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Have you ever noticed that meadows of long grass seem to be teeming with butterflies, bumble bees, beetles, crickets and other insects? Meanwhile, short-cropped, bright green lawns appear devoid of critters in comparison.
A six-year study of butterfly sightings in 600 gardens in the United Kingdom has confirmed that letting your lawn grow wild can significantly increase butterfly and moth numbers.
“Nature is in crisis; 80% of butterflies have declined since the 1970s, so we need to take action now to protect them. We wanted to be able to give tried and tested gardening advice that will benefit butterflies as we know lots of people want to help. This study proves, for the first time, that allowing a patch of grass to grow long will attract more butterflies into your garden,” said Dr. Richard Fox, co-author of the study and head of science at UK nonprofit Butterfly Conservation, in a press release from the charity.
Fox and fellow Butterfly Conservation researcher Dr. Lisbeth Hordley found that letting long grass in your garden grow can boost butterfly numbers by as much as 93 percent, while attracting a greater variety of species.
The researchers were assisted in their Garden Butterfly Survey by citizen scientists throughout the UK.
The biggest benefits to garden rewilding were found in intensively farmed areas and urban spaces. Gardens with long grass in highly arable areas had as much as 93 percent more butterflies, while urban landscapes saw an increase of 18 percent.
“The potential to provide wild spaces for butterflies and moths to thrive is huge. Gardens make up more than 728,000 hectares in Great Britain — the equivalent of over a million football pitches. If each of these gardens had a space that was allowed to go a little wild, with grass growing long, it would make a huge difference for butterflies and moths, providing spaces for them to feed, breed and shelter,” Butterfly Conservation advised.
The study looked specifically at gardens, but the benefits of wild spaces and long grass for butterflies are likely applicable to other green spaces like parks, small fruit and vegetable patches, the grounds of schools and strips of grass and vegetation between sidewalks and roadways. These areas could become important wildlife refuges if allowed to flourish.
“The simple act of creating wild spaces by allowing a patch of grass to grow long, or a border edge to go wild is free and easy to do, and can significantly boost butterfly numbers, especially in urban and agricultural settings where they are most under pressure. The benefits of each individual wild space are small, but if thousands of people get involved the boost to butterflies could be huge,” Fox said in the press release.
The study was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
Fox and Hordley found that flowering ivy in particular increased populations of specific butterfly species like Red Admiral, Comma and Holly Blue, which breed in ivy habitat and use it as a source of nectar.
They also discovered that long grass attracts more species with caterpillars who eat grasses, including gatekeepers, meadow browns, speckled woods, small skippers and ringlets, reported The Guardian.
Fox said this pointed to population increases not being just from the availability of wildflower nectar found in the grasses, but because the butterflies were seeking out or breeding in lawns that had been allowed to grow.
“It’s a really positive sign,” Fox said, as The Guardian reported. “What people are doing with long grass in gardens is creating potential or actual breeding habitat. In order to make an impact on the biodiversity crisis we need to be creating places where butterflies and other wildlife can breed. This is simple, doesn’t cost anything and saves you time and effort. If you have a patch of long grass you may have grasshoppers, beetles and ant hills as well – there will be all these spinoffs.”
Butterfly Conservation has a goal of transforming 100,000 areas in the UK to help butterfly populations through its Wild Spaces initiative.
The wildlife nonprofit is asking everyone to support butterfly and biodiversity recovery by creating their own wild spaces, whether large or small. These can be on patios, terraces and balconies or in gardens and shared local spaces.
“Whether you have a large garden, a small patch of grass, a community or school space, or a balcony or window box, anyone, anywhere can help. We hope that our Wild Spaces programme will inspire people across the UK to take action and help to create a national network of butterfly-friendly habitats,” Fox said in the press release.
The post Letting Your Grass Grow Wild Boosts Butterfly Numbers, UK Study Says appeared first on EcoWatch.
You can now apply to be one of the first members of the American Climate Corps. President Joe Biden declared that the program was open for applications on Monday with 273 jobs currently listed on the White House’s website, including coastal conservation in Florida, stream restoration in Montana, and forest management in the Sierra Nevada. The administration said the number of openings will soon reach 2,000, with positions spanning 36 states plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
“You’ll get paid to fight climate change, learning how to install those solar panels, fight wildfires, rebuild wetlands, weatherize homes, and so much more,” Biden said at a press conference on Monday at Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park, originally built in 1936 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, a model for the Biden administration’s new program. “It’s going to protect the environment to build a clean energy economy.”
