Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate change

[Anthea]

Farmland destroyed

Farmlands in Kirkuk's Pirde (Altun Kupri) have been damaged as floodwater flowed downstream from Erbil to the district on Friday. This has caused financial loss to dozens of Kurdish farmers

Floods hit several southeastern neighbourhoods and sub-districts in Erbil province early Friday, killing 12 people, including foreigners.

One of the most affected areas was Qushtapa subdistrict. Pride, located in the province of Kirkuk, is about 30 kilometres away from the area. The flood water headed to the farmlands of the district, destroying many of them.

On Sunday, farmers gathered on their devastated farms, demanding compensation from the government which they claim is responsible for the destruction because of its failure to clear runoff paths.

“In the past, two excavators were used to clean the streams, each digging from one side. But now the canes have filled the channel, preventing the water from flowing. Whenever the flooding comes, it engulfs the deserts and the fields of farmers,” Kurdish farmer Bakhawan Haji Jawhar told Rudaw on Sunday.

Sherwan Shwan, another farmer, estimates that he lost more than $8,000 due to the flood.

“I lost about 12 million dinars ($8,225). Most of my irrigation pipes have been swept away by the flood. I have only collected these pipes in the last two days,” he said.

Kirkuk's agriculture department has begun estimating the damage.

Mohammed Ahmed, director of Altun Kupri agriculture department, told Rudaw that a lot of crop fields, irrigation systems, and water pumps were destroyed by the flooding. “Within minutes, we contacted the director of the Kirkuk agriculture department. He told us to estimate the losses.”

Link to Article - Video:

https://www.rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/201220212

[Anthea]

Hurricanes to expand into more regions

Climate change will expand the range of tropical cyclones, making millions more people vulnerable to these devastating storms, a new study says

At present, these cyclones - or hurricanes as they are also known - are mainly confined to the tropical regions north and south of the equator.

But researchers say that rising temperatures will allow these weather events to form in the mid-latitudes.

This area includes cities such as New York, Beijing, Boston and Tokyo.

The study has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The scientists involved say their work shows by the end of this century, cyclones will likely occur over a wider range than they have for three million years.

When subtropical storm Alpha made landfall in Portugal in September 2020, the relatively small scale of damage caused by the cyclone made few headlines.

But for scientists this was quite a momentous event.

"We hadn't observed this before," said Dr Joshua Studholme, a physicist from Yale University.

"You had a traditional kind of mid-latitude storm, that sort of decayed, and in its decay, the right conditions for a tropical cyclone to form occurred, and that hadn't happened to Portugal before."

Dr Studholme is the lead author of this new study, which projects that a warming climate will see the formation of more of these types of storms in the mid-latitudes, where most of the world's population lives, and where most economic activity takes place.

He explained that as the world gets hotter, the difference in temperature between the equator and polar regions will decline, and this will impact the flow of the jet streams.

Normally, these high-altitude rivers of air act as a kind of border guard for hurricanes, keeping them closer to the equator.

"As the climate warms, that sort of jet stream activity that happens in the middle latitude, will weaken and in extreme cases split, allowing this sort of cyclone formation to occur."

The question of the impact of human induced climate change on hurricanes has been contentious in the past, but recent research suggests that the connections are becoming clearer.

In relation to hurricanes and tropical cyclones, the authors said they had "high confidence" that the evidence of human influence has strengthened.

"The proportion of intense tropical cyclones, average peak tropical cyclone wind speeds, and peak wind speeds of the most intense tropical cyclones will increase on the global scale with increasing global warming," the IPCC said.

The new research published on Wednesday makes use of multiple strands of evidence to show that tropical cyclones in future are likely to occur over a wider range than previously thought.

"What we've done is make explicit the links between the physics going on within storms themselves and the dynamics of the atmosphere at the planetary scale," said Dr Studholme.

"This is a hard problem because this physics isn't well simulated in numerical models run on modern computers."

The likely expansion of these storms poses a significant danger to the world, especially when the other impacts of warming come into play.

"Tropical cyclones in the mid-latitude band could experience other changes such as slower motion and heavier rainfall," said Dr Gan Zhang, previously an atmospheric scientist at Princeton University and NOAA who wasn't involved in the new paper.

Some of the damage done when Hurricane Ida made landfall in the US this summer

"These tropical cyclone changes, plus pronounced coastal sea level rise might compound potential societal impacts."

Dr Zhang cautioned that the sensitivity of tropical cyclones to warming has a high level of uncertainty but he said the risk from these storms could still increase even with moderate levels of warming.

Certainly, the authors argue that this course is not set in stone and that dramatic reductions in carbon emissions over the next decade particularly, could alter the outcome.

"The control over this is the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles, and that's very tightly linked to overall climate change," said Dr Studholme.

"By end of this century, the difference in that gradient between a high emission scenario and a low emission scenario is dramatic. That can be very significant in terms of how these hurricanes play out."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59775105

[Anthea]

Greta Thunberg: climate movement

Student and climate activist Greta Thunberg, 18, burst improbably onto the world stage in late 2018 when what began as a one-person school strike outside the Swedish parliament ended up galvanizing a global climate movement to demand immediate action to prevent environmental catastrophe

Thunberg’s school strike spread in Sweden and around the world, inspiring a youth-led global climate strike movement, Fridays for Future, which urged cuts in carbon emissions. Her speeches at major political gatherings, including the World Economic Forum, the British Parliament, the U.S. Congress and, most recently, the United Nations climate summit known as COP26, have castigated leaders for failing future generations with their “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” Or, as she said in one speech, “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

Thunberg credits her Asperger’s syndrome, which is considered part of the autism spectrum, for her truth-telling and focus as a climate activist. She lives in Stockholm.

You called COP26 a “failure” and a “PR event.”

Well, in the final document, they succeeded in even watering down the blah, blah, blah. Which is very much an achievement, if you see it that way. Of course it’s a step forward that, instead of coming back every five years, they’re doing it every year now. But still, that doesn’t mean anything unless that actually leads to increased ambition and if they actually fulfill those ambitions.

What do you mean when you say, “watering down the blah, blah, blah”?

As we all know, or as we might know, the so-called “f-word” was included for the first time in this document: fossil fuel. Which makes you wonder what they have been doing these decades without even mentioning fossil fuels for a problem which, to a very, very large extent, is caused by fossil fuels. And instead of “phasing out” [coal, the document’s language became] “phasing down.” So, yeah, that is one very clear example.

And also, one question that was very up in the air was the question about finance for loss and damage and the Green Climate Fund, which they again failed to agree on. The money that has already been promised, the bare minimum that the so-called global north have promised that they will deliver, they failed to come to any conclusions, and it’s been postponed once again.

And what are positives that might have come out of COP26?

One of the positives is that it shows that, under the current circumstances, within current systems, we won’t be able to solve the climate crisis unless there is massive pressure from the outside. Nothing will come out of these conferences unless there is a huge increase in the level of awareness and unless people actually go out on the streets and demand change. And these global events are a big opportunity to mobilize people and to redirect the focus onto the big climate crisis again and highlight the fact that nowhere near enough is being done about it.

I read recently that at the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, we have 11 years until we get to 1.5 degrees Celsius change [the Paris agreement’s aspirational temperature threshold for heading off the worst impacts of climate change]. How do you get people to focus on that?

Well, there are many different numbers that include many different things. But it’s just the principle that we need to understand: that we have a very limited time, that we are using up the carbon dioxide budget right now — no matter which carbon dioxide budget you go for — and that cannot be undone in the future. Yes, we may be able to come up with new technologies and scale them up so that we can absorb carbon dioxide from the air, but you cannot undo the damage that has been done if we trigger feedback loops and irreversible tipping points.

But also, we need to understand that 1.5 is not a safe level. Already, as it is now — 1.1 or 1.2 — people are already suffering. Countless people are already bearing the brunts of the climate crisis and have been doing so for a long time. So this is not just a future problem. We need to understand that this is here and now. It’s already happening — it has been happening for a long time — and many people have been bearing witness to this and trying to tell this, but they have been ignored.

Greta Thunberg with Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate at the opening plenary of a Youth4Climate event ahead of COP26, the United Nations climate conference. (Luca Bruno/AP)

You’ve been very successful in getting energy and attention on this issue over the last few years. Can you talk about first becoming aware of the climate crisis yourself, and being galvanized to action?

