Disease outbreaks could be coming your way — our interactive map shows how you could be affected.
You don’t have to wait decades to witness the impacts of climate change in the United States. Just ask people like Mark Elwin, a carpenter in Maine whose life was devastated after he was infected by a blood parasite.
The infection caused severe fever and pain that required Elwin to be hospitalized, and eventually left him unable to return to his job. He’s one of thousands of Americans who have already become victims of the tick-borne diseases outbreaks currently spreading across the Northeast because of warming temperatures.
As average temperatures across the United States and the rest of the world climb, disease-carrying ticks and insects have started spreading farther north, reaching places where winters were previously too long and cold for them to survive. Tick populations in wintery Maine, for instance, have exploded, causing cases of some diseases to multiply by 30 times in just the past decade.
Scientists have predicted that climate change is creating prime conditions for the spread of insects and contagions — bringing cases of plague from memories of medieval history to California’s Silicon Valley and tropical blood parasites to the plains of Nebraska. Some Texans could even become allergic to eating meat as a result of tick bites.
Despite these predictions President Trump has slashed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget to fight global epidemics by 80 percent. Although most of this funding goes to efforts in other countries, critics say the cut leaves the United States vulnerable to diseases that could be introduced to the country.
Speaking to the Boston Globe, Daniel Brooks, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nebraska, explained: ‘‘The warmer the planet gets, the more pathogens and vectors from the tropics and subtropics are going to move into the temperate zones. Countries such as the United States tend to have a false sense of security, but vectors and pathogens don’t understand international boundaries. You can’t just put up a fence to keep them out.’’
How could this affect you? Below, explore the counties where scientists predict 10 key diseases could spread or worsen because of climate change.
(Mobile users: click counties to select; desktop users: mouse over for results. The darker the county, the greater the disease risk.)
Get a closer look: Enter your ZIP code for more information about disease risks in your town or city.
Remember, these are just 10 of many possible diseases, and diseases that are already established in your area may not show up in this search.
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Diseases risks in other parts of the country:
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Sources and methods:
The data used to visualize national vector-borne disease risks due to climate change were derived from a compilation of predictive maps from suitable studies found through a literature search involving geospatial modeling of habitat suitability of vectors and/or pathogens. These studies utilized a range of internationally accepted climate models by CSIRO, Hadley and CCCma, for example, which further utilized a range of climate change scenarios/Representative Concentration Pathways established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The predictive time scale of these studies ranged from the years 2020 to 2080. Geographic scales and units of study ranged from counties to meters. Once identified, the published maps were georeferenced and areas with spreading and/or intensifying disease risks were isolated and used to build a compilation of general future disease risks to the country, visualized here. Considering the range of attributes used to build these predictive models and maps, the visuals presented here do not represent a single future scenario but paint a broad picture of possible future threats.
View supplemental information with the full list of mapping data and disease information sources here.
Tools used to generate map data were ESRI ArcMap 10.5.1 and Adobe Photoshop CC 2017.
Photo credits:
Ixodes scapularis by Patrick Randall CC BY-NC-SA.
Aedes aegypti from E. A. Goeldi (1905) Os Mosquitos no Pará. Memorias do Museu Goeldi. Pará, Brazil., Figure 2 from Plate 1 in the Appendix CC0.
Lutzomyia longipalpis from Ray Wilson, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine – (2009) PLoS Pathogens Issue Image – Vol. 5(8) August 2009. PLoS Pathog 5(8): ev05.i08. CC BY.
Anopheles quadrimaculatus by Edward McCellan, USCDCP CC0.
Lone star tick by CDC CC0.
Oropsylla Montana flea by Kat Masback CC BY-SA.
Triatoma gerstaeckeri by Drriss & Marrionn CC BY-NC-SA.
DOUGLAS, Ariz.— Public Works director Lynn Kartchner guides his city pickup truck down the overgrown, littered alleys of the Bay Acres mobile-home community in search of raw sewage.
Bay Acres’ small lots were carved from the desert 10 miles north of the Mexican border in the 1970s without any sewer connections, requiring each trailer to be connected to a septic tank and leach field. But septic systems built into clay-laden soils could only last so long. They were destined to fail.
