Climate change damage worldwide will cost approximately $38 trillion annually by 2050, according to a new study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

The impacts will be felt all over the world, but will most affect countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis.

“Our study highlights the considerable inequity of climate impacts: We find damages almost everywhere, but countries in the tropics will suffer the most because they are already warmer. Further temperature increases will therefore be most harmful there. The countries least responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60% greater than the higher-income countries and 40% greater than higher-emission countries. They are also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts,” said co-author of the study Anders Levermann, PIK’s head of research department complexity science, in a press release from PIK.

The study, “The economic commitment of climate change,” was published in the journal Nature.

“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany and the U.S., with a projected median income reduction of 11% each and France with 13%,” said study co-author Leonie Wenz, a PIK climate scientist and economist, as The Associated Press reported.

The severity of the impacts will almost definitely increase as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, reported Reuters.

“These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately – if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100. This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering non-economic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity,” Wenz said in the press release.

The research team used empirical models along with climate simulations and also examined the persistence of climate impact effects on the past economy. In assessing how changing climatic conditions would affect future economic growth, the researchers looked at 40 years worth of data from more than 1,600 regions across the world.

“Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected. These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure,” said Maximilian Kotz, a PIK climate scientist and first author of the study, in the press release.

The range of economic damages is estimated to be from $19 to 59 trillion by mid-century. The cause will mainly be rising temperatures, with additional impacts from rainfall changes and variations in temperature. Additional weather extremes like wildfires and storms could also increase the economic costs.

“[W]e find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices,” the researchers wrote in the study. “These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2°C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices.”

Levermann emphasized the need for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels.

“It is on us to decide: structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas and coal,” Levermann said in the press release.

Wenz said the extent of the inequity of the impacts was unexpected.

“It’s devastating,” Wenz said, as The Guardian reported. “I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking.”

The post Climate Damage Costs Could Total $38 Trillion per Year by 2050, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new report from Consumer Reports has found pesticide residue at levels that posed significant risks on about 20% of the foods analyzed. Among the foods with the highest risks are popular produce like strawberries, green beans and potatoes.

Consumer Reports evaluated 59 common produce items using seven years’ worth of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide Data Program (PDP) to compile the nonprofit organization’s most comprehensive study on pesticides in food.

Of the nearly 30,000 samples from 59 types of fruits and vegetables analyzed, about 20% were found to have significant risks from pesticides. Green beans, one of the produce types identified with the most significant risks, even had residues from a pesticide, acephate, and one of its breakdown products, methamidophos, both of which have been banned from use on vegetables for at least 10 years, Consumer Reports noted. 

“When you grab a handful of green beans at the supermarket or pick out a watermelon, your chance of getting one with risky pesticide levels may be relatively low,” James Rogers, food safety expert at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. “But if you do, you could get a much higher dose than you should, and if you eat the food often, the chances increase.”

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Risks from pesticides weren’t just found in fresh produce — the analysis revealed risks for frozen, canned and even organic produce, The Guardian reported. 

Bell peppers, blueberries, potatoes, strawberries, collard greens, celery and green beans were all found with very high risks from pesticides, although risk level varied by fresh or frozen produce, conventional or organic, and whether the produce was grown in the U.S. or imported. For instance, U.S.-grown conventional celery and collard greens revealed moderate risks, but imported varieties came with very high risks; organic versions of these two vegetables posed very low risks. 

Many of these findings align with the popular Dirty Dozen list for 2024 by Environmental Working Group, which has named produce such as strawberries, collard greens and green beans as the produce with the most pesticide contamination.

Other produce, including apples, peaches, grapes, spinach and tomatoes, revealed a moderate risk in the Consumer Reports study; apples, grapes, spinach and peaches are all named in the Dirty Dozen 2024 list.

So what do the risk levels mean? Consumer Reports based risk levels on chronic toxicity of pesticides as well as the amount of produce a 35-pound child could safely consume per day. According to Consumer Reports, most people should limit consumption of foods ranked with very high risks, and children and pregnant people should eat less than half of a serving a day of the very high risk foods. Further, the organization recommended that children and pregnant people consume less than one serving per day for high-risk produce.

“When possible, replace a food rated high or very high with a lower-risk one, or choose organic. Keep in mind that the risk comes from repeated servings over time,” wrote Catherine Roberts, associate editor of health at Consumer Reports. “If you usually choose produce with the best ratings, you can reduce the chance of future harm.”

The report also noted that while about 20% of the foods analyzed posed risks from pesticides, most of the popular produce we consume had low risks, especially for organic varieties. These lower-risk foods can be consumed at three or more servings per day safely, according to the report.