There’s a big difference between the first time I heard about the climate crisis and when I actually understood its consequences. I heard about it in school maybe when I was 7, 8 or 9. They teach the ground principles: the greenhouse effect, and it’s being amplified by us since we humans emit CO2 and so on. But then I read up on it more and more because it didn’t seem real that they’d explain it as a very big problem — but it wasn’t treated like one. It was kind of a long process because there’s a lot to read and a lot to understand. And based on the things that I read, I drew the conclusion that this was very, very serious.

[My actions] started small at home, like turning off the lamps when I wasn’t in the room and cutting down meat consumption and so on. And then I did more: I stopped flying, and I stopped buying new things. I became a vegetarian and a vegan. I tried to join organizations and marches and sign petitions and the things that they recommend us to do. But that didn’t have an effect.

Was there a moment you moved from personal actions to a bigger scale?

I remember I was on a call with other young people who cared about the environment and were trying to figure out something to do, and we were going to plan a march. And then I thought, Okay, this could be something. And then I presented my idea of school striking, and they weren’t very keen on the idea. They didn’t think it was going to have an impact. They were like, “We can eat some cookies and drink coffee and tea and make it a pleasant event for young people to educate themselves about the climate crisis.” And I was like, “No, you clearly haven’t understood the climate crisis.

This is an emergency. This is not only supposed to be nice, this actually has to be something important.” And I think we who have the privilege and the opportunity to actually do something should go put ourselves out there. So I hung up on the call. Well, it was a Zoom call, so I just pressed “Leave Meeting” — so it wasn’t as dramatic as it would have been otherwise. But I hung up, and I decided to go on and do it by myself.

And that’s when you were 15, right?

Yeah. I just thought that someone needs to do something. I need to do something more because this isn’t leading to anything. So I decided to school strike. And then many others did the same thing. And then we became a global movement.

But before that, when did the weight of the emergency hit you?

It was just the cognitive dissonance that I saw with everyone around me. My parents, my classmates, everyone I met. They were like, “Oh, what are your interests?” And I said, “I’m interested in the climate because it’s an emergency.” They’re like, “Oh, that’s fun.” And I was like, “You clearly don’t get this.” Because everyone said, “I care about climate change. I think it’s very important.” And then they don’t do anything. And that got to me because I’m autistic, and I don’t like when people say one thing and then do another thing. I have to live true to my values, so to speak.

I remember one time I was talking to my dad, and he said, “I want to buy a new car. This SUV looks really nice.” And I was like, “But you said you cared about the climate.” He was like, “I do, but you can still do both.” And I was like, “No, you cannot.” And I got really upset.

You’ve quipped that if more people had autism or Asperger’s maybe we would do better in focusing on the climate crisis and not continuing to justify the trade-offs in our own minds.

Of course not to romanticize autism or say that people should have autism. Because, under the wrong circumstances, autism can be something that holds you back. But I think that there are definitely many elements of what makes you autistic that more people should have. For example, us not having as much cognitive dissonance and being able to focus on facts, it’s a good thing. And being able to focus on an emergency and actually treat it as an emergency.

It feels like many today — neurotypical people, people in general — are so focused on following the stream, doing like everyone else, because they don’t want to stand out. They don’t want to be uncomfortable. They don’t want to cause any problems. They just want to be like everyone else. And I think that’s very harmful in an emergency where we are social animals. We’re herd animals. In an emergency, someone needs to say that we’re heading towards the cliff. And everyone is just following, saying like, “Well, no one else is turning around, so I won’t either.” That could be very dangerous.

Do you think one of the reasons you were so effective right away was because it was a shock to hear this small, young girl speaking uncomfortable truth to adults who were supposedly the experts?

Well, there have been many, many young people — many people — who have been speaking out on this. I’m not the only one who has gained attention on this. But, of course, many people have listened to me. And I’m very privileged to come from a part of the world where I have the opportunity to use my voice and to be listened to. But we just go straight to the point.

We don’t care for the blah, blah, blah, so to speak. We say just what we want to be said. And we are not scared of being uncomfortable. We are not scared of being unpopular. We are ridiculed and mocked and hated on and sent threats — and that’s not something that should be romanticized in any way. But many are still going because we know that what we are doing is right. It’s just the idea of: We don’t care about our reputation; we care more about the planet.

There are clearly people interested in climate change who take a more diplomatic tack, aware that they have to compromise to get things done. Do you ever worry that the “blah, blah, blah,” or more combative rhetoric, makes their job harder when they’re trying to do the right thing, just from a more temperate position?

If you choose, as the media often do, like, 20 seconds from a 10-minute speech and just look at those 20 seconds, it may seem like we have undemocratic views and that we are very populist and so on. Which is not true. So I understand that some people might think that way and that they frame it that way.

Of course we need compromises. But we have to also understand that we cannot compromise with the laws of physics. If we are here [gestures], and we need to be there [gestures again] to have, say, safe living conditions, and they are talking about moving [just a tiny bit], then I would rather say no. Yes, it’s better than nothing, but we have to zoom out and understand that we’re not going to get there if we pretend that this is enough.

Strategically, do you ever feel the need to change your tack these days, to say, “Okay, this is what people might expect me to say now, and so here’s a new way to shock people out of their complacency”?

At the speech I gave in the U.N. General Assembly, I said, “How dare you!” Of course, I said many other things, but that was what people took out of it. And me being emotional and angry, yelling at world leaders. And then I thought that, Okay, now I have people’s attention, I will only speak facts. So in the speech [in Madrid] at COP25 after that, I basically only spoke about facts and numbers because so much attention was on that. And then people watched it, and it felt like no one understood a word I said. Because sometimes the news is just that I’m making a speech rather than what I have to say — very, very often. So that’s a way of trying to, I don’t know, surprise, if that’s the right word.

Are you inspired by any of the world leaders, by President Biden?

If you call him a leader — I mean, it’s strange that people think of Joe Biden as a leader for the climate when you see what his administration is doing. The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. Why is the U.S. doing that? It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.

People ask us, “What do you want?” “What do you want politicians to do?” And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency. We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand. For example, in Sweden, we ignore — we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative. It’s all about, what are we actually trying to solve? Is it this emergency, or is it this emergency?

Thunberg at a climate march in Bristol, England, in February 2020. (Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images)
You have become a hero to young people, yet you were bullied as a kid and socially isolated. It must be sort of complicated now that young people who previously didn’t support you or give you the time of day are putting you on a pedestal.

Yeah, I was scared of other young people when I first started school striking. So it was very weird to have other young people join me; it was a very strange feeling. Because I didn’t know how they would react and how they would think.

What can you tell other young people, both those experiencing bullying and maybe those doing the bullying, to help them move to a better place?

Just to those who are experiencing it that you are not alone. There are many, many others who are experiencing this same thing — many more than you think — beneath the surface. And it should not be like that. Children can be very, very mean. But being strange is a good thing. I think most people in the climate movement are a bit strange — very much including myself. And that is a good thing because, if you’re not different, you are not able to envision another future, another world. And we need people who are able to think outside the box. So being different is something that should be celebrated.

Do you draw a connection between empathy for each other on a small level and empathy as a global community with climate change and climate justice?

Of course. Since there are no binding agreements that safely put us towards a safe future for life on Earth as we know it, that means that we have to use morals, and we have to be able to feel empathy with one another. That is all we have right now. Some people say that we shouldn’t use guilt or this sense of morality. But that is, quite frankly, the only thing that we have to use. So, therefore, we have to use it. And we have to make sure that we don’t lose that connection. We have to realize that we’re in it for the long run and that we need to take care of each other.

As somebody who had been living in social isolation before speaking out, how did you handle both the positive adulation and the sometimes very personal negative criticism, even from world leaders, on Twitter and other places?

I don’t know. I didn’t think too much about it. I just thought: I’m doing what is right, and as long as I’m doing what’s right, what I think is right, it doesn’t matter what others think. But of course it was a huge shift from never talking to anyone whatsoever — in those days, I only spoke to my parents and my teacher and my sister. So to then be speaking, more or less, to the whole world, it was a very big shift. I don’t think anyone in the world could have expected anything like that, no matter who you are or what you do. It just blew up completely in a way that is very hard to understand if you haven’t experienced it yourself. But I think just the fact that I was so different before made it easier to stay grounded and not to listen too much to what other people were saying, both positively and negatively.

