UPWELL
The growing awareness about plastic pollution among consumers seems to be producing some tangible results, with many cities, states, and nations banning single-use plastic. The latest big win in the battle against this long-lasting pollutant came in March, when the European parliament voted overwhelmingly to ban single-use plastic products, including cutlery, food containers, straws, and stirrers, in an effort to tackle plastic trash that is littering our beaches and polluting our oceans.
The ban, which will come into force by 2021, means the EU’s 28 member states will soon join another 27 countries around the world that have imposed regulations on single-use plastic.
The products covered by this new law constitute 70 percent of all marine litter items. In addition to targeting the most common sources of plastic litter, the directive bans single-use polystyrene cups and those made from oxo-degradable plastics that disintegrate into tiny fragments. EU member states will also have to introduce measures to reduce the use of plastic food containers and plastic lids for hot drinks. Plastic bottles will have to be made of 25 percent recycled content by 2025, and member states will also have to achieve a 90 percent collection target for plastic bottles by 2029.
The EU is also tackling wet wipes, sanitary towels, and tobacco filters — all of which will have to be labeled if they are made with plastic. Additionally, the agreement will extend the “polluter pays” principle, putting more pressure on manufacturers of tobacco filters, fishing gear, and other polluting products to bear environmental responsibility.
“We have taken an important step to reduce littering and plastic pollution in our oceans and seas,” Frans Timmermans, a European commission vice-president who spearheaded the plan, told reporters after the vote was passed. “We got this, we can do this. Europe is setting new and ambitious standards, paving the way for the rest of the world.” Timmermans took pains to emphasize that targeted products wouldn’t disappear, but would rather be made with different, “more environment-friendly” materials instead.
Europeans generate 25 million tons of plastic waste every year, but less than 30 percent is collected for recycling. The estimated cost of environmental damage by plastic pollution from EU nations, under business as usual conditions until 2030, is nearly $25 billion. This legislation aims to reduce that cost to zero.
CALL OF THE WILD
Our living world is in major crisis. Most of us already know that. But when you put a number to the crisis, it somehow brings it into much sharper focus. Which is why when news broke in early May of a new report that found that humans are driving up to 1 million of this planet’s 8 million known plant and animal species to extinction — many within decades — it went viral.
The groundbreaking report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) distils findings from nearly 15,000 studies and government reports, integrating information from the natural and social sciences, Indigenous peoples, and traditional agricultural communities. It is the first major international appraisal of biodiversity since 2005 and the first “single unified statement from the world’s governments that unambiguously makes clear the crisis we are facing for life on Earth,” conservation scientist Thomas Brooks, who helped edit the analysis, told Nature.
According to the report, shrinking habitat (largely due to agricultural activities), exploitation of natural resources, climate change, and pollution are the main drivers of species loss. It notes that more than 40 percent of amphibians, 33 percent of coral reefs, and over a third of all marine mammals are threatened with extinction.
“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health, and quality of life worldwide,” IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson, said in a statement that called for a “system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors” to reverse this downward spiral. But he also noted that such “transformative change can expect opposition from those with interests vested in the status quo.”
Talking of putting a number to things — the UN report came just weeks after another report in Science Advances estimated that to maintain a liveable planet, governments need to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and sea and sustainably manage another 20 percent.
It appears Waston is an optimistic person — despite noting the entrenched interests that have stymied concerted global action to save our environment for decades, he concludes that “such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good.” We hope his view prevails.
TABLE TALK
The Big Apple has taken a big bite towards living up to its fruit-friendly name. In early March, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that starting in the 2019-2020 school year, all New York City public schools would serve meatless meals on Mondays. This means that the district’s 1.1 million students will have access to vegan or vegetarian food for breakfast and lunch.
The Meatless Monday program, which is a part of New York City’s Free School Lunch for All program for public schools, was tested in 15 schools and was shown to be cost-neutral and well-favored among students. By implementing Meatless Mondays, the city hopes to accomplish two goals: improve childhood health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
With respect to public health, the new policy will decrease consumption of processed meat and encourage consumption of fresh produce. At a time when 65 percent of American children, ages 12 to 14, show signs of early cholesterol disease, Meatless Mondays could be the start of healthier lifestyle choices for New York youth.
