Madagascar: Cyclone Batsirai leaves at least 10 dead, thousands displaced

© UNICEF/NOAA I A satellite image shows the formation of a low-pressure system named Batsirai over the Indian Ocean on 2 February 2022.

Tropical Cyclone Batsirai wrought havoc across Madagascar over the weekend, the second deadly storm to batter the African island nation since the beginning of the year.

Batsirai made landfall on Saturday night local time, with wind speeds of up to 165 kilometres per hour, and wind gusts of up to 230km/h. The most affected districts of Nosy Varika, Mananjary and Manakara, according to early reports.

With more than 43,000 newly displaced across around 180 sites, and at least 211 schools impacted, UN teams are working with national authorities, to provide emergency relief and support, said the initial situation report published on Monday by the UN humanitarian affairs office, OCHA.

Numbers impacted are expected to rise in the days ahead, as more information becomes available, including for hard-to-reach areas yet to file initial reports on damage and loss of life sustained.

The Government estiates that up to 600,000 could be affected by Batsirai overall, and the number of displaced could rise to 150,000.

The World Food Programme (WFP) says that around 1.64 million are at crisis level or worse, when it comes to food insecurity.  

‘Considerable damage’

Tropical Cyclone Batsirai’s wind and rains have caused considerable damage to roads and transport links, leaving some of the hardest-hit areas inaccessible. At least 19 roads and 17 bridges have been cut.

“The devastation wrought by Batsirai has compounded the suffering caused by the passage of Tropical Storm Ana and an Intertropical Convergence Zone in Madagascar less than two weeks ago”, OCHA noted.

Tropical Storm Ana left 55 people dead and affected 132,000, including 15,152 people who remain displaced, with 14,938 of them sheltering temporarily in 68 centres across the Analamanga region.The Government declare a State of Emergency on 27 January.

© WFP/Sandaeric Nirinarison I Tropical Cyclone Batsirai brings destruction to east coast of Madagascar.

The cyclone has now entered the Mozambique channel, where it is moving southwards and away from land. It has lost much of its strength and was classified as Post-Tropical Depression ex-Batsirai at 4pm local time on Monday, said OCHA.

The Government activated search and rescue efforts on Sunday, including a helicopter rescue operation in some areas.

UN evaluating needs

UN assessments began on Monday, with the UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) conduction a first aerial assessment. This will be complemented by multisectoral needs assessments by teams on the ground in the coming days, which will provide a more comprehensive overview of the situation and help inform response priorities in the days ahead.

The Government is providing cash transfers for vulnerable households impacted by the cyclone, while humanitarian partners have deployed surge teams and are ramping-up their responses, said OCHA.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has started distributing hot meals to 4,000 evacuated and displaced people in shelters, in coordination with national authorities. 

Pasqualina DiSirio, Country Director of WFP Madagascar, said that around 150,000 had been affected so far, "but these numbers can easily rise."

"We have right now, still waters increasing in the canals, in the rivers, and people are still in danger. We know for sure that rice fields, that rice crops will be damaged. This is the main crop for Malagasy people and they will be seriously affected in food security in the next three to six months if we don’t do something immediately and we don’t help them recover.”

Protection effort

© WFP/Nejmeddine Halfaoui I Tropical Cyclone Batsirai brings destruction to east coast of Madagascar.

Protection partners, including UNICEF and its government counterpart, are providing kits to establish child-friendly spaces in Analamanga, Anosy and Analanjirofo regions, as well as training social workers on gender-based violence (GBV) and the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA) in other impacted areas.

The UN gender and sexual health agency UNFPA and its partners - including the Ministry of Health - are providing psychological first aid in Manakara, Fianarantsoa, Vangaindrano, Mahabako and Taolagnaro (Fort-Dauphin), distributing dignity kits for women and girl survivors of GBV in the Vatovavy, Fitovinany, Atsimo Andrefana, Anosy, Androy regions, and providing medical care for survivors of sexual violence

The Future of Epidemic Tracking Is in Your Toilet

Eleanor Cummins

Wastewater is a crucial epidemiological tool for tracking Covid-19. It’s only going to get more important as climate change accelerates.

A wastewater pool in Washington, D.C I NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Not everyone will get a Covid test, but everyone poops. That’s why cities across the United States are using municipal wastewater to track the still-raging pandemic. The amount of the SARS CoV-2 RNA in the sewershedcan indicate the level of the virus in a community as a whole, whether or not individuals above ground are experiencing symptoms. In fact, the tool is a leading indicator of Covid-19’s spread, predicting spikes three to seven days before the number of reported cases rises. It’s also drawn public attention to the sewer system’s vast public health potential—and just how much managing wastewater will matter in the face of accelerating climate change.

In the past week alone, local wastewater data has shown that infection rates have finally begun to slow in many parts of the country, from St. Louis to Boston; conversely, some communities, like San Rafael, California, may soon see a spike in cases. Earlier in the pandemic, scientists used wastewater to identify mutations in the virus. In the most recent wave, they’ve also used it to show that overall omicron-variant case counts have been dramatically underestimated. Wastewater is proving to be a “Covid crystal ball,” according to New York magazine.

The tactic isn’t perfect: Wastewater testing can’t tell an individual they’re sick. The amount of virus a person sheds changes throughout the course of their illness, so wastewater may flag cases that are already on the road to recovery. And many rural communities have yet to ramp up wastewater sampling. But “it’s a type of data that we are all creating, naturally, organically, when we are using the restroom,” Mariana Matus, co-founder of Biobot Analytics, a company tracking Covid-19 in wastewater in 25 states, recently told The New York Times. The pandemic is the latest evidence for what many civil engineers already knew: that sewer systems are uniquely useful as a public health apparatus. They’re passive, anonymous, and uniquely capable of multitasking. “Wastewater epidemiology” is just the latest in a series of attempts to make every flush count.

Managing human waste is a civilizational priority, and has been for thousands of years. But it didn’t always work very well. For much of American history, dense urbanizing communities relied on literal cesspools to store their combined excrement. The rare sewer that could accommodate human waste was privately owned, poorly constructed, and far too simple—routing unfiltered waste only as far as the nearest body of water.

That began to change in American cities in the mid-nineteenth century, as New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia invested in large-scale infrastructure to manage stormwater and wastewater at a municipal scale. Officials were motivated by the desire to manage the rampant infectious diseases of their own era, including cholera and typhoid. While sewers today tend to get short shrift, a global poll conducted by the British Medical Journal in 2007 rightly rated sanitation as the greatest medical advancement of the last 150 years.

As sanitation science advanced, centralized wastewater treatment plants sprang up, capturing and cleaning sewage as it flowed. Instead of simply dumping raw sewage into the ocean, these plants use screens, physical filters, aeration tanks, chemical treatments, and more to break wastewater down into relatively harmless compounds.

Cities have also begun to use the sludge as a source of energy. When anaerobic microbes digest excrement, they generate biogases, which engineers attempt to trap and use to power the treatment plants. (Unfortunately, fugitive methane emissions remain a serious concernwith this process.) Other municipal operations have taken a different tactic and turned their waste by-products into garden-quality compost. One of the oldest examples is Dillo Dirt, which can be purchased by the same Austin, Texas, residents who helped to create it.

The idea of using wastewater as a public health tracking system caught on only in the last 15 years, first focused on illicit drug use and eventually expanding to infectious disease. But the science has always been straightforward: Simply collect wastewater (as little as a half-ounce, in some cases) and send it to a lab. There, technicians will run it through a PCR test, the same technique used on nasal swabs. The amount of Covid-19 detected in the sample—and details on the most prominent variants, which can be determined with an additional genomic test—guides public health officers as they target testing kits, deliver educational materials, and deploy continued vaccination efforts.

In the U.S., wastewater epidemiology systems have been increasingly commercialized. In 2018, the company now known as Biobot launched its first tool to sample wastewater for illicit drug use, including heroin, fentanyl, and prescription opioids, as well as substitution therapies like methadone and emergency interventions like Narcan. The hope was that wastewater could provide better public health data on the opioid crisis. When the Covid-19 pandemic erupted in the U.S., Biobot was ready. In March 2020, the company published a paper based on Massachusetts samples that showed it could successfully identify the virus in wastewater, according to The Verge. Now Biobot tests wastewater for 183 communities and counting.

Some people have kept the process closer to home. In Houston, for example, chief environmental science officer Loren Hopkins has been sampling wastewater since summer 2020 as part of her efforts to track Covid-19 and send resources where they’re most needed. Each Tuesday, she collects materials from 39 treatment plants, as well as nursing homes and jails, according to The New York Times. “I’m not aware of any other city that’s doing it,” she said of other cities in Texas. But that’s sure to change. Whether cities do wastewater epidemiology themselves or outsource it to companies like Biobot, Hopkins says, “I’d imagine they’re going to try, you know, because it’s been such a success.”

Wastewater epidemiology will continue to be a critical tool as climate change pushes infectious diseases into new and unprepared parts of the globe. The U.S. is already on track for more mosquito- and tick-borne illnesses. Globally, researchers are concerned about an increased risk of that age-old waterborne illness: cholera, due to decreased precipitation and rising temperatures, both of which encourage the bacteria’s growth. Sewage could provide an effective tool for monitoring outbreaks of all kinds.

Wastewater could help in other ways, too. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is working to ensure 70 percent of the city’s water comes from local sources by 2035. To do it, the city is investing heavily in methods of water recycling—in particular, Garcetti is upgrading the city’s wastewater treatment facilities to make their output potable. “This is in some ways an easier engineering feat than what the city did 100 years ago,” Garcetti recently told Bloomberg. “We won’t be drought-free, but I do believe we’ll be drought-resilient.”

But just as easily, sewers could be part of the problem. New York City’s system, for example, was designed to handle just 1.75 inches of rain in a one-hour storm. In recent deluges, like those spinning out of Hurricane Ida, 3.15 inches fell in just the first hour. The result of such storms is widespread flooding—and untreated sewage skipping the treatment plants and flowing straight into oceans and rivers, where it can pose a threat to human and nonhuman health. While New York City says it’s working to bring the sewers into compliance with the Clean Water Act, critics have said the plan “doesn’t add up.”

The difference between wastewater as friend or foe comes down to how soon communities act. The twenty-first century’s public health challenges are vast, numerous, and exacerbated by a lack of trust in existing institutions. To stay healthy long into the future, we can’t only monitor outbreaks that are already underway. We will need proactive surveillance of emergent diseases, investments in wastewater infrastructure to strengthen it for severe weather and rising tides, and global decarbonization to limit future damage. Without a forward-thinking approach on the scale of the original sewer construction projects, our problems will mount. So will our poop.

Consumer knowledge ‘essential’ to fuel the circular economy

Darrel Moore

A recent survey by risk management experts, DNV, suggests consumer knowledge of circular economy is growing and their attitude towards it is generally positive. However, trust in companies requires ‘strengthening’ while more ‘innovation and legislation’ is needed to drive increased engagement and action, it says.

“Awareness is key but, subsequent consumer behaviour influenced by the knowledge they have is crucial to making the circular economy a reality.

“Ultimately, it is this knowledge is that will inspire consumer action to engage in recycling or take-back efforts or try out innovative circular products or services,” says Luca Crisciotti, CEO of Supply Chain & Product Assurance in DNV.

Awareness is key but, subsequent consumer behaviour influenced by the knowledge they have is crucial to making the circular economy a reality

Only 35.8% had not heard of circular economy, according to the findings. Of those that had, 45% indicated they have extensive knowledge and actively participate.  Knowledge and engagement appear to be higher among the younger generations with more than 53% saying they actively participated. Only 32.4% in the oldest grouping said the same.