While some homes are well kept, many bear the classic trappings of slums, including chained pit bulls guarding dilapidated singlewides and makeshift auto-repair businesses in back yards.
It doesn’t take Kartchner long to find his target.
Black sewage seeping from a failed septic system oozes into the alley, pooling in tire ruts. The black water indicates it has turned “septic,” meaning the water has become dangerously polluted.
Photo: John Dougherty
“There’s overflows of effluent all over the place,” Kartchner says. “You’ve got dogs and kids out there playing in it.” The community, he says, has had outbreaks of cholera and hepatitis and there is worry that polio could appear.
A Cochise County Health Department official later downplays that assertion, saying no “clusters” or disease “outbreaks” related to sewage exposure in Bay Acres have been reported to the county.
“Is it a risk? Absolutely,” says Carl Hooper, a Cochise County environmental health specialist. “Is it a concern? Absolutely.” Otherwise, he says, he wouldn’t be going down there every month and depositing chlorine tablets to disinfect the contaminated water.
Despite more than $10 billion in environmental infrastructure investments along both sides of the border by the United States and Mexico since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, many communities ranging in size from Tijuana to Bay Acres lack safe wastewater-treatment systems, threatening the public health of millions of people on both sides of the border.
“It’s definitely a public-health risk,” says Kelly Reynolds, an associate professor of public health at the University of Arizona. “If you look, historically and currently, at any developing country that doesn’t have some dependable infrastructure for sewage containment and treatment, there’s always a higher level of morbidity and mortality” from waterborne infectious disease.
Failing or nonexistent wastewater treatment systems on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border can impact public health on the other side, particularly if groundwater is used for drinking water, as is common in border communities.
“The way water moves underground, the way sewage moves underground, there’s no differentiation between where the border is,” Reynolds says. “There is definitely the potential for cross-contamination on either side of the border.”
Most communities along both sides of the border lack the financial resources to build wastewater-treatment systems, which can cost tens of millions of dollars and more. Communities are forced to rely heavily on federal grants and loans.
The Trump administration and Congress are cutting back on key infrastructure funding programs and, in some cases, seeking to eliminate all spending. The North American Development Bank, which is jointly owned and operated by Mexico and the United States, is facing a sharp reduction in lending unless both nations increase their capital contributions. The Environmental Protection Agency’s primary grant fund for border infrastructure projects is nearly depleted, and the Trump administration and House Republicans are requesting no additional money.
Without continuous investment in upgrading, maintaining and expanding facilities, wastewater systems fail. Geography then takes over and untreated sewage flows downhill — usually from higher-elevation Mexican border towns into their sister communities in the United States. The impact is felt border-wide, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
In Arizona border communities, waterborne diseases such as hepatitis A and shigellosis, occur at more than three times the rate in the rest of the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Hepatitis A is a liver disease associated with unhealthy wastewater disposal and the use of inadequate or contaminated water. Shigellosis is a diarrheal disease often the result of poor sanitation, lack of water or wastewater facilities, or the use of contaminated water and food. It is common in poverty-stricken communities such as Bay Acres.
The tale of wastewater treatment, or the lack thereof, in two small Arizona border towns provides insight into the complex political, financial, regulatory and emotional factors that have allowed a festering public health menace to continue for decades.
A novel proposal by a third Arizona border town offers a possible solution, but it would require cooperation at the presidential levels of both countries, a prospect dimmed by President’s Trump harsh rhetoric toward Mexico and demands for a $25 billion border wall.
Mystery Sewage Flows
After decades of delays, the city of Douglas plans to install sewer lines in Bay Acres to eliminate the septic systems on 342 lots. But first it must expand its wastewater treatment plant, which operates near, and occasionally beyond, its 2 million gallon-per-day capacity.
The plant abuts the Mexican border immediately north of the much larger Agua Prieta, Sonora. The treatment plant is wedged between the border fence and hills of black waste rock called slag, generated decades ago when Douglas was the hub of a major copper-producing region in southern Arizona. At the time, a Phelps Dodge Corp. copper smelter was one of the largest single-source sulfur dioxide polluters in the United States. When it closed in 1987, the surrounding community went into economic decline. Now one of the area’s biggest employers is a state prison.
