As firefighters contained the largest wildfire in Texas history last week, the electricity provider for the state’s Panhandle region, Xcel Energy, announced some bad news: The wildfire, which burned more than a million acres of land and killed at least two people, seemed to have been caused by one of the utility’s electrical poles. 

“Based on currently available information, Xcel Energy acknowledges that its facilities appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire,” the statement read, referring to the largest of several fires raging in the area. An investigation from the state’s forest management agency found that the fire began when a decayed wooden pole splintered and fell, sending sparks onto nearby grass. Photos obtained by Bloomberg News appear to show that the pole had been marked unsafe before the fire.

Seizing on this evidence, multiple landowners in the area have already filed lawsuits against the company — as have family members of the fire’s victims, seeking millions of dollars in damages. Xcel has denied that it was to blame for the historic fire: In the same statement, the utility said it “disputes claims that it acted negligently in maintaining and operating its infrastructure.”

The lawsuits are just the latest in a string of high-profile wildfire cases against major electrical utilities, whose flammable power lines are among the most common culprits for major fire events. California companies such as Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison have paid out billions of dollars to fire victims and insurance companies over the past decade. Earlier this month, a jury delivered a verdict against the Oregon utility PacifiCorp, which could owe victims billions of dollars. Xcel itself is fighting hundreds of lawsuits in Colorado over its similar role in the 2021 Marshall Fire near the city of Boulder. These lawsuits have hit utilities with huge charges that they have passed onto customers in the form of rate increases.

The emergence of the trend in Texas, a state that has avoided massive fire losses over recent years, underscores that wildfires are now a national threat to utilities, according to Karl Rábago, a former Texas utility regulator and expert on utility law.

“They’re not pivoting to the world in which we live,” he told Grist. “When we face these situations, we do have a legal system that will likely dole out a measure of pain. The sad thing is, after paying out a certain amount of money, the problem will become so ubiquitous, and so oft-repeating, that we will treat it as business as usual.”

As in many previous lawsuits, the question in Texas is what counts as negligence on the part of a utility. If the fact that Xcel knew the pole needed repairs but hadn’t yet repaired it is sufficient evidence of neglect, the company will likely be on the hook for a large share of the fire damages, which could amount to hundreds of millions. The state utility regulator requires companies to plan for emergencies, and Xcel has told the state in the past that it conducts rotating inspections of old poles. However, most experts agree that utilities need to do more, burying power lines or adding technology that allows for rapid and precise power shutoffs during fire weather. 

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“There is a recognizable negligence, at least, in the failure to ensure that the systems are not extremely vulnerable,” said Rábago. “If your pole [is] 40 years old, it’s probably gotten to be so weak that it’ll get knocked over in severe winds.” Other fires that broke out in the Texas Panhandle at the same time as the Smokehouse Creek Fire have also burned thousands of acres, but investigators haven’t yet determined the cause of those events.

Xcel declined to comment for this story.

Xcel’s subsidiary in the Texas Panhandle delivers power to around 400,000 customers over a vast and sparsely populated service area of around 50,000 square miles. Pacific Gas & Electric in California, by comparison, provides power to 16 million people across a service territory that isn’t much larger. On the other hand, the fire mostly burned open rangeland, destroying far fewer homes than the Marshall Fire or other urban blazes. That could keep the potential damages relatively low.

The Smokehouse Creek Fire and its companion blazes are the most devastating in Texas history, but there is some precedent for holding Lone Star State utilities accountable. Dozens of victims and insurance companies sued the much smaller Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative near Austin for failing to remove dead trees ahead of a 34,000-acre fire. The company and its tree-trimming contractor settled those cases over the following years, with the contractor paying $5 million as recently as 2020. The fire was the most destructive ever in Texas at the time, but the Panhandle complex is many times larger.

“The consequences of utility ignitions are larger than they used to be, and there’s an increasingly clear set of practices that utilities can take, which some do, to avoid these kinds of ignitions,” said Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford Law School and an expert on how climate change affects utilities. “This is creating a situation where juries are more likely to hold utilities liable when they cause these catastrophic fires, if they haven’t taken appropriate steps.”

Wara said the most cost-effective steps include installing more accurate weather stations and shutting off the power proactively during extreme weather events.

These lawsuits may become more common as climate change ratchets up the potential for massive fires in many parts of the country. The Texas Panhandle has always seen rangeland fires, but studies show that the state’s high plains now see an additional month of “fire weather” each year compared to the mid-20th century. The combination of high temperatures and high winds that started the Smokehouse Creek Fire will only get more common as the Earth continues to warm, which could mean more costly fires and more litigation.

