our children are getting diarrhea, vomiting, and often having fever because of the water.”
The low water levels could ultimately impact the millions of people that depend on the water in the Amazon basin. CNN reported that there are emergencies declared in over 20 cities, including Manaus.
The Roman Empire fell more than 1,500 years ago, but its grip on the popular imagination is still strong, as evidenced by a recent trend on TikTok. Women started filming the men in their lives to document their answers to a simple question: How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
“I guess, technically, like every day,” one boyfriend said, as his girlfriend wheezed out an astonished “What?” He wasn’t the only one, as an avalanche of Twitter posts, Instagram Reels, and news articles made clear. While driving on a highway, some men couldn’t help but think about the extensive network of roads the Romans built, some of which are still in use today. They pondered the system of aqueducts, built with concrete that could harden underwater.
There are a lot of reasons why people are fascinated by the rise and fall of ancient empires, gender dynamics aside. Part of what’s driving that interest is the question: How could something so big and so advanced fail? And, more pressingly: Could something similar happen to us? Between rampaging wildfires, a rise in political violence, and the public’s trust in government at record lows, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that America could go up in smoke.
Theories of breakdown driven by climate change have proliferated in recent years, encouraged by the likes of Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The Roman Empire, for example, unraveled during a spasm of volcanic explosions, which led to a period of cooling that precipitated the first pandemic of bubonic plague. The decline of the ancient Maya in Central America has been linked with a major drought. Angkor Wat’s downfall, in modern-day Cambodia, has been pinned on a period of wild swings between drought and monsoon floods. So if minor forms of climate change spelled the collapse of these great societies, how are we supposed to survive the much more radical shifts of today?
Focusing too closely on catastrophe can result in a skewed view of the past — it overlooks societies that navigated an environmental disaster and made it through intact. A review of the literature in 2021 found 77 percent of studies that analyzed the interplay between climate change and societies emphasized catastrophe, while only 10 percent focused on resilience. Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have recently tried to fill in that gap. The latest entry is a study that analyzes 150 crises from different time periods and regions, going off a comprehensive dataset that covers more than 5,000 years of human history, back to the Neolithic period. Environmental forces often play a critical role in the fall of societies, the study found, but they can’t do it alone.
A view of a paved intersection of the ancient Roman roads in Leptis Magna, the largest city of the ancient region of Tripolitania, in modern-day Libya, May 2000. Reza / Getty Images
Researchers with the Complexity Science Hub, an organization based in Vienna, Austria, that uses mathematical models to understand the dynamics of complex systems, found plenty of examples of societies that made it through famines, cold snaps, and other forms of environmental stress. Several Mesoamerican cities, including the Zapotec settlements of Mitla and Yagul in modern-day Oaxaca, “not only survived but thrived within the same drought conditions” that contributed to the fall of the Maya civilization in the 8th century. And the Maya, before that point, had weathered five earlier droughts and continued to grow.
The new research, published in a peer-reviewed biological sciences journal from The Royal Society last month, suggests that resilience is an ability that societies can gain and lose over time. Researchers found that a stable society can withstand even a dramatic climate shock, whereas a small shock can lead to chaos in a vulnerable one.
The finding is in line with other research, such as a study in Nature in 2021 that analyzed 2,000 years’ worth of Chinese history, untangling the relationship between climate disruptions and the collapse of dynasties. It found that major volcanic eruptions, which often cause cooler summers and weaker monsoons, hurting crops, contributed to the rise of warfare. But it wasn’t the size of the eruption that mattered most: Dynasties survived some of the biggest, climate-disrupting eruptions, including the Tambora eruption of 1815 in present-day Indonesia and the Huaynaputina eruption of 1600 in what’s now Peru.
What matters most, the Complexity Science Hub’s study posits, is inequality and political polarization. Declining living standards tend to lead to dissatisfaction among the general population, while wealthy elites compete for prestigious positions. As pressures rise and society fractures, the government loses legitimacy, making it harder to address challenges collectively. “Inequality is one of history’s greatest villains,” said Daniel Hoyer, a co-author of the study and a historian who studies complex systems. “It really leads to and is at the heart of a lot of other issues.”
