At the bottom of the Earth sits a massive bowl of ice you may know as the West Antarctic ice sheet. Each day, the ocean laps away at its base, slowly eroding the glaciers that line its rim. When they inevitably give in, the sea will begin to fill the basin, claiming the ice for its own and flooding coastlines around the world. 

Thwaites Glacier is one of the bulwarks guarding against the collapse of this critical ice sheet, most of which rests below sea level and holds enough ice to raise the ocean by 60 meters, or about 195 feet. Unfortunately, this frosty Goliath, the size of Florida, is also one of the world’s most unstable and fastest-melting glaciers. While glaciologists knew its rate of ice loss was dire, they recently discovered that it’s exposed to far more warming water than previously believed. In a study published this week, scientists using satellite imagery and hydraulic modeling found that warming tidal currents are permeating the massive block of ice at depths as great as 3.7 miles, causing “vigorous melting.”

“We really, really need to understand how fast the ice is changing,” said Christine Dow, an associate professor of glaciology at the University of Waterloo and one of the study’s authors. “We were hoping it would take a hundred, 500 years to lose that ice.” Although the researchers do not know how much faster the ice is melting, they worry it could be gone within a few decades.

As climate change drives global temperatures ever higher, glaciers and ice sheets in polar and mountainous regions inevitably melt. The water and dislodged ice flows into the oceans, causing them to rise. Since 1880, global sea levels have climbed roughly 9 inches, and any sudden increase could be catastrophic for coastal cities like New York, Mumbai, and Shanghai. Low-lying countries like the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu could be submerged entirely.

Thwaites Glacier, often dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier,” already accounts for 4 percent of the planet’s sea level rise and loses 50 billion tons of ice annually. When it collapses, it could raise oceans worldwide by 65 centimeters, or just over 2 feet. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you think of how much ocean water we have in the world, that’s a huge volume,” said Dow.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the pulsing of tides, which raise and lower the ice, allow water to creep further under its shelf and weaken its anchor to the seabed. While the same team observed this phenomenon at Petermann Glacier in Greenland, it had not been recorded in Antarctica. Thwaites has about eight times the amount of ice in contact with the ocean as Petermann.

Using high-resolution satellite images and hydrological data, the study identified high-pressure pockets where the glacier’s surface had been raised, which showed that warm water was flowing under the ice. Previous models had only used the part of the glacier that touches the ocean as the “grounding line” from which to start calculating the potential speed of ice loss from contact with warm, salty water. Now, according to the paper, researchers may have found the missing link in modeling how glaciers change.

“This boundary is a really crucial aspect in geology with respect to the glaciers’ response to a changing climate,” said Bernd Scheuchl, an Earth systems researcher at the University of California-Irvine and an author of the paper. He says a better understanding of the way ocean water can penetrate the base of a glacier can help scientists better predict ice loss across the West Antarctic ice sheet. “The entire region is the gateway to an area that’s well below sea level.”

Predicting the speed of ice loss and sea level rise is no easy task. Ever-shifting factors, like the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, could slow or accelerate global warming, and in turn, the rate that glaciers melt. And modeling glaciers, which are hydrologically dynamic, remote, and difficult to research, is a technological challenge that computers have only recently been able to handle, according to Dow.

Sharon Gray, a marine scientist at the nonprofit Rising Seas Institute, says research breakthroughs like this help the world prepare for and adapt to disappearing coastlines. “It’s never going to be perfect,” she said. “But obviously, the better we can get our models, the better we get our projections that help us plan.” 

Given the complexity and uncertainty of modeling, Gray said it’s best to assume seas will rise to the highest predicted level and to prepare for worst-case scenarios. Some high-risk places, like Singapore and the Netherlands, are doing just that and have been investing in infrastructure to meet the challenge. “I think there’s hope and an opportunity in really thinking creatively and trying to wrap our heads around what’s coming and what we can do about it,” she said.

Researchers like Dow and Scheuchl say the best way to protect glaciers is to limit carbon emissions. Although the heat that humanity has already put into the atmosphere will linger for centuries and continue to melt glaciers, curbing the amount the planet warms could buy us time to prepare for, if not prevent, the most extreme outcomes.

“It’s never too late to make some change,” Scheuchl said. “Even if we aren’t able to stop these developments, we can slow things down and lessen their impacts.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is melting faster than scientists thought on May 24, 2024.

Eight young people from Alaska are suing their state government, claiming a major new North Slope natural gas project is in violation of their constitutional rights.

The plaintiffs — who range in age from 11 to 22 — allege that a law mandating development of the Alaska Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) Project infringes on the protection of their health and livelihood from the release of dangerous greenhouse gases, reported Reuters.

“Alaska’s youth are on the front lines of the climate crisis, and their futures depend on a swift transition away from fossil fuel,” said Andrew Welle, an attorney with Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm representing the plaintiffs, as Reuters reported.