Additionally, by encouraging plant-based eating, New York City is taking a stand on the environment. According to a recent analysis by Oxford University, the production of animal products takes up 83 percent of all farmland globally, and is responsible for 58 percent of the agricultural industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. By replacing animal products with plant-based foods, New York City schools will reduce their carbon footprint. As Andrea Strong, founder of the NYC Healthy School Food Alliance, notes, if New York City public schools replaced all beef burgers with plant-based burgers just once a month, the city would reduce its carbon footprint by 375,000 pounds a year.
Hopefully, Meatless Mondays will help teach kids early-on the importance and feasibility of protecting not only their own health, but also our shared environment.
TEMPERATURE GAUGE
Though they haven’t stopped production, many big-name oil companies have publicly begun adding their voices to the growing chorus calling for climate action. But what these companies do with their money is a different story. A new report published in March by InfluenceMap found that the five biggest oil and gas companies — BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Total — spend almost $200 million a year to delay, shape, or block policies aimed at addressing climate change. At the same time, they’ve spent nearly the same amount building a public image that paints them in a favorable climate light. All told, InfluenceMap estimates that the “big five” have spent more than $1 billion on these dual efforts since the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted in 2015.
“Oil majors’ climate branding sounds increasingly hollow and their credibility is on the line,” Edward Collins, the report’s author, told The Guardian. “They publicly support climate action while lobbying against binding policy. They advocate low-carbon solutions but such investments are dwarfed by spending on expanding their fossil fuel business.”
These fossil fuel companies are embracing a variety of tactics. In some cases, they are throwing money at campaigns targeting ballot measures — BP donated $13 million to help fight a carbon tax in Washington state, for example. In others, they are using Facebook and Instagram ads to promote fossil fuels. While employing these promotional strategies, they continue to invest billions and billions in new oil and gas projects. According to the report, “Combined capital investment will increase to $115 [billion] in 2019 but only about 3 percent of this will go to low carbon investments, according to company disclosures.”
Big Oil isn’t the only sector failing us at this critical climate moment. Global banks have upped their fossil fuel investments since the Paris Agreement. The US, of course, intends to pull out of the accord. And greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise in many parts of the world, including in major-emitter nations like the US, China, and India.
Fossil fuel companies may well continue to talk out of both sides of their mouth, painting a sunny picture of a clean-energy future while doing all they can to monetize the Earth’s fossil fuels. But hopefully, the global citizenry will continue to follow the money, demand more than just words, and push for a livable future for generations to come.
CALL OF THE WILD
On April 30 the venerable Indian Army sent a tweet to its nearly six million followers claiming that its mountaineering expedition team had discovered “mysterious footprints of mythical beast ‘Yeti’ at the Makalu Base Camp [in the Himalayas].” Three pictures of massive footprints, purportedly of the legendary ape-like “abominable snowman” said to inhabit the Himalayas, and a group photo that appeared to be of the expedition group, accompanied the post.
For the first time, an #IndianArmy Moutaineering Expedition Team has sited Mysterious Footprints of mythical beast ‘Yeti’ measuring 32x15 inches close to Makalu Base Camp on 09 April 2019. This elusive snowman has only been sighted at Makalu-Barun National Park in the past. pic.twitter.com/AMD4MYIgV7
— ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) April 29, 2019
When the Twitterverse responded to the announcement with ridicule, hilarious parodies, and Game of Thrones references, the army, ever stoic, announced that the “evidence” about the Yeti had been “photographed” and “handed over to subject matter experts” earlier that month, and since the evidence matched earlier theories it had “thought it prudent [to go public] to excite scientific temper and rekindle the interest,” the Times of India reported.
Several previous scientific studies have concluded that the origins of yeti stories, which have been told for centuries, are based on real animals. The results of a DNA analysis of supposed yeti samples — including hair, fur, and feces — published in 2017, showed the samples were from Himalayan and Tibetan subspecies of brown bear and an Asian black bear, The Guardian reports. In 2011, a “yeti finger” found in Nepal in the 1950s was revealed by a genetic expert to have been human bone.
But let’s cut the Indian Army some flak. The thing is, despite all the myth-busting research, tales of encounters with big, hairy, upright-walking, humanoid creatures in the wilderness persist across the world to this day. There’s something about these “monsters” that fascinates us, that elicits some sort of a primeval response. Laura Krantz, a journalist who spent two years researching and reporting a podcast on Bigfoot in North America, connects this response to our evolutionary origins — we were once wild ourselves. “We fear the wild, and we miss it,” she writes in an essay in High Country News. “How better to personify the unpredictable nature of the wilderness than with a mysterious, unpredictable, wild thing? A creature like us — but not us.”