On the flipside, however, cooperation can give societies that extra boost they need to withstand environmental threats. “This is why culture matters so much,” Hoyer said. “You need to have social cohesion, you need to have that level of cooperation, to do things that scale — to make reforms, to make adaptations, whether that’s divesting from fossil fuels or changing the way that food systems work.”
View of the Temple of the Inscriptions at the archaeological site of Palenque, a Maya city-state, in present-day Chiapas, Mexico, January 14, 2020.
Rodrigo Arangua / AFP via Getty Images
It’s reasonable to wonder how neatly the lessons from ancient societies apply to today, when the technology is such that you can fly halfway around the world in a day or outsource the painful task of writing a college essay to ChatGPT. “What can the modern world learn from, for example, the Mayan city states or 17th century Amsterdam?” said Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University. The way Degroot sees it, historians can pin down the time-tested strategies as a starting point for policies to help us survive climate change today — a task he’s currently working on with the United Nations Development Programme.
Degroot has identified a number of ways that societies adapted to a changing environment across millennia: Migration allows people to move to more fruitful landscapes; flexible governments learn from past disasters and adopt policies to prevent the same thing from happening again; establishing trade networks makes communities less sensitive to changes in temperature or precipitation. Societies that have greater socioeconomic equality, or that at least provide support for their poorest people, are also more resilient, Degroot said.
By these measures, the United States isn’t exactly on that path to success. According to a standard called the Gini coefficient — where 0 is perfect equality and 1 is complete inequality — the U.S. scores poorly for a rich country, at 0.38 on the scale, beaten out by Norway (0.29) and Switzerland (0.32) but better than Mexico (0.42). Inequality is “out of control,” Hoyer said. “It’s not just that we’re not handling it well. We’re handling it poorly in exactly the same way that so many societies in the past have handled things poorly.”
One of the major voices behind that theme is Peter Turchin, one of the co-authors on Hoyer’s study, a Russian-American scientist who studies complex systems. Once an ecologist analyzing the rise and fall of pine beetle populations, Turchin switched fields in the late 1990s and started to apply a mathematical framework to the rise and fall of human populations instead. Around 2010, he predicted that unrest in America would start getting serious around 2020. Then, right on schedule, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, a reminder that modern society isn’t immune to the great disasters that shaped the past. “America Is Headed Toward Collapse,” declared the headline of an article in The Atlantic this summer, excerpted from Turchin’s book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.
The barrage of climate catastrophes, gun violence, and terrorist attacks in the headlines are enough to make you consider packing up and trying to live off the land. A recent viral video posed the question: “So is everyone else’s friend group talking about buying some land and having a homestead together where everyone grows separate crops, [where] we can all help each other out and have a supportive community, because our society that we live in feels like it’s crumbling beneath our feet?”
By Turchin’s account, America has been at the brink of collapse twice already, once during the Civil War and again during the Great Depression. It’s not always clear how “collapse” differs from societal change more generally. Some historians define it as a loss of political complexity, while others focus on population decline or whether a society’s culture was maintained. “A lot of people prefer the term ‘decline,’” Degroot said, “in part because historical examples of the collapse of complex societies really refer to a process that took place over sometimes centuries” and would perhaps even go unnoticed by people alive at the time. Living through a period of societal collapse might feel different from what you imagined, just like living through a pandemic did — possibly less like a zombie movie, and more like boring, everyday life once you get accustomed to it.
The Complexity Science Hub’s study suggests that collapse itself could be considered an adaptation in particularly dire situations. “There is this general idea that collapse is scary, and it’s bad, and that’s what we need to avoid,” Hoyer said. “There’s a lot of truth in that, especially because collapse involves violence and destruction and unrest.” But if the way your society is set up is making everyone’s lives miserable, they might be better off with a new system. For example, archaeological evidence shows that after the Roman Empire lost control of the British Isles, people became larger and healthier, according to Degroot. “In no way would collapse automatically be something that would be devastating for those who survived — in fact, often, probably the opposite,” he said.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that a better system will replace the vulnerable, unequal one after a collapse. “You still have to do the work of putting in the reforms, and having the support of those in power, to be able to actually set and reinforce these kinds of revisions,” Hoyer said. “So I would argue, if that’s the case, let’s just do that without the violence to begin with.”