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Recently, two climate change lawsuits brought by youth in Alaska were dismissed. In the most recent — dismissed in 2022 — the state supreme court said courts were not able to order sweeping policy changes.

The current youth plaintiffs said their suit complies with earlier rulings of the court, however, since it focuses on an individual project, rather than challenging broad state fossil fuel policies.

The Alaska LNG Project would involve constructing a treatment plant for natural gas on Alaska’s North Slope, reported The Guardian. A liquefaction plant on the pristine Kenai Peninsula and an 800-mile pipeline stretching across the state would also be built.

The lawsuit said the $38.7 billion project, proposed by the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation, would triple greenhouse gas emissions for the state for decades to come.

“[Y]outh plaintiffs are uniquely vulnerable to and disproportionately injured by the climate harms that would result from the Alaska LNG Project,” the lawsuit said, as The Guardian reported.

The pipeline would bisect Alaska, carrying billions of cubic feet of gas daily from the North Slope through local communities, reported Reuters.

The youth plaintiffs said they are already experiencing breathing issues caused by smoke from climate change-fueled wildfires, as well as other harms such as a diminished ability to subsistence fish and hunt.

They argued that the Alaska LNG project would exacerbate climate change and asked the court to declare the state law mandating its development unconstitutional and stop it from proceeding.

The young Alaskans also requested a declaration that the state constitution include a right to a climate system that is life-sustaining. Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country.

“[The Alaska LNG project] would drastically increase Alaska’s emissions at a time when climatologists are telling us that they need to be rapidly reduced in order to protect the health and safety of young people,” Welle said, as the Anchorage Daily News reported.

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The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Climate Prediction Center has forecast an “above-normal” Atlantic hurricane season for 2024, with a projected range of 17 to 25 named storms, of which eight to 13 are predicted to become hurricanes, a press release from NOAA said.

It is the most storms ever predicted by NOAA in a preseason forecast, said Rick Spinrad, NOAA’s director.

“The forecast… is the highest NOAA has ever issued for the May outlook,” Spinrad said at a news conference in Washington D.C., reported Reuters.

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Hurricane season in the Atlantic basin is from the beginning of June to the end of November.

NOAA is predicting an 85 percent chance the season will be above-normal, a 10 percent likelihood it will be “near-normal” and a five percent chance there will be fewer storms than usual.

“All the ingredients are in place for an active season,” said Ken Graham, director of the National Weather Service, as USA Today reported.

The higher than normal predicted activity is due to a combination of factors, including La Niña conditions developing in the Pacific, near-record Atlantic Ocean temperatures and reduced trade winds and lower wind shear in the Atlantic, NOAA said. Together, these conditions favor the formation of tropical storms.

Light trade winds mean there is no disruption from strong wind shear, which minimizes ocean cooling while allowing hurricanes to strengthen.

Oceans globally are warming due to human-caused climate change. Melting land ice leads to sea level rise, increasing storm surge risk and the potential damage from any given hurricane.

“With another active hurricane season approaching, NOAA’s commitment to keeping every American informed with life-saving information is unwavering,” Spinrad said in the press release. “AI-enabled language translations and a new depiction of inland wind threats in the forecast cone are just two examples of the proactive steps our agency is taking to meet our mission of saving lives and protecting property.”

NOAA scientists are forecasting a swift transition to the La Niña conditions that tend to be favorable for hurricane activity in the Atlantic after one of the most potent El Niños ever observed.

Erik A. Hooks, FEMA’s deputy administrator, warned those living in areas prone to hurricanes to take precautions ahead of time.

“Severe weather and emergencies can happen at any moment, which is why individuals and communities need to be prepared today,” Hooks said in the press release. “Already, we are seeing storms move across the country that can bring additional hazards like tornadoes, flooding and hail. Taking a proactive approach to our increasingly challenging climate landscape today can make a difference in how people can recover tomorrow.”

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A new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has found that about half of all mangrove ecosystems in the world are at risk of collapsing, meaning they are considered vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered by the organization’s Red List of Ecosystem standards.

Further, about 19.6% of mangroves, nearly one in five, are considered to be at severe risk of collapse, meaning they rank as endangered or critically endangered, the report found.

The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems measures the health and risks of specific ecosystems, but this is the first time the standards have been used to assess an ecosystem at a global scale.

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“The first global assessment of mangrove ecosystems gives key guidance that highlights the urgent need for coordinated conservation of mangroves — crucial habitats for millions in vulnerable communities worldwide,” Grethel Aguilar, IUCN director general, said in a press release. “The assessment’s findings will help us work together to restore the mangrove forests that we have lost and protect the ones we still have.” 

IUCN reported that mangrove ecosystems face an increasing number of threats, particularly from the effects of climate change. Frequent and severe weather events threaten the mangroves, but they are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise.

Mangrove ecosystems, which require tropical, humid environments, are expanding into temperate areas because of climate change. According to IUCN, agricultural use of freshwater has also limited the amount of freshwater that can reach coastal areas where mangroves typically thrive, limiting the mangroves’ ability to survive in their natural habitats.