UP IN THE AIR
If you’re a science lover with a sweet tooth, this may just be the news for you. New research out of the University of British Columbia has found that honey from urban hives can hold clues to just how clean, or dirty, a city is, and what pollutants residents may be inhaling.
The study, published in Nature Sustainability, examined honey from beehives in six Vancouver neighborhoods, testing for lead, zinc, and copper, among other heavy metals. Bees are local foragers, typically drawing their pollen and nectar from sources within a two-mile radius of their hive. This means their honey offers a good picture of the local environment.
Overall, the findings were positive. “The good news is that the chemical composition of honey in Vancouver reflects its environment and is extremely clean,” Kate E. Smith, lead author of the study and PhD candidate at the University’s Pacific Centre for Isotopic and Geochemical Research, told Phys.org. “We also found that the concentration of elements increased the closer you got to downtown Vancouver.”
The research team also carried out lead isotope analysis to identify where the heavy metal detected in the honey might have originated. The lead “fingerprints” didn’t match local natural sources of lead like lichens, volcanic rocks, or river sediments. They did, however, resemble those of certain manmade lead sources.
“We found they both had fingerprints similar to aerosols, ores, and coals from large Asian cities,” said Dominique Weis, senior study author and director of the center. “Given that more than 70 percent of cargo ships entering the Port of Vancouver originate from Asian ports, it’s possible they are one source contributing to elevated lead levels in downtown Vancouver.”
The scientists conducted their research in partnership with a local nonprofit, Hives for Humanity, which engages Vancouver residents in urban beekeeping. They noted the potential for citizen scientists to monitor pollutants in their own communities via urban hives, and hope to extend their sticky research to other cities.
TEMPERATURE GAUGE
Jakarta, the world’s fastest-sinking city, will soon lose its status as the capital of Indonesia. In late April, the country’s president, Joko Widodo, approved a long-term plan for the government to abandon the city and find a new home.
Prone to flooding and rapidly sinking due to uncontrolled groundwater extraction, the mega-city is creaking under the weight of its environmental problems. In some parts of Jakarta, which lies in a flat alluvial plain on the island of Java, the ground has sunk nearly 9 feet in less than a decade, twice the global average for coastal metros. Meanwhile, the sea level around it has risen by 10 feet in the past 30 years. By some estimates, the city could be permanently flooded by 2050 as sea levels are expected to rise anywhere between 20 inches to 5 feet by then.
Jakarta faces other challenges as well. The Associated Press reports that only 4 percent of the city’s wastewater is treated, causing massive pollution to the 13 rivers that run through it and contaminating the groundwater that supplies the city. Traffic congestion is also a major problem that is estimated to cost the economy $6.5 billion a year, and the city’s air quality is among the worst in the world. Jakarta is home to more than 10 million people, with an estimated 30 million in the greater metropolitan area. Officials hope that moving the country’s political capital someplace else will help relieve some of the burden on the city.
The new home for the capital hasn’t been finalized yet. Palangkaraya on the island of Borneo, which lies north of Java, has been mentioned as a possibility in the past, but Indonesia’s Minister of National Development and Planning Board, Chief Bambang Brodjonegoro, told reporters that the government was now eyeing some location on the eastern side of the archipelago. Brodjonegoro also said the move, which would involve building new infrastructure and relocating civil servants from Jakarta, could take up to 10 years and could cost up to $33 billion.
TEMPERATURE GAUGE
That the world’s second largest emperor penguin colony has “now all but disappeared,” according to researchers from the British Antarctic Survey. The Halley Bay, Antarctic colony, which formerly consisted of some 14,000 to 25,000 breeding pairs, comprised about 5 to 9 percent of the global emperor penguin population. This colony was stable for the past six decades, until 2016, when, due to abnormally stormy weather, the sea-ice split. Emperor penguins need stable sea ice to breed on from April through December, when their chicks fledge. The same scenario played out again in 2017 and 2018. The ice instability led to “the death of almost all the chicks at the site each season,” resulting in the eventual disappearance of the colony, the team noted in a report published in Antarctic Science.
It’s not all bad news though. The researchers, who based their findings on high resolution satellite imagery, also found that as the colony at Halley Bay disappeared, the nearby Dawson Lambton colony, noticeably increased in size, suggesting that many adult penguins migrated to better breeding grounds as their previous environment deteriorated. Scientists were previously unsure whether emperor penguins would seek out new breeding grounds as an adaptation to environmental change.