A record-breaking number of wildfires are blanketing the Amazon with smoke, choking some Brazilian cities and further isolating many Indigenous villages. Over 2,700 wildfires have been reported in the region in the first 11 days of the month — the highest number for any October since 1998, when the record-keeping began.
Air quality became so poor last week in places like Manaus that officials had to postpone the city’s annual marathon, and major universities canceled classes. Philip Fearnside, research professor at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia, said hospitals in the city are full of people who are having respiratory issues. “That should be a wake up call to actually change government policies and individual behavior to actually contain global warming,” he said.
Part of the issue is that the Amazon is in the middle of a severe drought. Water levels in the region’s major rivers have become so low as to be unnavigable, leaving many Indigenous river communities without any way to obtain certain foods, drinking water, or medicine, according to Reuters. Commercial shipping has also been impacted as vessels from the Denmark headquartered company Maersk suspended service in Manaus, after a barge ran aground on the Negro River last month.
“It’s a very worrisome situation,” said Marcia Macedo, an associate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “We’ve seen large fish kills [an event in which numerous dead fish are suddenly observed in a body of water], water levels dropping way faster than normal — lake levels, river levels, like, six meters below what would be expected at this time of year — and definitely the potential for it to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”
On Wednesday, Indigenous tribes in the region called for the Brazilian government to take more formal action. “We ask the government to declare a climate emergency to urgently address the vulnerability Indigenous peoples are exposed to,” read a statement from the Indigenous umbrella group APIAM, which represents over 60 Amazonian tribes.
As of Friday, almost all of the 62 cities in the state of Amazonas, which includes Manaus, had declared a state of emergency.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva campaigned on protecting the Amazon from deforestation and further destruction in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. But while Lula’s administration has upheld Indigenous rights by restoring land in the rainforest and the Brazilian Supreme Court struck down a challenge to Indigenous land rights last month, deforestation remains a major concern.
Tree loss is not the only factor contributing to the current crisis. Climate change as well as El Niño, a weather phenomenon that results in a mass of warm water traveling east over the Pacific and crashing into South America, are also driving dry conditions. “Deforestation contributes to global warming, although fossil fuels globally are the main cause,” said Fearnside. “But global warming is changing climate all over the world, including here in the Amazon.”
El Niño, climate change, and extreme heat
El Niño is a natural weather phenomenon that fuels above-average global heat and more intense natural disasters in parts of the world. It is characterized by warmer than normal sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The hottest years on record tend to happen during El Niño.
The planet’s weather over the past three years has been dominated by El Niño’s opposite extreme, La Niña, which has had a cooling effect on the globe. Even so, the past eight years were the hottest in recorded history, the result of the warming effects of climate change.
Now, in conjunction with accelerating climate change, El Niño means a wide array of exacerbated hazardsmay be coming down the pike. El Niño’s impacts differ by region, but can range from extreme rainfall to severe drought and increased wildfire risk.
Macedo warns that if the cycles that maintain the Amazon rainforests’ trademark wet, rainy, cloudy conditions start to dissipate, the forest could be permanently altered.
“If you get beyond a certain amount of deforestation, you start to affect that recycling of rainwater back to the atmosphere that helps to kind of cool the land surface and also seed new rain clouds,” she told Grist. “If fires get out of control, then you have less forest cover and these droughts are even more intense, and so on and so forth.”
While the system is fairly well understood, Macedo says it’s difficult to pin down at what point things will stop working as usual.
“It’s not linear. It’s not it’s not a simple process to kind of pin down,” Macedo said.
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
With little fanfare, the European Union has launched a huge climate experiment. On October 1, the EU kicked off the initial phase of a Europe-wide tax on carbon in imported goods. This marks the first time a carbon border tax has been tried at this scale anywhere in the world. Europe’s experiment could have ripple effects across the entire globe, pushing high-emitting industries to clean up their production and incentivizing other countries to launch their own carbon taxes. It may well end up being the most important climate policy you have never heard of.