But sea level rise remains the biggest threat to mangrove ecosystems, the report highlighted. In a business-as-usual scenario, about 25% of the global area covered by mangroves currently could be submerged over the next 50 years, and about 33% of global mangrove ecosystems will be severely impacted.

At the current rate, the predicted mangrove losses would lead to a loss of 1.8 billion metric tons of stored carbon emissions, equating to a cost to society of about $336 billion. Losing these mangrove ecosystems could also expose 2.1 million people to coastal flooding.

“Mangrove ecosystems are exceptional in their ability to provide essential services to people, including coastal disaster risk reduction, carbon storage and sequestration, and support for fisheries,” said Angela Andrade, chair of the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management. “Their loss stands to be disastrous for nature and people across the globe.”

The report, while grim, concluded with next steps to curb emissions and preserve these important ecosystems, which can store more carbon than tropical forests and protect over 15 million people from coastal flooding each year.

IUCN recommended efforts to preserve and restore mangrove forests as well as providing more inland space for the mangroves to naturally expand to adapt to sea level rise.

As NPR reported, humans will need to pursue ways to curb emissions and the effects of climate change to further protect these at-risk ecosystems, such as through a clean energy transition.

“The Red List of Ecosystems provides clear pathways on how we can reverse mangroves loss and protect these delicate ecosystems for the future, helping in turn to safeguard biodiversity, tackle the effects of climate change and support the realisation of the Global Biodiversity Framework,” Andrade said.

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Late in the summer of 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency sent the Mississippi state government a routine report assessing its use of federal funding for water infrastructure. The agency concluded with the words “no findings” — that is, the EPA found no issue with how Mississippi was spending its money.

The very next day, on August 29, as many as 180,000 residents in the Jackson area lost access to clean drinking water and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba both declared a state of emergency. 

More than 12 inches of rain had fallen across the region, causing the Pearl River, which begins about 75 miles northeast of Jackson and flows south to the Gulf Coast, to flood. Jackson’s main water treatment plant was overrun. Water pressure throughout the system plunged, leaving residents — along with hospitals and fire stations — without safe drinking water. Many homes had no water at all. Images of the National Guard distributing cases of bottled water to residents in miles-long queues flashed across screens. Contrary to the EPA’s conclusion, now public in a new report by researchers at the Project for Government Oversight, or POGO, the state’s capital was one heavy rainfall away from a public health crisis that captured the attention of the nation. 

Nearly two years later, thousands of residents across Jackson are still contending with low pressure and brown water. While blame for the crisis has largely fallen on the state and local governments, POGO​, a nonpartisan group that investigates waste, corruption, and abuses of power, spotlights the EPA’s role. The researchers obtained hundreds of documents that reveal a “troubling trend”: EPA officials knew that not enough federal funding was being dispersed by the state to Jackson for infrastructure improvements, and they failed to make note of these practices in their assessments. 

“EPA oversight is very important,” said Nick Schwellenbach, one of the researchers on POGO’s report. “The agency can’t force states to spend money in a certain way, but its oversight can nudge and prod states toward best practices.” The investigation highlights a breakdown in communication between different arms of the EPA: While the agency has been diligent about flagging drinking water issues in Jackson — suing the city in 2020 for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act — its supervision of the state’s use of federal dollars for water infrastructure updates has been limited. 

“There’s a lot that EPA oversight can do to head off disaster,” Schwellenbach said. “EPA was saying [to Jackson], ‘You’re out of compliance with federal law’ but wasn’t going to the state and saying, ‘What are you doing to help?’”

Long before the heavy rains that set off Jackson’s water crisis, the city’s infrastructure had been crumbling due to decades of neglect. Like many other midsize cities across the country — Memphis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh — Jackson experienced a decline in the late-20th century after its white, middle-class residents moved to the suburbs, severely limiting tax dollars available for infrastructure improvements. Today, Jackson is more than 80 percent Black, up from 50 percent in the 1980s, and a quarter of its residents live in poverty. As a result of the shifting demographics, the city council became majority-Black and Democrat, and by the 1980s, friction with the mostly white Republican state government had developed. 

When Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996, it established a program whereby municipalities could use federal funding to update their beleaguered water infrastructure. The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund is administered by state environment departments, which review applications by local governments and distribute funding in the form of loans each year. In accordance with the fund, the EPA is responsible for making annual reports on where the money is going. According to the agency, its audits are parts of a “circle of accountability,” and are meant to “guide funding decisions and program management policies.” But in the case of Jackson, the reports seem to have functioned as a “rubber stamp” of Mississippi’s management of the fund, POGO researchers wrote. 