DNV says the survey reflects that consumers are mostly gaining information from media and social media channels (60.9%), with political discussion (26.8%) and friends (23%) being some way behind.

Only 1 in 5 respondents mentioned information coming from manufacturers and suppliers directly, highlighting businesses may need to do more to get their message out and build trust.

The information gap

“Manufacturers and companies have to drive circular economy transition. However, this is not possible without consumer participation. Thus, more must be done to fill the information gap, ensure that consumer awareness is priority and provided validated, trusted information,” says Luca Crisciotti.

Consumers are beginning to consider the impact of their purchasing behaviours, DNV says. As many as 48.1% said they buy products with recycled properties and 62.9% prefer to buy less or go for second-hand products.

Behavioural patterns, upbringing and purchasing power seem to play a role. Those above 55 years of age do more repairs than their younger counterparts. The younger generations tend to buy more second-hand and rent instead of owning. This could reflect a mix of it new fashion trends and economic power.

Manufacturers and companies have to drive circular economy transition. However, this is not possible without consumer participation.

A number of aspects influence consumers when deciding on whether to buy circular fashion products.  Information on ecological footprint is very important (49.1%). It is closely followed by working and labour conditions, quality of the product, and certifications, verified labels and validated sustainability claims.

In the area of fashion, the primary reasons for choosing a circular product are still style and the price. Contributing towards environmental and circular causes ranks third. Price is especially relevant for the younger generations, which could potentially be linked to their purchasing power.

While consumers are not willing to go circular ‘at any cost’, DNV says, it notes that it is ‘interesting’ that when asked about plastic circularity, for example, they perceive most alternatives to single-use plastic as circular and sustainable. This provides an opportunity for the companies to adapt and consider business model innovation, focusing on the efforts that yield the most return, DNV says.

UN’s Zero Hunger Sustainable Development Goal at risk

Blaise Hope

After showing hopeful results during the Millennium Development Goals, the UN’s Zero Hunger Sustainable Development Goal is threatened by undernourishment

After the huge success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the United Nations laid out a new set of targets for 2030 - the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

The UN's SDG for Zero Hunger is measured by the prevalence of undernourishment, meaning a condition where "a person is unable to acquire enough food to meet daily minimum dietary energy requirements for one year". 

Based on this definition, the UN detected a rise in the undernourished population starting from 2015 after decades of steady decline. This increase emerged right after the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) period ended.

The MDGs combined an aim to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger as one goal. The SDGs split them into two. As of today, approximately 381 million of the world's undernourished are still found in Asia, while more than 250 million live in Africa. Despite the lower number, Africa has seen the fastest growth of anywhere in the world. 

SDG Zero Hunger goal could go the other way by 2030

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) latest estimation, nearly 690 million people, or 8.9% of the world’s population, is hungry. This figure shows a jump of nearly 60 million in just five years, suggesting the world may very well be on track to miss its 2030 targets.

At that rate 2030 would see over 840 million people suffering from undernourishment, and 2 billion by 2050.

The World Food Programme's (WFP) 2020 Global Report said at least 135 million people suffer from acute hunger due to man-made conflicts, climate change and economic downturns. It was clear then, too, that the Covid-19 pandemic would exacerbate the situation, with more than a quarter of a billion people potentially at the brink of starvation. 

The Hunger Hotspots Report from the WFP and FAO recently revealed food insecurity is still soaring across 20 countries and regions, with Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen the worst-affected.

What steps need to happen to save the Zero Hunger SDG goal?

The FAO urges countries to meet the immediate food needs of their vulnerable populations by boosting social protection programmes, keeping the global food trade going, keeping the domestic supply chain gears moving, and supporting smallholder farmers' ability to increase food production.

The plan is to double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers by 2030. By committing to sustainable food production systems and resilient agricultural practices, farmers can increase productivity and production, while also maintaining ecosystems, and the resilience to adapt to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding, and other disasters.

The Zero Hunger Challenge was launched by then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2012 to reflect five elements from within the SDGs. Done together, especially if integrated into nationally-led SDG implementation strategies, the challenge is hoped to end hunger, eliminate all forms of malnutrition, and build inclusive and sustainable food systems. These five elements are:

• All food systems are sustainable: from production to consumption,

• An end to rural poverty: double small-scale producer incomes & productivity,

• Adapt all food systems to eliminate loss or waste of food,

• Access adequate food and healthy diets for all people, all year round,

• An end to malnutrition in all its forms.

How can companies help achieve the 2030 Zero Hunger SDG?

The Zero Hunger's Private Sector Pledge is a UN initiative from its Food Systems Summit. Partners include the FAO, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Grow Africa, Grow Asia, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the World Benchmarking Alliance, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development(WBCSD) and the WFP.

The programme, launched in September 2021, initially attracted 43 companies, including Ajinomoto, PepsiCo, Rabobank, and Unilever. It provides an opportunity for companies and investment funds to align their investments with new commitments to end hunger by 2030. It is centred on new evidence from Ceres2030, the Programme of Accompanying Research for Agricultural Innovation (PARI) 2020, and the State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) 2021. More companies are expected to follow suit without necessarily joining the pledge.

On top of increasing investment through enhanced international cooperation in rural infrastructure, agricultural research and extension services, technology development, and plant and livestock gene banks, the UN also suggests companies correct and prevent trade restriction, distortions and manipulation of global agricultural markets. 

New framework of indicators for achieving Sustainable Development Goals

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

Newswise — The world is not on track to achieve all the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, and more insight into how we can get back on track is urgently needed. An article by an international team of scientists proposes a more limited set of more easily measurable targets that can be used in scenario analysis for achieving all of the SDGs by the target date.

The goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement are widely known and aim to limit the global temperature increase to well below 2°C and, if possible, 1.5°C. In that same year, UN member states agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030 in pursuit of global sustainable development. These 17 goals are much broader than the climate goals in the Paris Agreement and include, for example, secure livelihoods, food security, sustainable economies, and environmental protection.

Achieving the SDGs requires major changes in many areas, and because of the great interdependence between the goals, they must be pursued in conjunction. Combatting hunger, for example, may also involve increased use of fertilizers and water, and thus lead to more climate change, increasing water scarcity, and pollution. Scenarios made with computer models can provide insight into possible pathways for achieving the SDGs simultaneously. For example, what type of food system could both contribute to greater food security (SDG 2), protect biodiversity (SDGs 14 and 15,) and result in less climate change (SDG 13)? And what steps would need to be taken by 2025 in order to achieve this by 2030?

Although a variety of scenarios have been developed to achieve certain goals, such as for climate and biodiversity, such scenarios are still lacking for combinations of all SDGs.

“The 169 targets and more than 200 indicators that, together with the 17 SDGs agreed to monitor progress, are unsuitable for scenario development as there are too many of them and they are often not clearly formulated or difficult to measure. The development of usable scenarios requires a concise, clear set of targets that is representative of the SDGs,” says Caroline Zimm, a study coauthor and a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

An initial exploration in the new article just published in the journal One Earth shows that, for the SDGs for which scenario data were available, the goals will not be achieved if current trends continue. While numerous scenarios on climate change provide insight into the necessary changes, such as those in energy consumption, transport, and land use, such scenarios are not available for simultaneous achievement of multiple SDGs, even though they are essential for formulating concrete policy measures.

In their paper, the authors developed a specific set of targets and indicators. In doing so, they looked not only at the SDGs but also at international treaties (such as the Paris Agreement) and the scientific literature.

“The research outlined in our paper was an integral part of The World in 2050 (TWI2050) initiative coordinated by IIASA. Our aim was to develop a target space to delineate sustainability goals of the six transformations toward a safe and just future for the planet and its people to be achieved by 2050 and beyond,” explains Director of TWI2050 and IIASA Emeritus Research Scholar, Nebojsa Nakicenovic.

The paper proposes a set of 36 targets, which have been defined for 2030 (the target year of the SDGs), as well as for 2050, as work on sustainable development will still need to continue beyond 2030.

“At present, scenarios for the SDGs are almost completely lacking. The formulation of 36 measurable, unambiguous targets helps to explore pathways towards achieving the SDGs. Such scenarios make these SDGs far more manageable for policymakers and other stakeholders,” explains lead author Detlef van Vuuren, researcher at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and professor at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

“In the wake of the pandemic, it will be important to regain momentum towards the SDGs. This framework will hopefully facilitate the collaboration and collective understanding across disciplines of how to achieve the necessary societal transformations to meet this challenge,” adds coauthor Frank Sperling, a senior project manager at IIASA, who is also affiliated with the University of Oxford.

“With this paper, we hope to provide the scientific and policy community with a common, quantifiable basis for exploring policy measures, related trade-offs, as well as synergies across the SDGs,” concludes Keywan Riahi, study coauthor and Energy, Climate, and Environment Program director at IIASA.

Researchers from other institutes, in many fields, were involved, including economists, researchers on land and energy systems, social scientists, and environmental scientists. PBL’s IMAGE integrated assessment model will contribute to the use of the set of indicators in their scenario studies.

Reference

van Vuuren, D., Zimm, C., Busch, S., Kriegler, E., Leininger, J., Messner, D., Nakicenovic, N., Rockstrom, J., Riahi, K., Sperling, F., Bosetti, V., Cornell, S., Gaffney, O., Lucas, P., Popp, A., Ruhe, C., von Schiller, A., Schmidt, J.O., Soergel, B. (2022). Defining a Sustainable Development Target Space for 2030 and 2050. One Earth

Healthcare waste from COVID threatens environment: WHO

UN NEWS

Tens of thousands of tonnes of extra medical waste from the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has put tremendous strain on health care waste management systems around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.

Unsplash/Brian Yurasits

A face mask found during a beach cleanup in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, USA.

According to the agency’s Global analysis of healthcare waste in the context of COVID-19: status, impacts and recommendations, the mainly plastic trashthreatens human and environmental health, and exposes a dire need to improve waste management practices.

The sight of discarded masks, littering pavements, beaches and roadsides, has become a universal symbol of the on-going pandemic worldwide. 

Speaking to journalists in Geneva, the agency’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the report “is a reminder that although the pandemic is the most severe health crisis in a century, it is connected with many other challenges that countries face.”

The estimates are based on the approximately 87,000 tonnes of personal protective equipment (PPE) that was procured between March 2020 and November 2021 and shipped through a joint UN emergency initiative. Most of this equipment is expected to have ended up as waste.

For the agency, this is just an initial indication of the scale of the problem. It does not consider any of the COVID-19 commodities procured outside of the initiative, nor waste generated by the public, like disposable masks.

COVID fallout

The analysis points out that over 140 million test kits, with a potential to generate 2,600 tonnes of non-infectious waste (mainly plastic) - and 731,000 litres of chemical waste (equivalent to one-third of an Olympic-size swimming pool - have been shipped.

At the same time, over 8 billion doses of vaccine have been administered globally producing 144,000 tonnes of additional waste in the form of syringes, needles, and safety boxes. 

As the UN and countries grappled with the immediate task of securing and quality-assuring supplies of PPE, less attention and resources were devoted to the safe and sustainable management of this waste. 

For the Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, Dr Michael Ryan, this type of protection is vital, “but it is also vital to ensure that it can be used safely without impacting on the surrounding environment.” 

This means having effective management systems in place, including guidance for health workers on what to do. 

Lack of resources

Today, 30 per cent of healthcare facilities (60 per cent in the least developed countries) are not equipped to handle existing waste loads, let alone the additional waste.

This can expose health workers to needle injuries, burns and pathogenic microorganisms, said WHO. Communities living near poorly managed landfills and waste disposal sites can be impacted by contaminated air from burning waste, poor water quality, or disease carrying pests. 

