In an effort to bring the rare Scottish wildcat back from the brink of extinction, conservationists have released 19 young wildcats, which were bred in captivity, throughout the Cairngorms National Park in the Scottish Highlands.
The Scottish wildcat, or Felis silvestris, is the last surviving native wildcat in the UK, according to National Museums Scotland. The species, which once roamed all of Britain, is critically endangered, with an estimated 35 or fewer individuals left in the wild, Woodland Trust shared on its website.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported in 2019, “The number of wildcats is too small, the hybridisation too far advanced and the population too fragmented. We therefore conclude that it is too late to conserve the wildcat in Scotland as a standalone population.”
Scottish wildcats have faced several threats over the years, including hybridization with domestic cats, habitat loss, accidental trapping, road accidents, hunting and disease.
The recent release is part of a larger effort to restore the population in the wild and prevent the species from going extinct. The wildcats, raised at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS), have been released in small groups over the past few months. Each is equipped with a GPS-tracking tag to allow researchers with the organization Saving Wildcats to collect data on the group.
So far, one of the 19 wildcats has died from an infection, but the surviving wildcats are doing well and slowly moving away from where they were released, Helen Senn, a project leader with RZSS, told The Guardian.
“It has been really positive, in the main,” Senn said. “We have seen evidence that the cats are able to hunt and fend for themselves. From that perspective, we’re really happy.”
In total, the program is expected to release 60 Scottish wildcats, with another release in 2024 and again in 2025 at different locations within the Scottish Highlands. Cameras set up throughout the region, in addition to the GPS tags, will provide more information to ultimately determine the success of the program.
“These are the first trial releases and, based on experience from similar projects around the world, further releases and many more years of conservation action will be required to increase the likelihood of saving this iconic species in Scotland,” Senn shared in a statement.
Further efforts to protect the species include neutering and vaccinating feral, domesticated cats to prevent them from breeding with the wildcats or passing on diseases. The Scottish wildcat species is protected by law, and these animals are hard to spot in the wild, but even still, the program leaders from RZSS and Saving Wildcats are urging the public to avoid disclosing the location of any wildcat sightings.
When David Marchant looked at the weather forecast in early July, he had a bad feeling. His 50-acre farm sits in the bend of the meandering Lamoille River in northern Vermont. He watched its banks warily as a steady downpour soaked the landscape. Soon, the river began to rise. By 7:30 the next morning, he and his crew were out in the mud, trying to harvest all they could save.
Two months’ of rain fell in two days. Despite their efforts, Marchant’s River Berry Farm quickly lost upward of 10 acres of crops, with lettuce and summer squash suddenly swimming in the flooded fields. He estimates the torrents cost him around $150,000 in just 48 hours.
The storm wiped out roads and bridges and inundated homes across the state. The catastrophe came at a particularly hard time of year for farmers to face disaster: In early summer, many are heavily invested in their season, but not yet able to harvest. The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets estimates that the state’s food producers lost over $16 million as a result — somewhere between one-third and one-half of all the state’s yield.
As the climate changes, American farmers face a slew of new threats to their harvests and business models. More frequent floods and droughts can wipe out months of work overnight. Rising temperatures are expected to slow plant growth in the Northern Hemisphere within the next decade, while higher carbon dioxide levels reduce the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables. Altogether, a recent NASA study found that some yields could decrease 24 percent by as soon as 2030.
Research from the American Farm Bureau Federation suggests that nationwide, natural disasters caused $21.5 billion in agricultural losses last year. Only about half of those were protected by insurance, the majority of which is sold through federally-backed programs. Their payouts to farmers have increased over 500 percent in the last two decades.
Flood waters remain on destroyed fields in Burlington, Vermont after catastrophic rain in July. AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Back in 2007, a report from the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, called climate change a looming threat to insurance markets, and pointedly noted that while large private insurers were already incorporating it into their risk management, the two major federal insurance programs — for flooding and agriculture — ”have done little.”