Further, the analysis reveals that many of the higher risks come from only a small group of pesticides, which could help inform government policy on pesticide regulations in the future.

The post 20% of Common Produce Contains ‘Risky Pesticide Levels’: Consumer Reports Study appeared first on EcoWatch.

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.

When around 70,000 Indigenous Maasai were expelled from their lands in northern Tanzania in 2022, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. For years, the Tanzanian government has systematically attacked Maasai communities, imprisoning Maasai leaders and land defenders on trumped-up charges, confiscating livestock, using lethal violence, and claiming that the Maasai’s pastoralist lifestyle is causing environmental degradation—a lifestyle that has shaped and sustained the land that the Maasai have lived on for centuries. This rise in criminalization, especially in the face of mining, development, and conservation is being noted in Indigenous communities around the world and was the key focus of a report released this week at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the largest gathering of Indigenous activists, policymakers, and leaders in the world.

“It’s a very serious concern because the Indigenous people who have been resisting the taking over of their lands and territories, they are the ones who most commonly face these charges and criminalization,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples told a packed panel on the topic on Tuesday. “There is a need to focus on criminalization because this is what brings fear to Indigenous communities and it is also what curtails them in their capacity to assert their right to self-determination.”

The report “Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples’ human rights” lays out the mechanisms by which Indigenous Peoples around the world are increasingly facing criminalization and violations of their rights with impunity. Indigenous land, subsistence and governance rights are often poorly implemented if at all, leading to violations when they intersect with government and third party interests, especially in extractive industries and conservation. In addition to historical discrimination, a lack of access to justice for Indigenous rights holders—including environmental and human rights defenders, journalists, and communities—leads to higher rates of arrests and incarcerations. The report provides recommendations for UN bodies, states, and other relevant actors to better address this growing threat.

The use of criminal law to punish and dissuade people from protesting or speaking out is typically the way people understand criminalization, said Fergus Mackay, a Senior Legal Counsel and Policy Advisor to Indigenous Peoples Rights International, an organization that works to protect Indigenous Peoples rights defenders. But the bulk of criminalization Indigenous Peoples face actually stems from the inadequate recognition or non-recognition of their rights by governments. “The lack of recognition of Indigenous rights in national legal frameworks is at the heart of this issue,” Mackay said.

This is especially prevalent when those rights intersect with public or protected lands, or areas that overlap with extractive interests, conservation, or climate mitigation measures. For example in Canada, First Nations Fishermen are being arrested and harassed by federal fisheries officers for fishing–rights protected by treaty. In the Democratic republic of the Congo, Baka Indigenous peoples have been beaten, imprisoned, and prevented from using their customary forest by eco guards hired to protect wildlife. A 2018 study estimated that more than a quarter million Indigenous peoples have been evicted due to carbon-offset schemes, tourism, and other activities that lead to the creation of protected areas.

“The criminalization of Indigenous People could also be considered the criminalization of the exercise of practicing Indigenous rights,” said Naw Ei Ei Min, a member of Myanmar’s Indigenous Karen peoples and an expert UNPFII member at Tuesday’s panel.

Defamation and smear campaigns through social media are often used in the lead-up to false criminal charges, especially when Indigenous peoples speak up against government-supported private companies investing in large-scale projects on their traditional lands, said Tauli-Corpuz. Berta Cárceres, the renowned Indigenous Lenca environmental defender who opposed the development of the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras, had previously been detained on fabricated allegations of usurpation of land, coercion and possession of an illegal firearm before she was killed in 2016. Tauli-Corpuz, the former Special Rapporteur, along with around 30 other Indigenous leaders, was herself placed on a terrorist list in 2018 by the Philippine government, a move that was criticized harshly by the UN.

Criminalization comes with serious consequences. In 2021, of the 200 land and environmental defenders killed worldwide, more than 40 per cent were Indigenous. According to Indigenous Peoples Rights International, an organization founded in part to address the growing concern over criminalization of Indigenous Peoples, despite representing only 6% of the global population, Indigenous defenders suffered nearly 20% of attacks between 2015 and 2022 and were much more likely to experience violent attacks.

The UN report also pointed to the high rates of incarceration of Indigenous People, and their disproportionate risk of arrest. In Canada, dozens of members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, who have long protested the creation of the Coastal GasLink pipeline that will cross their unceded territory, have been arrested and await trial in Canada. That trial is currently on hold because of allegations of excessive force and harassment of the police. 

In countries like New Zealand and Australia, Indigenous peoples are already massively overrepresented in prisons. In Australia, despite making up only 3% of the population, Aboriginal Australians make up almost 30% of the incarcerated population. “This really speaks about the racism and discrimination that exists, which is the foundation for filing the criminalization cases against them,” said Tauli-Corpuz.