The Director for Environment, Climate Change and Health at WHO, Maria Neira, believes the pandemic has forced the world to reckon with this problem. 

“Significant change at all levels, from the global to the hospital floor, in how we manage the healthcare waste stream, is a basic requirement of climate-smart health care systems”, she said. 

Recommendations

The report lays out a set of recommendations, including eco-friendly packaging and shipping; purchasing safe and reusable PPE, made of recyclable or biodegradable materials; investment in non-burn waste treatment technologies; and investments in the recycling sector to ensure materials, like plastics, can have a second life.

For WHO, the health crisis also offers an opportunity to develop strong national policies and regulations, change behaviours, and increase budgets.

TheChair of the Health Care Waste Working Group, Dr Anne Woolridge, noted that there is a growing appreciation that health investments must consider environmental and climate implications.

“For example, safe and rational use of PPE will not only reduce environmental harm from waste, it will also save money, reduce potential supply shortages and further support infection prevention by changing behaviours”, she explained. 

Pandemic update

Last Sunday, 30 January, marked two years since WHO declared COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern, the highest level of alarm under international law.

At the time, there were fewer than 100 cases and no deaths reported outside China.

Two years later, more than 370 million cases have been reported, and more than 5.6 million deaths, and WHO says the numbers are an underestimate.

Since the Omicron variant was first identified just 10 weeks ago, almost 90 million cases have been reported, more than in the whole of 2020.

The WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that a narrative has taken hold in some countries that because of vaccines, and because of Omicron’s high transmissibility and lower severity, preventing transmission is no longer possible, and no longer necessary.

“Nothing could be further from the truth”, he said. 

He noted that WHO is not calling for any country to return to lockdown, but all nations should continue to protect their people using every tool in the toolkit, not vaccines alone.

“It’s premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory”, he argued. 

Carbon offsetting is not warding off environmental collapse – it’s accelerating it

George Monbiot
OPINION

Wealthy companies are using the facade of ‘nature-based solutions’ to enact a great carbon land grab

‘Last year, forests being used as corporate offsets were incinerated by the wildfires raging across North America.’ Photograph: Noah Berger/EPA

There is nothing that cannot be corrupted, nothing good that cannot be transformed into something bad. And there is no clearer example than the great climate land grab.

We now know that it’s not enough to leave fossil fuels in the ground and decarbonise our economies. We’ve left it too late. To prevent no more than 1.5C of heating, we also need to draw down some of the carbon already in the atmosphere.

By far the most effective means are “nature-based solutions”: using the restoration of living systems such as forests, salt marshes, peat bogs and the seafloor to extract carbon dioxide from the air and lock it up, mostly in trees or waterlogged soil and mud. Three years ago, a small group of us launched the Natural Climate Solutions campaign to draw attention to the vast potential for stalling climate breakdown and a sixth mass extinction through the mass revival of ecosystems.

While it is hard to see either climate or ecological catastrophe being prevented without such large-scale rewilding, we warned that it should not be used as a substitute for decarbonising economic life, or to allow corporations to offset greenhouse gases that shouldn’t be produced in the first place. We found ourselves having to shed a large number of partner organisations because of their deals with offset companies.

But our warnings, and those of many others, went unheeded. Something that should be a great force for good has turned into a corporate gold rush, trading in carbon credits. A carbon credit represents one tonne of greenhouse gases, deemed to have been avoided or removed from the atmosphere. Over the past few months, the market for these credits has boomed.

There are two legitimate uses of nature-based solutions: removing historic carbon from the air, and counteracting a small residue of unavoidable emissions once we have decarbonised the rest of the economy. Instead, they are being widely used as an alternative for effective action. Rather than committing to leave fossil fuels in the ground, oil and gas firms continue to prospect for new reserves while claiming that the credits they buy have turned them “carbon neutral”.

For example, Shell’s Drive Carbon Neutral scheme tells businesses that by buying fuel on its loyalty card, the “unavoidable” emissions from their fleets of vehicles can be offset “through Shell’s global portfolio of nature-based solutions projects”. It assures customers that, by joining the programme, “you don’t even have to change the way you work”. Similar claims by Shell in the Netherlands were struck down by the country’s advertising watchdog.

The French company Total is hoping to develop new oilfields in the Republic of the Congo and off the coast of Suriname. It has sought to justify these projects with nature-based solutions: in Suriname by providing money to the government for protecting existing forests, and in Congo by planting an area of savannah with fast-growing trees.

This project is extremely controversial. If the drilling goes ahead it will help to break open a region of extremely rich forests and wetlands that sits on top of the biggest peat deposit in the tropics, potentially threatening a huge natural carbon store. The rare savannah habitat the company wants to convert into plantations to produce timber and biomass has scarcely been explored by ecologists. It’s likely to harbour a far greater range of life than the exotic trees the oil company wants to plant. It is also likely to belong to local people though their customary rights, which are unrecognised in Congolese law, were not mentioned in Total’s press release about the deal. In other words, the offset project, far from compensating for the damage caused by oil drilling, could compound it.

These are not the only issues. In all such cases, an extremely stable bank of carbon – the fossil fuels buried below geological strata – is being swapped for less secure stores: habitats on the Earth’s surface. Last year, forests being used as corporate offsets were incinerated by the wildfires raging across North America. It’s also hard in some cases to prove that offset money has made a real difference. For example, two of Shell’s projects have been criticised on the grounds that the forests they claim to defend may not be at risk. These schemes often rely on untestable counterfactuals: what would have happened if this money had not been spent?

While there are international standards for how carbon should be counted, there is no accounting for the moral hazard of carbon offsets: the false assurance that persuades us we need not change the way we live. There is no accounting for the way companies use these projects to justify business as usual. There is no accounting for how they use this greenwashing to persuade governments not to regulate them. Nature-based solutions should help us to avoid systemic environmental collapse. Instead, they are helping to accelerate it.

And then there’s a small issue of land. There is simply not enough land on Earth to soak up corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Oxfam estimates that the land required to meet carbon removal plans by businesses could amount to five times the size of India – more than the entire area of farmland on the planet. And much of it rightfully belongs to indigenous and other local people, who in many cases have not given their consent. This process has a name: carbon colonialism.

During the Cop26 climate summit in November last year, the government of the Malaysian state of Sabah announced a carbon credits deal with foreign corporations covering an astonishing 2m hectares (5m acres) of forest. Indigenous people say they knew nothing about it.

In Scotland, Shell is spending £5m extending the Glengarry forest. While Scotland needs more trees, it also needs a much better distribution of land. As big corporations and financiers pile into this market, land prices are risingso fast that local people, some of whom would like to run their own rewilding and reforestation projects, are being shut out.

A better strategy would be to spend money on strengthening the land rights of indigenous people, who tend to be the most effective guardians of ecosystems and the carbon they contain. Where communities don’t own land, they should be funded to buy it back and restore its missing habitats. But none of these projects should be counted against the fossil fuels we should leave in the ground.

Yes, we need to restore life on Earth. Yes, we need to draw down as much carbon as we can. But we cannot let this crucial tool be turned against us.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Madagascar: Deadly tropical storms cause flooding, landslides

Over the last week intense rainfall has pummelled the African island country in the Indian Ocean, sparking multiple crises across the country’s central Analamanga Region.

© UNICEF/Rindra Ramasomanana I A road flooded with rain water in Antananarivo, Madagascar.

🇲🇬 Over 62,000 people have been affected by flooding in #Madagascar, with close to 37,000 displaced. @UNOCHA_ROSEA Flash Update No.1

📊 Explore the trending datasets, including sub-national admin boundaries and movement range maps on HDX here: https://t.co/nztn4yoizf#opendata pic.twitter.com/bGvleuCWzw

— OCHA Centre for Humanitarian Data (@humdata) January 25, 2022

“The Government, municipal authorities in Antananarivo and humanitarians are mobilizing assistance to people impacted by flooding in the capital”, OCHA tweeted, saying that “providing access to water, food and other vital items in displacement sites is the top priority”.

The rains were initially driven by an Intertropical Convergence Zone, around the equator, around 17 January and increased when a Tropical Depression, or cyclone, made landfall in the east of the country some three days later, exiting the other side of the island the following day.

Houses collapsed

Twenty-four lives were lost over the weekend, mostly in the capital where traditional houses collapsed, and others were swept away by landslides.

According to authorities, over 62,000 people have been affected in seven regions, including more than 58,000 in the Analamanga Region and its surrounding metropolitan area.

Meanwhile over 6,800 houses are under water and many others are at risk of flooding or collapsing.

Over 35,260 people have been forced to take shelter in 62 displacement sites established by the authorities, according to the National Office for Risk and Disaster Management.

Rippling effects

OCHA said that nearly 27,000 people were displaced or evacuated last weekend alone, and that the Government continues to carry out preventive evacuations in Antananarivo, which is on red alert for further flooding.

As river waters are increasing to emergency levels, the red alert has prompted the Ministry of Education to extend the suspension of classes, which was previously announced on 20 January, for 48 hours in Analamanga Region, until at least Friday.

The rains have also damaged roads and other infrastructure in that Region, including the water intake structure of the treatment station in Ambohidratrimosome District.

Some parts of the national road connecting the capital to Ambatondrazaka in the country’s east were also destroyed, impacting transport in and out of Antananarivo.

Looming famine

Meanwhile, one million people in the south are facing severe hunger.

The World Food Programme (WFP) recently warned that familiels continue to go hungry, where extreme weather in the form of recurring drought, and a feeble economy worsened by the fallout out from COVID-19, are driving the crisis.

“The world cannot look away. People in Madagascar need our support now, and into the future,” said Issa Sanogo, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in the country, noting the critical need to scale up a humanitarian response as the country is in its lean season, which runs until April. 

Persisting rainfall 

© UNICEF/Rindra Ramasomanana I A man transports people on a cart on the flooded main road in Ilanivato district, Antananarivo. Madagascar.

Across Madagascar, heavy rainfall is expected to continue and could affect many regions in the days ahead, including Alaotra, Betsiboka, Mangoro, and Sofia, according to Meteo Madagascar and other weather services.

The Tropical Depression that left the country on 23 January has evolved into the Moderate Tropical Storm Ana and is still causing rains in Madagascar.

“Tropical Storm Ana made landfall yesterday in Nampula Province, northern Mozambique, bringing heavy rains and strong winds”, OCHA tweeted, warning that it could “affect thousands of people in the northern and central regions of the country in the coming hours and days”.

Meanwhile, Meteo Madagascar and the Red Cross Piroi Centre are monitoring other tropical weather systems currently in the southwest of the Indian Ocean, which could lead to the formation of tropical storms or even cyclones in the coming days.

Shark attacks increased around the world in 2021 after years of decline

Associated Press in Miami

‘Shark bites dropped drastically in 2020 due to the pandemic – this past year was much more typical,’ says researcher

A sign on 24 December 2021, in Morro Bay, California, site of the only fatal unprovoked shark attack in the US in 2021. Photograph: David Middlecamp/AP

Shark attacks increased around the world in 2021 following three years of decline, though beach closures in 2020 caused by the coronavirus pandemic could make the numbers seem more dramatic, officials in the US said on Monday.

Researchers with the International Shark Attack File recorded 73 unprovoked incidents last year compared to 52 in 2020, according to a new report administered by the Florida Museum of Natural History and the American Elasmobranch Society.

The International Shark Attack File manager, Tyler Bowling, pointed out that 52 bites in 2020 were the lowest documented in more than a decade. The 73 bites in 2021 more closely align with the five-year global average of 72.