That’s a problem not only for food security, but for the people growing the nation’s food. “I don’t think there is an appreciation of how significant the detrimental changes might be, because I think people are thinking things are already bad,” said Jeffrey Amthor, principal scientist at Verisk Analytics, a risk assessment firm that advises insurance and reinsurance companies.
Shortly before this summer’s flooding, Grace Oedel, the executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, was helping growers deal with hazardous wildfire smoke from Canada. Before that, a late spring freeze withered buds on apple trees and blossoms on blueberry bushes, costing Vermont farmers $10 million in lost production. The nonprofit has an emergency fund that food producers can apply to, and in the last few years, the organization has seen a surge in such petitions. “It just feels like nothing’s predictable,” Oedel said.
The financial stress this causes can be devastating: One recent study found 60 percent of farmers and their children are experiencing depression — about double the national average. Suicides within farm families are skyrocketing. “It’s definitely intensifying,” Oedel said. “The question is, how long can these farmers hold on before they get some kind of support?”
April 14, 1935, began as a sunny, spring Sunday in Kansas. But by afternoon, a dark cloud billowed over the horizon, so dense it obscured sunlight like an eclipse. It lashed across the plains at 60 mph. People suffocated, their lungs filled with dust. “The onrushing cloud, the darkness, and the thick, choking dirt, made this storm one of terror,” reported the Weather Bureau, now known as the National Weather Service.
The “black blizzard” was formed of displaced topsoil, becoming one of the worst of the Dust Bowl’s storms that drove hundreds of thousands of people off their land in search of other work. A lethal combination of destructive farm practices and an extended drought desiccated the region. In response, Congress authorized the Federal Crop Insurance Program, or FCIP, in 1938. No one was sure it would work. At first, the effort ran into the same hurdles private insurers had: Participation was low because rates were high, yet payouts still greatly exceeded premiums. At the time, the Christian Science Monitorasked, “Will the program become in effect an underwriting of high-risk areas which in fact ought to be retired from farming?”
Nevertheless, by 1980, the federal government decided to bolster its support for crop insurance, eliminating an overlapping disaster payments program. As part of the Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, authorized a small number of private companies to sell these policies, while heavily subsidizing their cost. Today, taxpayers cover about 60 percent of these premiums, more than ever before.
If weather reduces an enrolled farmer’s yield or revenue from a particular crop, the FCIP will issue indemnity payments, essentially guaranteeing a set amount of income. Most of those subsidies are going to commodity crops; corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton have received 75 percent of all payments in the last two decades. “It’s really concentrated to just a few states, and also just a few crops,” said Anne Schechinger, Midwest director at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, which recently published a report on crop insurance.
While these average yields are supposed to be set by looking at a grower’s historical output, in practice, bad years are frequently excluded from those calculations, said Schechinger. “That’s something we see a lot in California, Texas, Oklahoma,” she said. A provision called Actual Production History Yield Exclusion allows farmers to ignore up to 15 bad years when calculating typical yields, falsely raising insurance payouts. This misrepresentation is highest in the southern Great Plains — the same region that experienced the worst consequences of the Dust Bowl.
Firefighters battle a large blaze on farm fields near Smithville, Texas in 2011. AP Photo/Erich Schlegel
The FCIP will also pay the same farmers for the same kinds of losses year after year — and it often does. One hotspot for claims is the Mississippi River Critical Conservation Area, a USDA-designated area across 13 states. It has accounted for $1.5 billion of federal payments from flood damage since 2001, which Schechinger says could have instead been used to transition more 300,000 acres of frequently inundated land out of production. Forty unlucky counties, primarily in the Corn Belt, received payouts for losses related to both drought and extreme precipitation every year for the last two decades. Failing to account for these risks in insurance policies raises the chance that today’s potential solutions will become insufficient.
Critics say the crop insurance program is now actually deterring climate adaptation by minimizing the true costs of growing in places that have become unsuitable. In some cases, federal crop insurance is also actually making climate impacts worse: As groundwater declines across the Midwest, for example, farmers may risk losing coverage if they take steps to conserve water, since irrigated crops receive higher payouts. This highlights the need for urgent reforms in the next farm bill, legislation passed approximately every five years that addresses the United States’ agriculture and food systems. “We know the last 20 years aren’t the next 20 years,” Schechinger said.