Can you get to the place in your mind where you say, Okay, it’s 30 years hence, and we were successful? What does that look like? And then what do you get to focus on in your life?

I have no idea. I try not to think about that too much. I try to rather do as much as I can in the now and change the future instead of overthinking the future. Hopefully we will take care of this, however that would look. But no matter what happens, if we continue to ignore it, the consequences are going to be much, much worse.

What do you do when you need a break?

I take occasional breaks. Like, this is my life all day, every day, but that doesn’t mean I cannot focus on other things. I can focus on several things. For example, school. Although now we’re actually talking about the climate. So I can’t get away there, either!

So does the teacher just turn it over to you: “Greta …”?

[Laughs.] We’re in climate role play. We’re going to represent different countries, and then we’re going to reenact a climate conference, make speeches and be delegates, try to come up with a resolution. And I’m going to be Saudi Arabia. I’m going to block everything. Yeah, I’m going to make sure that they don’t come up with a useless resolution.

After the experience of the last few years, its roller-coaster up and down, do you find yourself more or less hopeful than when you first sat out in front of the Swedish parliament with your [“SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET”] sign?

I don’t know. In one sense, we’re in a much worse place than we were then because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher and the global emissions are still rising at almost record speed. And we have wasted several years of blah, blah, blah.

But then, on another note, we have seen what people can do when we actually come together. And I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things. That we can treat a crisis like a crisis. So I think I’m more hopeful now.

What can we learn from the pandemic about what can be accomplished when people do, in fact, treat a crisis like a crisis?

I think many people have realized how important science is. Because we saw how, when we really wanted to find a vaccine, we could do that in, like, no time. Which just shows that, if we actually focus on something, if we actually want something, we can accomplish almost anything.

Right now, what’s holding us back is that we lack that political will. We don’t prioritize the climate today. Our goal is not to lower emissions. Our goal is to find solutions that allow us to continue life [as it is] today. And, of course, you can ask, “Can’t we have both?” But the uncomfortable truth is that we have left it too late for that. Or the world leaders have left it too late for that. We need to fundamentally change our societies now. If we would have started 30 years ago, it would have been much smoother. But now it’s a different situation.

But also, it has just shown how fast social norms can change. And I think that can be something that we can learn from it. If I would have gone up to someone and shaken hands with them during the worst part of the pandemic, that would have been totally unacceptable. But just before the pandemic, everyone did that. It changed, basically overnight, people’s mindsets. And that just shows the possibilities.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine ... obal-en-GB

[Anthea]

Jump in deforestation

SAO PAULO, Jan 3 (Reuters) - Deforestation last year rose to the highest level since 2015 in Brazil's Cerrado, prompting scientists on Monday to raise alarm over the state of the world's most species-rich savanna, a major carbon sink that helps to stave off climate change

The Cerrado, which is spread across several states of Brazil and is one of the world's largest savannas, is often called an "upside-down forest" because of the deep roots its plants sink into the ground to survive seasonal droughts and fires.

Destruction of these trees, grasses and other plants in the Cerrado is a major source of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions, although it is far less densely forested than the more famous Amazon rainforest that it borders.

Deforestation and other clearances of native vegetation in the Cerrado rose 8% to 8,531 square kilometers in the 12 months through July, Brazil's official period for measuring deforestation, according to national space research agency Inpe. That is more than 10 times the size of New York City's land area of 783.84 square km.

"It's extremely worrying," said Mercedes Bustamante, an ecologist at the University of Brasilia.

Bustamante also criticized the government for a lack of transparency for announcing the deforestation data on New Year's Eve.

The added destruction is particularly concerning, scientists say, when considering that roughly half of the Cerrado has been destroyed since the 1970s, mostly for farming and ranching.

"You're transforming thousands of square kilometers annually," said Manuel Ferreira, a geographer at the Federal University of Goias.

"Few other places on earth have seen that rapid of a transformation."

Ferreira said that new plant and animal species are regularly being discovered in the Cerrado and that many are probably being eradicated before they can be studied.

After falling from highs in the early 2000s, deforestation in the Cerrado has been creeping up again since right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019, calling for more farming and development in sensitive ecosystems.

Last month, a Brazilian soy lobby group said that data showed farmers were increasingly using previously cleared land in the Cerrado rather than deforesting wholly new areas to plant the cash crop. More than half of Brazil's soy farmland is in the Cerrado.

Bustamante and other scientists blame Bolsonaro for encouraging deforestation with his pro-development rhetoric and for rolling back environmental enforcement.

Bolsonaro's office did not immediately respond to request for comment. He has previously defended his policies as a means to lift the interior of the country out of poverty and pointed out that Brazil has preserved far more of its territory than Europe or the United States.

"Deforestation is the most naked and raw indicator of the terrible environmental policy of this government," said Ane Alencar, the science director at the non-profit Amazon Environmental Research Institute.

https://www.reuters.com/business/enviro ... 022-01-03/

[Anthea]

Water critically low across Turkey

Major cities across Turkey face running out of water in the next few months, with warnings Istanbul has less than 45 days of water left

The Guardian said according to Turkey’s chamber of chemical engineers Poor rainfall has led to the country’s most severe drought in a decade and left the megacity of 17 million people with critically low levels of water.

İzmir and Bursa, Turkey’s next two biggest cities, are also struggling, with dams that are about 36% and 24% full respectively, and farmers in wheat-producing areas such as the Konya plain and Edirne province on the border with Greece and Bulgaria are warning of crop failure.

The acute lack of rainfall in the second half of 2020 – approaching 50% year on year for November – led the religious affairs directorate to instruct imams and their congregations to pray for rain last month. The Guardian said.

“Instead of focusing on measures to keep water demand under control, Turkey insists on expanding its water supply through building more dams … Turkey has built hundreds of dams in the last two decades,” the Newspaper quoted Dr Akgün İlhan, a water management expert at the Istanbul Policy Center as saying.

“The warning signs have been there for decades but not much has been done in practice.”

Turkey has long prioritized economic growth over environmental concerns and remains the only G20 country apart from the US yet to ratify the 2015 Paris agreement.

“Everybody knows that water basins must be preserved, especially for these drought episodes which are becoming more severe and long term,” said Dr Ümit Şahin, who teaches global climate change and environmental politics at Istanbul’s Sabancı University.

“Yet in Istanbul, for instance, the most vital water basins, the last forests and agricultural land, [have been opened] to urban development projects … the new airport, the new Bosphorus bridge, its connection roads and highways, and the Istanbul canal project. These policies cannot solve Turkey’s drought problem.”

In İzmir, local authorities are preparing against water shortages by digging 103 new boreholes, recycling wastewater and minimizing loss and leakage by repairing ageing pipes, according to the city’s mayor, Tunç Soyer.

The Guardian concluded that, Turkey’s cities need lots of rain, immediately, to avoid having to ration water in the next few months – and even sustained rainfall for the rest of the winter might not be enough for farming communities to rescue this year’s crops.

https://www.shafaq.com/en/World/Water-a ... oss-Turkey

[Anthea]

LAST CHANCE

Did We Just Blow Our Last, Best Chance to Tackle Climate Change?

In mid-2020, after the pandemic had settled in, I wrote in a TIME cover story that the stars had aligned to make 2020 and 2021 the “last, best chance” to keep the world from experiencing the worst impacts of climate change. Temperatures have risen more than 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution, and the COVID-19 pandemic had unexpectedly opened up new pathways to rethink the global economy to help the world avoid the 1.5°C of temperature rise, long seen as a marker of when the planet will start to experience the catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change.

Now, 18 months later, the world seems poised to blow it. Governments across the globe have failed to spend big on a green economic recovery. Political leaders from the world’s largest economies have made lofty promises to eliminate their carbon footprints but failed to offer concrete policies to get there. And President Joe Biden’s ambitions for bold climate legislation have been stymied in Congress.

“We’re sort of standing on the precipice,” says Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project. “I am loath to say it, but I’m deeply skeptical that we will reduce emissions fast enough to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5°.”