“Shark bites dropped drastically in 2020 due to the pandemic.“ Bowling said. “This past year was much more typical, with average bite numbers from an assortment of species and fatalities from white sharks, bull sharks and tiger sharks.”

Researchers saw 11 shark-related fatalities last year, with nine considered unprovoked. Australia had three unprovoked deaths, followed by New Caledonia with two. The US, Brazil, New Zealand and South Africa each had a single unprovoked fatal shark attack.

Provoked attacks are defined as when humans initiate contact, such as divers trying to touch a shark or fishermen removing a shark from a fishing net, according to the International Shark Attack File.

Florida has led the US and the rest of the world in unprovoked shark bites for decades, and the trend continued in 2021, researchers said.

Florida had 28 unprovoked bites last year, compared to 19 in the rest of the US and 26 total outside the US. This is consistent with Florida’s most recent five-year annual average of 25 attacks. Of Florida’s 28 unprovoked bites, 17 were in Volusia county, which includes Daytona Beach.

The single fatal unprovoked shark attack in the US in 2021 was in California. A man was killed while boogie boarding in Morro Bay on Christmas Eve.

Bringing dry land in the Sahel back to life

UN NEWS
HUMANITARIAN AID

Millions of hectares of farmland are lost to the desert each year in Africa’s Sahel region, but the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is showing that traditional knowledge, combined with the latest technology, can turn arid ground back into fertile soil.

©FAO/ Giulio Napolitano I Workers preparing tractors to start ploughing in Burkina Faso.

Those trying to grow crops in the Sahel region are often faced with poor soil, erratic rainfail and long periods of drought. However, the introduction of a state-of-the art heavy digger, the Delfino plough, is proving to be, literally, a breakthrough. 

As part of its Action Against Desertification (AAD) programme, the FAO has brought the Delfino to four countries in the Sahel region – Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal – to cut through impacted, bone-dry soil to a depth of more than half a metre. 

The Delfino plough is extremely efficient: one hundred farmers digging irrigation ditches by hand can cover a hectare a day, but when the Delfino is hooked to a tractor, it can cover 15 to 20 hectares in a day. 

Once an area is ploughed, the seeds of woody and herbaceous native species are then sown directly, and inoculated seedlings planted. These species are very resilient and work well in degraded land, providing vegetation cover and improving the productivity of previously barren lands.  

In Burkina Faso and Niger, the target number of hectares for immediate restoration has already been met and extended thanks to the Delfino plough. In Nigeria and Senegal, it is working to scale up the restoration of degraded land.

Farming seen through a half-moon lens

This technology, whilst impressive, is proving to be successful because it is being used in tandem with traditional farming techniques.

“In the end the Delfino is just a plough. A very good and suitable plough, but a plough all the same,” says Moctar Sacande, Coordinator of FAO’s Action Against Desertification programme. “It is when we use it appropriately and in consultation and cooperation that we see such progress.”

The half-moon is a traditional Sahel planting method which creates contours to stop rainwater runoff, improving water infiltration and keeping the soil moist for longer. This creates favourable micro-climate conditions allowing seeds and seedlings to flourish.

©FAO/ Giulio Napolitano I Women dig mid-moon dams to save water in Niger.

The Delfino creates large half-moon catchments ready for planting seeds and seedlings, boosting rainwater harvesting tenfold and making soil more permeable for planting than the traditional - and backbreaking – method of digging by hand. 

“The whole community is involved and has benefitted from fodder crops such as hay as high as their knees within just two years”, says Mr. Sacande. “They can feed their livestock and sell the surplus, and move on to gathering products such as edible fruits, natural oils for soaps, wild honey and plants for traditional medicine”.

Women taking the lead

According to Nora Berrahmouni, who was FAO’s Senior Forestry Officer for the African Regional Office when the Delfino was deployed, the plough will also reduce the burden on women.

“The season for the very hard work of hand-digging the half-moon irrigation dams comes when the men of the community have had to move with the animals. So, the work falls on the women,” says Ms. Berrahmouni. 

Because the Delfino plough significantly speeds up the ploughing process and reduces the physical labour needed, it gives women extra time to manage their multitude of other tasks.

©FAO/ Giulio Napolitano I Tractors at work to prepare the land for plantation in Burkina Faso.

The project also aims to boost women’s participation in local land restoration on a bigger scale, offering them leadership roles through the village committees that plan the work of restoring land. Under the AAD programme, each site selected for restoration is encouraged to set up a village committee to manage the resources, so as to take ownership right from the beginning.

“Many women are running the local village committees which organise these activities and they are telling us they feel more empowered and respected,” offers Mr. Sacande. 

Respecting local knowledge and traditional skills is another key to success. Communities have long understood that half-moon dams are the best way of harvesting rainwater for the long dry season. The mighty Delfino is just making the job more efficient and less physically demanding.

Millions of hectares lost to the desert, forests under threat

And it is urgent that progress is made. Land loss is a driver of many other problems such as hunger, poverty, unemployment, forced migration, conflict and an increased risk of extreme weather events related to climate change. 

In Burkina Faso, for example, a third of the landscape is degraded. This means that over nine million hectares of land, once used for agriculture, is no longer viable for farming.

It is projected that degradation will continue to expand at 360 000 hectares per year. If the situation is not reversed, forests are at risk of being cleared to make way for productive agricultural land. 

Africa is currently losing four million hectares of forest every year for this reason, yet has more than 700 million hectares of degraded land viable for restoration. By bringing degraded land back to life, farmers do not have to clear additional forest land to turn into cropland for Africa’s rising population and growing food demands.

When Mr. Sacande talks about restoring land in Africa, the passion in his voice is evident. “Restoring degraded land back to productive good health is a huge opportunity for Africa. It brings big social and economic benefits to rural farming communities,” he says. “It’s a bulwark against climate change and it brings technology to enhance traditional knowledge.”

A version of this story first appeared on the FAO website.

Dumped fishing gear is killing marine life. Yet no governments seem to care

George Monbiot

One Scottish trawlerman is so incensed by the dumping of nets he’s come to me – a longstanding critic of his industry – with evidence

‘The nets these boats use are enormous: every large vessel deploys between 50 and 70 miles of them. But gillnets tend to wear out quickly.’ Photograph: Seaphotoart/Alamy

How could they be so careless? How do fishing vessels lose so many of their nets and longlines that this “ghost gear”, drifting through the oceans, now presents a mortal threat to whales, dolphins, turtles and much of the rest of the life of the sea? After all, fishing gear is expensive. It is either firmly attached to the vessel or, using modern technologies, easily located.

I’ve asked myself these questions for a while, and I think I now have an answer. It comes from an unlikely source: a trawlerman working in Scotland. I’m not a fan of trawling, but I recognise that some operations are more damaging than others. He and his colleagues now appear to be pulling in more nets than fish. On trip after trip they catch vast hauls of ghost gillnets and longlines, often wrapped around marine animals. He has sent me his photos, which are so disturbing I can scarcely bear to look: drowned seabirds, decapitated seals and fish and crustaceans of many species, which died a long, slow death. Where are these nets and lines coming from? He believes they’re being deliberately discarded.

I have checked his identity, but he wants to remain anonymous. Like other local trawlers, his boat brings its waste to land. The problem, he says, lies with large vessels, many from France and Spain, that spend four to six weeks at a time at sea. They don’t have enough storage space for the rubbish they generate: most of the hold is dedicated to frozen fish. Worn-out gillnets and longlines should be returned to port for disposal. But those he retrieves have a revealing characteristic: the expensive parts, those that can be reused – floats, weights and hooks – have been cut off. This, he believes, is a giveaway: if you find a net or line like that, it has been deliberately thrown overboard.

He and his colleagues, he says, often watch French and Spanish boats landing plenty of fish in Scottish ports when “no rubbish is taken ashore by these vessels”. He estimates that a typical crew of 20 on a month-long fishing voyage would generate roughly 20 cubic metres of waste, aside from the fishing gear. Where is it? There might be a clue in some of the other rubbish his boat trawls up: bin bags full of French and Spanish food wrappers. As for the gear, he tells me that he sees boats come into port and “miles and miles of new gillnetting is put onboard – but none is taken ashore for discard”.

The nets these boats use are enormous: every large vessel deploys between 50 and 70 miles of them. But gillnets tend to wear out quickly. The fisherman tells me, “the vessel I work on takes ashore approximately one cubic metre of discarded gillnets every four to five days on average.” That’s a lot of net.

Gillnets have been banned from many waters because of their very high rates of bycatch, and their mysterious tendency to go missing. In Scotland, they are prohibited within six miles of the coast. But these boats work farther from the shore. Beyond 12 miles, my contact says, it’s “basically bandit territory for any vessel not UK-registered, as UK law does not apply”. He alleges that, while local boats are closely regulated, there is practically no monitoring of foreign, offshore vessels.

Competition between national fishing fleets is an explosive issue, further charged by Brexit. At first I was wary of these claims, as I know how bitter the rivalry has become. But the photographic evidence speaks for itself, and his testimony is compelling. Moreover, it’s clear that there is a new mood among many of the local boats, which are now desperate to save their fisheries. Most of them are involved in the Fishing for Litter scheme, landing the discarded gear and other rubbish they catch. But this is likely to be a small fraction of the equipment being dumped. Unless active gillnetting and ghost fishing by discarded nets are stopped, my contact believes, the entire marine ecosystem is likely to collapse.

He and other fishers “have written to the authorities until we are blue in the face”, but he says he has been repeatedly stonewalled. It’s a sign of desperation that he has come to me, a longstanding critic of his industry.

When I approached the Scottish government, it told me: “We take protection of the marine environment seriously and are clear that any form of dumping and other illegal activities is completely unacceptable … We would encourage anyone with intelligence relating to suspicious activities by vessels to report this to us on our website.”

But, as the Scottish government’s own report points out, “no data or studies” have been produced showing where the discarded gear is coming from. This is despite the fact that, in the north Highlands, commercial fishing gear accounts for 90% of the ocean plastic picked up by beach cleaners, and that entanglement in static fishing equipment is a major cause of death for minke and humpback whales in Scotland. There’s a reliable principle of public administration: if a government takes a genuine interest in an issue, it commissions researchers to study it. No data tends to mean no interest.

There are similar issues all over the world. Gillnetting and the ghost fishing it causes have reduced the population of vaquita – the world’s smallest member of the whale and dolphin family, which lives in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez – to fewer than 20. Last week a young humpback whale was spotted in Antarctic waters, its dorsal fin severed, with nets cutting through the skin around its tail. As global seafood consumption has doubled in 50 years, the issue has become ever more urgent.

Yet most governments propose to do nothing except “encourage” fishers and gear manufacturers to behave responsibly, without sanctions or incentives. No vessel should be allowed to leave port unless it has enough space to store all its rubbish. Mandatory deposit return schemes would ensure that fishers returned used gear to the manufacturers at the end of its life. All nets should be traceable to the boats that use them. While some equipment is bound to be lost accidentally, it’s not hard to spot patterns of deliberate disposal.

But, like the fictional US president in the movie Don’t Look Up, the world’s governments, faced with ecological collapse, have again decided to “sit tight and assess”.

Africa’s fourth COVID wave flattens out after six-week surge

© UNICEF/ Thoko Chikondi Women queue to receive their COVID-19 vaccine in Malawi.

WHO said that this marked the shortest surge since the pandemic began on the continent, where total cases have exceeded 10.2 million.

Recorded cases of infection show that the weekly number plateaued in the seven days leading up to 9 January, from the previous week.

“Early indications suggest that Africa’s fourth wave has been steep and brief but no less destabilizing”, said WHO’s Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti.