Though it is impossible to know whether the colony’s disappearance is directly linked to the climate crisis, researchers note that such complete breeding failures like those at Halley Bay are unprecedented, and warn that their prevalence may increase. “Even taking into account levels of ecological uncertainty, published models suggest that emperor penguins numbers are set to fall dramatically,” says Phil Trathan, a co-author of the report. He adds that the species is likely to lose 50 to 70 percent of its population by the end of the century due to climate change and breaking sea ice. By continuing to study these penguin colonies and how they react to changing sea ice conditions, the researchers believe they can collect vital information on how this species may adapt to future environmental changes.
AROUND THE WORLD
People have been hunting animals since the beginning of human history, when hunter-gatherers would supplement their foraged food with hunted game. Today, humans continue to kill animals, whether to feed their families or to sell the meat — and sometimes the bones, eggs, pelts, and other animal parts too. Some species have been able to keep pace with demand. Other haven’t.
Today, humans pose a threat to wildlife populations at a scale never seen before. Growing infrastructure is damaging habitat while also allowing humans to access and hunt in areas that were previously out of reach. An increasingly interconnected world is also growing appetites for some animal products in places they weren’t previously coveted. Here are some of the species humans may eat out of existence if things don’t change.
Sources: The Guardian, The Scientific American, BBC, Science Daily, National Geographic
1 Pangolins
Pangolins, coveted for both their meat and scales in countries like China and Vietnam, are the world’s most trafficked wild animal. Globally, more than a million of these small mammals have been killed since 2000. All four Asian pangolin species are endangered. Two, the Chinese and Sunda, are listed as critically endangered on the International Convention for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Redlist. Due to dwindling numbers in Asia, poachers have increasingly been targeting African pangolins to meet demand. Already this year there have been several large seizures of illegally transported pangolins, including the discovery of 30 tons of body parts in Malaysia in January and of 8.3 tons of scales, which are used in traditional medicine, in Hong Kong in February.
2 Red Colobus
Many of the 18 species of red colobus monkey that live across sub-Saharan Africa have been hunted widely by humans for food. They are appealing targets due in part to their large size, which means a single monkey feed many mouths. In recent years, it has been easier to access red colobus habitat due to improved roads to areas once largely inaccessible to humans. At the same time, rising demand for monkey meat in many African cities has contributed to the over-hunting crisis. One species, Miss Waldron’s red colobus, is already feared to be extinct, while another, the Niger Delta red colobus, is predicted to soon be lost as well if adequate conservation measures aren’t put in place.
3 Angel Shark
Angel sharks are the second-most threatened group of sharks and related fish. Consisting of 23 species, angel sharks’ range extends globally throughout temperate and tropical waters. One species, Squatina squatina, or the common angel shark, once ranged from the waters off of Scandinavia down to northwestern Africa. Today, the critically endangered fish is only regularly sighted around the Canary Islands. Though not targeted as food, angel sharks are often killed as bycatch as fishermen trawl for other fish to sell commercially. Several species of angel sharks have gained protection under the US Endangered Species Act. However, none of the protected species live in US waters, and there are few regulations within their range to help with their survival.
4 Indri
The indri, or babakoto, is a member of the world’s most endangered primate group: lemurs. Madagascar alone is home to 111 lemur species, 105 of which are endangered, including the endemic indri, which is listed as critically endangered. Due to political and economic turmoil in Madagascar over the past 15 years, humans have increasingly resorted to subsistence hunting and commercial poaching in order to feed their families and earn a living. Habitat destruction — much of it related to agricultural expansion — poses an even greater threat to the island’s lemurs.
5 European Eel
Populations of the European eel, which breeds in the Sargasso Sea and has historically been popular in European cuisine, have declined an estimated 90 to 95 percent over the past 45 years. Although legal trade of European eel has been confined to the European Union since 2010, an illegal international market has been fast growing and now poses a major threat to this critically endangered species. In East Asia, for example, the eel can fetch between $1,200 and $1,500 per kilogram on the black market. Illegal trade not only threatens the future of the European eel, but also makes it increasingly difficult for legal fishers to make a living since illegal fishers deplete fish stocks.
6 Beluga Sturgeon
The Beluga Sturgeon, an ancient fish that can weigh more than 3,500 pounds, is hunted for its highly valuable caviar that can cost thousands of dollars per pound. The species has long been overexploited in Russia for its caviar, and is listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Redlist. Modern river infrastructure like dams have also blocked the sturgeon’s traditional spawning grounds and contributed to its decreasing range, which is now limited exclusively to the Ural and Danube rivers and the Caspian and the Black seas.