By the late 1990s, the city couldn’t afford to upgrade its 80-year-old wastewater collection system, water-delivery network or wastewater-treatment plant. Failing septic tanks were becoming a health hazard in places like Bay Acres.
The North American Development Bank helped arrange for more than $8 million in financing in the early 2000s, allowing the city to rebuild its water and sewer connection network and make improvements to the treatment plant. But there wasn’t enough money to hook Bay Acres up to the improved system.
The Bay Acres residents are finally about to see change. The development bank, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Arizona Water Infrastructure Financing Authority are helping the city finance a $16.3 million project to expand the treatment plant to 2.6 million gallons a day and connect Bay Acres.
Douglas City Manager Jim Russell says construction on the treatment plant is expected to begin later this spring. The improvements can’t come soon enough.
Lynn Kartchner. Photo: John Dougherty
Kartchner, the Douglas public works director, told The Revelator on two separate occasions that untreated sewage is appearing in the Douglas wastewater discharge pipe immediately after it crosses under the border wall into Agua Prieta.
The United States and Mexico have a longstanding agreement that Agua Prieta would accept treated wastewater from Douglas and use it to irrigate farms. But releases of untreated raw sewage would violate the binational agreement.
Kartchner insists that the Douglas wastewater facility is not the source of the untreated sewage. Instead he blames Mexico.
“There is no untreated water that goes through there,” he says referring to the Douglas wastewater-outfall pipe. “There’s a few thousand (gallons) that come up from Mexico and join our line as it crosses the border, but that’s their raw sewage, not ours.”
Renata Manning, the North American Development Bank’s director of projects, says she was not aware of any raw sewage in the Douglas outfall pipe until told of Kartchner’s comments. She contradicted Kartchner’s explanation that it was coming from Mexico.
“The (Agua Prieta) sewage collection system does not intersect with the Douglas outfall pipeline,” she says, adding that Agua Prieta city officials also confirmed this on Mar. 1. Manning says the bank is “not aware of the source of the wastewater that may be appearing in the outfall box on the Mexican side.”
In late February The Revelator observed what appeared to be feces in a cement junction box where the Douglas outfall pipe enters Mexico just feet away from the border fence. Douglas’ 20-inch diameter outfall pipe connects with a 10-inch Mexican pipe that carries the Douglas effluent underneath a two-lane dirt road and into retention ponds about 40 yards south of the border fence.
Douglas outfall junction box. Photo: John Dougherty
The junction box is in disrepair and overflow wastewater was observed leaking from it and flowing into a ditch between the border wall and a nearby street.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. section of International Boundary and Water Commission, which is part of the State Department, stated on Tuesday that the agency sent engineers to inspect the outfall and “they did not find any sewer pipe connection to the outfall sewer line or structure, or any evidence of raw sewage in the discharge flow.” The commission provides binational solutions to issues that arise regarding boundary demarcation, national ownership of waters, sanitation, water quality, and flood control in the U.S.-Mexico border region.
Erin Jordan, an Arizona Department of Environmental Quality spokeswoman, says the Douglas wastewater treatment plant is in compliance with state regulations and “is not discharging raw sewage.” The state, however, does not have jurisdiction across the border to inspect the junction box, she says.
Margot Perez-Sullivan, an Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 spokeswoman, says it is possible that stagnant water from the wastewater holding ponds is backing up in the sewage junction box.“There is no raw sewage discharge from the U.S. nor is there any connection between the Agua Prieta sewer system and the junction box,” she says.
Douglas City Manager Russell stated in an email on Wednesday email that the city “is not discharging, in any way, any waste into” Agua Prieta. Russell states that the city believes any raw sewage showing up in the Douglas outfall is coming from Agua Prieta sewage pipes that drain into the wastewater holding ponds and untreated waste is backing up in the outfall.
It could not be independently confirmed Wednesday whether Agua Prieta has sewage pipes that dump into the wastewater reservoirs.
If raw sewage is being released from the United States into Mexico it would show how difficult it is for both nations to properly manage waste flows at the border. This would also signify the need for more cooperation at a time of high political tensions between the United States and Mexico and declining funds for improving environmental infrastructure along the border.