Multiple arms of the EPA flagged issues with the agency’s oversight of the fund over the past decade. The Office of Inspector General, or OIG, the agency’s internal watchdog, found issues with the reports stretching back to 2011 and as recently as last year. In a 2014 document, the OIG noted that the EPA’s audits often do little to ensure that federal dollars from the fund go to communities with the greatest public health need or to disadvantaged communities — which, as POGO researchers pointed out, are often one and the same. Then, in a 2017 internal memo that the POGO report surfaced, EPA officials cited an unspent pool of money in Mississippi that represented “unrealized potential to protect public health.” That year, the agency’s regional office sent Mississippi a gleaming audit.  

While Mississippi has historically enjoyed generous allocations from the fund, with more than $260 million allotted between 2017 and 2021 alone, the city of Jackson has not reaped the benefits. In a civil rights complaint filed with the EPA in 2022, the NAACP noted that Jackson has received loans just three times in the program’s 25-year history. The Bear Creek Water Authority in the largely rural and white Madison County, by comparison, received funds nine out of the past 25 years. (The EPA dismissed the NAACP complaint earlier this month.) 

The Mississippi state government has denied that Jackson received less funding than other parts of the state, with Governor Tate Reeves writing in 2022 that there is “no factual basis whatsoever to suggest that there has been an ‘underinvestment’ in the city.” His account, the POGO researchers noted, does not acknowledge the state’s historically unforgiving loan program and the city’s wariness of taking on debt. 

Part of the problem, Schwellenbach noted, is that the EPA does not proactively make its oversight reports public. To complete its investigation, Schwellenbach’s team had to request hundreds of records through a freedom of information request. In addition to reviewing the EPA’s program assessments for dozens of states, which they compared to Mississippi, the researchers read through internal EPA memos and inspector general reports and interviewed EPA staffers to develop a comprehensive picture of the agency’s knowledge of conditions in Jackson. 

“The EPA’s reviews of state programs are something of a black hole,” Janet Pritchard, the director of water infrastructure policy for the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, told POGO. “While some states have recently revised how they define ‘disadvantaged communities’ and other policies that govern the distribution of state revolving fund awards … the extent or impact of EPA engagement remains unclear.” Johnnie Purify, an EPA staffer in the Region 4 office, which oversees Mississippi, told POGO that he “has no concerns with making EPA oversight reports public, and said they would be helpful to external parties and the public at large.”

The EPA’s failure to alert Mississippi about its uneven distribution of federal funds has had severe consequences for the people of Jackson, where brown-tinged water continues to flow out of taps across the city. These days, as little as a powerful thunderstorm can upset the fragile water infrastructure and upend residents’ lives for weeks. The ongoing crisis has also contributed to further population decline: Last year, the Clarion Ledger reported that Jackson is the fastest shrinking city in the nation.

In November 2022, a federal judge appointed Ted Henifin, an engineer by training, to manage the city’s water system. Local advocates initially felt hopeful that Henifin’s expertise would go far toward improving conditions in the water system, but over time, they became frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of transparency in his decision-making. 

In December 2022, the Biden administration announced a $600 million allocation in the bipartisan infrastructure law for Jackson to repair its water system, a historic sum that Henifin has the authority to use as he chooses. In early 2023, Henifin established JXN Water, a private company, to update the city’s water system, prompting fears from the public that the system itself may soon be privatized, and fueling concerns about transparency, as corporations are not subject to public disclosure laws. Repeated requests by local advocates for data on water-sampling efforts have gone unanswered. Local advocates also became frustrated after Henifin inexplicably fired Tariq Abdul-Tawwab, a long-time community advocate and the only Black employee at JXN Water. Last summer, Henifin told a federal judge that there was “no health risk” in the drinking water that he was aware of, despite reports that some residents’ tap water was still the color of tea.

After his firing, Abdul-Tawwab began managing the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s ground support team, a group of emergency responders that work on “anything that the community needs help with that the state is not helping them with, and that the city may not have the resources to help with,” he told Grist. Residents call in to request assistance on a range of issues — leaky roofs, burst sewage pipes — but the most common complaint is the drinking water. Members of Abdul-Tawwab’s team spend much of their time delivering bottled water and filters and testing residents’ taps for heavy metals like lead or bacteria like E. coli. The results often come back positive. 

While he was careful not to get into the details of his firing, Abdul-Tawwab was open about his frustrations with Henifin’s management of Jackson’s financial resources. Journalists occasionally visit Jackson to report on the decrepit infrastructure, he said, but hardly ask questions about where the federal money meant to help residents is actually going. 

“Anyone in the United States of America reading this story needs to understand that the state of Mississippi is taking steps to make sure that Jackson doesn’t get what it needs,” Abdul-Tawwab said.

In an email, Henifin told Grist  that he stood by his statement that Jackson’s water is clean, noting that JXN Water conducts regular tests in accordance with federal permitting requirements. He also stated that brown water complaints are investigated as soon as they are received through the company’s call center, and that they don’t occur often. 

“JXN Water posts all Quarterly Reports on our website, hosts quarterly public meetings to address questions, and regularly speaks to community groups when invited to participate in their meetings,” he wrote. “Transparency is not an issue.”