“This is an excellent example of wild ambition on the regulatory front,” says Emily Lydgate, a professor of environmental law at the University of Sussex. Nothing approaching the scale or ambition of the EU’s carbon border tax exists anywhere in the world, although California has a very limited version of its own carbon tax on energy imports. “It’s very novel to roll this out in such a big market. The perturbations throughout the system are pretty huge.”
So how does it work? The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is essentially an import tax on carbon-intensive products, such as cement, steel, fertilizer, and electricity. Since 2005, the EU has levied a carbon price on highly polluting industries within its own borders, requiring manufacturers to buy credits to cover the carbon they emit or risk heavy fines. Businesses receive a certain number of free allowances, but to emit more carbon they must pay around €80 ($75) per metric ton for the privilege—one of the highest carbon charges anywhere in the world.
You might sense the problem with this system. China, for instance, doesn’t levy a carbon tax on steel, which means it can undercut the EU steel industry. And EU companies looking for a good deal will likely turn to countries with the cheapest steel prices. The CBAM is an attempt to level this playing field. Under the new regime, an importer of Chinese steel will have to purchase carbon credits that correspond to the same rate as steel produced in the European Union. That is the crux of the CBAM—making sure that the carbon in high-emission products is priced at the same rate, no matter where those products are produced.
“The EU is trying to export its price on carbon to the rest of the world,” says Marcus Ferdinand, chief analytics officer at carbon consultancy Veyt. For now, the CBAM is still in a soft-launch stage. From October 2023 to December 2025, importers of goods covered by the CBAM will need to declare emissions in those products, but they won’t have to buy any carbon allowances. From 2026, however, importers will have to buy CBAM certificates to cover these “embedded” emissions.
Even this transition stage is a pretty big deal, says Lydgate. The new rules will initially apply to imports of cement, iron, steel, aluminum, fertilizers, electricity, and hydrogen. This means that all of these importers and manufacturers will have to start quantifying their emissions to make sure they don’t fall foul of the CBAM. “Just by being the first mover on this, the EU is catalyzing this huge upskilling of firms around the world in having to do something which they haven’t really had to do on a mandatory basis,” says Lydgate. Other high-emission goods, such as crude petroleum, synthetic rubber, and other metals, may be added in later versions of the CBAM.
Of course, the EU isn’t being entirely altruistic. When the European Commission proposed the carbon border tax, it leaned heavily on fears of “carbon leakage”—the idea that polluting industries in the EU would move to countries with less stringent carbon regulations—or of EU products being replaced by imports from elsewhere. The European steel industry has felt the pressure of carbon prices for years, says Adolfo Aiello, deputy director general of the European Steel Association, Eurofer, although he says it’s still far too early to tell whether the CBAM will be a net positive for the steel industry. “At this stage we are neither positive nor negative, we are simply agnostic.”
The border tax will provide an incentive for other countries to model their own carbon prices after the EU emissions trading plan. One of the core features of the CBAM is that carbon prices don’t need to be paid twice, so if a steel manufacturer pays for carbon credits in their own country, the EU importer will not pay for additional credits. In effect, this incentivizes non-EU governments to set carbon prices in their own countries so that they can reap the benefits of taxing carbon, rather than let that money escape to the EU. Of course, businesses could also invest in cleaner ways of producing their goods to avoid these added costs. At the moment, EU member states must put at least half of the revenues from carbon credits back into plans to reduce carbon emissions or improve climate resilience.
If all of this sounds like a fiddly way to push the dial on climate change, well, it is. The CBAM is a good example of the Brussels Effect—a term coined by Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford back in 2012. The phrase describes the subtle way the EU wields its influence: by setting new regulatory standards that nudge the rest of the world to keep pace. The CBAM is ostensibly about protecting EU industry from being undercut by overseas producers, but it will also encourage other countries to set up European-style emissions trading structures and decarbonize highly polluting industries. Just under a quarter of the world’s population lives in places with a price on carbon, but many of these markets are limited to just a few industries. The EU’s initiative, on the other hand, covers around 45 percent of the bloc’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
“What we are going to see is a potential mushrooming of other carbon markets,” says Ferdinand. “It’s going to make it more visible, and it’s also going to lift carbon pricing up the political agenda for places that probably didn’t pay that much attention before.”