It’s part of an Earth Day-related policy push from Biden, who also announced $7 billion in grants to install solar power and reduce energy costs for 900,000 low-income and disadvantaged households. The moves might appeal to the young people who were crucial to Biden’s 2020 victory over President Donald Trump and who, according to polls, have been souring on his performance in the White House. But this same demographic supports climate action, according to a poll taken last week by CBS News and YouGov, with more than three-quarters of those surveyed from both parties saying they wanted the U.S. to take steps to address climate change.
Monday’s announcements also offered a glimpse into what climate corps positions might be available in the future, as the White House looks to employ 20,000 people in the program’s first year, with a target of 200,000 in five years. A new partnership with TradesFutures, a nonprofit construction company, suggests that members could help fill the country’s shortage of skilled workers who can install low-carbon technologies like electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps, while at the same time gaining skills toward getting good-paying jobs. The White House is also planning to place American Climate Corps members in so-called “energy communities” — such as former coal-mining towns — to help with projects like environmental remediation.
The pay for the listed jobs ranges dramatically depending on location and the experience required. On the lower end, coastal restoration jobs in Puerto Rico offer the equivalent of $12.50 an hour. On the upper end, a position for a biological technician in Idaho that requires experience in identifying plants and managing invasive species pays $23 an hour. The lengths of the terms are all over the place, with some as short as two or three months, though most last at least several months, and the website says that some jobs can be extended or renewed.
Biden first announced that he planned to revive a version of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps during his first days in office in 2021. But the program took a while to get off the ground after its funding got cut during negotiations with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate bill Biden signed in 2022. In time, the Biden administration cobbled together funding from a bunch of different agencies to start the program, but it’s much smaller than climate advocates had hoped. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York and Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts had called for 1.5 million jobs over a span of five years in legislation introduced in 2021.
Still, Ocasio-Cortez celebrated the corps’ official arrival at the press conference on Monday. “People said then it was impossible,” she said. “We knew an American Climate Corps wasn’t impossible because our country has done this before … What we needed, though, was the political will.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The American Climate Corps is now hiring on Apr 22, 2024.
President Joe Biden will celebrate Earth Day with the announcement of $7 billion in residential solar grants through the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Solar for All program.
The program will save recipients roughly $400 a year on their energy bills and create 200,000 jobs, a press release from the White House said.
The program is in line with the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of directing 40 percent of federal benefits for green energy investments to disadvantaged communities, reported Reuters.
“We’re opening up a market where everybody, no matter their zip code or their economic background can tap into the savings opportunity that clean energy represents,” said a senior administration official on Friday, as Reuters reported.
Funding for Solar for All comes from the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The announcement will be made during the president’s visit to Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park, a national park developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Biden will also announce the opening of applications to the American Climate Corps, which helps prepare young people for climate-related jobs.
Applicants to the program can access the 2,000 available positions across the U.S. and Puerto Rico here.
The climate corps will offer training on the installation of solar panels, restoration of mangrove ecosystems, operating methane emissions detection cameras and other climate-related jobs.
“These positions are hosted by hundreds of organizations advancing clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience,” the press release said.
The first climate corps class begins in June.
The Solar for All grants will result in power for nearly one million low-income households, reported Reuters.
“The selectees will provide funds to states, territories, Tribes, municipalities, and nonprofits across the country to develop long-lasting solar programs that enable low-income and disadvantaged communities to deploy and benefit from distributed residential solar,” the press release said. “The program also advances the President’s Justice40 Initiative, which set a goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”
Recipients of the Solar for All grants include 60 local and state agencies, as well as nonprofits that have programs to assist residents of poorer communities with going solar. Some of the winners have plans to bring solar to Native American residences in Alaska, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, Reuters reported.
Residential solar has historically been hard to access for low-income people due to the high upfront cost of solar and because they often rent their homes.
“Selectees under the Solar for All program will serve every state and territory in the nation and deliver residential solar power to over 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities, saving overburdened households more than $350 million in electricity costs annually… and avoiding more than 30 million metric tons of carbon pollution over the next 25 years,” the press release said.
This week, the administration will share other developments in its climate change agenda.