However, the many Jackson residents that Grist has interviewed point out that while the water coming out of the city’s treatment plants may be clean, after it has traveled through the thousands of miles of pipes, the water comes out of their faucets in a vastly different condition. Requests for extensive testing of the network of pipes have sometimes gone unanswered, said Brooke Floyd, a director at the People’s Advocacy Institute, the organization that launched the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She said she found it hard to believe that, as Henifin told Grist, residents were not reporting contaminated water to JXN Water’s call center, since the ground team gets frequent reports of water “with stuff floating in it.” 

Floyd acknowledged that JXN Water is proactive about posting its reports on its Facebook page, but said that advocates’ concerns about transparency go beyond the quarterly paperwork — they want to be involved in making decisions. Last month, a federal judge granted advocates at the Mississippi Poor Peoples’ Campaign and the Peoples’ Advocacy Institute their request to become parties to the EPA’s lawsuit against the city of Jackson. A seat at the table of the legal proceedings, they hope, will allow them to have a say in how federal funds are spent and ward off threats of privatization.

“When Henifin leaves, and the DOJ and the EPA leave, because they will, whatever is done — we will have to live with that,” Floyd said. She pointed to Flint, Michigan, where more than a decade after that city’s lead water crisis began, the system is still not fixed.

Schwellenbach, the POGO researcher, pointed out that the situation in Jackson is emblematic of a systemic problem, and could be a harbinger of worse things to come if the EPA does not step up its oversight. He pointed to Memphis, where the aging water system is coming under stress from climate-related impacts and years of disinvestment. The bipartisan infrastructure law represented a massive infusion of federal dollars to help cities update their water infrastructure, but to make sure the funds are used to actually help communities, the EPA needs to step up its involvement. 

“The EPA could have raised red flags earlier and more aggressively to push the states to do the right thing,” he said. “I think the most important thing here is to learn lessons from what went wrong, so we don’t have these kinds of crises in the future.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A pot of unspent federal money could have prevented Jackson’s water crisis on May 23, 2024.

No human organ is safe from microplastic contamination, it seems — not even the testicles. 

Researchers at the University of Mexico recently tested 70 samples of testicular tissue — 47 from dogs and 23 from humans — and found microplastics in every single one. The attention-grabbing study, published last week in the journal Toxicological Sciences, highlights microplastics’ “pervasive presence” in male reproductive systems, and their potential consequences on male fertility. 

The study isn’t the first to identify microplastics in the human male reproductive system; that came last year, when a small-scale analysis identified microplastics in 6 out of 6 testes and 30 out of 30 semen samples. The new paper built on that research by examining many more testes and finding more than 20 times as much microplastic in human samples as the previous study. The most dominant polymer found in the samples was polyethylene, which is the most commonly produced plastic globally. 

The findings add to a growing list of studies finding microplastics throughout the human body, including in livers, lungs, carotid arteries, breast milk, and placentas, the organs that form to provide nutrients to growing fetuses. Microplastics are particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter — about the width of a paperclip — and they tend to slough off of larger plastic items as they break down.

So how do the microplastics get into people’s bodies? The main pathways are through food, beverages, and air. Seafood is a particularly significant source — perhaps because so much plastic pollution winds up in the ocean, where it breaks down and can be mistaken by fish for food. The particles have also been found in dairy milk and other animal products, as well as tap and bottled water, salt, honey, and foods packaged in plastic. Many studies have documented microplastics in dust samples and ambient air, especially indoors. Synthetic clothing, furniture upholstery, and other textiles release microplastics all the time, and one 2022 study estimated that people may inhale more than 48,000 microplastic particles per day.

The mechanism by which microplastics migrate from the lungs and stomach to other parts of the body is not fully understood, but microplastics have been shown to be absorbed into the human bloodstream.

Xiaozhong Yu, an environmental health professor at the University of New Mexico and a co-author of the new study, said he hadn’t expected to see so much microplastic in testicular tissue because of a cell structure called the “blood-testis barrier,” which is supposed to prevent toxic materials from getting into and damaging the testes. 

“After we received the dog results I was so surprised,” Yu told Grist. And he was even more taken aback by the human samples, which had on average three times more microplastic contamination: 328 micrograms per gram, versus 123 in dogs. The most contaminated sample of human testicular tissue contained 696 micrograms of plastic per gram. In a testicle that weighs 20 grams (0.7 ounces), that would translate to nearly 14,000 micrograms of plastic per testicle — about the weight of six 6-inch human hairs.

Yu said microplastics may be hitching a ride through the body via blood vessels and then breaking through the blood-testis barrier, though more research is needed to understand how this is happening.

More research is also needed to understand the exact effects of microplastics on reproductive health, although many scientists agree they’re probably bad news. Some 16,000 chemicals are used to make consumer plastic products, and many of them are endocrine disruptors, meaning they mimic or disrupt the body’s natural hormones. In the canine samples Yu tested, certain types of microplastic were associated with smaller testes and lower sperm count. (The human sperm count couldn’t be counted because the testicles had been preserved in a formaldehyde solution.) 