So with two landmark years for the planet—not to mention everyone who lives on it—in the rearview mirror, it’s worth looking at the missed opportunities. But it’s just as important to consider what comes next: missed chances cannot be viewed as an excuse to give up.
Spending money

The most obvious—and perhaps easiest—opportunity to turn the COVID-19 pandemic into progress in the fight against climate change boiled down to dollars and cents. COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns shocked the economy, requiring governments to spend trillions to keep the wheels turning. Quickly hard-nosed analysts and idealistic activists alike said governments should focus that spending on initiatives that would foster clean energy and push polluting industries to transform.

This message caught on quickly, and a “green recovery” became a key talking point for heads of government from countries large and small. But, as the pandemic wore on, most of those policies failed to materialize. Only around 3% of the nearly $17 trillion countries have spent on recovery measures have been allocated to clean energy and sustainable recovery, according to an October report from the International Energy Agency.

The challenge is particularly stark in developing countries where finding financing for clean energy can be difficult. Other analyses have been more optimistic—but only slightly so. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found in April that 17% of recovery spending would provide environmental benefits while another 17% was negative or mixed. The rest of it was neither, in effect meaning it propped up business as usual.

These numbers present huge challenges for progress on climate. First, building new fossil fuel-based infrastructure locks in a future for oil, gas and coal for decades to come. Countries are unlikely to spend millions on, say, a pipeline only to turn around and shut it down a few years later. Moreover, spending money on infrastructure is for many countries a zero sum game. Once the money is spent, it’s gone, and the opportunity to spend big again may not come back again for years or decades. “We’ve spent a lot of money very quickly,” says Jackson. “We won’t get that money back.”

COP26

Even before the pandemic, 2020 was meant to be a big year for action on climate change. Because of a cycle laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries were supposed to produce new climate commitments ahead of a key conference in Glasgow, Scotland, known informally as COP26.

Organizers of the summit—originally scheduled for the fall of 2020 and held a year later as a result of the pandemic—planned the talks with the hope that, when the summit concluded, country commitments would leave the world with a clear and viable pathway to keep temperature rise to 1.5°C. Two heated weeks of negotiations led to a complicated outcome. If you extrapolate from countries’ promises to eliminate their carbon footprints, temperature rise might be limited to around 1.8°C, according to an analysis from Climate Action Tracker.

Countries committed to “phasing down” coal and eliminating “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies. Perhaps more importantly, countries said they would return next year once again with new policies to bring the world even closer to the 1.5°C. “Despite what I would describe as a fractured international politics more generally, we did have consensus,” says Alok Sharma, the British minister who served as COP26’s president.

But promises don’t mean much without policies to make them possible. Any leader can promise to, say, eliminate its carbon footprint by 2050. But to do so requires concrete policies like deploying clean energy or transitioning to electric vehicles. And, if you add up the real policies that drive enacted by countries by the middle of COP26, temperatures are expected to rise 2.7°C—a big gap from the 1.8°C suggested by the vague promises.

The outcome was better than many expected, but it seems fair to say that much work remains to be done to really put the world on a 1.5°C trajectory. “Is [the agreement] enough to hold global warming to 1.5°?” James Shaw, New Zealand’s climate minister, asked his counterparts at the end of the conference. “I honestly can’t say that I think that it does, but we must never, ever give up.”

Political change

The U.S. is the world’s largest economy and second largest greenhouse gas emitter after China, and so what happens in Washington matters a great deal for global efforts to cut emissions. As president, Donald Trump took the U.S. backward, slashing climate rules and taking the country out of the Paris Agreement, and slowed the rest of the world down at the same time. Biden came to office promising to recommit the U.S. to climate action. He put the issue at the forefront of his domestic and international agendas, and, in April, he made a key promise: to slash emissions by at least 50% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.

The Biden Administration has described its strategy as an “all of government” approach, meaning every agency and official needs to consider how their work can help address the issue. But, despite a swathe of new rules and regulations targeting emissions, the Administration has hinged much of its agenda on a key piece of legislation dubbed Build Back Better.

The spending plan, which passed the House of Representatives in November, contains more than $550 billion in clean energy and climate investment that would promote the adoption of electric vehicles, invest in conservation efforts and provide tax incentives for clean energy. At a macro level, that kind of investment would be transformational. Several independent analyses have shown that when combined with other measures, like tighter efficiency rules for automobiles and another key infrastructure package which Biden signed into law earlier this year, the investment would allow the U.S. to meet Biden’s 2030 target.

Without it, or something of equal scale, the target remains an empty promise. “It’s impossible to get from here to there without these investments,” says John Podesta, the former advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who now works on climate issues, of the role Build Back Better bill plays in meeting Biden’s goal.

But on Dec. 19, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin told Fox News that he would not support the current version of the bill. Because the legislation needs support from every Democratic member of the Senate to pass, Manchin’s statement undermined both Biden’s climate agenda and global climate efforts more broadly. “If we don’t pass this, we basically have lost the war,” Sean Casten, a member of the House of Representatives from Illinois, told me earlier in December. “This is how we actually make sure that the fires, the floods don’t get worse every year.”

What comes next

If all of this sounds depressing, it is. While keeping temperature rise to 1.5°C may still be technically possible, it becomes harder and harder to imagine leaders finding the political will to do so with each passing year. That means an increasing likelihood that we may soon trigger a tipping point that leads to non-linear changes—think of the melting of Arctic permafrost that releases huge quantities of methane, for example, that in turn leads to even faster warming.

Many who work on climate issues are hesitant to admit that critical threshold may already be behind us. Acknowledging that reality is often seen as tantamount to giving up.

But there’s another way to look at it. On a recent panel I moderated, Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economics professor who served as the chief economist on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, ran through his calculations of the damage done by each ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. His conclusion was simple: “Every ton matters.”

No matter how close we are to hitting 1.5°C of warming—or by how much we’ve passed it—every ton of carbon matters, as does every new effort the world makes in reducing the harm being done. The world came up short in 2020 and 2021. In 2022, leaders need to go back to the drawing board.

https://time.com/6130470/climate-change ... obal-en-GB

[Anthea]

12 Asiatic cheetahs left

Iran is now home to only a dozen Asiatic cheetahs, the deputy environment minister said Sunday, describing the situation for the endangered species as "extremely critical"

"The measures we have taken to increase protection, reproduction, and the installation of road signs have not been enough to save this species," Hassan Akbari told Tasnim news agency.

"There are currently only nine males and three females against 100 in 2010 and their situation is extremely critical," he added.

His ministry said the animals had been victims of drought, hunters and car accidents, especially in the country's central desert where the last of them live.

The world's fastest land animal, capable of reaching speeds of 120 kilometers (74 miles) per hour, cheetahs once stalked habitats from the eastern reaches of India to the Atlantic coast of Senegal and beyond.

They are still found in parts of southern Africa, but have practically disappeared from North Africa and Asia.

The subspecies "Acinonyx jubatus venaticus", commonly known as the Asiatic cheetah, is critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Iran, one of the last countries in the world where the animals live in the wild, began a United Nations-supported protection program in 2001.

In 2014, the national football team emblazoned an image of the cheetah on its jerseys for the World Cup tournament.

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iran/10012022

[Anthea]

Stray dogs in Sulaimani find care at shelter

A new shelter designed to take in at least 3,000 stray dogs from the streets of Sulamaini’s city center opened in Sulaimani, Kurdistan on Monday, with 20 dogs already settled into their new home and the numbers of others set to increase over the coming weeks

Ako Ali, deputy mayor of Sulaimani, was pleased to show off the new initiative to Rudaw.

"This five dunams [of land] has been divided into four fenced parts,” he explained. “One part is designed for male dogs... another part is for female dogs, and [a third] part is designed for puppies. The last one is designed for Hawshari [Kurdish Mastiffs, otherwise known as the Pshdar] dogs.”

Male and female dogs will be separated from each other to prevent them from reproducing.

“We have created sunshade covers and built concrete walls,” the deputy mayor continued, proudly. “The municipality has dedicated a team to look after them, clean the place and bring [leftovers] from restaurants on a daily basis to serve them."

Municipality teams have also been directed to search for strays across Sulaimani neighborhoods to take them to the shelter. Locals can also join the municipality by bringing any stray dogs they encounter to their new home.

The introduction of the shelter is a welcome move in the Kurdistan Region, where stray dogs frequently starve to death, and it provides people with the opportunity to care for dogs they come across without committing to taking them home.

According to Ali, however, only stray dogs from Sulaimani can be housed by the shelter.