Indigenous journalists were included in this year’s report as being increasingly at risk of criminalization. In 2020 Anastasia Mejía Tiriquiz, a Guatemalan Kʼicheʼ Mayan journalist was arrested and charged with sedition after reporting on a protest against the municipal government. And just this year, Brandi Morin, an award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta was arrested while covering an Indigenous-led homeless encampment in Edmonton.

Indigenous Peoples are also affected by the growing use of criminal law to deter free speech and protests. Since the Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation in 2016 lawmakers in two dozen states in the US have taken up bills that ratchet up penalties for pipeline protesters. Globally, laws targeting everything from anti-terrorism, national security, and free speech only add to the ability for states to lay criminal charges on Indigenous activists. 

Olnar Ortiz Bolívar, an Indigenous Baré lawyer from Venezuela who works to defend the rights of Indigenous communities, has been the target of both physical violence and harassment for his work in the Amazon, an area where illegal miners, criminal organizations, and the government are competing for control of resources, especially gold. He has been an outspoken critic of the Government-designated mining area in southern Venezuela known as the Orinoco Mining Arc.  Now he fears that a new bill introduced by the Maduro regime into congress, that effectively turns dissent against the government and protesting into a criminal act, will severely affect his ability to continue to speak out against such projects.

“It’s a contradiction because we have rights in theory, but we don’t have the right to practice those,” he said. “What they are doing is taking away the freedom of expression of Venezuelans and, evidently, of the Indigenous People, who are increasingly vulnerable.”

As countries attempt to reach their goals of protecting 30% of their lands and waters by 2030 along with growing demand for transition minerals, criminalization of Indigenous Peoples is likely to grow, say experts. A survey of more than 5000 existing “energy transition mineral” projects found that more than half were located on or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands; for unmined deposits, that figure was much higher. 

The report set forth a series of recommendations to counteract criminalization, emphasizing the importance of revising national laws, improving measures to protect Indigenous human rights defenders and access to justice, and promoting efforts to prevent, reverse and remedy criminalization and its consequences.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UN puts spotlight on attacks against Indigenous land defenders on Apr 18, 2024.

Have you ever considered how our perspective of climate change might shift if we focused…

The post Land and Sea Change for Earth Day, Expanding the Climate Change Narrative appeared first on Earth911.

To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year. 

Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until recently, no one really knew. Data on more obscure metals like neodymium and palladium, which play small but critical roles in established and emerging green energy technologies, has been especially hard to come by.

Now, the United Nations has taken a first step toward filling in these data gaps with the latest installment of its periodic report on e-waste around the world. Released last month, the new Global E-Waste Monitor shows the staggering scale of the e-waste crisis, which reached a new record in 2022 when the world threw out 62 million metric tons of electronics. And for the first time, the report includes a detailed breakdown of the metals present in our electronic garbage, and how often they are being recycled.

“There is very little reporting on the recovery of metals [from e-waste] globally,” lead report author Kees Baldé told Grist. “We felt it was our duty to get more facts on the table.”

One of those facts is that some staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin. 

Two of the most recyclable metals found abundantly in e-waste are aluminum and copper. Both are slated to play essential roles in the energy transition: Copper wiring is prevalent in a range of low- and zero-carbon technologies, from wind turbines to the power transmission lines that carry renewable energy. Aluminum is also used in some power lines, and as a lightweight structural support metal in electric vehicles, solar panels, and more. Yet only 60 percent of the estimated 4 million metric tons of aluminum and 2 million metric tons of copper present in e-waste in 2022 got recycled. Millions of tons more wound up in waste dumps around the world.

The world could have used those discarded metals. In 2022, the climate tech sector’s copper demand stood at nearly 6 million metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency, or IEA. In a scenario where the world aggressively reduces emissions in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, copper demand for low-carbon technologies could nearly triple by 2030. 

Aluminum demand, meanwhile, is expected to grow up to 80 percent by 2050 due the pressures of the energy transition. With virgin aluminum production creating over 10 times more carbon emissions than aluminum recycling on average, increased recycling is a key strategy for reining in aluminum’s carbon footprint as demand for the metal rises.

For other energy transition metals, recycling rates are far lower. Take the rare-earth element neodymium, which is used in the permanent magnets found in everything from iPhone speakers to electric vehicle motors to offshore wind turbine generators. Worldwide, Baldé and his colleagues estimated there were 7,248 metric tons of neodymium locked away in e-waste in 2022 — roughly three-quarters of the 9,768 metric tons of neodymium the wind and EV sectors required that year, per the IEA. Yet less than 1 percent of all rare earths in e-waste are recycled due to the immaturity of the underlying recycling technologies, as well as the cost and logistical challenges of collecting rare earth-rich components from technology.