If this works as planned, the CBAM should also have the long-term effect of pushing other countries to increase their environmental ambitions in step with Europe. At the moment, the EU hands out a large number of free carbon credits to highly polluting industries, but those allowances are slowly being phased out and should cease altogether by 2034. Reducing those allowances should keep the carbon price high and incentivize businesses in Europe and beyond to find ways to reduce their carbon footprints.
Not every country is thrilled by the prospect of the carbon border tax. In June, China’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization said the CBAM was “regrettable” and would unfairly penalize developing countries. The border tax might also put least-developed countries in an unenviable position. These countries are responsible for a tiny fraction of historic emissions, but they often have relatively high-carbon industries, compared to more developed nations. This essentially puts some countries at a big trading disadvantage, which might put the CBAM on the wrong side of WTO rules that say traders must not discriminate against similar products from different trading partners.
“It’s difficult to come up with a watertight legal defense for it,” says Lydgate. But because the CBAM is so far-reaching and novel, no one is exactly sure what impact it will have or how countries and businesses will respond. “In policy, it’s not only the framework, but it’s the material and the design of the measure that makes it effective or not,” says Aiello. The EU’s carbon border tax could herald one of the most significant environmental shifts of the decade, but its impact—as always—will come down to the details.
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Oil giant ExxonMobil agreed to buy the shale group Pioneer Natural Resources for $59.5 billion in a deal that places a vast bet on a future for fossil fuel production in the United States.
America’s largest oil and gas deal in more than two decades will increase Exxon’s dominance in the Permian Basin shale field, at the heart of the country’s transformation into the world’s biggest oil producer.
Shares in Exxon have almost doubled over the past two years as oil and gas prices rose sharply. Its takeover of Pioneer – an all-stock transaction – capitalizes on this market rally.
While the Biden administration has sought to hasten the shift towards renewable energy in the face of the climate crisis, this acquisition underlines the confidence of America’s largest oil company that fossil fuel output will not be significantly hampered in the coming years.
With shareholders in Pioneer set to vote on the proposed tie-up, Scott Sheffield, the operator’s chief executive, declared the combined fracking giant would create value for them “for decades to come.”
Darren Woods, chief executive and chairman of Exxon, said: “Pioneer is a clear leader in the Permian with a unique asset base and people with deep industry knowledge. The combined capabilities of our two companies will provide long-term value creation well in excess of what either company is capable of doing on a standalone basis.”
This would be ExxonMobil’s biggest deal since Exxon’s $75 billion merger with Mobil Oil in 1998. Together, Exxon and Pioneer are set to have “the largest footprint of high-return wells in the Permian Basin,” Sheffield noted.
Exxon’s production in the Permian would more than double to 1.3 million barrels of oil equivalent per day following the purchase, it said. This is expected to rise to about 2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2027.
The company is pitching the takeover as environmentally friendly, however. It pledged to leverage its “industry-leading” greenhouse gas reduction plans in the Permian, which Woods said will to “accelerate Pioneer’s net-zero plan from 2050 to 2035.”
The deal – expected to close in the first half of next year – is subject to regulatory approvals. The boards of Exxon and Pioneer have already granted the green light. It values Pioneer at $253 per share, which amounts to a 9 percent premium on where the operator’s stock was trading about a month before reports of takeover talks first surfaced.
Shares in Pioneer Natural Resources climbed 0.3 percent to $238.10 on Wednesday. Exxon dropped 4.8 percent to $105.11.
Unlike some of its rivals, Exxon has so far defied calls to move away from fossil fuels and concentrate on cleaner energy sources. Rather than place big bets on the shift to renewable energy, the oil giant has instead focused on its core business.
The company’s annual profits soared to a record $55.7 billion last year, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a surge in oil prices. President Biden accused the industry of “war profiteering” as prices rose at the pump. Exxon claimed on Wednesday that its purchase of Pioneer would both strengthen energy security and bolster the US economy.
“ExxonMobil expanding is bad for people, communities, and our climate,” said David Tong, global industry campaign manager at nonprofit research and advocacy group Oil Change International. “Further consolidation of the fossil energy market into a smaller number of mega companies will not secure energy access for people or help achieve climate targets.”