Some experts suspect that endocrine-disrupting chemicals are contributing to a globally observed decline in sperm count over the past several decades. According to an analysis published last year, human sperm count fell “appreciably” between 1973 and 2018, with the greatest declines in the years since 2000.

Meanwhile, lab studies have already established that microplastics can damage human cells at levels that reflect what people might be exposed to by ingesting contaminated food and water. Last year, a systematic review commissioned by the California Legislature concluded that microplastics are a “suspected” hazard to humans’ digestive and reproductive systems, and that they may contribute to cancer and respiratory problems.

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One of the researchers’ interesting findings was that there was significant variability in the microplastics identified across samples. In humans, testes from those older than 55 showed lower concentrations than those from younger people, and canine testes taken from public veterinary clinics showed higher levels of microplastics than those from private clinics. The authors couldn’t explain these observations, but said they highlighted a “complex interplay of environment, dietary, and lifestyle factors in the accumulation of microplastics within biological tissues.” There’s not yet much research yet on how microplastics impact different populations, but experts say that vulnerable populations are more likely to be harmed by the production, use, and disposal of plastics more broadly.

Although microplastics are virtually everywhere, Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, said that it’s possible for people to limit their exposure. Because food and water are two of the main ways microplastics can get into people’s bodies, her tips include opting for nonplastic food and drink containers, not storing food in plastic wrap, and shifting away from highly processed foods, which may have more microplastic contamination than unprocessed ones. She also recommends keeping plastic out of the microwave, and — because microplastics are released from synthetic clothing and can migrate through dust particles — washing your hands before you eat. 

The problem can feel overwhelming, Woodruff said, but consumers shouldn’t be solely responsible for protecting themselves. She called for policymakers and regulatory agencies to limit the growth of the plastics industry so there’s less of the stuff being produced in the first place. 

“It is prudent to act now,” she said, pointing to ongoing negotiations over the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, where some countries are fiercely advocating for a cap on plastic production. “We don’t need more plastics in our lives.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Microplastics are in human testicles. It’s still not clear how they got there. on May 23, 2024.

In Mexico City, more and more residents are watching their taps go dry for hours a day. Even when water does flow, it often comes out dark brown and smells noxious. A former political leader is asking the public to “prioritize essential actions for survival” as the city’s key reservoirs run dry. Meanwhile, 2,000 miles south in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, reservoir levels are falling just as fast, and the city government has implemented rotating water shutoffs. The mayor has begged families to shower together and leave the city on weekends to cut down on water usage.

The measures come as a so-called heat dome sitting atop Mexico is shattering temperature records in Central America, and both Central and South America are wasting beneath a drought driven by the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, which periodically brings exceptionally dry weather to the Southern Hemisphere. Droughts in the region have grown more intense thanks to warmer winter temperatures and long-term aridification fueled by climate change. The present dry spell has shriveled river systems in Mexico and Colombia and lowered water levels in the reservoirs that supply their growing cities. Officials in both cities have warned that, in June, their water systems might reach a “Day Zero” in which they fail altogether unless residents cut usage.

In warning about the potential for a Day Zero in the water system, both cities are referencing the famous example set by Cape Town, South Africa, which made global headlines in 2018 when it almost ran out of water. The city was months away from a total collapse of its reservoir system when it mounted an unprecedented public awareness campaign and rolled out strict fees on water consumption. These measures succeeded in pulling the city back from the brink.

Six years later, Cape Town stands as a success story in municipal crisis management, but experts say its playbook will be hard for Mexico City and Bogotá to replicate. Instead of focusing primarily on changing public behavior, these cities will need to make big investments to improve aging infrastructure and shore up their water supplies. How they fare in these endeavors will in turn inform future efforts to make the world’s fast-growing cities resilient to increasing climate volatility.

“The bigger question, and what’s relevant for other cities, is now that we’ve experienced this, what can we do going forward to make sure that this doesn’t happen again?” said Johanna Brühl, a water expert at the nonprofit Environment for Development in South Africa who has studied Cape Town’s water crisis.

Coining the very phrase “Day Zero” was part of Cape Town’s solution to a water crisis that many officials had seen coming for years. As reservoir levels fell between 2015 and 2017 amid a drought, city leaders released dozens of statements urging residents to reduce water usage, but no one paid much attention. Only in early 2018, when officials started talking in increasingly apocalyptic terms about a collapse of the municipal water system, did residents — and international media outlets — start to pay attention. 

The city rolled out a set of measures to enforce cuts, including a tariff system that charged more thirsty users a higher price per gallon plus a door-knocking campaign to shame the biggest water hogs. But it was the rhetoric around Day Zero that seemed to be the most effective tool to slash water usage, experts who studied the crisis told Grist. When the local government warned that residents would have to pick up buckets of water from public collection points managed by the military, consumption plummeted. The effort to stave off a water crisis began to look like a grassroots movement, with residents sharing conservation tricks like flushing the toilet with water captured from the shower.