“Throughout Earth Week, the Biden-Harris Administration will announce additional actions to build a stronger, healthier future for all: Tuesday will focus on helping ensure clean water for all communities; Wednesday will focus on accelerating America’s clean transportation future; Thursday will focus on steps to cut pollution from the power sector while strengthening America’s electricity grid; and Friday will focus on providing cleaner air and healthier schools for all children,” the press release said.
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A new study has found high concentrations of perfluoroalkyl acids, or PFAA, in sea spray. In fact, researchers noted that the levels of PFAAs in sea spray aerosols were even higher than in seawater itself, and the researchers estimated that emissions of PFAAs from sea spray could be even greater than those in the atmosphere from manufacturing sources and other known polluters.
The study looked at PFAAs that are remobilized from seawater into sea spray via field studies of the Atlantic Ocean between the UK and Chile, The Guardian reported. Researchers Bo Sha and Jana Johansson used a sea spray emulator and worked from a ship for two months, according to Sha. They found that PFAA concentrations in the sea spray were over 100,000 times greater than the amount of PFAAs in the water itself. The team of researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances.
“The common belief is that PFAS drain from the land into the oceans where they stay to be diluted into the deep oceans over the timescale of decades,” Ian Cousins, co-author of the study and professor at the Stockholm University’s Department of Environmental Sciences, said in a statement. “But we’ve now demonstrated in multiple studies that there’s a boomerang effect, and some of the toxic PFAS are re-emitted to air, transported long distances and then deposited back onto land.”
PFAAs are the most-studied subgroup of PFAS and have been previously found in rainwater, a previous study by the same research team found. PFAS (per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances) are chemical compounds that do not break down in the environment and have been linked to human health risks, including elevated risks of certain types of cancer, as well as potential environmental impacts as they bioaccumulate in wildlife. PFAAs in particular are common in firefighting foams, food packaging and waterproof and stain-repellent materials, as explained by Science Direct.
Scientists are continuing to try to understand the long-term impacts of PFAS in the atmosphere, so the latest findings of high PFAA concentrations in sea spray provide more information of how PFAA accumulates near the surface of the ocean and then release into the atmosphere from sea spray aerosols. From there, the researchers warned that the PFAAs can be transported back to land, forming a cycle of PFAAs moving from land to sea and back again.
According to the study authors, an estimated 49 tons of PFOA and 26 tons of PFOS are emitted each year from sea spray aerosols, compared to an estimated 1 to 1.4 tons of PFOS emitted into the air annually from industrial sources. The amount of PFOA emissions from sea spray is also comparable to the up to 74 tons of PFOA in the atmosphere from various known emitters as of 2012, the authors wrote in the study.
The scientists noted that these findings raise health concerns for people in coastal regions. They also suggested that their estimates in the study could fall short of the actual amount of PFAAs moving through to coastal regions.
“These findings have implications for human exposure to PFAAs, especially in coastal regions, and this merits further investigation,” the study concluded. “For example, our estimates include neither the contribution of shoreline wave breaking to the atmospheric burden of PFAAs nor the influence of the higher concentrations of PFAAs generally found in coastal regions. As such, our estimates on the deposition of PFAAs to coastal regions following their remobilization through SSA are likely to be conservative.”
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This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
For more than 20 years, Tom Goldtooth has listened to conversations about the negative impacts fossil fuels and carbon markets have on Indigenous peoples. On Wednesday, Goldtooth and the Indigenous Environmental Network, or IEN, called for a permanent end to carbon markets. Beyond being an ineffective tool for mitigating climate change, the organization argues; they harm, exploit, and divide Native communities around the world.
The recommendation was delivered to a crowd of Indigenous activists, policymakers, and leaders at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, and is the most comprehensive moratorium on the issue the panel has ever heard. If adopted, the position would pressure other United Nations agencies — like the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC — to take a similar stance. The heightened urgency stems from the COP29 gathering planned later this year, when provisions in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement on carbon market structures are expected to be finalized.
“We are long overdue for a moratorium on false climate solutions like carbon markets,” said Goldtooth, who is Diné and Dakota and executive director of IEN. “It’s a life and death situation with our people related to the mitigation solutions that are being negotiated, especially under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Article 6 is all about carbon markets, which is a smokescreen, which is a loophole [that keeps] fossil fuel polluters from agreeing to phase out carbon.”