Last year, federal crop insurance payments topped $19 billion — the highest since 2001, when current subsidy levels were set. (A USDA spokesperson told Grist, “The total amount of losses has increased during that time, but so has the program’s size.”) According to several reports from the GAO, the share of the total costs paid by taxpayers has also increased.
Yet a third of all subsidies for the FCIP are now being paid out not to farmers, but the private companies that sell and service its policies — many of whom are large corporations. In addition to their administrative costs, these companies earn a 14.5 percent return from the government, much higher than similar industries, like property insurance. Reducing that overhead rate could free up financing for the growers who need it most.
This could expand other federal programs like the Whole Farm Revenue Policy, which insures the revenue of all the commodities on a farm, making it more accessible to the kinds of small, diversified operations that grow for farmers markets. “It’s a great policy, but it’s not subsidized as highly,” said Schechinger, “so not that many farmers use it.” She adds that insurance agents are typically compensated based on the value of the premiums they sell, incentivizing them to sell more expensive policies to larger players. The USDA introduced a “Micro Farm” program in 2022, which is intended to be a better fit for small operations, but nationally, there have only been 120 such policies sold so far.
A Texas farmer looks over a cotton crop he shredded and planted over with wheat in Kress, Texas in 2022. Like many other cotton growers, he has walked away from more than 2,000 acres of his bone-dry fields. AP Photo/Eric Gay
Watchdog groups like GAO have long criticized the crop insurance program’s poorly managed approaches — like propping up water-intensive cotton growers in the Southwest desert — but clearly the risks to farmers are also rapidly increasing. Hundreds of cattle died this summer in Iowa as the heat index climbed to 117 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition to extreme temperatures, ongoing drought continues to plague much of the Midwest’s breadbasket. According to recent research from Stanford University, climate hazards have increased annual crop insurance losses by about $1 billion every year since 1991.
The threat of such catastrophes now looms over agriculture across the country. As sweeping changes start to alter what food can be produced where, Schechinger says Congress needs to “really reevaluate how we’re doing business as usual.”
The next farm bill, though its timing is uncertain due to a looming government shutdown, will determine federal agriculture policy for the next five to 10 years. It is expected to be the most expensive in the country’s history. “We choose how we subsidize everytime we make a farm bill,” Oedel, of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, said. “That is a policy choice, not a reality about how food has to grow.”
As dawn rises over a field of corn in Illinois, light beads off the collected dew, the horizon stretching out over the rippling stalks. That precious, twinkling moisture is the reason daytime summer temperatures have so far remained fairly stable across the Midwest, “counter to almost everywhere else on the planet,” said Verisk’s Amthor. He recently conducted a report looking at the impacts of climate change on the region’s yields of this commodity. To his surprise, he found that plants in the rolling, endless rows across the Corn Belt are drawing water from the soil and releasing it as vapor at such a scale that it is actually helping keep surface temperatures cooler. This has shielded the area from the poor harvests other places are already facing.
But as the mercury continues to rise, this natural air conditioning won’t be able to keep compensating. “If the Midwest catches up, and it does that in a rapid way, I think we probably don’t appreciate how significantly and negatively that might impact the Midwest,” he said. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer and exporter of corn, so this could have global consequences.
A farmer pulls a carrot from one of his fields near Madras, Oregon in 2021. Due to drought, his farm had gone without irrigation water for weeks. AP Photo/Nathan Howard
The more we can do to slow down these changes, the easier it will be to adapt, Amthor says. It takes time to breed new genotypes of plants that might be able to better endure heat, or bring new technologies into the field. That kind of tinkering is something farmers naturally excel at, says Rich Bonnano, a fourth-generation farmer who’s now the director of the North Carolina State University Extension program. It is, in a way, a form of insurance separate from the traditional financial systems. “I think about avoiding risk all the time,” he said. “You can’t stop a hurricane, but maybe some varieties can handle wet roots and standing water.”