The fast-spreading #Omicron variant has become dominant in countries experiencing a surge in #COVID19 cases.

While it took around four weeks for the #Delta variant to surpass the previously dominant Beta, Omicron outpaced Delta within two weeks in worst-hit African countries. pic.twitter.com/1b9aDx8nfJ

— WHO African Region (@WHOAFRO) January 13, 2022

Omicron on record

In countries experiencing a surge in cases, the fast-spreading Omicron variant has become the dominant type.

While it took around four weeks for the Delta variant to surpass the previously dominant Beta, Omicron outpaced Delta within two weeks in the worst-hit African countries, according to WHO.

Southern Africa saw a huge increase in infections during the pandemic wave but recorded a 14 per cent decline in confirmed cases over the past week.

And South Africa, where Omicron was first reported, saw a nine per cent fall in weekly infections.

While East and Central Africa regions also experienced falling numbers of cases, North and West Africa are seeing a rise in infections, with North Africa reporting a 121 per cent increase over the past week, compared with the previous seven days.

“The crucial pandemic countermeasure badly needed in Africa still stands, and that is rapidly and significantly increasing COVID-19 vaccinations”, said the senior WHO official. “The next wave might not be so forgiving”.

‘Concerted push’ needed’

Through training in bioinformatics, specimen handling and other key areas, WHO is supporting countries across the continent in bolstering genomic sequencing to identify new mutations.

The Organization is also helping to procure and deliver critical laboratory equipment and supplies.

So far, 30 African countries - and at least 142 worldwide - have detected the Omicron variant while the Delta variant has been reported in 42 African nations.

In West Africa, where COVID-19 cases are on the rise, the number of Omicron sequences undertaken by countries including Cabo Verde, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal, is growing.

And Omicron is currently the dominant variant in both Cabo Verde and Nigeria.

“We have the know-how and the tools and with a concerted push we can certainly tip the balance against the pandemic”, said Dr. Moeti.

Stem variants, inoculate

While the continent appears to be weathering the latest pandemic wave, only around 10 per cent of the population have been fully vaccinated.  

However, vaccine supplies to Africa have improved recently, and WHO is stepping up its support to countries to deliver doses to the wider population.

“This year should mark a turning point in Africa’s COVID-19 vaccination drive”, said Dr. Moeti.

“With vast swaths of the population still unvaccinated, our chances of limiting the emergence and impact of deadly variants are frighteningly slim”, she added.

Seeing 1,000 glorious fin whales back from near extinction is a rare glimmer of hope

Philip Hoare
OPINION

Whales still face many threats, mostly from us, so let us savour this rare congregation of them in the Antarctic Peninsula

Spouts from fin whales near the South Orkney Islands in the Southern Ocean. Photograph: Conor Ryan

Good news doesn’t get any more in-your-face than this. One thousand fin whales, one of the world’s biggest animals, were seen last week swimming in the same seas in which they were driven to near-extinction last century due to whaling. It’s like humans never happened.

This vast assembly was spread over a five-mile-wide area between the South Orkney islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. A single whale is stupendous; imagine 1,000 of them, their misty forest of spouts, as tall as pine trees, the plosive sound of their blows, their hot breath condensing in the icy air. Their sharp dorsal fins and steel-grey bodies slide through the waves like a whale ballet, choreographed at the extreme south of our planet.

The sight has left whale scientists slack-jawed and frankly green-eyed in envy of Conor Ryan, who observed it from the polar cruiser, National Geographic Endurance. Messaging from the ship on a tricky connection, Ryan, an experienced zoologist and photographer, says this may be “one of the largest aggregations of fin whales ever documented”. His estimate of 1,000 animals is a conservative one, he says.

We found about 1000 fin whales over a 5x5 mile area off South Orkney. Blue and humpback also mixed in. Mind completely blown 🐳 @LindbladExp #NationalGeographicEndurance pic.twitter.com/xtdvexXwI5

— Conor Ryan (@whale_nerd) January 14, 2022

“We were about 15 miles north of Coronation Island,” Ryan reports, with “four large krill fishing vessels working the same area”. The vessels’ presence makes clear the reason for this party. The whales were feeding on a grand scale, sucking up tonnes of tiny shrimps.

Fin whales are surprisingly slender, serpentine creatures when you see them underwater, and so long that they seem to take for ever to swim past. Like blue, humpback and minke whales, they’re baleen whales, distinguished by food-filtering keratinous plates in lieu of teeth. Unlike toothed whales, such as sperm whales and killer whales, they are not usually seen as social animals. In Moby-Dick Herman Melville classifies the fin whale as “not gregarious … very shy; always going solitary … the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race”.

Factor in their tremendous size – at up to 27m long, only just short of the blue whale’s 33m – and you come close to appreciating the astonishing intensity of this eruption of marine life.

So, is it really good news? In this same ocean, at least two million whales were slaughtered in the past century. Given that we now know fin whales can live for up to 140 years, the effects of that cull are still being felt in their culture. It may be that our assumption that fin whales aren’t “social” animals actually stems from the fact that they amended their behaviour to evade the whalers, as sperm whales did in the 19th century. Scientists suspect that baleen whales also learned not to gather in large groups to stay one step ahead of the hunters. Only now, perhaps, are they returning to old foraging grounds.

Ryan delights in calling himself a “whale nerd”; he and his best friend, Peter Wilson, were just 14 years old when they published their first peer-reviewed scientific paper on killer whales in 2001. When he gets home from this trip, he’ll be writing another paper. Despite his 20 years’ experience at sea, Ryan has never seen anything like this. “Words fail me,” he says. “I have seen maybe 100 fins here before in previous years. Thousands of chinstrap penguins, petrels, and albatrosses, too … It was unusually calm weather,” he adds, “and unusually good visibility.”

If Ryan considers himself blessed, then so should we. Whales still face many threats, mostly from us. And we would do well to remember that the protests that saved the whales in the 1970s and 80s will be outlawed if the new police and crime bill passes into law. In a world constrained by woe and threats to democracy (it’s a good job whales don’t have to apply for the right to assemble), 1,000 fin whales can’t help but lift our hearts. They might even convince us that, as another species of (supposedly) sentient mammal, we still stand a chance of getting through “all of this”. So long as we stick together and send up a few protest spouts of our own.

• Philip Hoare is the author of several books, including Leviathan, The Sea Inside and Albert and the Whale

Six Questions to Help You Understand the 6th Warmest Year on Record

Roberto Molar Candanosa,
NASA's Earth Science News Team

This data visualization shows global surface temperature anomalies for 2021. Higher than normal temperatures, shown in red, can be seen in regions such as the Arctic. Lower than normal temperatures are shown in blue. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Lori Perkins

The year 2021 was tied for the sixth warmest year on NASA’s record, stretching more than a century. Because the record is global, not every place on Earth experienced the sixth warmest year on record. Some places had record-high temperatures, and we saw record droughts, floods and fires around the globe. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Katie Jepson, Kathryn Mersmann, Kathleen Gaeta

The year 2021 tied with 2018 as the sixth warmest year on a record that extends back to 1880, according to NASA’s annual analysis of global average temperatures. The year contributed to an unprecedented, but well-understood trend in which the last eight years have been the warmest ever recorded.

Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City produce this record using data from instruments all over the world, which is validated by satellite data. Scientists update the record every year, maintaining one of the world’s most important datasets to study the extent, pace and causes of warming on our home planet.

Here, we answer six questions to help you understand the GISS global surface temperature analysis, what it shows about 2021 and how NASA makes sense of the data.

GISTEMP, NASA’s global temperature analysis, uses data from tens of thousands of weather stations and Antarctic research stations, together with measurements by instruments on ships and ocean buoys to estimate global temperatures. Shown here as green dots are the locations of more than 20,000 stations currently used in the analysis.

1. What is the GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis?

Also known as GISTEMP, this product is one of several independent datasets by major scientific organizations that track Earth’s temperatures. Its publicly available raw data come from tens of thousands of instruments on weather stations, ships and ocean buoys, and Antarctic research stations.

The NASA analysis takes into account the seasonal cycle and average climate in each of these locations to determine how much warmer or cooler it is on average. Temperatures at different locations on Earth can vary by as much as 100 degrees Fahrenheit (55 degrees Celsius), but the average global temperature over the course of the year changes much more subtly. In other words, when scientists pull all that data together to estimate global average temperatures, the analysis serves as a massive, planetary thermometer.

2. If the record shows unprecedented warming, why isn’t every year the warmest year ever?

Earth’s temperature varies every year because of the many interactions among the land, air and ocean. These complex connections influence weather and temperatures regionally and globally.

One of these interactions is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a natural phenomenon in which heat transfers for several months between the Pacific and the atmosphere lead to temperature and rainfall fluctuations all over the world. La Niña, the cooler phase of this phenomenon, generally leads to weather patterns that lower Earth’s average temperature with a slight lag of several months. That’s how a La Niña event in early 2021 led to a cooler year than it would have been otherwise, in particular cooler than 2020 or 2016 — the warmest years on record.

Scientists are predicting that because La Niña reappeared in late 2021, its cooling influence will likely affect temperatures in 2022. Still, even with these phenomena, 2021 contributes to, and is consistent with, the observed long-term warming trend. Global temperatures are rising at a pace that the planet has not experienced in millennia, according to NASA. That is, even though short-term weather cycles can affect any single year, the warming trends are still very clear and growing.

3. How does NASA crunch the numbers to analyze global temperatures?

NASA’s analysis averages temperature estimates made over many decades. That produces a trend, or pattern, of how fast Earth’s surface temperatures have changed in recent times. The analysis uses a fixed period of 1951 to 1980 that serves as a baseline to compare how global temperatures today are deviating from what was normal then.

The baseline period included the best available data when scientists designed the basic methods for NASA’s analysis in the 1980s. These data also included comprehensive global coverage, since datasets from pre-1950 generally excluded input from the Southern Hemisphere.

The steps to calculate temperature anomalies today remain fundamentally the same as they did in the 1980s. A key exception is that refined algorithms now minimize errors resulting from data in urban areas, which tend to warm more than rural areas. The amount and quality of data available also has increased substantially over time, improving how much of Earth’s surface the dataset covers.

4. How reliable is NASA’s temperature analysis?

This plot shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2019, as analyzed by NASA and other scientific institutions. Though there are minor variations from year to year, all five temperature records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other.

This plot shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2019, as analyzed by NASA and other scientific institutions. Though there are minor variations from year to year, all five temperature records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other.

Scientists always try to confirm the accuracy of the record with independent studies and, in recent decades, satellites. Recent assessments revealed the agency's estimates of the annual average are accurate to within a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit.

The record uses raw data stretching back to 1880, when methods to measure temperature were less developed. But these historic data still provide a very useful window into the past. The recent assessments show that even when factoring in greater uncertainties in data from before 1950, they still provide the basis for a good estimate of past global annual temperatures. In other words, the pre-1950 data are like a blurry photo compared to the sharpness of today's datasets: Scientists are a little more uncertain about some of its details but can still be certain about the overall picture the data show.

NASA also checks for irregularities in the quality and distribution of data, as faulty instruments, human errors in recording and processing data and other non-climatic factors can yield unrealistic readings. When raw data from individual stations seems inaccurate, scientists double-check them manually by comparing these data against neighboring areas with similar climatic conditions. These adjustments can influence records at individual stations and small regions, but they barely change global averages.

Other organizations also process the same data with slightly different methods. Their records all show trends remarkably similar to NASA’s analysis.