“Each district and sub-district can make shelters of their own,” he said on Monday, although if a person can show that the dog was taken from Sulaimani then the shelter will house them. “We can pay them 2,000-3,000 [IQD] for each dog they bring,” he continued. With a hint of a smile on his face, the mayor added that this payment will not be included for puppies.

Erbil has not yet established a similar initiative. A few years ago, a policeman in Erbil proudly admitted to killing around 3,000 stray dogs, 40 of whom he shot in one night

In November 2020, a dog in Erbil was found brutally murdered, with two of her puppies beheaded and another two dying of hunger, with the four surviving puppies forced to eat their mother's flesh

For the dogs cared for in the Sulaimani shelter, veterinary teams have been tasked with checking up on the health of the strays on a daily basis.

Dr. Ari Salahaddin, in charge of Sulaimani Veterinary Directorate, told Rudaw that their teams visit this shelter “every day” in order to vaccinate them, “and to treat any animal that may need treatment, or to carry our surgeries for them including neutering the dogs or any other kind of surgery."

Animal rights activists are delighted with the new project, but say that more needs to be done.

They are calling on local authorities to employee guards for the shelter and to provide a budget for food and other essentials

According to Farman Aziz, a member of the animal charity PAKO Organization, the shelter “needs to have its own employees,” including physicians.

“When a dog enters this shelter, it immediately starts fighting with other dogs," he explained. "Experienced people need to be employed to prevent such problems from happening.”

Link to Article - Video:

https://www.rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/11012022

[Anthea]

Iraq climate change difficulties

Ahead of two major climate summits in Egypt and the UAE this year, the impact of climate change in the Middle East - and pressing need for action to mitigate its devastating consequences - can be felt most critically in Iraq, a report has warned, as the local implications of a global problem become ever clearer in its southernmost province where the Tigris and Euphrates combine to form the Shatt al-Arab

Public interest and policy responses have been slow to respond to Iraq’s heating climate, a recently published paper by the EU Institute of Security Studies (EUISS) warns, despite mounting concern among experts and activists in the region.

The country also lacks the capacity to tackle climate change with ill-prepared government structures, it finds, as bad governance and policies contribute to exacerbating the environmental impact.

While the issue is outrageously unjust - the Middle East region has contributed just 3% of all global CO2 emissions since 1850 - its findings are nonetheless damning for Iraq; a country increasingly vulnerable to the impact of a climate heating at a disproportionate rate.

In a significant move, the Iraq Republic announced on Monday that the country will soon have a dedicated Environment Ministry for the first time - rather than a role attached to another department as is currently the case - which may go some way to dealing with political mismanagement so far.

Discussing the risks facing the Middle East as set out in the EUISS report, the Arab Reform Initiative held a panel on Wednesday, hosted by Majd Alsaif, featuring panellists including the authors of the report, and Iraqi environmental expert and activist, Salman Khairalla.

Presenting to the think tank, Khairalla shared his perspective on the importance of preserving water resources in order to promote stability and protect heritage in southern Iraq where water pollution and scarcity is already a reality. Climate change is a leading cause, but so too are political failings.

More than 70% of Iraq’s water comes from outside the country, the executive director and founder of the Tigris Rivers Protectors Association, defending the country’s marshes since 2007, stressed. “There is no rain for more than half of the year,” he said, condemning the process in which rainwater from the other half of the year is collected and stored.

Since Saddam Hussein’s regime, Khairalla continued, there has been no agreement with Iran over water sharing issues, as Iraq’s government prioritises oil and economic ties. He is more hopeful for Iraq-Turkey dialogue over water, following the recent announcement by Iraq’s water minister over new negotiations between the neighbours next month.

Despite this, there are significant political forces at play in Kurdish-controlled Western Kurdistan. “The Turkish government has been cutting the water supply for more than 3 million people in Hasaka,” he explained, citing just another example of water being used as a weapon.

In terms of domestic action, Khairalla urges the country to begin immediately. “On climate change, the Iraqi government wants to start from the end of what European countries are doing,” he said, referring to the limited introduction of eco-friendly policies. Tackling climate issues "depends on the local community, as well as governments around the world."

Assessing the risks associated with climate change in the region, the EUISS Chaillot Paper includes indices measuring vulnerability across the region’s countries in the form of climate risk assessments. Unlike progress in neighbouring Gulf States, it says, “actions to combat climate change have not been developed into a multidimensional long-term public strategy” in Iraq.

Although Iraq has said that it aims to reduce 14% of its current emissions by 2035 - the policy comes with the caveat that 13% is dependent on international aid, and just 1% will be as a result of its own funding commitment.

“Low levels of climate risk preparedness increase existential risks when it comes to human habitat, water and food security - which in turn leads to an overall higher exposure to conflict risk,” the report concludes. “Climate change therefore exposes these states in particular not ‘just’ to environmental risks, but also to political ones.”

Egypt is set to host the 27th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP27) later this year. It remains to be seen whether action will be implemented across the region desperately in need of political measures to tackle a heating environment.

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/27012022

[Anthea]

Mount Everest is melting

It took nearly 2,000 years for ice to form at the highest glacier on the Earth’s highest mountain, but climate change has caused nature’s ancient creation to lose decades worth of ice every year

A new study published in the Nature Portfolio Journal Climate and Atmospheric Science found that human-sourced climate change has reached the high-mountain glacier systems of Mount Everest and several decades of accumulation are being lost annually now that glacier ice has been exposed.

The study was a result of the 2019 National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition, which brought together 34 international and Nepali scientists to learn more about vulnerable and dynamic nature systems.

Warming climate trends have driven surface melt of Mount Everest’s South Col Glacier, demonstrating that, “even the roof of the Earth is impacted by anthropogenic source warming,” said the study.

“It answers one of the big questions posed by our 2019 NGS/Rolex Mount Everest Expedition — whether the highest glaciers on the planet are impacted by human-source climate change. The answer is a resounding yes, and very significantly since the late 1990s,” said Paul Mayewski, climate scientist at the University of Maine who was involved in the study, in a statement.

In order to investigate the timing and cause of significant mass loss on Mount Everest’s South Col Glacier, researchers used weather stations, satellite imagery and other records. They estimated that ice thinning rates were approaching about 2 meters of water per year as the glacier turned from snowpack to ice, as a result losing its ability to reflect solar radiation while also melting rapidly.

As South Col Glacier ice became regularly exposed, about 55 meters of glacier thinning was estimated to have occurred in a quarter century, which is 80 times faster than the nearly 2,000 years it took to form the glacier’s ice.

The level of overall ice mass loss in the region, considered the transition from permanent snowpack to majority ice cover, could have been triggered by climate change since the 1950s and was further intensified in the 1990s.

At the current rate of melting, Mount Everest expeditions could be climbing over more exposed bedrock, potentially making it more challenging to climb as snow and ice cover continues to thin in the coming decades, according to Mayewksi and Maruisz Potocki, another University of Maine climate scientist involved in the study.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/su ... sing-mount

[Anthea]

Iraq: Oil reliance versus vanishing water

The country could suffer a 20 percent drop in water resources by 2050 with nearly one-third of irrigated land parched

Despite continuing political instability, pressure from Iranian and US influence, and a resurgent ISIS presence, Iraq faces its most significant challenge elsewhere: climate change.

The environment is increasingly becoming an issue for the country, with the future habitability of vast areas now in question.

The Euphrates and Tigris Rivers are historically considered the lifelines of Iraq’s fertile land. However, climate change and associated drought are wreaking havoc of unprecedented proportions.

Agriculture remains the livelihood for most people across the country, but Iraqi farmers are increasingly faced with the frightening reality that water supplies are quickly drying up.

The World Bank recently warned Iraq would be hit particularly hard by climate change, with a significant effect on the economy and employment.

The country could suffer a 20 percent drop in water resources by 2050, with nearly one-third of the irrigated land in Iraq left parched

“Without action, water constraints will lead to large losses across multiple sectors of the economy and come to affect more and more vulnerable people,” said the World Bank’s Saroj Kumar Jha.

George Zittis, associate research scientist on climate change impacts at the Cyprus Institute, said over the last 40 years Iraq and surrounding areas have witnessed accelerated warming of about 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade.

“These regional warming rates are greater than the global ones,” Zittis told Al Jazeera. “The country has also experienced more frequent and extreme heatwaves. Particularly in the last decade, several temperature records have broken … Hydrological and agricultural droughts are affecting several activities, including agriculture and food production.”