In addition to breeding resilience into crops, Bonnano’s family’s experience suggests that diversifying crops provides its own form of insurance. Much of their 50 acres in Methuen, Massachusetts, flooded in 2006, drowning several plantings of lettuce and spring greens, and ruining acres of plastic mulch and drip irrigation. It cost Bonnano, who was uninsured, an estimated $60,000. He then discovered that agriculture isn’t eligible for the disaster relief loans available for small businesses. “We got nothing,” he said.
But Bonnano had carefully planned a variety of crops to handle exactly that kind of risk. He was able to replant some of his cool season vegetables, including leaf lettuce and other greens. Warm season vegetable starts like peppers and eggplants were still safely in greenhouses, and flowers rounded out his end-of-summer income. “We didn’t have our eggs in one basket,” he said. At the end of the year, the farm’s revenue was only 10 percent less than the previous year. “The more diversified you are, the more you’re able to handle this year-to-year variability,” he explains, even without an insurance policy.
In Vermont this summer, Marchant’s similarly wide-ranging plantings also helped him recover. “We are naturally insured with our diversity,” he says. He had previously looked into the Whole Farm Revenue Policy, and found it too expensive. But he had enrolled in the USDA’s Non-Insured Crop Disaster Assistance Program, which, despite its name, functions a lot like insurance: When enrolled farmers lose more than 50 percent of an expected crop, it begins paying for those losses at 55 percent of their market value, with higher electable coverage for an additional price. This won’t necessarily cover all of his damage, Marchant said, “but the [upfront] cost is incredibly cheap.”
A farm worker watches a plume of smoke from a wildfire in Santa Paula, California in 2017. AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
The disaster assistance program is run through regional governments, in Marchant’s case, Franklin County. Its agents were more familiar with dairies, and in assessing his damages initially thought “lettuce was lettuce,” he said. “Well for us, lettuce is 17 different plantings,” including multiple varieties. He says the county had a “steep learning curve” to handle specialty vegetables, as it needs data on typical crop yields to determine pricing. “It takes a while to build all that, but they are getting better.”
In the meantime, many of his neighbors remain uninsured, due to the systematic gaps that persist for small farmers. In the absence of official coverage, some are turning to crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe. Following a disaster, such crowdsourcing is at least more immediate, Marchant adds. “You get the money quick,” he said. “It takes forever for the government.”
But such efforts come with complications. Despite their potential, most campaigns fail to meet their goal. Furthermore, receiving funds for specific needs like flood damage can adversely impact eligibility for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. (Farms themselves are not eligible for FEMA aid, but residential repairs often are.)
As the growing season draws to a close in Vermont, insurance adjusters await soil testing results, and to see which crops might have recovered from the year’s disasters. The federal government eventually declared Vermont a natural disaster area, making its farmers eligible for expanded low-interest loan programs through the USDA. But that doesn’t really help, Oedel says. “Frankly, nobody wants to take on a loan when they’re already extremely in debt.”
A farmer in Burlington, Vermont holds a bouquet of mud-covered flowers, part of their crop destroyed after severe flooding in July. AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Instead of incentivizing farms like Marchant’s — whose organic approach has been shown to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve soil carbon sequestration, and support biodiversity — government support continues to leave out the very farmers who could help improve climate resilience.
As severe weather becomes the norm, the damage of these disasters is usually tallied individually. But when Vermont’s floods were followed by a record-breaking hurricane hitting California’s vegetable farms, which grow a third of the country’s produce, even as a drought shrivels wheat fields across the Midwest, the effect is larger than the sum of its parts. “This flood is not like a ‘flood and done’ experience,” Oedel said. “The economics of it do not work. And that’s really scary.”
Even if your hometown is lucky enough never to be hit by a major catastrophe, our food system is becoming increasingly brittle — and agriculture insurance programs are failing to keep up.
When the quality of a particular batch of wine is exceptional, it is referred to as a “good year.” But what factors go into that designation?
A new study demonstrates the crucial role weather plays in wine quality from year to year.