“It’s a lot of hassle to collect and separate out” rare-earth magnets for recycling, Baldé said. Despite the EV and wind energy sectors’ fast-growing rare-earth needs, “there is no push from the market or legislators to recover them.”

The metals present in e-waste aren’t necessarily useful for every climate tech application even when they are recycled. Take nickel. The lithium-ion batteries inside electric vehicles gobble up huge amounts of the stuff — over 300,000 metric tons in 2022. The amount of nickel required for EVs could rise tenfold by 2050, according to the IEA. But while the world’s e-waste contained more than half a million metric tons of nickel in 2022, most of it was inside alloys like stainless steel. Rather than getting separated out, that nickel gets “recycled into other steel products,” said Kwasi Ampofo, the lead metals and mining analyst at energy consultancy BloombergNEF. Some of that recycled steel could wind up in wind turbines and other zero-emissions technologies. But it won’t directly help to fill the much larger nickel demands of the EV battery market. 

In other cases, e-waste might represent a significant supply of a specialized energy transition metal. Despite being present in tiny amounts, certain platinum group metals — found on printed circuit boards and inside medical equipment — are already recycled at high rates due to their value. Some of these metals, such as palladium, are used in the production of catalysts for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, said Jeremy Mehta, technology manager at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office. “Recycling palladium from e-waste could help meet the growing demand for these metals in fuel cell technologies and clean hydrogen production, supporting the transition to clean energy,” Mehta said.

For the energy transition to take full advantage of the metals present in e-waste, better recycling policies are needed. That could include policies requiring that manufacturers design their products with disassembly and recycling in mind. Josh Blaisdell, who manages the Minnesota-based metals recycling company Enviro-Chem Inc., says that when a metal like copper isn’t getting recycled, that’s usually because it’s in a smartphone or other small consumer device that isn’t easy to take apart. 

In addition to design-for-recycling standards, Baldé believes metal recovery requirements are needed to push recyclers to recover some of the non-precious metals present in small quantities in e-waste, like neodymium. To that end, in March, the European Council approved a new regulation that sets a goal that by 2030, 25 percent of “critical raw materials,” including rare-earth minerals, consumed in the European Union will come from recycled sources. While this is not a legally binding target, Baldé says it could “create the legislative push” toward metal recovery requirements.

Harvesting more of the metals inside e-waste will be challenging, but there are many reasons to do so, Mehta told Grist. That’s why, last month, the Department of Energy, or DOE, launched an e-waste recycling prize that will award up to $4 million to competitors with ideas that could “substantially increase the production and use of critical materials recovered from electronic scrap.” 

“[W]e need to increase our domestic supply of critical materials to combat climate change, respond to emerging challenges and opportunities, and strengthen our energy independence,”  said Mehta of the DOE. “Recycling e-scrap domestically is a significant opportunity to reduce our reliance on hard-to-source virgin materials in a way that is less energy intensive, more cost effective, and more secure.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin on Apr 18, 2024.

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.

Sometimes when a storm hits and the waves are high in the Straits of Mackinac, which connects Great Lakes Michigan and Huron, Whitney Gravelle wonders if she’ll get a call: Maybe there will be a breach, and oil from the Line 5 pipeline under the strait will spill into her homelands. Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, has been working to decommission Line 5, run by Enbridge, for years. The pipeline was built in the strait in 1953, without consultation with Bay Mills or other tribes. In 2010, a nearby pipeline also overseen by Enbridge spilled 1 million gallons of oil into Michigan waters.

“I have routine nightmares about Line 5,” Gravelle said. “I think it’s because we are so involved in the issue — we work on it every single day.” 

In 2023, Gravelle brought the issue of Line 5 in front of the U.N. Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the largest annual gathering of Indigenous peoples in the world. In response, the U.N. recommended that the U.S. and Canada decommission the pipeline because of its “real and credible threat” to Indigenous rights. That has not yet happened. This week Gravelle was at UNPFII again to bring attention to Line 5.

Gravelle was also there to speak on a panel about how the United States has — or hasn’t — applied the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Also known as UNDRIP, the declaration is the international standard for Indigenous rights. While legally non-binding, UNDRIP encompasses the rights of Indigenous peoples to maintain lifeways, language, sovereignty, and political autonomy, free from assimilation and colonizing forces.

The discussion — put on by the Implementation Project, a partnership between the Native American Rights Fund and University of Colorado Law School — included U.S. officials like Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, also a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, and others from the Department of Commerce and Agency for International Development. There, Newland highlighted the Biden administration’s recent policies to increase inclusion of tribal nations’ priorities and perspectives.