A recent analysis by Tong’s group found that, despite their climate pledges, no major oil and gas company comes close to aligning with the 2015 Paris Agreement, a groundbreaking international treaty aimed at keeping global temperatures “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels.
The non-profit environmental advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund has raised concerns that the deal will reduce transparency around methane emissions, which are 80 times more planet-warming than carbon emissions in the short term.
Pioneer has been an industry leader in methane reporting, but the group expressed fear that Exxon’s acquisition will likely mean that those practices “would likely revert to Exxon’s own outdated and inadequate practices.”
Humans love portable electronics, from the Walkman in the 1980s to the disposable vapes and handheld, miniature fans of today. Over the years, as demand for these electronic gadgets has soared, they have gotten cheaper, leading to an enormous amount of waste.
In the past year, 471 million small, inexpensive everyday electronics like headphones and remote controls made their way into landfills in the United Kingdom, according to research from the nonprofit Material Focus, reported The Guardian.
Material Focus Executive Director Scott Butler called these items “FastTech.”
According to the research, 16 cheap electronic items per second were bought in the UK last year, including 4.8 million miniature fans; 9.8 million USB sticks; 26 million cables; 29 million decorative, LED and solar lights; and 260 million disposable vapes.
“People should think carefully about buying some of the more frivolous… items in the first place,” Butler said, adding that consumers may not know these electronics contain valuable recyclable materials like lithium, copper and stainless steel, as The Guardian reported. The recycled components can be used in medical devices, wind turbines and electric cars.
“FastTech is seriously rivalling Fast Fashion, and is causing similar headaches,” Butler said, as reported by Circular Online. “But as FastTech items are quite cheap and small, people may not realise that they contain valuable materials and will just pop them in the bin, meaning we lose everything inside them instead of recycling them into something new.”
People have gotten accustomed to recycling large items like refrigerators, the nonprofit said, while many smaller electronics get forgotten, The Guardian reported.
“We want to get the message across that anything with a plug, battery or cable can be recycled and there’s somewhere near you to do it,” Butler said.
Material Focus found that the average household in the UK had four to five chargers, two to three remotes and the same number of cell phones.
An online tool created by Material Focus can help guide consumers to recycling locations near them.
Consumers correlate inexpensive items with being disposable, the nonprofit said. It estimated that residents of the UK have spent more than $3.4 billion on cheap electronics in the past year.
Material Focus called the wasted electronic items “the tip of the iceberg” compared to the overall electronic waste in the UK. They said that more than 110,000 tons of electronics were thrown away annually, with 880 million items sitting unused in homes across the UK.
A survey of 2,000 people conducted by the nonprofit found that each year, the average adult in the UK buys nine cheap electronic products and disposes of eight of them. The most commonly trashed items were handheld vacuums, mini speakers and step counters.
“The scale of the issue is huge, but there’s an easy solution – just as the trend for recycling and repurposing fashion has grown and grown, we want to encourage the nation to recycle fast tech, guilt-free and fuss-free,” Butler said, as the Institution of Engineering and Technology reported.
The loss of pollinator insects is putting some of the most popular tropical crops in the world — like cocoa, coffee, mango and watermelon — at risk, a new study led by researchers from University College London (UCL) and the Natural History Museum has found.
The scientists cataloged 3,080 species of insect pollinators and gathered data from 1,507 agricultural sites across the globe. Their findings revealed that climate change and agriculture have led to significant losses in the richness and abundance of pollinators.
The study, “Key tropical crops at risk from pollinator loss due to climate change and land use,” was published in the journal Science Advances.
“[I]t is expected that the tropics will experience the greatest risk to crop production from pollinator losses. Localized risk is highest and predicted to increase most rapidly, in regions of sub-Saharan Africa, northern South America, and Southeast Asia. Via pollinator loss alone, climate change and agricultural land use could be a risk to human well-being,” the study said.
Three quarters of the planet’s crops rely on animal pollination to some extent, the press release said. The researchers created a model to explore which of these crops were most at risk until 2050. They hope their findings will serve as a warming to agricultural and conservation communities.