In the study, a half-century’s worth of scores from wine critics in France’s Bordeaux wine region were analyzed along with each year’s weather. The researchers found that warmer years with earlier, shorter growing seasons and higher winter rainfall — conditions associated with climate change — resulted in higher quality wine.
“Weather drives wine quality and wine taste,” said Andrew Wood, lead author of the study and a graduate student in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, according to a press release from Cell Press. “We found evidence that temperature and precipitation effects occur throughout the year — from bud break, while the grapes are growing and maturing, during harvesting, and even overwinter when the plant is dormant.”
The same grapes grown on the same land at the same vineyard can result in varying vintage quality, even if comparable methods are used.
The study, “Seasonal weather impacts wine quality in Bordeaux,” was published in the journal iScience.
But how might climate change impact the quality of wine?
In order to investigate this question, the research team looked at the yearly wine critics’ scores and climate data for Bordeaux from 1950 to 2020, Cell Press said. The researchers analyzed wine quality at the regional and local levels, looking at both the general quality of wine within Bordeaux, as well as annual variations in quality for individual “appellations d’origine contrôlée” (AOCs). AOCs are geographical regions that use defined processes for the cultivation of grapes and wine production.
The researchers then tested for weather impacts — like season ranges and length, precipitation and temperature shifts — on wine quality using models.
Prior weather impact studies focused just on the growing season, but the new study also included the winter season, when plants are most often dormant.
“Perennial crops like grapes are there all the time, and so things that happen outside of the growing season can also impact the wine,” Wood said in the press release.
The researchers focused on the Bordeaux wine region because it relies solely on rainfall to irrigate grape vines and has an extensive record of wine scores. The team used overall regional scores of merchants from 1950 to 2020. For the individual AOCs, they looked at wine critic scores starting in 2014 and going up to 2020.
Critics tasting the wines know their origins, so it is subjective. But since most wine critics agree on what makes a “good” or “bad” wine, the study’s authors said quality is “a non-subjective property of perennial crops,” so it could be used for monitoring how they change in the long run.
The research team found that wine quality scores in Bordeaux had a tendency to improve from 1950 to 2020, which could be because the region’s climate warmed during that time. Another reason for the improvement could have been the increased use of technology employed in winemaking or the fact that winemakers had a tendency to match their techniques more and more to what the consumer wanted.
“The trend, whether that’s driven by the preferences of wine critics or the general population, is that people generally prefer stronger wines which age for longer and give you richer, more intense flavors, higher sweetness, and lower acidity,” Wood said. “And with climate change — generally, we are seeing a trend across the world that with greater warming, wines are getting stronger.”
The researchers also found that weather affected the quality of wine all year round, not only during the growing season. High-quality wines were generally associated with winters that were wetter and cooler; springs that were wetter and warmer; dry, hot summers; and autumns that were cool and dry.
Because climate change is bringing weather patterns like those to Bordeaux, the research team predicts that its wine will likely continue to increase in quality with the progression of climate change.
“With the predicted climates of the future, given that we are more likely to see these patterns of warmer weather and less rainfall during the summer and more rainfall during the winter, the wines are likely to continue to get better into the future,” Wood said in the press release.
But this only holds true until water becomes scarce.
“The problem in scenarios where it gets really hot is water: if plants don’t have enough, they eventually fail, and when they fail, you lose everything,” Wood said. “But the general idea or consensus is that the wines will continue to get better up to the point where they fail.”
The researchers said their methods could be used to examine the impacts of climate change and annual weather variations on other wine regions, as well as on other perennial crops like coffee and cocoa, as long as there are long-term quality records to accompany the analysis.
The report says investments must be increased to facilitate cross-border collaboration and water resources assessments, improved monitoring and data sharing, a press release from WMO said.
“This WMO report offers a comprehensive, and consistent overview of water resources worldwide, highlighting the influence of climate, environmental, and societal changes,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, according to UN News.
The new WMO report expands on last year’s pilot, with more information on hydrological variables like soil moisture, evaporation, groundwater, streamflow, frozen water, terrestrial water storage, reservoir inflows and hydrology-related disasters, the WMO press release said. It combines remote satellite-based sensing data with numerical modeling simulations and field observations to assess global water resources.