Compiled by Cindy Xin
FINDINGS
Concern about climate change has been rising among Americans in recent years, but it’s still not as high as a lot of scientists and advocates would like, particularly given the towering piles of research showing how quickly our planet is warming. But how to convince ideological outliers who turn a blind eye to the science and deny our climate reality? Turns out, it may be good to start with their kids.
New research published in Nature Climate Change this spring indicates that when children learn about climate science in school, their parents are likely to become significantly more concerned about the global warming. The shift is most pronounced in conservative parents, followed by parents of daughters, and men.
“This study tells us that we can educate children about climate change and they’re willing to learn, which is exciting because studies find that many adults are resistant to climate education, because it runs counter to their personal identities,” says lead author of the study, Danielle Lawson, a PhD student at North Carolina State University. “It also highlights that children share that information with their parents.”
The study involved 238 middle school students and 292 of their parents in North Carolina. All participants were given a survey at the beginning of the research, asked to rate their concern about climate change on a 17-point scale from -8 (not concerned at all) to +8 (extremely concerned). More than half of those students then received climate change curriculum in their science class. The remaining students were part of a control group.
Once the climate curriculum had been completed, the students and parents were asked to complete a second survey. “We found that there was an increase in climate concern for both the experimental and control groups, but that the shift was much more pronounced in families where children were taught the curriculum,” Lawson says of the results.
The level of concern among conservative parents in the experimental group increased by a whopping 4.77 points after their children completed the climate curriculum, compared to a 0.25-point bump in the control group. Perhaps most notably, the gap between liberal and conservative parents shrunk from 4.5 points to just 1.2 points once their kiddos had learned more about climate science.
The researchers attribute these changes to the fact that youth are often less ideologically rigid than adults, and thus open to learning new ideas. Adults, in turn, may be more receptive to new viewpoints when they come from their children, rather than from other sources.
HIGH VOLTAGE
Another one bites the dust. The only reactor still in operation at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant — the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history — is set to close by September 30 this year, 15 years before its license runs out.
On May 8, after it became clear that a government bailout it had been asking for wasn’t going to materialize, the plant’s owner, Exelon Corp., announced that it would begin a planned shutdown of the money-losing operation along the Susquehanna River starting June 1. Power from the plant is expected to be replaced by electricity from coal and natural gas-fired power plants that run below capacity in a saturated market, the Associated Press reports.
The Three Mile Island plant has been in financial trouble since 1979 when a partial meltdown left it with just one functioning reactor and resulted in the release of radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the environment. The accident instilled fear in nearby residents and crystallized US citizens’ concerns about nuclear power. Experts have come to no firm conclusion about the health effects associated with the accident or the amount of radiation released, though government scientists have said the maximum individual exposure was not enough to cause health problems.
Exelon says the plant has been losing money for years. Like most other nuclear plants in the US, it’s been struggling to compete with cheaper power produced by the natural gas and renewable energy industries. Nationwide, nuclear energy currently provides about 20 percent of electricity.
The company first announced it would close the reactor two years ago unless lawmakers stepped in to keep it open. It then campaigned to save the plant by seeking a subsidy from Pennsylvania’s legislature, arguing that in light of climate change and efforts to address it, the plant deserves compensation for the supposedly low-carbon electricity it produces. Exelon has won similar bailouts for its plants in New Jersey, New York, and Illinois, and in neighboring Ohio, lawmakers are embroiled in a debate over rescuing two FirstEnergy Corp. nuclear power plants.
A bill proposing a roughly $500 million subsidy deal for Three Mile Island and Pennsylvania’s four other nuclear power plants was introduced in the state legislature in March, but it faced stiff opposition from the Pennsylvania’s powerful natural gas industry, as well as consumer advocates and anti-nuclear activists. Opponents of the bill pointed out that Exelon had reported $2 billion in profits last year and that a bailout meant investing in outdated, inefficient, and expensive power plants while benefiting shareholders of a profitable company on the backs of Pennsylvania ratepayers.
When the bill stalled without a vote in May, the company decided to close the plant as it “couldn’t see a path forward.” Exelon estimates that decommissioning Unit 1, dismantling its buildings, and removing spent fuel could take six decades and cost more than $1 billion. The company said it would offer jobs at its other facilities to those of Three Mile Island’s roughly 675 employees willing to relocate.
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