5. What are some indicators and consequences of warming?

Satellite data confirm how warming on the land, air and ocean is affecting different parts of the planet. The rising temperatures are causing ice sheets and glaciers worldwide to melt, heatwaves to be longer and more intense, and plants and animal habitats to shift as they respond to warming.

As NASA’s temperature analysis shows the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, satellites show a decline in the region’s sea ice extent of about 13% per decade. Satellites also show the ocean is warming at an unprecedented rate, with 2021 marking the hottest ocean temperatures and the highest global sea levels ever recorded.

In 2021, Earth saw several extreme examples of how excess heat in the ocean and atmosphere can influence often devastating, sometimes unexpected, disasters in different parts of the world. Australia, Europeand Asia experienced historic floods driven by record-breaking levels of intense rainfall. In the United States, the record-setting Dixie Fireburned in California, massive heat-waves were seen in the Pacific Northwest and Hurricane Ida caused damages from Louisiana to New York.

6. Why does NASA estimate global surface temperature change?

In the early 1970s, research into Venus’ atmosphere provided a stark example of how extremely high amounts of greenhouse gasses, which trap heat in the atmosphere, turned Earth’s so-called twin into an uninhabitable world with blistering surface temperatures that would melt lead.

Scientists then became increasingly concerned about the influence of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses on Earth. In 1981, NASA scientists were the first to estimate global temperature averages using the techniques that eventually evolved into the current analysis. The idea was to provide context for predictions of future climate change.

Today, the analysis has helped explain how carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation and other human activities are driving global warming — and why volcanic eruptions, fluctuations in the Sun’s energy output and other natural factors are not the primary drivers of the observed warming trend.

Hottest ocean temperatures in history recorded last year

Oliver Milman

Ocean heating driven by human-caused climate crisis, scientists say, in sixth consecutive year record has been broken

The world’s oceans have been set to simmer, and the heat is being cranked up. Last year saw the hottest ocean temperatures in recorded history, the sixth consecutive year that this record has been broken, according to new research.

The heating up of our oceans is being primarily driven by the human-caused climate crisis, scientists say, and represents a starkly simple indicator of global heating. While the atmosphere’s temperature is also trending sharply upwards, individual years are less likely to be record-breakers compared with the warming of the oceans.

Last year saw a heat record for the top 2,000 meters of all oceans around the world, despite an ongoing La Niña event, a periodic climatic feature that cools waters in the Pacific. The 2021 record tops a stretch of modern record-keeping that goes back to 1955. The second hottest year for oceans was 2020, while the third hottest was 2019.

“The ocean heat content is relentlessly increasing, globally, and this is a primary indicator of human-induced climate change,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and co-author of the research, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

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Warmer ocean waters are helping supercharge storms, hurricanes and extreme rainfall, the paper states, which is escalating the risks of severe flooding. Heated ocean water expands and eats away at the vast Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which are collectively shedding around 1tn tons of ice a year, with both of these processes fueling sea level rise.

Oceans take up about a third of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity, causing them to acidify. This degrades coral reefs, home to a quarter of the world’s marine life and the provider of food for more than 500m people, and can prove harmful to individual species of fish.

As the world warms from the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other activities, the oceans have taken the brunt of the extra heat. More than 90% of the heat generated over the past 50 years has been absorbed by the oceans, temporarily helping spare humanity, and other land-based species, from temperatures that would already be catastrophic.

The amount of heat soaked up by the oceans is enormous. Last year, the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean, where most of the warming occurs, absorbed 14 more zettajoules (a unit of electrical energy equal to one sextillion joules) than it did in 2020. This amount of extra energy is 145 times greater than the world’s entire electricity generation which, by comparison, is about half of a zettajoule.

Long-term ocean warming is strongest in the Atlantic and Southern oceans, the new research states, although the north Pacific has had a “dramatic” increase in heat since 1990 and the Mediterranean Sea posted a clear high temperature record last year.

The heating trend is so pronounced it’s clear to ascertain the fingerprint of human influence in just four years of records, according to John Abraham, another of the study’s co-authors. “Ocean heat content is one of the best indicators of climate change,” added Abraham, an expert in thermal sciences at University of St Thomas.

“Until we reach net zero emissions, that heating will continue, and we’ll continue to break ocean heat content records, as we did this year,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University and another of the 23 researchers who worked on the paper. “Better awareness and understanding of the oceans are a basis for the actions to combat climate change.”

How the speed of climate change is unbalancing the insect world

Oliver Milman

The pace of global heating is forcing insect populations to move and adapt – and some aggressive species are thriving

The climate crisis is set to profoundly alter the world around us. Humans will not be the only species to suffer from the calamity. Huge waves of die-offs will be triggered across the animal kingdom as coral reefs turn ghostly white and tropical rainforests collapse. For a period, some researchers suspected that insects may be less affected, or at least more adaptable, than mammals, birds and other groups of creatures. With their large, elastic populations and their defiance of previous mass extinction events, surely insects will do better than most in the teeth of the climate emergency?

Sadly not. At 3.2C of warming, which many scientists still fear the world will get close to by the end of this century (although a flurry of promises at Cop26 have brought the expected temperature increase down to 2.4C), half of all insect species will lose more than half of their current habitable range. This is about double the proportion of vertebrates and higher even than for plants, which lack wings or legs to quickly relocate themselves. This huge contraction in livable space is being heaped on to the existing woes faced by insects from habitat loss and pesticide use. “The insects that are still hanging in there are going to get hit by climate change as well,” says Rachel Warren, a biologist at the University of East Anglia, who in 2018 published research into what combinations of temperature, rainfall and other climatic conditions each species can tolerate.

Some insects, such as dragonflies, are nimble enough to cope with the creeping change. Unfortunately, most are not. Butterflies and moths are also often quite mobile, but in different stages of their life cycle they rely on certain terrestrial conditions and particular plant foods, and so many are still vulnerable. Pollinators such as bees and flies can generally move only short distances, exacerbating an emerging food security crisis where farmers will struggle to grow certain foods not just due to a lack of pollination but because, beyond an increase of 3C or so, vast swaths of land simply becomes unsuitable for many crops. The area available to grow abundant coffee and chocolate, for example, is expected to shrivel as tropical regions surge to temperatures unseen in human history.

The climate crisis interlocks with so many other maladies – poverty, racism, social unrest, inequality, the crushing of wildlife – that it can be easy to overlook how it has viciously ensnared insects. The problem also feels more intractable. “Climate change is tricky because it’s hard to combat,” says Matt Forister, a professor of biology at the University of Nevada. “Pesticides are relatively straightforward by comparison but climate change can alter the water table, affect the predators, affect the plants. It’s multifaceted.”

Insects are under fire from the poles to the tropics. The Arctic bumblebee, Bombus polaris, is found in the northern extremities of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Russia. It is able to survive near-freezing temperatures due to dense hair that traps heat and its ability to use conical flowers, like the Arctic poppy, to magnify the sun’s rays to warm itself up. Rocketing temperatures in the Arctic, however, mean the bee is likely to become extinct by 2050. Species of alpine butterflies, dependent on just one or two high-altitude plants, are also facing severe declines as their environment transforms around them.

Further south, in the UK, glowworm numbers have collapsed by three-quarters since 2001, research has found, with the climate crisis considered the primary culprit. The larvae of the insects feed on snails that thrive in damp conditions, but a string of hot and dry summers has left the glowworms critically short of prey.

A fire in the Amazon rainforest in Para state, Brazil, August 2020. Drought and wildfires are causing a population collapse in the forest’s dung beetles. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

These sort of losses in Europe have challenged previous assumptions that insects in temperate climates would be able to cope with a few degrees of extra heat, unlike the mass of species crowded at the world’s tropics that are already at the upper limits of their temperature tolerance. A team of researchers from Sweden and Spain have pointed out that the vast majority of insects in temperate zones are inactive during cold periods. When just the warmer, active, months of insects’ lives were considered by the scientists, they found that species in temperate areas are also starting to bump into the ceiling of livable temperature. As Frank Johansson, an academic at Sweden’s Uppsala University, glumly puts it: “Insects in temperate zones might be as threatened by climate change as those in the tropics.”

Bumblebees, those large, furry insects permanently sewn into their winter coats, are at the pointy end of this rising heat. A study by the University of Ottawa in 2020 found that bumblebee populations in North America have nearly halved, with those across Europe declining by 17%.

Some scientists have warned that the correlation shown in this research has yet to prove causation, but there is a broad acceptance that changes in temperature and rainfall could overwhelm insects already facing a barrage of threats. In 2019, for example, scientists revealed the happy news that nine new bee species had been discovered in the south Pacific island of Fiji, only to then immediately note that many of them face climate-related extinction due to their warming mountaintop habitats. “In the future, climate change is going to be the nail in the coffin for quite a lot of creatures which are already in much reduced numbers,” says Dave Goulson, a University of Sussex ecologist. “They’ll simply be unable to cope with a 2C rise in temperature and all the extreme weather events that are likely to go with that.”

Even the Amazon rainforest, that humming trove of insect life, is seeing complex relationships torn asunder. The increasing incidence of the El Niño phenomenon, coupled with human interventions such as deforestation, are spurring more intense drought and wildfires. Researchers were shocked to find this changing regime causing a population collapse among the humble dung beetles, which are key distributors of nutrients and seeds and important indicator species of the health of an ecosystem. Counts of beetles before and after an El Niño event in 2016 found that insect numbers had been cut by more than half within the studied forests. The climate crisis is making the Amazon drier, more brittle and more prone to fires, while also stripping away the unheralded dung beetles that help regenerate burned forests. “I thought the beetles would be more resilient to drought than they were,” says Filipe França, the Brazilian scientist who led the research. “If climate change continues we’ll not only see less biodiverse forests but also make them less able to recover after further disturbances.”

Insects are so interlaced with the environment that they acutely feel any jolt to the regular rhythms of life. Spring is being pushed earlier and earlier in the year, unsettling the established life cycle of insects. In the UK, moths and butterflies are emerging from their cocoons up to six days earlier a decade on average, while in parts of the US, springtime conditions that trigger insect activity occur as much as 20 days earlier than they did 70 years ago. Most plant and animal species rely on the buildup of heat in spring to set in motion flowering, breeding and hatching of insect eggs. The reshuffling of the season’s start risks throwing delicately poised interactions off-kilter, such as birds setting off on migration early only to find a food source isn’t quite ready for them yet.

British scientists who looked at half a century of UK data found that aphids are now emerging a month earlier than they once did, due to rising temperatures, while birds are laying eggs a week earlier. The aphids aren’t necessarily growing in number, despite their elongated season, but their earlier appearances means they are targeting plants that are younger and more vulnerable.

“There’s good evidence here in the UK that under climate change things are warming up early, so we’ve got all these bees coming out early but not the flowers, because obviously the day length isn’t changing,” says Simon Potts, a bee expert at the University of Reading. “We’re getting this decoupling between pollinators and the plants and that’s starting to mess up all these very delicate, very sophisticated food webs.”

The violet carpenter bee has extended its range to the warming UK. Photograph: Ruth Swan/Alamy

For some insects, a warmer Britain is a welcome development. In recent years, insects such as the violet carpenter bee and the camel cricket have crossed the Channel and established themselves, while some native butterflies, such as the marbled white, are hauling themselves out of population declines with a climate-assisted march northward to cooler climes. Flowers such as wild orchids are heading north, too.

These adaptive techniques will mean little when climate breakdown warps the properties of the plants themselves, diminishing them as a food source wherever insects can find them. Scientists have found that CO2 can reduce the nutritional value of plants, providing insects with a meal of empty calories lacking elements such as zinc and sodium. A study site in the prairies of Kansas found that grasshopper numbers there are dropping by around 2% a year, and researchers felt confident enough to rule out pesticide use or habitat loss as the likely cause. Instead, they concluded that the grasshoppers were suffering starvation via the climate emergency.