“The irony here is that it is usually the United States that finds itself at the receiving end of sewage flows that cross or join the boundary, as seen at Laredo, Texas, Nogales, Ariz., Calexico, Calif., and San Diego,” says Steve Mumme, a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where he specializes in comparative environmental politics and policy with an emphasis on Mexican government and U.S.-Mexican relations.
“If this is a chronic problem, Mexico is well within its rights to ask the U.S. to fix it,” he says.
While the reports of raw sewage in the Douglas outfall remains a mystery, residents in Bay Acres provided a mixed reaction to having the community finally hooked up to the sewer system.
Miguel Ochoa, who has lived Bay Acres for 10 years, says it is “very good” that the septic tanks will be removed because bad smells often occur at night and there are a lot of cockroaches in the neighborhood, which he blames on the open sewers. The new sewer system, he says, will encourage homeowners to upgrade their properties.
But other residents in the impoverished community were more worried about the additional cost of having to pay $40 a month for city sewage hookups rather than free disposal in septic systems — even if they are leaking raw sewage.
“After they do this we will start paying and I think that will be a heavy impact,” says Norma Loreto, who has lived in Bay Acres for more than 20 years, and shares a trailer with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson.
Norma Loreto and her grandson. Photo: John Dougherty
Raw Sewage Contaminates Twin Border Towns
Less than 30 miles west, in the twin border towns of Naco, Sonora, and Naco, Ariz., raw sewage has intermittently flowed from Mexico into the United States for decades. The untreated sewage spills over from sediment-filled treatment ponds on the east side of the Sonoran town and from sewer manholes on the west side of town.
The Naco, Sonora, wastewater and potable water-supply system was upgraded in the late 1990s with $200,000 in North American Development Bank funds and a $454,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant. The wastewater system, however, is once again failing from a lack of maintenance.
Since the Mexican town is at a higher elevation than its sister city, the sewage flows beneath the border fence and, depending on the flow rate, into Greenbush Draw, an ephemeral stream that runs within 600 feet of the primary drinking water wellfield for communities north of the border, including nearby Bisbee.
Greenbush Draw. Photo: John Dougherty
On the west side of the Sonoran town, workers have punched holes in the sides of manhole standpipes to prevent raw sewage from backing up inside homes, allowing it to discharge directly on the ground.
In late February raw sewage was observed pouring out of the side of a manhole pipe about 15 yards south of the border fence. A stream of sewage flowed down a dirt road in Naco, Sonora, before turning north beneath the border fence.
On the east side, sewage could be seen draining from the holding ponds and flowing beneath the border fence, where it collected in a low spot on a Border Patrol dirt road. During heavy flows the sewage crosses the road and drains into the desert toward Greenbush Draw, says Hooper, the Cochise County environmental health specialist.
During a late February inspection of the site by TheRevelator, the overwhelming stench from the untreated sewage made it uncomfortable to be nearby for more than a few minutes before a headache set in.
Hooper routinely places disinfecting chlorine tablets in pools of sewage north of the border. Nevertheless, Hooper says increased levels of fecal coliform bacteria have been detected in Greenbush Draw. The local water utility is putting the maximum allowable amount of chlorine into drinking water drawn from nearby wells.
Chlorine tabs in sewage. Photo: John Dougherty
The raw sewage flows have recently been averaging about 60 gallons per minute, but Hooper says there have been surges where more than 6,000 gallons a minute of untreated sewage is released into the United States.
“Depending on the flow rate, it could go a couple of hundred yards or up to a mile and quarter,” Hooper says. During the heavy monsoon summer rains, the sewage can be swept about 20 miles down Greenbush Draw into the environmentally critical San Pedro River.
Last summer heavy rains unleashed a torrent of raw sewage from Mexico that flowed into Greenbush Draw and through a nearby cattle ranch. The incursion attracted widespread press coverage, and Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, along with Rep. Martha McSally, sent joint letters complaining about the situation to the EPA and the International Boundary and Water Commission.
“This flow of sewage poses a health, safety, and economic risk to Arizona’s vulnerable border towns” the joint letter stated, “and we are greatly concerned about the lack of response of the federal agencies tasked with the oversight of this issue.”