U.S. history with the declaration is rocky. When Indigenous leaders from across the globe first introduced it in 2007 the U.S. voted against it, saying that it “should have been written in terms that are transparent and capable of implementation.” Three years later, under the Obama administration, the U.S. became the last country to adopt UNDRIP, acknowledging it as a “moral and political force.” But today, there is still a “vast implementation gap,” said former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya at the forum Tuesday. 

The declaration is an articulation of basic human rights to things like life, religion and self determination in an Indigenous context, said Kristen Carpenter, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and past appointee to the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which helps governments implement UNDRIP. “United States law and policy often still fall short of those basic human rights. It’s easy to get lost sometimes in the nuts and bolts and the very difficult work of policy,” Carpenter said at the discussion Monday. “But this work could not be more important, in my perspective, because of the issues that are on the table.”

In the U.S., concerns range from land protection to cultural continuity to reckoning with America’s past policies of genocide. A critical part of the declaration is that governments should get Indigenous nations’ informed consent on projects and policies that could impact them. And while UNDRIP considers such consent to be the bare minimum, many countries, including the U.S., interpret it as the highest standard, and have failed to enact it. 

Free, prior, and informed consent could give tribes and Indigenous communities more control over decisions that currently rest solely with the federal government, like Line 5 or the massive copper mine proposed at Oak Flat that is opposed by the San Carlos Apache Tribe. 

Consultation with tribes has been federal policy — in name, if not in practice — since 2000, but has been widely interpreted by agencies and officials. Even though the U.S. hasn’t adopted consent as the basis for its relationships with Indigenous nations, it has begun to incorporate it into specific policies, Newland said at the forum discussion on Monday.

Last December, for example, the department revised the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, first passed in 1990, which determines how burial sites, sacred objects, and human remains are handled and returned to tribal nations. The revision uses consent language directly from the declaration, and includes the requirement that federally funded museums, agencies, and universities receive the free, prior, and informed consent of descendants or tribes before exhibition, research, or access to human remains or sacred objects. The change has already been impactful, if narrow, and some museums have taken action to avoid violating the law.

Newland also said the department has instituted a new model to find consensus with tribes when an activity impacts tribal health, jurisdiction, sacred sites and rights. The policy applies to everything from mining to green energy development. 

In addition to improvements in consultation policies, Newland cited the Department of Interior’s report on the history of boarding schools in the U.S. as one way the department is upholding article 8 of the declaration, which deals with forced assimilation. The department is also in the process of consulting with tribal nations on a 10-year national plan for Indigenous language revitalization.

While acknowledging the Interior Department is the “shining star” of tribal consultation in the U.S., Gravelle said that’s just not the case with other agencies the tribe has to engage with, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The result is an uneven dynamic across the government. “We touch so many different federal agencies,” Gravelle said. “They all have to honor those obligations that were made with our tribal nations, and yet we continue to see that failure over and over again.” 

There is also the shifting ground of policy changes from one administration to the next. The changes at the Department of Interior are positive, but can be undone — or go unused — by a new administration. “It does continuously feel like that you are trying to prove that you are worthy of life, and that you are worthy of having a home, and that you are worthy of being able to raise your children with your cultural values on the lands that your ancestors lived,” Gravelle said of the struggle to be heard by federal governments. 

That domestic discord, Gravelle said, “has prevented the United States from emerging as a leader, especially in the international field, when it comes to international Indigenous rights.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At UN, Indigenous leaders fight for application of rights on Apr 18, 2024.

April 17 is International Bat Appreciation Day! In celebration of these sometimes unsung nocturnal pollinators, a new study has demonstrated how bats can be allies of agriculture, as they feed on important crop “pests.”

The researchers found that encouraging bats can be beneficial for conservation efforts, as well as local farmers, a press release from University of Oxford said.

“Bats often get a bad rap. Our study highlights their significance, revealing that while their nocturnal habits and secretive lifestyle make them elusive to many, insectivorous bats play a crucial role in the ecosystems they inhabit and, through the ecosystem services they provide, they can help humans in multiple ways,” said co-author of the study Dr. Ricardo Rocha, an associate professor in the biology department at University of Oxford, in the press release.

Because of bats’ ability to fly, they have colonized a variety of oceanic islands, including Portugal’s sub-tropical Madeira, and their presence has been beneficial for the island’s farmers.

About one-fifth of mammal species are bats. They play an especially vital role in island ecosystems, since these environments usually have much fewer mammals than mainland habitats. However, the diets of island-dwelling bats have traditionally been understudied.