Not only is climate breakdown potentially causing insects to be malnourished; it also appears to be altering the scent of plants. Pollinators searching for food will note the colour and number of flowers as well as the plant’s scent, with bees able to recall a fragrance and associate it with certain plants and their nectar content. Scientists who measured the fragrance molecules emitted by rosemary in shrubland near Marseille, in France, discovered that a different scent was given off by plants that were stressed, which deterred domesticated bees. As the climate crisis stresses more plants by subjecting them to drought and soaring heat, insects may find them not only a bland meal but also unappealing to even approach.

This alteration in plants may be, for insects at least, the most far-reaching symptom of climate breakdown.

Not all insects are doomed in a warming world, however. As with all realignments, there are winners and losers, and our attention is more easily captured by thoughts of hordes of marauding insects unshackled by global heating than by a handful of scientists fretting about a declining desert moth. In 2020, east Africa suffered its worst plague of locusts in decades. The previous year, the Horn of Africa had been pounded by rainfall, up to 400% above average levels, aiding the reproduction of locusts. Increased heat is also thought to boost locust numbers, with both factors heavily influenced by climate breakdown. Farmers in Kenya watched on helplessly as the sky darkened with locusts that descended to decimate their corn and sorghum. Separate, massive swarms then broke out in western and central India, chewing up land at a rate not seen in a generation.

A hotter world is likely to bring an array of insect pests and pathogens to attack potatoes, soya beans, wheat, and other crops. A group of American researchers calculated that yields of the three most important grain crops – wheat, rice, and corn – lost to insects will increase by as much as 25% per degree Celsius of warming, with countries in temperate areas hit the hardest. Crop pests also tend to thrive in simplified environments that have been stripped of their predators – another legacy of monocultural farming practices.

A sorghum farmer holding a locust in Amhara region, Ethiopia, October 2020. Photograph: Tiksa Negeri/Reuters

In the American suburbs, we will see more emerald ash borers, the brilliantly green beetles native to Asia that were introduced to the US after a few of them clung to some wooden packaging that made its way to Detroit. The rapacious beetles have killed off hundreds of million of ash trees across North America and are now establishing themselves in eastern Europe. Milder winters mean the pests will be able to spread farther north, causing further devastation.

Even the domestic environment will see a new influx of unwanted insects, with populations of houseflies more than doubling by 2080, according to one estimate, due to changes in temperature, humidity and rainfall. But while houseflies can cause illness through the transfer of waste on to food, at least they aren’t major vectors of deadly conditions.

It is worrisome, therefore, that there’s an expansion under way of mosquitoes.

Freezing temperatures tend to kill mosquito eggs. This means that a heated-up planet is allowing the insects to conquer new territories, helping trigger outbreaks of dengue in France and Croatia, chikungunya in Italy and malaria in Greece in the past decade. These incursions are likely to be vanguards; the Mediterranean region is already a partly tropical region, and as heat and moisture continue to build, the central swath of Europe and even the southern regions of the UK will be within striking range of a fearsome cadre of newcomers. “If it gets warmer we could get West Nile. Malaria could come back, too,” says Simon Leather, a British entomologist. “We could see a real change in terms of human health problems.”

Mosquitoes are clearly, by the number of people killed, the most deadly animal on Earth to humans; but in our eagerness to vanquish them, we often deploy weapons with high levels of collateral damage. The chemical compound DDT was developed for widespread anti-mosquito use – before mosquitoes developed resistance and the chemical’s pernicious impact on other wildlife led to its ban. A more recent replacement, an organophosphate called naled, is now sprayed on mosquito habitat despite evidence that it is toxic to bees, fish and other creatures. But if our fears of a seething invasion of heat-loving insects were to be embodied by one animal, it would probably be the Asian giant hornet.

You might have heard it referred to as a “murder” hornet. The bulky, thumb-sized hornet has the demeanour of a cartoonish supervillain, with its tiger-striped abdomen, large burnt orange-coloured face, teardrop eyes like a demonic Spider-Man and a pair of vicious mandibles. Despite a flurry of public concern to the contrary, murder hornets do not murder people; they kill honeybees. The hornets loiter outside bee hives and gruesomely decapitate emerging worker bees, dismembering the unfortunate victims and feeding the body parts to their larvae.

This carnage can go on until a hive is completely annihilated, the crime scene marked by thousands of scattered corpses. In some places, bees do fight back. Bees in the hornets’ native range have evolved a defensive tactic whereby a mob of bees will hurl themselves at a hornet that enters the hive, covering the invader in a ball-like mass and then vibrating their flight muscles to generate so much heat, up to 47C, that the hornet is roasted alive. Honeybees in Europe and North America, however, are unused to the hornet and are essentially helpless in face of the slaughter.

As its name suggests, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) is native to the forests and mountain foothills of east and south-east Asia. It is commonly mixed up with its cousin, the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina), which has found its way to Europe and dismembered so many honeybees in the UK and France that bee-keepers have fretted over the viability of colonies already under stress from varroa mites and pesticides. Vespa mandarinia, meanwhile, has launched an assault on the western coast of North America, most likely hitching a ride over on cargo shipping.

Agriculture department workers clear Asian giant hornets in Washington state, US, October 2020. Photograph: Elaine Thompson/AFP/Getty Images

Three confirmed specimens were discovered by surprised Canadian authorities on Vancouver Island in August 2019, then another hornet was found further south, close to the US border. By December, the species was spotted again, this time in the US, about 12 miles further south in the state of Washington. One beekeeper, stung a few times by irate hornets, set the entire colony on fire to destroy it. Another fresh hornet queen, found 15 miles south-west of the next nearest find, suggested either a repeated influx from overseas or a vigorous dispersal by the hornets.

By May 2020, with the hornet appearing to have gained a decent foothold on the west coast, the situation had attracted the attention of the New York Times, which ran a story headlined “‘Murder Hornets’ in the US: The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet.” Climate change could help turbocharge the pace of the hornet’s advance, similar to the astonishing travels of the Asian hornet in France, where it has moved at nearly 50 miles a year since arriving in the early 00s and is now found in the Alps.

It’s natural to get squeamish over the idea of a squadron of murderous hornets or the idea that those ever-durable cockroaches will march on despite the surging heat. The genuinely scary part of all this, though, is climate breakdown itself, an existential threat we have brought upon ourselves and all other living creatures that we still, despite decades of increasingly frantic warnings, move too sluggishly to avert.

But as we’ve reacted so grudgingly and ponderously to the menace of flooding, storms and droughts that can spark civil unrest and even wars, what hope is there that the plight of insects will spur us on? A more realistic goal is a concerted effort to restore complex, connected insect-friendly habitat and ensure that it remains largely toxin free, in the hope that this will at least parcel out a little time and space from the onslaught of the climate crisis. Although climate breakdown can often feel like a drawn-out, almost imperceptible rearrangement that far-off generations will have to deal with, it is also punctuated with lacerating reminders that it’s already well under way.

This is an edited extract from The Insect Crisis: the fall of the tiny empires that run the world, published on 20 January by Atlantic

5 things you should know about the greenhouse gases warming the planet

UN NEWS

News stories about the climate crisis often contain mentions of greenhouse gases, and the greenhouse effect. Whilst most will find the analogy easy to understand, what exactly are these gases, and why are they contributing to the warming of the Earth?

© Apratim Pal I On bone-dry land, severely affected by drought, two women search for their daily water supply.

1. What is the greenhouse effect?

In a greenhouse, sunlight enters, and heat is retained. The greenhouse effect describes a similar phenomenon on a planetary scale but, instead of the glass of a greenhouse,  certain gases are increasingly raising global temperatures.

The surface of the Earth absorbs just under half of the sun’s energy, while the atmosphere absorbs 23 per cent, and the rest is reflected back into space. Natural processes ensure that the amount of incoming and outgoing energy is equal, keeping the planet’s temperature stable.

However, human activity is resulting in the increased emission of so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs) which, unlike other atmospheric gases such as oxygen and nitrogen, becomes trapped in the atmosphere, unable to escape the planet. This energy returns to the surface, where it is reabsorbed.

Because more energy enters than exits the planet, surface temperatures increase until a new balance is achieved. 

2. Why does the warming matter?

Unsplash/Johannes Plenio I Carbon dioxide levels continue at record levels, despite the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This temperature increase has long-term, adverse effects on the climate, and affects a myriad of natural systems. Effects include increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events – including flooding, droughts, wildfires and hurricanes – that affect millions of people and cause trillions in economic losses.

“Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions endanger human and environmental health,” says Mark Radka, Chief of the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Energy and Climate Branch. “And the impacts will become more widespread and severe without strong climate action.”

GHG emissions are critical to understanding and addressing the climate crisis: despite an initial dip due to COVID-19, the latest UNEP Emissions Gap Report shows a rebound, and forecasts a disastrous global temperature rise of at least 2.7 degrees this century, unless countries make much greater efforts to reduce emissions.

The report found that GHG emissions need to be halved by 2030, if we are to limit global warming to 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

3. What are the major greenhouse gases?

Water vapour is the biggest overall contributor to the greenhouse effect. However, almost all the water vapour in the atmosphere comes from natural processes.

Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide are the major GHGs to worry about. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years, methane for around a decade, and nitrous oxide for approximately 120 years.

Measured over a 20-year period, methane is 80 times more potent than CO2 in causing global warming, while nitrous oxide is 280 times more potent.

4. How is human activity producing these greenhouse gases?

Coal, oil, and natural gas continue to power many parts of the world. Carbon is the main element in these fuels and, when they’re burned to generate electricity, power transportation, or provide heat, they produce CO2.

Oil and gas extraction, coal mining, and waste landfills account for 55 per cent of human-caused methane emissions. Approximately 32 per cent of human-caused methane emissions are attributable to cows, sheep and other ruminants that ferment food in their stomachs. Manure decomposition is another agricultural source of the gas, as is rice cultivation. 

Unsplash/TJK I Wind farms generate electricity and reduce reliance on coal-powered energy.

Human-caused nitrous oxide emissions largely arise from agriculture practices. Bacteria in soil and water naturally convert nitrogen into nitrous oxide, but fertilizer use and run-off add to this process by putting more nitrogen into the environment.

Fluorinated gases – such as hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – are GHGs that do not occur naturally. Hydrofluorocarbons are refrigerants used as alternatives to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which, having depleted the ozone layer,were phased out thanks to the Montreal Protocol. The others have industrial and commercial uses.

While fluorinated gases are far less prevalent than other GHGs and do not deplete the ozone layer like CFCs, they are still very powerful. Over a 20-year period, the global warming potential of some fluorinated gases is up to 16,300 times greater than that of CO2.

5. What can we do to reduce GHG emissions?

Shifting to renewable energy, putting a price on carbon, and phasing out coal are all important elements in reducing GHG emissions. Ultimately, stronger emission-reduction targets are necessary for the preservation of long-term human and environmental health.

“We need to implement strong policies that back the raised ambitions,” says Mr. Radka. “We cannot continue down the same path and expect better results. Action is needed now.”

During COP26, the European Union and the United States launched the Global Methane Pledge, which will see over 100 countries aim to reduce 30 per cent of methane emissions in the fuel, agriculture and waste sectors by 2030.

Despite the challenges, there is reason to be positive. From 2010 to 2021, policies were put in place  to lower annual emissions by 11 gigatons by 2030 compared to what would have otherwise happened. Individuals can also join the UN’s #ActNow campaign for ideas to take climate-positive actions.