He noted Iraq and the broader Middle East region are considered the most prominent climate change hotspots in the world with “limited resources for adaptation”.

Aid groups have warned more than 12 million people in Iraq and Syria were losing access to water, food, and electricity because of rising temperatures and record low rainfall.

Acute water insecurity

Zeinab Shuker, assistant professor of sociology at Sam Houston State University, told Al Jazeera other than rising temperature, the building of dams by neighbouring Iran and Turkey to deal with their water shortages was diverting river water from the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Shuker said Baghdad’s “inability” to negotiate with Tehran and Ankara over the water diversion along with Iraq’s failure to address water shortages with appropriate measures, as well as outdated irrigation systems and increasing salinity all add up to a burgeoning humanitarian crisis.

“All are contributing to a major water shortage, undermining the agricultural sector, and forcing unplanned migration from rural areas to cities, which is putting further pressure on already high levels of unemployment, poverty, and population density in cities,” she explained.

“The first primary issue is acute water insecurity.”

Zittis said “business-as-usual” efforts to handle climate change currently being employed by governments around the world will likely result in additional average warming of about 2.5C (4.5F) by 2050.

“And this warming will likely exceed 5C [9F] by the year 2100. In other words, even the coolest years of the future will be comparable to the hottest years of the recent past … This will result in heatwaves of unprecedented magnitude and duration,” said Zittis.

The most vulnerable in Iraqi society will face tremendous danger with harvest and income shortages, a lack of drinking water, and the increase of malnutrition and hunger, analysts say.

If the status quo on rising temperatures does not change, Iraq will lose much of its farmland, Shuker noted.

“This will force more and more families and individuals to migrate to the already overcrowded cities … Others will attempt to make the dangerous journey to Europe to join the many climate migrants from across the region,” she said.

Another issue facing Iraqis is the country’s inability to properly refine natural gas, meaning efforts to stay cool through air conditioning is increasingly unaffordable.

“Iraq’s limited ability to separate and process natural gas forces the country to rely heavily on Iranian gas and electricity imports – which have been irregular – to meet its increasing electricity needs,” Shuker said.

“The combination of irregular electricity supplies and high temperatures – which regularly reached above 50C [122F] and are expected to increase even more due to climate change – have forced many Iraqis to depend on privately owned and operated generators for their electricity needs, which is costly for many Iraqi families.”

What can be done?

Facing such a dire future, efforts to drastically reduce hydrocarbon emissions and take measures to adapt to the warming planet are urgently required, analysts say.

Zittis underscored that nations in the Middle East are among the highest emitters of greenhouse gases globally.

“Most of these emissions are related to the energy production sector. Therefore, for mitigating global and regional warming, these emissions need to be reduced substantially within the following decades. A transition to renewable energy sources appears to be the coherent solution,” said Zittis.

Scientific research will play a key role in minimising the dangers posed by climate change, however, Iraq and other MENA nations are far behind in such planning, Zittis noted.

“Such adaptation plans require climate datasets of high accuracy, interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborative research, currently lacking from the region,” he said.

Some measures required to reduce the effects of global warming, including optimising water resource management and agricultural practices, securing energy access through renewables, improving the energy efficiency of buildings, and “developing early warning and forecasting systems for extreme weather preparedness”, said Zittis.

Iraq’s current government, so far, has yet to take the necessary steps.

“The political leaders don’t have a clear long-term policy in place,” said Shuker, highlighting that power struggles among various political factions do not bode well for climate action.

“Resources from the rentier economy have helped fund many of the operations of these centres of power. One can even argue that a big part of their survival depends on their access to oil revenue. As a result, even if there is a state capacity that can tackle something as complicated as climate change, there is a limited political will to do so.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/2 ... hing-water

[Anthea]

Several kinds of food could go extinct

Your morning coffee is in a perilous state. There are just two species of coffee plants on which the entire multibillion-dollar industry is based: One of them is considered poor-tasting, and the other, which you’re likely familiar with, is threatened by climate change and a deadly fungal disease

Thankfully there’s another kind of coffee out there, known as stenophylla. It has a higher heat tolerance, greater resistance to certain fungal pathogens, and it tastes great. There’s just one problem: It’s incredibly rare, and until recently, scientists believed it was extinct.

Stenophylla is just one of dozens of important foods that are threatened with extinction, according to Dan Saladino, a BBC journalist and author of the new book Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them. While grocery stores may seem as abundant as ever, Saladino argues that the diversity of food is actually in decline. Of the hundreds of thousands of wheat varieties that farmers once cultivated, for example, only a handful are now farmed on a large scale, he told Vox.

As we grow and harvest fewer varieties of plants and animals, the foods you can buy in the grocery store may become less nutritious and flavorful, and — as the current state of coffee demonstrates — the global food system could become less resilient. That’s why it’s so crucial to lift up communities that are protecting foods from disappearing, Saladino told Vox in an interview about his new book.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Grocery stores may be stocked, but the variety of food is in decline
Benji Jones

You write that a lot of foods, such as varieties of coffee and wheat, are going extinct. Yet when I walk into the grocery store it seems like there’s more variety than ever. I just tried cotton candy-flavored grapes, for example.
Dan Saladino

Whether it’s cotton candy grapes or certain varieties of avocado, there’s a degree of uniformity. And while you’ll see this abundance — consider bread, and the wheat it’s made of — it’s extremely narrow in terms of its genetics.

In this amazing place in the Arctic called Svalbard, there’s a seed vault buried deep under the ice, down a tunnel, in which there are more than 200,000 different unique samples of wheat. That’s the kind of diversity that’s hidden from us. A farmer today in the UK might get a recommended list of wheat varieties to grow — dictated largely by the food industry and millers and bakers — of fewer than 10 kinds.
Dan Saladino.
Artur Tixiliski

You can take all of the world’s staple crops, including maize [also known as corn] and rice, and you’ll see the same thing. In seed banks around the world, there are tens to hundreds of thousands of varieties, yet in the food system that we experience, it’s an extremely small number.
Benji Jones

Why should the average grocery shopper care about losing these rare varieties of food?
Dan Saladino

Endangered foods give us options in a future with many challenges — feeding a growing population, reducing emissions, and finding fresh water, for example.

Take a type of maize tucked away in a mountain village in southern Mexico, very close to where maize was first domesticated thousands of years ago. Botanists arrived in the late 1970s and saw this 16-foot-tall stock of maize. It shouldn’t have been growing there because the soil was so poor.

Not only was it so tall, but it also has these aerial roots that were dripping with mucus, like something out of a science fiction film. Just three years ago, a scientist figured out that the mucus is an interplay between sugars and microbes that’s actually feeding the plant from the air. That hadn’t been seen before in cereal crops.

A type of maize that grows in the Sierra Mixe region of Oaxaca, Mexico. It has aerial roots coated in mucus that help the plant pull nutrients out of the air.
Allen Van Deynze et. al./PLOS Biology

Why should we care? If we understand how this plant works, could we potentially use it to reduce our use of fertilizer globally? We know there is a way in which some plants are feeding themselves. We need to give thanks to the Indigenous people who have looked after this maize for centuries, if not thousands of years.
Benji Jones

A wider variety of crops also makes our food system more resilient to threats like disease and climate change, right?
Dan Saladino

That’s another really important lesson. I traveled to eastern Turkey to get as close as I could to the Fertile Crescent, where wheat was first domesticated. I found farmers who had saved a type of emmer wheat that had been growing for 8,000 to 9,000 years. It’s been growing in high altitudes where it’s damp.

If you put a modern wheat variety in that environment, fungal diseases would ruin the crop. And so what they have in Turkey is a precious genetic resource that has forms of resistance, such as to fungal pathogens.
A field of kavilca, or emmer, wheat.
Dan Saladino

You can also find those principles of disease resilience among ancient varieties of rice and maize — really, in all of the crops. Over thousands of years, our ancestors created these adaptations through farming under different conditions.