The research team looked at three bat species living on the island of Madeira — the Madeira Lesser Noctule (Nyctalus leisleri verrucosus), the Madeira Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus maderensis) and the Grey Long-eared Bat (Plecotus austriacus).

The team collected droppings from more than 100 individual bats, then extracted DNA from their feces to determine what they were eating. The researchers found that the diets of all three bat species were highly diverse. They ate more than 50 distinct species between them, including flies, beetles, butterflies, moths and spiders. Of the identified species, 40 percent were either likely or confirmed forestry or agricultural pests.

“We anticipated that all three species would primarily feed on nocturnal butterflies; however, we did not expect that over 40% of the species detected in the bats’ diet are likely or confirmed agricultural or forestry pests,” said the study’s lead author Angelina Gonçalves of the University of Porto in Portugal in the press release.

The research team discovered that the bats consumed a well-known agricultural pest, the banana moth (Opogona sacchari), which impacts banana trees, an economically important local crop.

The bats also feasted upon insects such as golden twin-spot moths (Chrysodeixis chalcites) and turnip moths, who frequently damage cereals and vegetables. Bats also ate a human parasite called Psychoda albipennis, which causes urogenital myiasis, leading to burning sensations, abdominal pain and diarrhea.

The study, “A metabarcoding assessment of the diet of the insectivorous bats of Madeira Island, Macaronesia,” was published in the Journal of Mammalogy.

Collecting the bats was challenging for the researchers at first, as it involved the use of mist nets to capture and hold them until the collection of their fecal samples. Through their use of echolocation, the bats were initially able to easily avoid the nets.

“Fortunately, we discovered that the bats lowered their guard when they came to drink so we changed tactics slightly and waited at strategic water points,” Gonçalves explained. “In this way, we were then able to capture enough individuals to conduct our research.”

The expansion of agriculture is one of the biggest causes of biodiversity loss globally, but some species like bats are able to exploit its resources. The study shows that encouraging bats can benefit  conservation while supporting island farming communities.

“An increasing number of farmers are using bat boxes to attract insectivorous bats to their fields,” Rocha said. “During our study, we experimented by placing some in the protected area where we were working, and to our excitement, some of these are now inhabited by the vulnerable Madeiran Pipistrelles. This suggests that deploying simple artificial bat roosts might lead to win-win outcomes for both conservation and local farmers.”

The post Despite Their ‘Bad Rap,’ Bats Can Help Farmers appeared first on EcoWatch.

The planet is currently experiencing its fourth global coral bleaching event on record, affecting most of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). It is the second mass bleaching in the past decade, NOAA scientists said in a press release.

Across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins, heat stress at levels high enough to cause bleaching has been extensive, as monitored remotely by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Coral Reef Watch (CRW).

“From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of each major ocean basin,” said Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA CRW, in the press release.

CRW bases its sea surface temperature data on information gathered from NOAA and partner satellites from 1985 to the present.

For a bleaching event to be “global,” there must be significant bleaching in the three ocean basins over a one-year period, reported Reuters.

Since February 2023, mass bleaching has been detected among reefs in at least 54 nations and territories, CRW said.

Bleaching occurs when extreme water temperatures trigger corals to expel the vibrant algae that live in a symbiotic relationship with them, providing the corals with nutrients.

“More than 54% of the reef areas in the global ocean are experiencing bleaching-level heat stress,” Manzello said, as Reuters reported.

As with the current global bleaching event, the other three — 1998, 2010 and 2014 to 2017 — happened at the same time as the El Niño climate pattern, known to cause warmer sea surface temperatures. The combination of El Niño and climate change have resulted in ocean temperatures breaking long-standing records over the past year.

“As the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe,” Manzello said in the press release. “When these events are sufficiently severe or prolonged, they can cause coral mortality, which hurts the people who depend on the coral reefs for their livelihoods.”

Mass coral reef bleaching has been recorded throughout the tropics since early last year, including in Florida, the Caribbean, the eastern Tropical Pacific, the GBR, Brazil, the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Aden and the South Pacific.

Widespread bleaching has also been reported to NOAA in other areas of the Indian Ocean, including the Seychelles, Kenya, Tanzania, Mayotte, Tromelin and off Indonesia’s western coast.

Bleaching does not always mean affected corals will die. They can recover if the heat stress causing the bleaching diminishes in time.

“The bottom line is that as coral reefs experience more frequent and severe bleaching events, the time they have to recover is becoming shorter and shorter. Current climate models suggest that every reef on planet Earth will experience severe, annual bleaching sometime between 2040 and 2050,” Manzello said, as reported by The Guardian.