“Glaciers and ice cover are retreating before our eyes. Rising temperatures have accelerated – and also disrupted – the water cycle. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. We are seeing much heavier precipitation episodes and flooding. And at the opposite extreme, more evaporation, dry soils and more intense droughts,” Taalas said in the press release.
In order to provide holistic and integrated information for policy makers, the report brings together expert opinions and is a complement to WMO’s report on the State of the Global Climate.
“The overwhelming majority of disasters are water-related and so water management and monitoring lies at the heart of the global Early Warnings for All initiative. Many of the countries targeted for priority action in Early Warnings for All suffered from major floods or droughts in 2022. Not a single country had timely and accurate hydrological data available to support evidence-based decision making and early action,” Taalas said. “This report is a call to action for more data sharing to enable meaningful early warnings and for more coordinated and integrated water management policies that are an integral part of climate action.”
According to UN Water, 3.6 billion people currently face inadequate water access for at least one month each year. By 2050, this number is predicted to increase to more than five billion.
According to UN News, WMO said food security is greatly impacted by limited water resources since upwards of 70 percent of withdrawals of water are used for food production.
The new report quantitatively assesses large river basin water resources as compared to long-term averages for variables like groundwater, evaporation, river discharge, inflow, soil moisture and reservoirs, the WMO press release said.
Last year, more than half of the catchment areas around the world deviated from standard river discharge conditions. Most were drier than normal, with a small percentage of basins showing conditions that were above or much higher than normal.
In Europe, heat waves and drought meant decreased river flows and soil moisture during the summer, as well as increased evaporation. This caused agricultural challenges and closed power plants due to a lack of cooling water.
The change from last year’s La Niña to this year’s El Niño conditions is likely to greatly impact the hydrological cycle as well.
Alpine snow cover was far below average last year. Snow melt from the Alps is essential for rivers like the Rhine, Rhone, Danube and Po. The European Alps also saw unprecedented glacial melt.
“Unfortunately, we have lost this glacier melting game. Glacier melting and sea level rise may continue for the coming thousands of years because of high concentrations of carbon dioxide. In general, we will have challenges to get water for agriculture, for human beings, industry and also for hydropower production,” Taalas said, according to UN News.
Due to continuous drought in the U.S., extremely low water levels on the Mississippi River affected navigation, causing some shipping delays, WMO said.
The Horn of Africa has been suffering a major humanitarian crisis due to prolonged drought.
Pakistan’s Indus River Basin experienced a megaflood that killed at least 1,700 people and affected 33 million. An early-year heat wave had increased glacial meltwater, leading to higher river levels that then swelled following monsoon rainfall in July and August that was more than two times the average.
The report emphasized the lack of verified and accessible hydrological data. Observational data was especially lacking in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
“There has been a substantial increase in the number of observed discharge data compared to the previous year, which were received from more than 500 stations. After quality control, this was reduced to 273 stations as compared to the 38 stations utilized in the previous report. However, data sharing was limited to only 14 countries, leaving regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia notably underrepresented in terms of available observational data,” the press release said.
The current State of Global Water Resources report includes input from a variety of hydrological experts, including Global Data Centres, National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, supporting organizations like the German Research Centre for Geosciences and NASA, as well as community members.
The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has announced two new wildlife refuges. The Wyoming Toad Conservation Area and the Paint Rock River National Wildlife Refuge in Tennessee become the 569th and 570th refuges in the National Wildlife Refuge System, and the announcement comes amid National Wildlife Refuge Week, which started Oct. 7 and runs until Oct. 14.
“Nature is essential to the health, well-being, and prosperity of every family and every community in America. National wildlife refuges help connect Americans to a diverse array of public lands, while also serving as a crucial means of protecting wildlife and conserving habitat,” Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “Through locally led collaborative conservation, these two special landscapes are now protected as part of our shared natural heritage and accessible to everyone.”