Utilities in other states have responded to fire lawsuits by raising rates on customers and using the money to pay out settlements or upgrade their infrastructure. Most Texans purchase power through a controversial wholesale market that has come under criticism for jacking up prices during extreme weather, but Xcel’s system in the Panhandle isn’t part of that market, so the utility’s customers could see a direct rate increase depending on how the lawsuit shakes out.

The growing trend of utility lawsuits has started to make markets nervous. Warren Buffett, whose company Berkshire Hathaway owns the Oregon utility PacifiCorp, said in his annual letter to shareholders last month that “the regulatory climate in a few states has raised the specter of zero profitability or even bankruptcy … in what was once regarded as among the most stable industries in America.” The legendary investor referred to his failure to foresee this trouble as “a costly mistake.”

In an interesting twist, Buffett then speculated that this threat to utility profits may someday lead more areas to adopt public power models, where governments rather than corporations control electrical infrastructure.

“Eventually, voters, taxpayers, and users will decide which model they prefer,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Texas, as in California, big fires lead to big lawsuits on Mar 13, 2024.

When Suwanna Gauntlett started working on conservation in Cambodia in the early 2000s, hundreds of hectares of rainforest were set ablaze every month to clear the land for illegal sales, and dozens of tigers and elephants had been killed. 

Gauntlett had founded the Wildlife Alliance in 1994 to fight tiger poaching in the Russian Far East, and a decade later expanded the nonprofit’s work to India, Ecuador, Myanmar, and Thailand. In 2000, Cambodia was their next frontier, home to one of the last giant rainforests in Southeast Asia stretching across the country’s Southern Cardamom region — what Gauntlett described as a “remote and completely lawless province.” 

“There were no rangers, no park headquarters, no ranger stations, no law enforcement at all in the area,” Gauntlett said in a 2016 interview with Mongabay. “It was literally the wild, wild west.”

Gauntlett spoke with the news outlet to celebrate the establishment of a new national park, which promised to protect more than a million acres of rainforest. It was a big victory for Gauntlett’s organization, and helped spur an even more expansive project in partnership with the Cambodian government to protect rainforests and sell carbon credits as corporate offsets to fund the work.

The project is part of the United Nations framework called REDD+, which stands for “‘Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.” The idea is that countries can fund environmental protection projects by selling a project’s carbon credits to corporations. 

But that project, known as the Southern Cardamom REDD+, has come under fire from the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, an international human rights watchdog. 

In a report released February 28, Human Rights Watch investigators describe how the project by the Wildlife Alliance and Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment repeatedly violated the rights of the Indigenous Chong peoples who have called the Cardamom mountains home for centuries. 

According to the authors, the Wildlife Alliance and Cambodian government embarked on the project without first consulting with the Indigenous peoples who lived there, violating their right under international law to free, prior, and informed consent to projects on their land. The report also outlines how Indigenous people were prevented from farming on their land and even thrown in jail for collecting resin from trees. “This is my livelihood and tradition, and I am doing nothing wrong,” a man referred to as Chamson in the report told investigators. 

Luciana Téllez, lead author of the Human Rights Watch report, said the findings reflect a broader trend globally in which Indigenous peoples and other traditional communities manage some of the best-preserved landscapes globally but are repeatedly marginalized and discriminated against. 

“The push to increase the areas that are under protected status is not matched by an impulse to recognize these minority groups’ rights. And we need to see the pace of both of these things match each other,” Téllez said. “We need to see conservation moving at the same rhythm as the move to recognize, protect, uphold the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.”

Overlooking Indigenous peoples while establishing conservation areas is a long-standing global problem. Settlers in the U.S. who saw the continent as a remote and lawless place established many national parks only after the removal of Indigenous peoples. But the practice continues across the globe: In Tanzania, the Indigenous Maasai people fled gunfire in 2022 to make way for a game reserve. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, park guards at Kahuzi-Biega National Park have killed Indigenous Batwa people in the name of conservation. Forced evictions are a feature, not a bug, of the practice known as fortress conservation: The United Nations estimates that since 1990, 250,000 people have lost their homes to make way for conservation projects. 

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In order to comply with international law, conservation projects like the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project should conduct thorough consultation with Indigenous peoples before projects begin. The report noted that for years, Wildlife Alliance and Cambodian government officials made key decisions about the conservation project, including mapping the area, applying for funding, and signing contracts in the region, before embarking on consultations.