Three new alert levels were added to CRW’s worldwide coral bleaching warning system earlier this year to represent the increasing extremes impacting the planet’s ocean environments.

According to CRW data, in 2024 a record 80 percent of the GBR has been subjected to heat stress  sufficient to cause bleaching. The iconic reef is currently suffering another mass bleaching — its fifth in eight years.

“[T]he prognosis is not good for coral reefs as we know them, and the GBR is not immune. We are certainly not giving up on reefs, but they’re under serious pressure,” said Dr. Roger Beeden, chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, as The Guardian reported.

The post NOAA Confirms 4th Global Coral Bleaching Event as Climate Crisis Puts Reefs ‘Under Serious Pressure’ appeared first on EcoWatch.

A report from the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) has found that capacity of new global wind energy installation reached 117 gigawatts (GW) in 2023, a global record.

Compared to 2022, capacity from global wind energy installations increased 50% year-over-year, the report found. Globally, 54 countries, with representation of all continents, installed new wind energy infrastructure.

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As Reuters reported, most of the new wind installations were onshore, which made up 106 GW of total new capacity added in 2023. Offshore wind installations made up 10.8 GW.

Wind energy capacity reached 1 terawatt for the first time last year, according to the report. With the record-high wind energy capacity added in 2023, GWEC has increased its wind capacity growth forecast for 2024 to 2030 by 10%. 

The council has estimated that new wind installation capacity will grow by 158 GW per year until 2028, Reuters reported.

According to the report, China, U.S., Brazil, Germany and India led the world in new wind energy installations last year. China reached a record of 75 GW, nearly 65% of all new wind energy capacity in 2023.

Despite the promising new record, the report authors are still concerned that wind energy capacity is not growing quickly enough to meet renewable energy targets outlined at COP28 in late 2023.

“It’s great to see wind industry growth picking up, and we are proud of reaching a new annual record. However much more needs to be done to unlock growth by policymakers, industry and other stakeholders to get on to the 3X pathway needed to reach Net Zero,” Ben Backwell, CEO of GWEC, said in a press release. “Growth is highly concentrated in a few big countries like China, the U.S., Brazil and Germany, and we need many more countries to remove barriers and improve market frameworks to scale up wind installations.”

As The Associated Press reported, wind energy capacity will need to increase 320 GW or more per year to meet the COP28 targets of tripling renewable energy capacity to at least 11,000 GW by 2030. Wind energy capacity will also need to increase at a higher amount each year to meet the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

To reach these goals, GWEC outlined several global actions that could help in its latest report, including new and enhanced governmental policies, public and private partnerships and investments, a secure supply chain, improved trade policies that don’t increase costs for end-users, updated production models, closing power grid gaps, efficient permitting processes, community engagement and more.

“Geopolitical instability may continue for some time. But as a key energy transition technology, the wind industry needs policymakers to be laser-focused on addressing growth challenges such as planning bottlenecks, grid queues and poorly designed auctions,” Backwell said. “These are the measures that will significantly ramp up project pipelines and delivery, rather than reverting to restrictive trade measures and hostile forms of competition. Enhanced global collaboration is essential to fostering the conducive business environments and efficient supply chains required to accelerate wind and renewable energy growth in line with a 1.5C pathway.”

The post New Wind Installations Reached Record High in 2023 appeared first on EcoWatch.

Silica dust, thrown into the air while mining, has contributed to a staggering rise in cases of progressive, incurable, and deadly black lung disease in America’s coal miners. The insidious particulate is particularly common in the seams of low quality coal found in central Appalachia, yet the Mine Safety Health Administration, or MSHA, has for decades pegged safe exposure levels at about twice what the government allows for every other occupation. On Tuesday, the agency finally announced an updated standard, outlining not only a new threshold for exposure, but increased on-the-job safety measures and medical surveillance to protect workers.

“Miners deserve to go home safe and healthy each day and should never have to choose between sacrificing their lungs and providing for their families,” Chris Williamson, MSHA’s director, said in an address on Tuesday in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. “Miners also deserve to retire in dignity and enjoy the fruits of their labor with their loved ones. That’s why we’re all here today to take a long overdue step forward to protect miners from exposure to toxic silica dust.”

Williamson joined representatives of United Mineworkers of America and United Steelworkers in making the announcement, which miners and their advocates have spent years fighting for.

The need was urgent. Silica dust is toxic, and long-term exposure can cause a slow but fatal hardening of lung tissue called progressive massive fibrosis, or, as it’s known among miners and their families, coal-mining areas, black lung disease. The toxin increasingly abounds in mines as companies plumb thinner coal seams with greater impurities. 