The Network’s language on “false climate solutions” is intentional. Tamra Gilbertson, the organization’s climate justice program coordinator and researcher, said a false climate solution is anything that looks like a tool for reducing emissions or fighting climate change but allows extractive companies to continue profiting from the fossil fuels driving the crisis.
“Carbon markets have been set up by the polluting industries,” Gilbertson said. “The premise of carbon markets as a good mitigation outcome or a good mitigation program for the UNFCCC is in and of itself a flawed concept. And we know that because of who’s put it together.”
The carbon market moratorium the Network called for would end carbon dioxide removal projects like carbon capture and storage; forest, soil, and ocean offsets; nature-based solutions; debt-for-nature swaps; biodiversity offsets, and other geoengineering technologies.
This year’s moratorium recommendation builds on a similar proposal the IEN offered at last year’s Forum, when it called for a stop to carbon markets until Indigenous communities could “thoroughly investigate the impacts and make appropriate demands.” That call led to an international meeting in January, where Native experts discussed the impacts a green economy has and would have on their communities. Ultimately, the participants produced a report detailing how green economy projects and initiatives can create a new way to colonize Indigenous Peoples’ lands and territories.
Darío José Mejía Montalvo, of the Zenú tribe in Colombia, participated in the January meeting and has chaired a previous UNPFII. He highlighted the report during a UN session last week.
“The transition towards a green economy [keeps] starting from the same extractivist-based logic that prioritizes the private sector, which is guided by national economic interests of multinationals, which ignores the fights of Indigenous people, the fight against climate change, and the fight against poverty,” Montalvo said, according to a UN translation of a speech he delivered in Spanish.
Goldtooth and Gilbertson say that, while the January report established wider consensus around the negative impacts of the green economy, the IEN felt that the report’s recommendations were unclear and did not go far enough to discourage the growth of carbon markets – which is why the organization is calling for a permanent moratorium.
“We have to do everything that we can from every direction we possibly can in this climate emergency that we’re in, because we don’t have a lot more time,” Gilbertson said. If carbon markets are enshrined in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement as they are currently written and become a more powerful international network, “we are in a whole new era of linked-up global carbon markets like we’ve never seen before. And then we’re stuck with it.”
Under the Paris Agreement, countries submit plans detailing how they will reduce emissions or increase carbon sequestration. Article 6 provides pathways for nations to cooperate on a voluntary basis and trade emissions to achieve their climate goals. More specifically, paragraph 6.4 would create a centralized market and lead to large-scale implementation of emission reductions trading. The nuances of these structures and how carbon markets are presented in Article 6 has far-reaching impacts: A report released in November by the International Emissions Trading Association, or IETA, showed that 80 percent of all countries indicate they will or would use carbon markets to meet their climate goals.
In its current form, carbon offset projects as described in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement would further threaten Indigenous land tenure and access to resources. If finalized in November, pilot projects are expected to start as soon as January 2025.
At this year’s Forum, organizations like the United Nations Development Program, Climate Focus, Forests Peoples Programme, and Rainforest US discussed new initiatives to protect Indigenous peoples’ rights within a carbon market. In particular, there’s increased attention on policies that would more effectively incorporate free, prior, and informed consent, or FPIC, into carbon offset operations. But Kimaren Riamit, executive director of ILEPA-Kenya, an Indigenous-led nonprofit, said the foundation that must be established even before FPIC is better recognized Indigenous self-determination – agency for tribes to decide for themselves if they want to engage in carbon market projects at all.
“FPIC without enablers of self determination is useless because what do you give consent over when your land rights are not there? What do you give consent of if you are not part of the decision governance arrangement?” said Riamit, who is of the Maasai tribe in Kenya. Enablers of self-determination include protections for Indigenous land sovereignty and land tenure security.
Riamit says that, in carbon market projects, free, prior, and informed consent has become a strategic tool and a confusing exercise in disseminating information rather than a way of obtaining meaningful consent from tribes. There must be a deliberate and full disclosure to tribes of what they are agreeing to when engaging in a carbon market project, and time for them to digest the information, consult internally, provide feedback, and – critically – “be able to say no.”
It’s notable to Riamit that carbon offset companies don’t advocate strongly, if at all, for improved self-determination of the Indigenous communities they work with.
“They don’t sharpen a knife to slaughter themselves,” he said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous peoples rush to stop ‘false climate solutions’ ahead of next international climate meeting on Apr 22, 2024.