The waters in the new Paint Rock River National Wildlife Refuge in Tennessee provide habitat to about 100 fish species and 50 different types of freshwater mussels, some that are found only in these waters. The protected area will preserve threatened and endangered species on land and in aquatic habitats, including gray bats, Indiana bats Tennessee cave salamanders and Alabama cave shrimp.
The Wyoming Toad Conservation Area will help protect white-tailed prairie dogs, pronghorns, migratory birds and Wyoming toads, which is the most endangered amphibian species on the continent, officials shared. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Wyoming toad is considered extinct in the wild.
The conservation area was established in the Laramie Plains of southern Wyoming, and officials noted the wildlife refuge will provide public access to the Laramie River in the future.
Both of the new wildlife refuges will also double as recreational areas.
These new national wildlife refuges are the second and third units to be established under Haaland, the DOI reported. The first, Montana’s Lost Trail Conservation Area, was designated in August 2022.
According to a report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the national wildlife refuge system boosts local economies by about $3.2 billion per year. As of 2022, visits to wildlife refuges in the U.S. reached about 67 million in one year.
“The Service is grateful for incredible partnerships like these that lead to demonstrated successes across the country on behalf of wildlife and people,” Service Director Martha Williams said in a statement. “Locally led conservation efforts provide a lasting impact on our efforts to protect crucial wildlife habitat for threatened, endangered and priority species while prioritizing recreational access.”
Lager, ale or bitter? Many beer drinkers have a preference, but the taste profile of beer in general is known to be hoppy and at least somewhat bitter compared to other beverages. But that may be changing due to the climate crisis.
According to a new study, climate change threatens European cultivation of the aromatic hops that give all beers their bitter taste.
“Beer drinkers will definitely see the climate change, either in the price tag or the quality,” said co-author of the study Miroslav Trnka, a scientist at the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, as The Guardian reported. “That seems to be inevitable from our data.”
The most-consumed beverage in the world after water and tea, beer has been around for thousands of years.
Hops varieties in Europe are known for their quality, but lack of rain and hotter temperatures mean reduced yields, as well as a lower concentration of the special compounds that give beer that bitter taste.
“Since the cultivation of high-quality aroma hops is restricted to relatively small regions with suitable environmental conditions, there is a serious risk that much of the production will be affected by individual heat waves or drought extremes that are likely to increase under global climate change,” the authors of the study wrote.
The research team looked at climate models and weather data in their analysis of how climate change has affected and will affect European hops from 1970 to 2050, assuming temperatures continue to rise and rainfall keeps decreasing.
The study, “Climate-induced decline in the quality and quantity of European hops calls for immediate adaptation measures,” by a team of international researchers, mostly from the Czech Republic, was published in the journal Nature Communications.
The researchers looked at data collected from five sites in the biggest hops growing countries in Europe: Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. According to the study, these countries have nearly 90 percent of all of Europe’s aromatic hop fields. All the study sites were in regions that have a “mild continental climate.”
The researchers compared data from 1995 to 2018 with data from 1971 to 1994. At four of the sites, the team found that yields had fallen from 9.5 to 19.4 percent. A fifth site had remained stable.
At the same time, the concentration of bitter compounds called alpha acids had decreased.
“In addition to water, malting barley and yeast, a much more expensive hop is needed to give beer its incomparable taste. The specific hop aroma emerges from its bitter acid content and many other compounds, including essential oils and polyphenols,” the study said. “Changes in alpha bitter acids affect the quality of hops, and there has been a recent change in consumer preference towards beer aromas and flavors that heavily depend on high-quality hops. Amplified by the ongoing craft beer popularity, this trend contrasts with previous demands for lower alpha content.”
After analyzing the data, the prediction of the research team was for a reduction in yield of four to 18 percent, compared to 1989 to 2019, with a possible drop in alpha acid concentration from 20 to 31 percent due to more rainfall and rising temperatures.
“Hop farmers can and have responded to climate change by relocating hop gardens to higher elevations and valley locations with higher water tables, building irrigation systems, changing the orientation and spacing of crop rows, and even breeding more resistant varieties,” the study said.