What we’ve done since is create these incredibly high-performance plants that need specific conditions to grow, and a lot of inputs, like fertilizer. Each wheat or maize plant is almost a clone, whereas in traditional farming, there’s a huge amount of genetic diversity in the field. If you get a bad summer or too much or too little rain, some of those traditional varieties are still going to bear grains because there is diversity within the crops.
You can breed out bitterness, but you might lose deliciousness
Benji Jones

Is there a flavor extinction happening as well?
Dan Saladino

Absolutely. I tell the story of a type of wild citrus from northern India called memang narang. It has a cultural, culinary, and medicinal function, but the striking thing is how bitter these fruits are. The people who live here place huge value on bitterness, a flavor that’s disappearing from most of our palates. Fruit breeders, over centuries, have been ingenious at giving us something that we love: sweetness. They have bred out the bitterness.

When you realize that the bitter taste comes from compounds that help plants protect themselves from pests, then you understand why it might be beneficial to retain that flavor. We’ve taken the beneficial bitter compounds out, and we’ve cloaked plants in pesticides and other chemicals to protect them.

Another example comes from coffee. We live in a world where we can enjoy a lot of different types of arabica coffee. There’s robusta as well. But these are just two of more than a hundred different types of coffee around the world.

Historically, there were cultures in parts of Africa that had more distinctive types of coffee, including one called stenophylla that was prized in parts of East Africa up until the 1960s, when it pretty much went extinct because farming systems changed. It has greater disease resistance than arabica. And arabica is under pressure now because of climate change — it’s an extremely delicate plant. Stenophylla offers the benefit of disease resistance, and it’s an amazing-tasting coffee.
Benji Jones

Another example that helps explain the decline of flavor comes from a region of France, home to the Salers cow. It really shows the connection between biodiversity and flavor, right?
Dan Saladino

“Salers” is a place, a breed of cow, and a cheese. Farmers would take their cattle in the spring and summer to [mountain] places where the pasture is richest, often ending up in remote places. It was a monastic experience; they were up there living a solitary life. At the end of the summer, the cheese would end up back down in the village. It’s this mind-blowing process that highlights the power of cheese: The pasture captures the energy of the sun, the animals convert the pasture into milk and cheese, and the villagers then eat the cheese during the winter when other foods are running out.

The remarkable thing is that the pasture is so rich in microbes that these farmers don’t even need a starter culture to coagulate the milk and turn it into cheese. As soon as the milk hits these wooden barrels, it’s inoculated with microbes. For a modern health inspector, it would be a nightmare to watch.

We’ve been talking about the endangered genetics of crops and endangered tastes. Here, we’re talking about endangered microbes that are not only missing from the cheesemaking process, but also from our gut microbiomes.
A breed of cattle called Salers in the Cantal region of France.
Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Benji Jones

You also explain that when these cows have access to a wide diversity of plants in the pasture, their milk and cheese end up tasting richer. That’s because different grasses have different types of defense chemicals called terpenes, which can translate to flavor in the milk.
Dan Saladino

Terpenes can be found in milk from rich pastures, but not in cheese made from cattle that have been fed on grains. We’re only beginning to understand the connections between biodiversity and our food and our health and our flavors.
Benji Jones

You traveled the world sampling all of these foods with unique flavors. What were some that stood out?
Dan Saladino

Skerpikjøt is this food from the Faroe Islands. There’s not enough sunlight or firewood there to produce salt to preserve food. People instead built these huts that have gaps that allow the sea air in. They raise sheep and hang the meat in these huts, which gets bathed by the salty air and slowly fermented and preserved. It doesn’t look like food. It’s covered in mold. It needs to be washed. It’s almost as if this sheep meat is gently rotting away in these huts, but actually, the conditions are exactly right so it doesn’t rot or become too funky. It becomes this wonderful preserved meat.
Benji Jones

You also have an incredible chapter about a type of wine in the country Georgia, which you explain is where some of the world’s first — or the first — winemakers were practicing their craft.
Dan Saladino

Georgia is the most likely country in which grapes were domesticated and the first winemakers were practicing their craft. They have a technology that predates the barrel by thousands of years — the qvevri. These are terracotta vessels that you bury underground with whole branches of grapes with skin and pips [seeds] inside.
A workshop where Georgian qvevris are being made.
Dan Saladino

Many people think France and Italy and Spain and California are great wine-producing regions. Here is a place where the relationship with wine just goes up another level. There is a reverence and spiritual dimension to wine drinking.
Our relationship with food mirrors our relationship with nature
Benji Jones

In your book, you talk about how losing certain foods isn’t just about losing resilience, flavor, and culture, but also about our changing relationship with nature. You explain that some groups, like the Hadza people of Tanzania, are deeply connected to their environment through food — and by losing certain foods, we may be losing these connections.
Dan Saladino

The Hadza story brilliantly sums that up. I followed some of these hunter-gatherers out within a landscape of baobab trees. In those trees, some of which are a thousand years old, you can find bees’ nests and one of the greatest prizes the Hadza can find: honey. It’s an extremely important food — and their favorite food — but it’s hard for them to find the hives high up in the trees.
An illustration of a greater honeyguide.
Brown Bear/Windmill Books/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Hadza whistle, and after a period of time, if they’re lucky, a very humble-looking bird will fly down. The bird will start a “conversation” with the hunter-gatherers and lead them to a tree with honey. The bird knows where the honey is, whereas the hunter-gatherers have the fire and the smoke to get rid of the bees, which are a risk for the bird. The Hadza can go up, extract the honey, and then leave something behind for the birds.

Toward the end of the Hadza visit, we went to a mud and brick hut, and inside there were cans and cans of soda. This was a source of sugar and energy that could mean that they no longer use that skill to find honey within our lifetimes — something so fundamentally important to human history could disappear.
Benji Jones

Do we run the risk of glorifying some of these older cultures? Don’t some of these groups want soda — or access to health care, or other benefits that come with Western or modern life?
Dan Saladino

There’s story after story of another culture coming in and imposing its food and its farming systems and its values and its desires on these Indigenous food systems. My argument is that people should be given the choice. They should have access to health care, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their way of life should be fundamentally changed because they’re buying into our system.
How to save endangered foods
Benji Jones

There are clearly a lot of things that don’t work with our food system. What gave you hope while reporting the book? What inspired you?
Dan Saladino

There’s a network of people out there who are saving the diversity of foods. Before Covid, they gathered at a slow food event to bring their foods from around the world, and share stories about what they’ve saved and what threats they’re facing. This solidarity is what gives me optimism.

In southwestern China, I met a farmer saving an extremely rare type of highly nutritious colored rice. He got out his phone and sold rice through WeChat to people in Beijing and Chengdu, some of the biggest cities in the world. Modern technology can actually connect us.
Benji Jones

The food industry is massive and largely run by just a small number of companies. How does one person help prevent these unique foods from going extinct?
Dan Saladino

It’s important to understand what we mean by endangered foods and diversity. I think we should all choose our favorite foods and interrogate the diversity of that food. Explore cacao, coffee, or different types of cheeses. Then maybe develop a relationship with a cheesemaker and become a different kind of customer — somebody who’s supporting a local farmer.
A man dries a rare and prized type of Venezuelan cacao called criollo.
Dan Saladino

This also needs to be dealt with on a much larger scale. I was inspired by stories of cities, such as Copenhagen, where schools use diversity as a criterion for the contracts they’re issuing to farmers: Don’t just give me the cheapest apples — give me a choice of apples, and we will reward you. That’s also happening in Brazil. Over the last few decades, they’ve had a policy that requires schools to source 30 percent of ingredients from local family farms.

These levers do exist for governments to make a big, significant change. I also think we have the most selfish reasons to embrace diversity — our own health. We know what’s happening in many parts of the world, in terms of type 2 diabetes, cancers, and other diseases that have a food dimension. Perhaps we will be motivated by health to try and bring diversity back into the food system. The science says we need to.

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22906 ... obal-en-GB

[Anthea]

Drought conditions worsen

Some of California’s agricultural areas are bracing for water cuts later this year after the chair of the state’s Water Resources Control Board said escalating drought conditions will require the state to prepare for the “worst-case scenario.”

“We have to assume that we don’t get another drop, that we don’t receive any more real precipitation” this year, said Joaquin Esquivel at a board meeting on Tuesday. The agency should start working with affected communities now, he said, to model and prepare for how much worse conditions could become by midsummer.

Esquivel’s comments followed a sobering drought update from Michael Macon, an environmental scientist, and Erik Ekdahl, the deputy director of the board’s Division of Water Rights.