By April 2018, water usage had fallen to about half of what it was three years earlier, a decline that astonished even city officials. As consumption dropped, the city pushed the estimated date of the apocalypse out by a few days, then a few weeks. When a big rain arrived in the early summer and began to refill the reservoirs, the government turned off the countdown altogether, declaring the crisis at a temporary end.

“The big take-home point for any city in terms of navigating that kind of crisis is just to change the culture and to get the needle moving in the right direction,” said Eddie Andrews, the deputy mayor of Cape Town, who was a city council member during the Day Zero affair. “Culture is really important — making sure that you remain on message.”

Political leaders in Mexico and Colombia have both been sending out the same dire warnings: One prominent Mexico City politician warned in March that the city is “at the edge of the precipice,” and last month Bogotá’s mayor announced that the city had only around 50 days of water remaining, with residents looking at “weeks and months” of water rationing. 

But Cape Town’s grassroots conservation success will be difficult to replicate. In order for such messaging to work, residents have to trust their government. Indeed, other large South African cities like Johannesburg and Durban have struggled to spur usage reductions during periods of water stress, in part because they are governed by the African National Congress, or ANC. While the ANC has been the country’s dominant political party since its heroic 1994 victory over the apartheid regime that had ruled South Africa for decades, popular enthusiasm for the party has plummeted in recent years as corruption scandals have engulfed its top ranks. Unlike the governing bodies of South Africa’s other major cities, the Western Cape government that oversees Cape Town is led by an opposition party that enjoys far more local support than the ANC.

Manuel Perló Cohen, a professor who studies water infrastructure at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, said the government in Mexico City doesn’t enjoy the same kind of goodwill, meaning the government’s available tools may be limited to things like mandatory water restrictions.

“It won’t work here, because there’s a lack of confidence in the government,” he told Grist. “People don’t believe in most of what the government says, even if it’s the truth.” Mexico is just weeks away from a major election, and the incumbent leaders in Mexico City as well as the federal government have tried to downplay the water issues even as their opponents seize on it for campaign fodder. 

To really have control over the future of its water, a city also needs to have control over its physical infrastructure. But Mexico City loses almost 40 percent of its municipal water to leakage from pipes and canals, one of the highest rates in the world. This means that residential conservation efforts can only have a limited effect on the overall water budget, according to Perló Cohen. The city has also seen a rise in water theft from canals and reservoir systems: Organized crime groups siphon off public water and use it to grow avocados or resell it to water-starved households at a high markup. Locals call this huachicoleo de agua, using a term coined to describe fuel theft.

While the city government of Bogotá has both the public trust and the political power to implement rotating water shutoffs — which has helped protect reservoir levels — the city’s conservation campaign is lacking another crucial ingredient: enthusiasm. As in Cape Town, residents shared novel ways to reduce water usage during the first week of the crisis, but since then the local media has stopped devoting as much attention to the shutoffs. Water usage has begun to tick back up.

“These types of campaigns are difficult to get across to people,” said Laura Bulbena, a Bogotá-based researcher with the environmental nonprofit World Resources Institute. “It’s rained a little in Bogotá, two weeks passed, and actually the numbers show that water consumption went up. So not only there isn’t enough reduction, there’s not enough water coming into the reservoirs.”

But there are other lessons from Cape Town’s water crisis, ones that any city could follow. In its aftermath, the city diversified its water system and reduced reliance on the main reservoirs that shrank during the drought. Officials now plan to build multiple seawater-desalination plants and recharge groundwater aquifers with treated wastewater. This will put the city on far better footing for future dry spells.

“Every single crisis presents opportunities,” said Andrews, the deputy mayor of Cape Town. “We’ve seen that you can’t just rely on the rainfall. You have to augment.”

Bogotá relies on reservoirs for almost its entire water supply, and officials had long believed that the reservoir system was resilient to drought. Now, they may change course and invest in alternate supplies. Experts say bringing in new water sources wouldn’t break the bank; the local water utility could tap the healthy underground aquifer beneath the city, and Bulbena’s team at World Resources Institute has shown that restoring a natural environment in the nearby Bogotá River could help clean that river’s water for drinking.

“The water system is overall very good in Bogotá, but the city must invest in a backup system, because this El Niño system will probably be repeated frequently,” said Armando Sarmiento López, a professor of ecology at Javeriana University in Bogotá. 

Alejandra Lopez Rodriguez, a policy advocate at the Nature Conservancy in Mexico City, said that the government of that city could also fix its severe leakage problem and build wastewater treatment plants — if officials choose to prioritize those projects.

“We have resources and we have access to financing,” she told Grist. “There are resources available. It just also takes a will and an interest to want to invest in these issues.”