The rule, which spans hundreds of pages, covers all miners, regardless of what they dig from the earth, as well as anyone working construction on mine sites. It tightens medical surveillance for black lung by making more frequent clinical visits available to workers at no cost, outlines measures for silica dust monitoring, and, most importantly, lowers the exposure standard to the same 50 micrograms long enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — 50 micrograms of silica per cubic meter of dust during an eight-hour work day. It also outlined a renewed push for site compliance with stricter consequences, including, Williamson said, “citations, proposed penalties, immediate corrective actions, and if abatement does not occur in a reasonable period of time, withdrawal orders” leading to closure of mines violating the rule.

“Ultimately, this rule’s success will depend on its implementation and enforcement,” he said.

And that, some worry, is exactly where the effort may fail. The new regulations still allow mine operators to conduct their own sampling, a longtime source of grievance for miners and their advocates who simply do not trust coal companies to accurately report silica levels.

“I’m pretty upset,” said Vonda Robinson, the vice president of the national Black Lung Association. Her husband John is 57 and succumbing to the disease; he was diagnosed 10 years ago, far younger than coal miners of previous generations. His doctor recommends a lung transplant, and he’s waiting until the last possible moment, because of the stress the operation places on the body. Those with silicosis tend to live about five years after a transplant.

In the 14 years since MSHA proposed updating the silica dust standard, Robinson and the National Black Lung Association lobbied lawmakers and rallied tirelessly for improved enforcement. Although she feels the regulation announced Tuesday is a “good” rule, “if it’s not enforced, we’re gonna be sitting in the same boat that we were in.”

Regulators allow mines to do their own monitoring because MSHA simply can’t afford to inspect every mine. To do that, the agency, which saw its budget peak in 1979, would have to overcome the consequences of years of budget cuts, and resulting staffing shortages, seen during every presidential administration of this century. Even under the more labor-friendly Biden administration, MSHA saw a smaller-than-expected budget increases in last year’s annual appropriations bill. Mining deaths have also jumped — up 31 percent in fiscal 2023, when 42 workers died — due to accidents, a troubling increase that may signal the agency is having trouble keeping up. The agency also tends to move slowly; it  identified a cluster of black lung cases in the 1990s but failed to act. 

Robinson also worries about other weaknesses in the new regulation. It uses an eight-hour day as an average to estimate silica exposure, but most miners work 10- or 12- hour shifts. It also allows for just four MSHA silica dust inspections per mine per year, a rate that may not capture the true risk of exposure. Recent investigations by National Public Radio also revealed the agency may have undercounted the number of black lung cases recorded in recent years because studies showing explosive growth have not yet been peer-reviewed.

Rebecca Shelton, the policy director at Appalachian Citizens Law Center, has been poring over the rule since its release. She is particularly concerned about coal companies’ continued control over testing, since the industry has had a history of cheating on results. Shelton said monthly mine testing by MSHA would be ideal because the amount of dust in the air can change depending on where in a mine the company is working, ventilation and other factors. The Mine Safety Health Administration dismissed the idea of creating a lower permissible exposure limit because it would be too costly for mine operators, something she said indicates “a prioritization of the economics of the industry over the lives of miners.”

For people like Brandon Crum, a radiologist who X-rays black lung patients and sees the damage first-hand, the disease, and MSHA’s response to it, is personal. He worked the mines, the fourth generation in his family to do so. “It was a dusty job in dusty conditions,” he said.  

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Crum’s radiology office is in Pike County, Kentucky, on the border with West Virginia. He is among the few radiologists certified to read chest X-rays for signs of black lung. After documenting early signs of the alarming and continual rise in the disease, particularly among younger miners — those in their 30s and 40s who worked as little as 10 years underground before becoming so sick they needed transplants or died. In 2016, he joined three young men in making a video pleading for federal action to address the crisis; one of them has since died and the others have come to need lung transplants.

Crum says the disease cuts a wide swath through the region, affects those who have it, those who know them, and those who wonder if they might be next. He relayed his experiences in comments he made to the MSHA when the rule was in its draft stages last year. “I tried to put more of a personal touch on it,” he said. “It not only affects the men, but women and families and entire communities.”

The United Mine Workers of America is supporting the new rule, participating in its promotion and celebrating it as the fruit of many years of hard work, which continued even as, union communications officer Erin Bates said, coal companies refused to acknowledge the scale of the disease. The union went around them to Congress, knocking on doors and making calls for decades. She concedes the regulation isn’t perfect, but is happy anything was adopted at all. “Obviously, we want it to be better,” she said, “but no matter what, more health and safety is better for our miners.”

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new federal rule aims to protect miners from black lung disease on Apr 17, 2024.