The American West is enduring its worst drought in 1,200 years, though California is doing better than some places following a string of record-breaking storms that pulled a lot of the state out of exceptional drought earlier this winter. “We’ve been in worse conditions,” said Macon after showing the board a map of the state’s depleted reservoirs.

But the drought is still severe in most of California, and the state’s projected rainfall is particularly worrying. February is usually California’s wettest month, but “we just had the driest January and February in California’s recorded history,” said Ekdahl. There is virtually no precipitation forecast for this month, and March is looking exceptionally dry as well. February has also been unusually hot throughout the state, and the deluge of rain and snow from earlier storms is starting to evaporate.

“At this point, we’re falling behind [where we should be] by about 1% to 2% per day,” said Ekdahl. “It really does seem like things are moving in a significantly more concerning [direction] and will continue to do so.”

That could mean reimposing water curtailments, though Ekdahl and others said they would need more data before making those decisions. One area of concern is the Russian River watershed, which supplies water to vineyards, dairies, and orchards in California’s wine country, as well as to 650,000 state residents. Communities were placed under water restrictions last year, then got a reprieve when the cuts were suspended last fall. Ekdahl says his team is monitoring water levels and will “see if we need to start reimposing them.”

Ekdahl also touched on the Scott and Shasta rivers, which are essential Coho and Chinook salmon habitat in the northern part of the state. The rivers also supply water to a network of farmers and ranchers and feed into the Klamath River, which has been the site of escalating tensions over water rights between Native and farming communities. The Water Resources Board had suspended water cuts from those rivers through February 11, but Ekdahl suggested the cuts may need to be reimposed as the drought continues.

Erick Orellana, a policy advocate with the Community Water Center, urged the board to focus on the drought’s effects in frontline rural communities.

“The most significant drought impacts we’ve seen have been when households lose access to running water in their homes as a result of large agricultural wells depleting groundwater levels near drinking water wells,” said Orellana. “We have to be clear that every Californian’s human right to water is not less important than another’s pursuit of wealth.”

Produced with FERN, non-profit reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health.

https://www.agriculture.com/news/busine ... e-scenario

[Anthea]

International Polar Bear Day 27 February

We created the day to coincide with the time when polar bear moms and cubs are snug in their snow dens. As part of our celebration, we focus on the need to protect denning families across the Arctic

We’ve planned an array of live events and special outreach, starting a few days beforehand and ending on the day itself. Bring your curiosity and tune in to learn about moms and cubs, the threats they face, and how you can help ensure their future.

Explore the Schedule

Q&A on Polar Bear Moms and Cubs
Thursday, February 24th, 8 am CT/3 pm CET— On Facebook Live
Add to calendar

Join our own Dr. Thea Bechshoft to learn about polar bear moms, cubs, and the denning period. Ask questions and see if you can stump the scientist! The session will air live from Denmark and is timed for our followers in Europe.

Polar Bears International Video Premiere: Protecting Polar Bear Moms and Cubs
Friday, February 25th, at 3 pm CT — On Facebook Live
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Staff scientist Alysa McCall will join us live from Yukon, Canada to talk about our research on moms and cubs and why protecting dens is so important. She’ll share fun facts and unveil a new video that takes you into the field with our team.

The Weather Network Video Premiere: Bear Witness
Sunday, February 27th, Goes Live at 8 a.m. – On The Weather Network
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To celebrate International Polar Bear Day, the Weather Network will roll out a video filmed in Churchill, Canada, during the polar bear migration. It highlights our conservation efforts and includes interviews with our own Geoff York.

Facebook Video Premiere: Protecting Polar Bear Moms and Cubs
Sunday, February 27th, 12 pm CT - On Facebook
Add to calendar

If you missed the first showing of our new moms and cubs video, we’re airing it again today. Caught it the first time? Add to your Arctic inspiration by watching it again.

Behind the Scenes: Filmmaker Q&A
Sunday, February 27th, 4 pm CT - On Instagram Live
Add to calendar

Join Neil Osborne of The Weather Network, Ray Friesen of Handcraft Video, and our own Emily Ringer as they talk about the experience of filming Bear Witness. Ray will be leaving for Svalbard to film our den study just four days after the event. Come with questions and prepare to be inspired!

In addition to these live events, visit our International Polar Bear Day page for more ways to get involved. Find a toolkit to help spread the word, donate to help us develop new technology to find and protect dens, take our Protect Moms and Cubs Challenge, and explore our favorite facts about moms and cubs.

And don't forget to spend some time outside to celebrate polar bears! Visit your local Arctic Ambassador Center and find out what they’re offering for the community that day.

https://polarbearsinternational.org/new ... dule-2022/

[Anthea]

Rare Persian Leopard

A rare Persian leopard being temporarily held in a Kurdish zoo faces an uncertain future, wildlife specialists fear

Six weeks ago the male leopard was caught in a trap set by a villager who had recently lost dozens of goats in the mountainous Batifa area of northern Duhok province, in the autonomous Kurdistan region, and had to have its right hind leg amputated.

A vet, Dr Sulaiman Tameer, was called out to help capture the animal, and he said that he had walked with villagers and Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers into the mountains, tracking the leopard after it climbed to a peak, dragging the trap that gripped its leg.

Tameer estimates the leopard had been in the trap for at least 10 days and had lost a lot of blood. The animal fell from the mountain and plunged into a river about 30 metres below. There, dogs surrounded it and Tameer was able to shoot it with a tranquilliser gun.

The trap had broken the bone, torn muscle and tendons, and punctured an artery. It was clear to Tameer that he would need to amputate the lower half of the leopard’s leg immediately.

A specialist team put together through the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) was asked to help treat the leopard. Dr Hans Nieuwendijk, a Dutch veterinary surgeon, and Dr Iman Memarian, an Iranian wildlife vet, arrived in Duhok later in January. They performed a second surgery to amputate the leg just below the hip joint, improvising an operating theatre in a cage at the zoo.

Dubbed Plinga Batifa (Batifa leopard), the 65kg (10 stone) male is about five or six years old; its expected lifespan is 10-15 years. The animal is recovering well from the surgeries, but can never return to the wild. Missing a hind leg and having lost three of its canine teeth, possibly while being captured, it cannot jump or hunt.

Plinga Batifa now spends most of his time in a 3- by 4-metre dark room, which provides some insulation from the noises and smells of the zoo, and opens into a 120 sq metre (1,300 sq ft) caged area that the leopard ventures into only after dark, when the zoo is closed and the people have gone.

The smell of jaguars and tigers in neighbouring cages is also very stressful for the leopard. A recent video of the animal shows it moving around the cage, staying low to the ground.

Experts hope it can quickly be moved to a more suitable location. “The best is to go to a rehabilitation centre, otherwise it will be a captive animal and in a zoo all its life,” said Tameer, but he noted there was no such option in Iraq or its immediate neighbours.

The leopard’s current home is the worst place for it, according to Nieuwendijk. Persian leopards are “very solitary animals”, he explained. They are used to having a range of thousands of miles to themselves, meeting another leopard only once a year, for a single day, to mate.

“It’s very afraid and out of that it’s very, very aggressive,” said Nieuwendijk, noting that the animal is a risk not only to itself in the zoo, but also to people around it. “If the animal stays, I just hope he dies quickly.”

Persian leopards are found only in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Armenia and the Caucasus mountains and are endangered: there are estimated to be fewer than 1,000 in the wild. Hana Raza, a biologist and founder of a leopard conservation programme in Iraqi Kurdistan, said there are only about 20 to 25 leopards left in Iraq.

They range through the oak forests of the mountains, but their habitat is shrinking. The number of leopards in the wild is so small that removing even one individual puts the whole population at risk. “We don’t know what we’re losing right now,” she said.

The region lacks the resources and expertise to breed the leopard as part of species conservation efforts. Raza would like to see the leopard loaned to a European facility where it would be cared for and used in a breeding programme as recommended by the IUCN, but would remain the property of the Kurdistan region, as would any potential offspring. “This would be great for Kurdistan’s reputation,” said Raza.

She is trying to get the local government’s support, but has so far been unable to secure a meeting with the provincial governor. How quickly the leopard can be moved “all depends on how urgently the government treats this”, she said.

The government’s position is to keep the leopard in the country, “under the supervision and care of the veterinary teams and specialists in an appropriate setting”, said Abdulrahman Seediq, head of the Kurdistan regional government’s environment board.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ain-future