The Nature Conservancy runs a water investment fund in Mexico City that has financed conservation efforts in the pine forests surrounding the metropolis; these forests capture water and help recharge the city’s collapsing groundwater aquifers.

Recharging aquifers and building desalination plants is one thing, but the water crises in these cities have also revealed a stark fact: For many of the poorest residents in a metropolis like Cape Town, clean water was never available in the first place. 

The wealthy and middle-class areas of Cape Town receive piped water from reservoirs, but residents who live in the vast townships outside the city have to get water from communal standpipes — the very fate that so frightened middle-class residents of the city in the leadup to Day Zero. In the eastern neighborhoods of Mexico City, many taps have never released water for more than a few hours each day, according to Lopez Rodriguez, and much of that water is from contaminated sections of the aquifer. Lopez Rodriguez speculates that the crisis in Mexico City has drawn international attention because it has begun to affect upper-class neighborhoods that are accustomed to reliable water deliveries from the reservoir system.

Even during the peak of the Day Zero affair, many of the worst-off residents of Cape Town pointed to the same disparity, said Richard Meissner, a professor of political science at the University of South Africa who has studied the city’s response to the 2018 drought.

“I remember that some of the less affluent people in the city said that the campaign is aimed at the more affluent portions of Cape Town,” he said. “They said, ‘They don’t care about us, because for us every day is a Day Zero.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As reservoirs go dry, Mexico City and Bogotá are staring down ‘Day Zero’ on May 23, 2024.

Conservation efforts are more effective when Indigenous peoples and local communities are given more autonomy and involvement over their lands. That’s according to a new study published this month in the sustainability journal One Earth.

Researchers analyzed 648 studies of conservation areas between 1991 and 2020, about half of which had data on either the ecological or social outcomes of specific environmental protection efforts. Authors then categorized each conservation case based on the degree to which Indigenous peoples and local communities were involved, ranging from complete exclusion from the process to having full autonomy and decision-making power recognized by authorities. Researchers then conducted statistical analyses comparing the social and ecological outcomes of each case to determine trends across categories.

They discovered that even though including Indigenous peoples and local communities is often talked about as a moral or ethical imperative, it’s actually better for the environment. The researchers noted their findings have significant implications for ongoing global efforts to ramp up conservation and tackle climate change.

“The findings reveal that more equitable governance, based on equal partnership or primary control for [Indigenous peoples and local communities], are associated with significantly more positive ecological outcomes,” the authors concluded.

The study found that in the hundreds of conservation cases they reviewed, Indigenous peoples and local communities were most often treated as stakeholders or consultees, with little to no power over the conservation project. It was rare for their rights and full autonomy to be respected. 

But in such cases where the latter did occur, the study authors found conservation efforts were far more likely to be successful. Their analysis found that positive ecological outcomes were associated with 85 percent of cases where Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ autonomy was respected, compared with just 18 percent of the cases where Indigenous peoples or local communities were simply treated as stakeholders. 

The researchers pointed to the Los Lagos Indigenous Marine Areas established by Chile in 2012 as an example of an effective conservation effort.

“Indigenous groups fought for control, access to marine resources, and the ability to restore them through their own values and institutions, eventually winning against the tide of rapid coastal economic development and weak environmental regulations,” the authors wrote. “The shift to inclusive Indigenous institutions and collective custodianship produced transformational positive social and ecological outcomes relative to intensive commercial agriculture.” 

In contrast, the authors found when China established the eco-province of Hainan in 1994, authorities excluded the Li peoples from involvement. 

“The new governance regime was weakly enforced, poorly resourced, and lacked accountability, which reduced effectiveness by providing conditions that were exploited for corrupt logging, relative to when communities themselves helped regulate extraction,” the study said. 

In addition to better environmental outcomes, the researchers found positive social outcomes, such as higher incomes and better social relations, also associated with projects that had the greatest respect for Indigenous rights. More than half of the conservation efforts that recognized Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ primary control, or full autonomous control, reported positive social outcomes. When Indigenous peoples or local communities were merely consulted, beneficial social effects were negligible.

The authors said their findings are relevant to global conservation goals, which include protecting 30 percent of Earth’s land and seas by 2030, an initiative also known as 30X30. Indigenous peoples have raised concerns that aggressive conservation efforts could lead to further land grabs harming Native peoples, compounding the trauma of colonization. Efforts to preserve large swaths of land such as national parks in the U.S. and elsewhere have often involved removing Indigenous peoples from those lands. 

The study emphasizes that allowing Indigenous peoples to steward their own lands is better for the environment than ignoring their rights. 

“This carries important implications, including for actions toward the Global Biodiversity Framework targets, suggesting a need to elevate the role of [Indigenous peoples and local communities] to conservation leaders while respecting their rights and customary institutions,” the authors concluded. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The key to better climate outcomes? Respecting Indigenous land rights and autonomy. on May 23, 2024.

You may have heard the phrase, “glass is infinitely recyclable.” So why isn’t kitchen glassware…

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