By making choices that have less harmful effects on the environment, everyone can be a part of the solution and influence change. Speaking up is one way to multiply impact and create change on a much bigger scale.

UNEP’s role in reducing GHGs

• UNEP has outlined its six-sector solution, which can reduce 29–32 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2030 to meet the 1.5°C warming limit. The six sectors identified are: energy; industry; agricultureand food; forests andland use; transport; and buildings and cities.

• UNEP also maintains an online “Climate Note,” a tool that visualizes the changing state of the climate with a baseline of 1990.

• Through its other multilateral environmental agreements and reports, UNEP raises awareness and advocates for effective environmental action. UNEP will continue to work closely with its 193 Member States and other stakeholders to set the environmental agenda and advocate for a drastic reduction in GHG emissions.
   

Alok Sharma: Cop26 must not become ‘bunch of meaningless promises’

Fiona Harvey

Climate summit president makes clear UK net zero agenda is responsibility of all government colleagues

Alok Sharma said the UK would be judged by the rest of the world on its delivery of climate goals. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Tackling the climate crisis must be a whole government effort or risk the Cop26 climate summit becoming “just a bunch of meaningless promises”, the cabinet minister who chaired the UN summit has said.

Alok Sharma, who acted as president for Cop26 in November, made clear that all of his colleagues must bear a joint responsibility for the UK’s net zero agenda, and that the international community viewed continued UK efforts as vital.

“Given that people do see that the UK has shown a great deal of international leadership when it comes to climate, it’s important we maintain that focus across the whole of the UK government,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “When it comes to domestic policy, it’s vital that every country – including the UK – focuses on delivery.”

Without a focus on net zero from the government, there was a danger that the progress made in Glasgow would be undermined, said Sharma.

“What people will judge us on, as they will also judge other governments on, is delivery [on climate goals],” said Sharma. “The key issue is to show that countries are delivering on [their Cop26] commitments and they are not wavering. That is what is going to give confidence to parties [to the Paris agreement], the climate vulnerable countries, to civil society, but globally as well, that we are making progress on promises – that it’s not just a bunch of meaningless promises, that there is real commitment to deliver them as well.”

The UK continues to act as president of the ongoing diplomatic effort to fulfil the 2015 Paris agreement until Egypt takes over next November. Sharma is likely to hold the role until then, though he would not be drawn on rumoured proposals for him to lead a new cross-cutting government department to oversee net zero.

Sharma’s impassioned intervention on net zero comes at a crucial time for the government’s commitment to the climate crisis. As Boris Johnson has been embroiled in scandal over Downing Street parties and sleaze allegations, rival camps have sought to distance themselves from Johnson’s green goals, in order to court the right wing of the Tory party, making the net zero effort a major flashpoint.

When Lord Frost resigned recently, he let it be known that the net zero agenda was one of his top areas of disagreement with Johnson, alongside Brexit policy. As the Guardian has previously revealed, there is a rift between the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and Johnson over the climate issue, while the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, pointedly omitted even to mention November’s Cop26 – the biggest diplomatic event held on British soil – in her first foreign policy speech earlier this month.

But Sharma said the net zero strategy was key to the government’s future. “[The question] for every economy is how you do that [shift to a low-carbon footing], not just one or two sectors, but across the whole of the economy. The issue now is that we push on and deliver on that particular [net zero] strategy itself. That’s what we will be judged on.”

Sharma, who was business secretary before Johnson ordered him to take full-time control of Cop26 last year, pointedly referred to the role of business, a core Tory constituency that has been exasperated by Brexit and other policy confusion. The CBI and other leading business voices have spoken out strongly in favour of net zero, and the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, is said to have undergone a “conversion” from sceptical free-marketeer to green interventionist.

“There has been a clear change in approach from the corporate sector,” said Sharma. “They have demonstrated their understanding that green growth is the future, and net zero is a big opportunity.”

While he declined to explicitly criticise reported plans to cut 20% of Foreign Office staff, he made clear his concern. “Given that we have said we do see tackling climate change and biodiversity as a top international priority for the UK, it’s important to back that up with having the right presence in our embassies and high commissions around the world,” he said.

Sharma also stressed his personal loyalty to Johnson, and his own lack of interest in any leadership contest. “I don’t think even my mother has suggested that as a credible possibility! I have always backed the prime minister.”

Johnson was fully behind the net zero effort, he added. “This is an agenda that he has followed for a long period. I worked with him at the Foreign Office where I was one of his junior ministers, and this whole issue on biodiversity, on climate, this was an agenda he focused on even at that point.”

Sharma said reactions to the outcomes of Cop26 had grown even more positive in the weeks since it closed. “The feedback from counterparts around the world is that they do think we got something historic over the line,” he said.

His next task is to ensure that the world’s biggest emitters – including big G20 economies – return to the negotiating table next year with improved and detailed plans on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The prospect of holding global temperature rises to 1.5C – which scientists warn is the limit of safety – was still uncertain. He said: “We’ve absolutely kept it alive but the pulse is still weak. That’s why this next year, and the following year, are going to be very much about pushing forward on the delivery of the commitments that have been made.”

Greta Thunberg says it’s ‘strange’ Joe Biden is considered a climate leader

Maya Yang

Environmental activist criticises US president for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure

Greta Thunberg poses for a photo with a sign reading ‘School strike for climate’ as she protests in front of the Swedish parliament in November. Photograph: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

In an interview with the Washington Post, the 18-year old Swedish environmental activist rejected the idea that the US president is a leader on climate issues.

“It’s strange that people think of Joe Biden as a leader for the climate when you see what his administration is doing,” she said. “The US is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure.

“Why is the US 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.”

Asked what she wants politicians like Biden to do, Thunberg said: “First of all, we have to understand what is the emergency.

“We are trying to find a solution to a crisis that we don’t understand … 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?”

In November, Thunberg called the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow “a failure”, arguing it “turned into a PR event” in which “leaders are not doing anything” except “actively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks” in order to keep profiting from a “destructive system”.

Speaking to the Post, Thunberg said that a Cop26 final agreement “which is very much an achievement” will not amount to anything unless it increases ambitions which leaders then fulfill.

One of the positives of Cop26, she said, was that it revealed that “under current circumstances, within current systems, we won’t be able to solve the climate crisis unless there is massive pressure from the outside”.

'Cop26 is a failure': Greta Thunberg rallies climate activists in Glasgow – video

Thunberg said global summits like Cop26 presented a “big opportunity” for public mobilization to highlight the climate crisis.

In Glasgow, Biden vowed that the US would “lead by example” in the fight to avoid global heating beyond 1.5C. He made new promises to cut down on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and to end deforestation, drawing widespread praise.

Nonetheless, when more than 40 countries announced a promise to end coal mining, the US was absent from the list.

In a recent report, the UN environment program and other researchers found that global production of oil and gas is on track to rise over the next 20 years at a rate that will result in double the fossil fuel production in 2030 consistent with a 1.5C rise.

The report found that the US projects increases in oil and gas production by 17% and 12% respectively by 2030.

The Biden administration has approved at least 3,091 new drilling permits on public lands at a rate of 223 permits a month, at a faster rate than the Trump administration.

In November, the US held the largest-ever auction of oil and gas drilling leases in Gulf of Mexico history, offering up more than 80m acres of seabed.

Thunberg told the Post: “What’s holding us back is that we lack the political will.

“Our goal is to find a solution that allows us to continue life [as it is] today,” she said. “… 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 smoother. But now it’s a different situation.”

UNESCO marks semi-centennial anniversary of biosphere preservation

FAO/João Roberto Ripper I Farmers, who gatherer flowers in the Southern Espinhaço Mountain Range in Brazil, enhance biodiversity and preserve traditional knowledge.

“This is really a programme for the people, because people are part of nature…so they are incorporated in nature protection but also in sustainable use of natural resources”, said Miguel Clusener Godt, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) MAB Programme Secretary.

Where we stand

© UNESCO

Today 727 biosphere reserves integrate nature conservation and sustainable development in 131 countries, including 22 transboundary sites.

In Africa there are 86 sites in 31 countries; Arab States, 35 sites in 14 countries; Asia and the Pacific, 168 sites in 40 countries; Europe and North America 306 sites in 24 countries; and 132 sites in 24 Latin American and the Caribbean countries.

If bioreserves worldwide were to be put together, Mr. Godt said that they would be equivalent to about five per cent of the world’s surface, spanning  6,812,000 km² or “around the size of Australia”.  

Africa

The diverse vegetation and unique fauna in Tanzania’s Gombe Masito Ugalla Biosphere Reserve is also home to the largest chimpanzee community in the country and includes the Gombe National Park, forest land reserves and part of Lake Tanganyika.

Faunal species in the area include African elephants, ornate frogs and eight primate species.

© UNESCO I The core area of the Gombe Masito Ugalla Biosphere Reserve in Tanzania is endowed with natural, scenic, cultural and social attributes, including the largest chimpanzee community in the country.

Flora there includes a species discovered in, and named after, Gombe, while the biodiversity of Lake Tanganyika encompasses over 300 fish species, 250 bird species, and reptiles, such as the water cobra and the Tanganyika water snake. 

The core area of the Gombe Masito Ugalla Biosphere Reserve in Tanzania is endowed with natural, scenic, cultural and social attributes, including the largest chimpanzee community in the country.

Asia and the Pacific

The Maolan in China was listed as a biosphere reserve in 1996. It lies in the Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Guizhou Province and covers an area of 20,000 hectares, with a forest coverage of 88.61 per cent.

Renowned for its “hugging trees” which cling tenaciously to the rocks of the mountain landscape, the rich biodiversity also includes pheasants, orchids and magnolias.

The local Yao, Buyi and Shui indigenous peoples value their region’s environment and cohabit harmoniously with nature. As the trees provide them with vital resources, for over 1,000 years local communities have performed ceremonial practices and rituals to care for the trees. 

Arab States

© UNESCO

Located on the western slopes of the Mount Lebanon range and overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the 6,500-hectare biosphere reserve of Jabal Moussa encompasses the ‘Mount of Moses’ – an important site to Christian pilgrims – and its seven villages.

Jabal Moussa’s landscape, preserved throughout centuries, conceals the markings of a region at the meeting point of civilizations, which archaeologists are still unearthing.

Only 40 km to the north-east of Beirut, the biosphere reserve is three times as large as the city, and together with the Shouf and Jabal Rihane biosphere reserves forms an ecological corridor running along Lebanon’s mountainous backbone.

Latin America and the Caribbean

Located in south-east Uruguay, Bañados del Este harbours a remarkable complex of ecosystems, including white sand beaches, dunes and lagoons along the Atlantic coast and is home to diverse wildlife that remains almost intact both on land and at sea.

The biosphere reserve covers 12,500 km² of Uruguay’s eastern coast and is also home to the State’s highest summit, Cerro Catedral.

Hidden among the dunes, this tourist destination is among the most popular in the biosphere reserve and the perfect spot to connect with nature. Due to its remoteness, there is no connection to the local grid or landlines, but the local population is able to access mobile networks and the internet.

Europe

In Spain, transitioning to clean energy at the El Hierro Biosphere Reserve exemplifies ongoing efforts to live in harmony with nature.

The biosphere reserve covers the entire island and some of its waters, with 60 per cent of the island integrated into the core zone and buffer areas.

© UNESCO I El Hierro, a volcanic island in Spain, has an incredibly diverse landscape and a great variety of plant and animal life.

El Hierro is aiming to produce 100 per cent of its electricity from renewables.

Meanwhile, at least 2,604 species of flora and fauna have been recorded on the island, and the reserve is a safe-haven for species of friendly sea-faring mammals.