Additionally, with the increase of central and southern European droughts, “it will be necessary to expand the area of aroma hops by 20 percent compared to the current production area to compensate for a future decline in” yields and potency.
The authors emphasized that “urgent adaptation measures” were necessary for the stability of international market chains.
“One of the side motives of this study was to illustrate how climate change might be important for even those who think it doesn’t matter,” Trnka told CNN. “We are really seeing changes that are affecting things that we value, like the taste of beer. Climate change really can have an effect on it, or at least have an effect on commodities that are critical for production.”
The energy required to heat, cool, and power American homes makes up about a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions the United States produces every year. And, even as the nation transitions to renewable energy and buildings grow more efficient, the housing sector is not changing fast enough to meet the nation’s climate targets. At the same time, a growing number of Americans — some 20 million people as of 2022 — are falling behind on their utility bills.
On Thursday, the Department of Energy took aim at both of those issues, announcing the Biden administration’s goal of cutting the cost of home decarbonization in half and slashing household energy costs at least 20 percent by the end of the decade.
“Every American deserves to live in a home with affordable, clean, reliable power,” said energy secretary Jennifer Granholm in remarks prepared for the announcement. Energy savings, she said, “means real money back into the pockets of hard-working Americans.”
The effort will focus on spurring cheaper ways of retrofitting households that make below 80 percent of their area’s median income. Granholm highlighted low-cost approaches such as installing simple, compact heat pumps and insulated panels for exterior walls.
The new targets are part of the Biden administration’s broader Justice40 initiative, which aims to funnel 40 percent of the benefits of federal climate action to low-income and minority communities. But the hope is that any solutions will be applicable elsewhere as well.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
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“We want to look at technologies that can start in affordable housing and go to the larger built environment,” said Ram Narayanamurthy, deputy director of the Energy Department’s building technologies office. ”We know that we have to drive down the costs, and make energy more affordable.”
The push announced today, called the Affordable Home Energy Shot, is the eighth and final pillar in the agency’s “Energy Earthshot” initiative, the objective of which is to accelerate the Biden administration’s attempt to roughly halve the nation’s emissions by 2030. The first of these initiatives, the “Hydrogen Shot” announced in the summer of 2021, set the goal of reducing the price of clean hydrogen fuel by 80 percent by 2030. Other “shots” include driving down the cost of floating offshore wind technology, geothermal energy, and technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“The Affordable Home Energy Earth Shot is a great example of the federal government stepping in to fill a real gap in the market,” said Sara Baldwin, senior director of electrification at Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, a nonprofit energy and climate think tank. She pointed to the success of the Department of Energy’s 2011 SunShot initiative to cut the cost of utility-scale solar to $1 per watt within a decade. Prices hit that mark in 2017, roughly three years early.
Funding for the latest efforts flows from the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The two sweeping laws provided $13.5 billion for the Department of Energy’s housing programs.
On Thursday, the Biden administration also announced $30 million in clean energy funding from the infrastructure bill for 27 states, counties, and cities, as well as the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians in Alabama. The grants, awarded to help primarily low-income and minority communities, will be disbursed by states and local governments to fund rural electrification projects, build electric vehicle charging stations, and power hospitals, among other local initiatives.
The Department of Energy admits that ensuring Justice40 communities will get their share of the research and development benefits from the latest energy shot will be harder than simply tracking grant dollars. Many of those same communities have already criticized the administration for failing to define exactly what such a “benefit” is and keeping what amounts to a very loose score of where the funds are going.
“Not every project is going to be something that directly serves a community,” said Michael Reiner, a policy analyst in the Energy Department office of economic impact and diversity. ”But you want to know that what you’re investing in is making progress toward something that will.”
The department is also still in the process of establishing the benchmarks and processes for assessing progress on achieving the latest Earthshot’s overall reduction goals. But, officials say, the first step is ensuring that everyone is working toward the same end.
“It’s really about pushing the innovation forward with new materials [and] new technology in a way that can bring down the cost of what’s currently needed to decarbonize homes,” said Jennifer Arrigo, the department’s director for science and energy crosscuts. “Energy Shots are meant to provide that North Star.”