Even the establishment of a national park in 2016 enclosed eight Chong communities before mapping or titling their traditional lands, the report found.

Protecting conservation land at the cost of Indigenous rights is a problem that’s expected to continue as countries face increasing pressure to combat climate change. At least 190 nations have pledged to conserve 30 percent of the Earth’s lands and waters by 2030, many of which are home to Indigenous peoples, and the United Nations’ REDD+ framework has added financial incentives to these conservation efforts. 

But Téllez said major questions remain about who actually benefits from carbon offset projects. Human Rights Watch found that in 2021, Southern Cardamom REDD+ made $18 million from carbon credit sales to multinational corporations. At the same time, Indigenous peoples described to investigators that the Wildlife Alliance’s enforcement of the REDD+ program cost them their livelihoods, including forcing some to borrow money when they were unable to farm on their family land. 

“Everybody is banned from entering the forest, but many people have farmland there,” a woman named Sothy told investigators. Another named Pov said, “Wildlife Alliance came to cut down the banana trees. There was no warning or discussion prior to the destruction.”

Téllez said a key problem is the lack of a legally binding benefit-sharing agreement to ensure that the communities affected receive a certain proportion of project funds. Wildlife Alliance and the Cambodian government had committed to complying with voluntary standards set by Verra, a company that sets quality-assurance standards on the voluntary carbon market. But Verra does not require that agreements be made with Indigenous communities to ensure they benefit financially. After learning of Human Rights Watch’s findings, Verra announced it would begin investigating the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project.

Wildlife Alliance says the report is misleading. “Many of the criticisms the report makes about the Southern Cardamom project conveniently fit the narrative HRW had already created as part of their advocacy on international carbon markets,” the Wildlife Alliance said in a statement on their website. 

The organization published a video this week of one of its community managers, Sokun Hort, denying that anyone had been evicted and saying that Human Rights Watch ignored broad community support for the project. The Wildlife Alliance and Cambodia’s Ministry of the Environment did not respond to requests for comment on the report. 

Téllez of Human Rights Watch said the report reflects what investigators heard in dozens of interviews. Even a Cambodian government official told Human Rights Watch that the Wildlife Alliance had been “harassing poor people just for collecting forest products.” 

Téllez is concerned by the organization’s continued denial of the allegations. 

“There isn’t an acknowledgment that some people have been harmed by the project, and there isn’t an acknowledgment that those people are entitled to remedy,” she said. “And so we will continue demanding accountability.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New report slams carbon offset project in Cambodia for violating Indigenous rights on Mar 13, 2024.

Researchers have discovered a variety of large plastic pieces in the guts of dead sea turtles found in the eastern Mediterranean. Some of these plastic items include bottle caps and a Halloween toy in the shape of a witch finger.

A team led by the University of Exeter and the North Cyprus Society for the Protection of Turtles (SPOT) examined 135 loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) that had died in North Cyprus, which has several nesting and foraging sites on beaches in the area. According to the study, many sea turtle deaths in the area are because of bycatch, and strandings also occur that may be related to interactions with the fisheries.

The researchers collected dead sea turtles from 2012 to 2022 and examined their guts for debris, including macroplastics, or plastic pieces larger than 5 millimeters.

In total, researchers found 492 macroplastic pieces in 42.7% of the turtles, and one individual turtle contained 67 of those macroplastic pieces. They published their findings in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

Overall, the researchers noted that the plastic pieces ingested tended to be rectangular, sheetlike, hard or foam texture and clear or white in color. The most common types of macroplastics found were polypropylene, polyethylene and polyamide.

The researchers also recorded findings of plastic-like debris, including elastic and rubber. In one turtle, they found a witch finger toy made from rubber.

“The journey of that Halloween toy — from a child’s costume to the inside of a sea turtle — is a fascinating glimpse into the life cycle of plastic,” Emily Duncan, from the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the Penryn Campus, said in a statement. “These turtles feed on gelatinous prey such as jellyfish and seabed prey such as crustaceans, and it’s easy to see how this item might have looked like a crab claw.”

According to the study authors, these findings could further support sea turtles as a bioindicator species, although more studies are needed. A bioindicator species is one that reveals changes to the health of an environment, such as the often-cited example of a canary in a coal mine.

As Brendan Godley, a professor at the University of Exeter who leads the Exeter Marine research group, explained, “Much larger sample sizes will be needed for loggerheads to be an effective ‘bioindicator’ species, and we recommend studies should also include green turtles — allowing a more holistic picture to be gathered.”