“While localised risks are highest in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, northern South America, and south-east Asia, the implications of this extend globally via the trade in pollination dependent crops,” said lead author of the study Dr. Joe Millard, who completed the research as a Ph.D. student at the UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, before joining London’s Natural History Museum, in the UCL press release.
The study identified the tropics and the crops grown there as being especially vulnerable to the relationship between land use and climate change. The reduction of these crops could lead to heightened income insecurity for millions of the region’s small-scale farmers.
“As insects decline, due to being unable to cope with the interacting effects of climate change and land use, so too will the crops that rely on them as pollinators,” Millard said. “In some cases, these crops could be pollinated by hand but this would require more labour and more cost.”
The cacao tree is particularly difficult to grow, as it produces short-lived flowers that are pollinated almost exclusively by a certain type of midge, reported the Natural History Museum. However, the damp, shady environments that are preferred by the midge are under threat due to more intense cocoa production and climate change.
“Cocoa is experiencing a perfect storm of threats that mean it is at high risk of pollinator losses,” Millard said, as the Natural History Museum reported.
Planting patches of natural pollinator habitat between and around cropland is one way to provide a refuge of suitable microclimates for the insects.
“There are also other solutions that can help,” Millard said, according to the Natural History Museum. “It may be possible to breed varieties of these plants that can reproduce without pollinators, as has already been seen in some crops. Other technological solutions, like pollination by hand or through artificial means, are already used on a large scale for some crops like vanilla. To buffer against pollinator declines, it might become more common in crops like cocoa, but this will increase the production cost.”
The study highlights the importance of a diversity and abundance of pollinators for food security.
“Climate change poses grave threats not only to the natural environment and biodiversity, but also to human well-being, as the loss of pollinators can threaten the livelihoods of people across the globe who depend on crops that depend on animal pollination,” said senior author Dr. Tim Newbold of the UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences, in the press release.
The best way to address the issue of pollinator losses is to restore and preserve their habitats while reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit the most extreme climate change effects.
“Our findings underscore the urgent need to take global action to mitigate climate change, alongside efforts to slow down land use changes and protect natural habitats to avoid harming insect pollinators,” Newbold said.
In an effort to bring the rare Scottish wildcat back from the brink of extinction, conservationists have released 19 young wildcats, which were bred in captivity, throughout the Cairngorms National Park in the Scottish Highlands.
The Scottish wildcat, or Felis silvestris, is the last surviving native wildcat in the UK, according to National Museums Scotland. The species, which once roamed all of Britain, is critically endangered, with an estimated 35 or fewer individuals left in the wild, Woodland Trust shared on its website.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported in 2019, “The number of wildcats is too small, the hybridisation too far advanced and the population too fragmented. We therefore conclude that it is too late to conserve the wildcat in Scotland as a standalone population.”
Scottish wildcats have faced several threats over the years, including hybridization with domestic cats, habitat loss, accidental trapping, road accidents, hunting and disease.
The recent release is part of a larger effort to restore the population in the wild and prevent the species from going extinct. The wildcats, raised at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS), have been released in small groups over the past few months. Each is equipped with a GPS-tracking tag to allow researchers with the organization Saving Wildcats to collect data on the group.
So far, one of the 19 wildcats has died from an infection, but the surviving wildcats are doing well and slowly moving away from where they were released, Helen Senn, a project leader with RZSS, told The Guardian.
“It has been really positive, in the main,” Senn said. “We have seen evidence that the cats are able to hunt and fend for themselves. From that perspective, we’re really happy.”
In total, the program is expected to release 60 Scottish wildcats, with another release in 2024 and again in 2025 at different locations within the Scottish Highlands. Cameras set up throughout the region, in addition to the GPS tags, will provide more information to ultimately determine the success of the program.
“These are the first trial releases and, based on experience from similar projects around the world, further releases and many more years of conservation action will be required to increase the likelihood of saving this iconic species in Scotland,” Senn shared in a statement.
Further efforts to protect the species include neutering and vaccinating feral, domesticated cats to prevent them from breeding with the wildcats or passing on diseases. The Scottish wildcat species is protected by law, and these animals are hard to spot in the wild, but even still, the program leaders from RZSS and Saving Wildcats are urging the public to avoid disclosing the location of any wildcat sightings.