The post Bottle Caps, Halloween Toy and Other Plastics Found Inside Dead Sea Turtles in the Mediterranean appeared first on EcoWatch.

Despite the difficulties of recycling such a hefty household item, mattresses can be disposed of responsibly.

The post Recycling Mystery: Mattresses appeared first on Earth911.

If you’re a fan of chewing gum, there’s a big likelihood that you’re chewing single-use…

The post We Earthlings: Are You Chewing Single-Use Plastic? appeared first on Earth911.

The United States government said it is immune to 27 lawsuits filed by local and state governments, businesses, and property owners over the military’s role in contaminating the country with deadly PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.” The lawsuits are a small fraction of the thousands of cases brought by plaintiffs all over the country against a slew of entities that manufactured, sold, and used a product called aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF — an ultra-effective fire suppressant that leached into drinking water supplies and soil across the U.S. over the course of decades.

The Department of Justice asked a U.S. district judge in South Carolina to dismiss the lawsuits last month, arguing that the government can’t be held liable for PFAS contamination. Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the move “misguided” and said that dismissing the lawsuits would extend an ongoing environmental catastrophe the Pentagon helped create. 

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known by the acronym PFAS (pronounced PEA’-fass), were invented by the chemical giant DuPont in the 1940s. DuPont trademarked the chemical as “Teflon,” which many Americans came to know and love for its use in nonstick cookware in the back half of the 20th century. 3M, another industry behemoth, quickly surpassed DuPont as the world’s largest manufacturer of PFAS, which have also been used in makeup, food packaging, clothing, and many industrial applications such as plastics, lubricants, and coolants. 

Unfortunately, PFAS cause a host of health problems. PFAS have been linked to testicular, kidney and thyroid cancers; cardiovascular disease; and immune deficiencies.

The Department of Defense became involved in PFAS development in the 1960s. In response to a number of deadly infernos on military ship decks, the Navy’s research arm, the Naval Research Laboratory, collaborated with 3M on a new kind of firefighting foam that could put out high-temperature fires. The foam’s active ingredient was fluorinated surfactant, otherwise known as perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, or PFOS — one of thousands of chemicals under the PFAS umbrella. Internal studies and memos show that 3M became aware that its PFAS products could be harmful to animal test subjects not long after the foam was patented.  

Starting in the 1970s, every Navy ship — and, soon, almost every U.S. military base, civilian airport, local fire training facility, and firefighting station — had AFFF on-site in the event of a fire and to use for training. Year after year, the foam was dumped into the ocean and on the bare ground at these sites, where it contaminated the earth and migrated into nearby waterways. The chemicals, which do not break down naturally in the environment, are still there today. According to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, there are 710 military sites with known or suspected PFAS contamination across the U.S and its territories including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

The Department of Defense, or DOD, has been under growing pressure from states and Congress to clean up these contaminated sites. But it has been slow to do so, or even to acknowledge that PFAS, which has been found in the blood of thousands of military service members, pose a threat to human health. Instead, the DOD, which is required by Congress to phase out AFFF in some of its systems, doubled down on the usefulness of the chemicals as recently as 2023. “Losing access to PFAS due to overly broad regulations or severe market contractions would greatly impact national security and DOD’s ability to fulfill its mission,” defense officials wrote in a report to Congress last year. 

Meanwhile, people living near military bases — and members of the military — have been getting sick. The lawsuits filed in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina, which were brought by farmers and several states, seek to make the government pay for the water and property contamination the DOD allegedly caused. 

Even if these lawsuits are allowed to proceed, experts told Grist they are not likely to be successful. That’s because they rely on the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, a law that allows individuals to sue the federal government for wrongful acts committed by people working on behalf of the U.S. if the government has breached specific, compulsory policies.

But the Federal Tort Claims Act has loopholes. One of these loopholes, called the “discretionary function” exemption, states that federal personnel using their own personal judgment to make decisions should not be held liable for harms caused. The U.S. government is arguing that members of the military were using their discretion when they began requiring the use of AFFF and that no “mandatory or specific” restrictions on the foam were violated. “For decades military policy encouraged — rather than prohibited — the use of AFFF,” the Department of Justice wrote in its motion to dismiss the cases. 

“Every decision has some discretion to it,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, noting that the discretionary function exemption could be applied to virtually any decision made by a federal employee. “But I don’t think anyone, except maybe the manufacturers of PFAS, had much of an inkling that it was so harmful,” he said. 3M and DuPont did not reply to Grist’s requests for comment.

In its motion to dismiss, the government made another argument that experts told Grist is likely to be successful. The Pentagon has the authority under the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — better known as the Superfund Act — to clean up its own contaminated sites. The Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t classified PFAS contamination as “hazardous contamination” yet, but the DOD says it is already spending billions to investigate and control PFAS at some of its bases. Because the military is voluntarily exercising its cleanup authority under the Superfund Act, its lawyers said in the motion, it should not be held liable for PFAS contamination. 

Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the defendants declined requests for comment, citing the ongoing legal proceedings. 

The U.S. government is the only defendant involved in the PFAS lawsuits that is likely to enjoy immunity. Already, 3M, DuPont, and other chemical companies, faced with the threat of high-profile trials, have opted to pay out historic, multibillion-dollar settlements to water providers that alleged the companies knowingly contaminated public drinking water supplies with forever chemicals. And the judge presiding over the enormous group of AFFF lawsuits has hundreds of other cases to get through that were not brought by water providers. These include personal injury and property damage cases, as well as those seeking to make PFAS manufacturers pay for medical monitoring for exposed populations. 

The scale of the litigation is a clear indication that communities around the U.S. are desperate to find the money to pay for PFAS cleanup — the full cost of which is not yet clear, but could be as much as $400 billion. “We can’t even imagine what it would cost,” Tobias said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pentagon tries to dodge PFAS lawsuits over a product it helped invent on Mar 12, 2024.

If, in the 18 months since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, you’ve found yourself muttering Jerry Maguire’s timeless mantra — “Show me the money!” — a handful of policy analysts has just done exactly that. Their analysis of the nation’s investment in clean energy found that for every dollar the government has contributed to advancing the transition, the private sector has kicked in $5.47, leading to nearly a quarter-trillion dollars flowing into the clean economy in just one year.

Across nearly every segment tracked by Rhodium Group and its collaborators at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investments have not only increased since President Joe Biden signed the legislation, the rate of growth has quickened, too. In the 12 months from October 2022 through September 2023, $220 billion poured into everything from battery factories to solar farms to emerging technologies like hydrogen, including $34 billion in federal spending, mostly in the form of tax credits.

The report shows, among other things, the scale of investments that the government can spur with a clear commitment to a specific course of action. Both figures reveal a substantive increase in the financial pressure building behind the transition to a clean economy and testify to the role progressive policies play in pushing that economic transformation forward. 

“It’s proving the value of the federal government taking the lead, putting in place policy that says, ‘This is the direction that we’re headed: supporting decarbonization, supporting clean energy,’” said Hannah Hess, an associate director of climate and energy at Rhodium Group who co-authored the report.

By taking that lead, many billions more have flowed into the clean economy. In 2023, the sector as a whole logged new records for yet another year. Utility-scale solar and storage grew more than 50 percent compared to 2022 to a total of $53 billion. Investment in the entire EV supply chain hit $42 billion — up 115 percent over the previous year. Meanwhile, retail spending by businesses and households on things like EVs, heat pumps, and rooftop solar came in at $118 billion, all told.

Nonetheless, several economists and analysts said that, while impressive, the rate of investment revealed in the Clean Investment Monitor still isn’t enough for the U.S. to achieve its climate goals. We can certainly cut emissions by 40 percent, as stated in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, but we’re still far from the 50 percent reduction needed by 2030 to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement.

“We have more work to do,” said Catherine Wolfram, a professor of energy economics at MIT. While not involved with the Clean Investment Monitor, much of Wolfram’s work at MIT has studied the expected economic impacts of the IRA. Though she doesn’t see the level of investment as yet being sufficient to achieve that ambitious goal, she underscored that the IRA remains a big win, especially as a symbol of America’s commitment to climate action.

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By holding a torch to the path the nation’s economy can take toward a future in which excess emissions fade into myths and fables, the government has garnered investments in projects that won’t receive federal support for years to come. In particular, Hess pointed out that more than one-fifth of the $239 billion spent in the 2023 calendar year on clean investments went toward manufacturing, particularly to all things EV. In many cases, companies are spending tens, sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars to build factories on the promise that they will receive tax credits once batteries, solar panels, and other products start coming off the assembly line.

This reality has some investors keeping a keen eye on Congress.

Bob Keefe, executive director of the nonpartisan advocacy group E2, said that the dozens of attempts by Republican members of Congress to repeal or otherwise roll back provisions and funding sources in the IRA is making some investors squeamish. 

“Nobody’s going to want to invest in something if the policies that [are] driving it are under threat,” Keefe said. “I mean, just the mention of ‘threat’ is enough to spook people.”

Even with those policy scares and a looming election whose outcome may jeopardize the IRA’s various funding streams, E2 has nonetheless tracked announcements for hundreds of clean energy projects across 41 states since the legislation passed, with $4 billion worth of investments announced in February alone.

As long as the government doesn’t “screw it up,” Keefe said, “We are quite literally on the cusp of the biggest economic revolution we’ve seen in this country in generations.”

The trends for this have crystallized. Yes, the wind industry stumbled on land and at sea, according to the report, but it’s poised to find its footing again. But every other sector saw substantial, even startling, growth — particularly emerging technologies like hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuel. That broad category saw a tenfold increase in spending in 2023, hitting $9.1 billion.

Federal investments are already exceeding the Biden administration’s own estimates, and this spending, as Hess pointed out, will only increase. Barring unexpected obstructions, the government is on track to inject not the oft-cited figure of $369 billion, but perhaps as much as $1 trillion or more into the clean economy through IRA-related spending alone, according to estimates by Wolfram and her colleagues.

Wherever the final dollar figure falls, the report from Rhodium Group emphasizes the energy and enthusiasm there is behind this economic transition. To those who aren’t forehead deep in economic forecasting, the outpouring has been so expansive as to be wholly unexpected.

“Nobody could have ever predicted that we would see this type of investment, this type of job creation,” Keefe said. “It’s absolutely incredible.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The IRA has injected $240 billion into clean energy. The US still needs more. on Mar 12, 2024.

One of the most visible indicators of ocean surface temperature warming due to climate change is the bleaching of coral reefs. Environmental changes like warming waters can cause corals to expel the algae that live on them and provide them with nutrients, turning the corals white.

A new study has found that, while most of the world’s coral reefs are currently damaged or under threat, efforts to restore them can revitalize important ecosystem functions remarkably quickly.

“We found that restored coral reefs can grow at the same speed as healthy coral reefs just four years after coral transplantation,” lead author of the study Ines Lange, an associate professor of marine conservation and management at University of Exeter, said in a press release from Cell Press. “This means that they provide lots of habitat for marine life and efficiently protect the adjacent island from wave energy and erosion. The speed of recovery that we saw was incredible. We did not expect a full recovery of reef framework production after only four years.”

The study was conducted through Indonesia’s Mars Coral Reef Restoration Programme and involved the restoration of coral reefs that had been badly injured by blast fishing three or four decades earlier by adding substrate and transplanting corals.

Before scientists intervened, the reefs had not demonstrated any signs of recovery. This was because loose coral rubble was preventing the survival of coral larvae.

In order to consolidate the rubble, the researchers added steel structures coated with sand, which provided a framework for the transplantation of coral fragments.

To find out how fast the restored sites would recover, the research team looked at the carbonate budgets of a dozen sites — restored at various times as much as four years ago.

“Corals constantly add calcium carbonate to the reef framework while some fishes and sea urchins erode it away, so calculating the overall carbonate budget basically tells you if the reef as a whole is growing or shrinking,” Lange said. “Positive reef growth is important to keep up with sea-level rise, protect coastlines from storms and erosion, and provide habitat for reef animals.”

The study, “Coral restoration can drive rapid reef carbonate budget recovery,” was published in the journal Current Biology.

Research data showed that quick growth of coral transplants supports carbonate production and coral recovery. In only four years, a threefold increase in corals’ net carbonate budget was equal to those at healthy control sites.

However, restored reef communities differed from natural ones because during the transplantation process, branched corals were chosen over other types of corals.

The researchers pointed out that the differences “may affect habitat provision for some marine species and resilience to future heat waves, as branching corals are more sensitive to bleaching.”

The researchers said the findings showed that vigorous management can help improve coral reef resilience and revitalize ecosystem functions essential for marine life — as well as local communities — relatively quickly.

The team hoped that restored reefs would eventually begin to attract a more diverse array of corals.

They emphasized that the outcome in any particular location would depend upon restoration methods, environmental conditions and many other factors.

“These results give us the encouragement that if we can rapidly reduce emissions and stabilize the climate, we have effective tools to help regrow functioning coral reefs,” said study co-author Tim Lamont, a marine biologist at Lancaster University’s Lancaster Environment Centre, in the press release.

The post Coral Reef Restoration Can Help Provide ‘Full Recovery’ Within Four Years, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.