The International Boundary and Water Commission provided Naco, Sonora, with a pump to help reduce the amount of sewage in sedimentation ponds and the EPA provided $10,000 to help defray emergency repairs.
But the repairs have failed to stem the untreated sewage flows.
Hooper says one potential solution to the problem would be to connect the Naco, Sonora, wastewater system to the Naco, Ariz., system, which has capacity to handle the overflows. This could be done with only 300 feet of pipe at a relatively low cost, he says.
The Naco Sanitary District, which operates the Naco, Ariz., wastewater collection and treatment system, rejected the proposal last fall during a contentious meeting fraught with harsh overtones against allowing Mexican sewage into the treatment system.
Hooper says “they almost took my head off” when he suggested the proposal.
Naco Sanitary District general manager Rosa Ramirez says the board was “not necessarily opposed” to the idea but wanted more details on how Mexican sewage would impact their wastewater treatment system, particularly if toxic chemicals were present. “We were concerned not with just the sewage but what else was coming through,” she says.
Ramirez confirmed that political opposition to accepting sewage from Mexico was part of the reason the district did not agree to the proposal. She declined to elaborate and referred The Revelator to district board president Jim Dwyer, who in turn declined to comment.
Board member David Loyd said he another member of the five-person board wanted to take action to address the problem. “Speaking personally, the board was regressive,” Loyd says. “Considering the conditions, personally, I and one other member felt that we missed an opportunity to be progressive.”
Congressional finger-pointing and a lack of adequate funding to construct environmental infrastructure, along with a refusal by the Naco Sanitary District to treat sewage spills from its neighbor, means untreated wastewater will continue to flow from Naco, Sonora, into Arizona for years to come.
“We all know what needs to be done but folks who could potentially be part of the solution are often the same ones who say we don’t want (to process Mexican sewage) here,” says Hooper. “‘It’s going to ruin my property values.’ There’s a laundry list of excuses that are out there.”
Bisbee Proposes a Radical Idea
A common problem in Mexican border towns is the lack of qualified personnel and money to operate and maintain wastewater-treatment systems.
Municipal elections are held every three years, and a new mayor may appoint unqualified political supporters to jobs that require technical training. Many impoverished Mexicans, meanwhile, are reluctant or unable to pay their monthly water and sewer bills. Local politicians, in turn, may use promises of low utility rates to get elected.
This can result in situations where Mexican utilities lack the funding and expertise to manage wastewater systems — just like in Naco, Sonora.
“They don’t have the money or the expertise to man a modern plant and they don’t have the money and wherewithal to manage what they have,” says Andy Haratyk, Public Works operations manager for Bisbee.
Rather than browbeat Mexico and demand political, financial and technical reforms that could stop the sewage from flowing across the border but are unlikely to occur anytime soon, Haratyk is proposing a solution.
“We will take your water,” he says. “We will bring it to our plant and treat it and we get to keep the water to either sell or to sell discharge credits” for replenishing the ground water basin. “That will be how we recoup our costs.”
Bisbee’s plan would require the North American Development Bank and EPA to provide the city with approximately $20 million spread out over several years. This would allow the city to add additional capacity to treat about 500,000 gallons a day of wastewater from Naco.
Haratyk emphasizes that Bisbee’s proposal to treat Naco’s wastewater would be “at no cost to the city of Bisbee or the citizens of Bisbee. Not a penny.” The plan would also not require any payment from Naco residents or the Sonoran city, both of which are hard-pressed for money, he says.
The Bisbee expansion would cost about one-third of what it would take to construct a new wastewater plant in Naco, Sonora, which lacks the technical manpower to run a new plant and the financial strength to maintain it.
“What’s important to me is that we can’t allow this to continue to be happening for the health, safety and welfare of our citizens,” Haratyk says. “This is the least expensive way to protect the United States of America and the people I live with.”
One major challenge is that plan will require a treaty with Mexico, because wastewater that could theoretically be reused in Mexico would instead be transferred to the United States, he says.
Haratyk is hopeful that the EPA will fund a feasibility study to firm up the plant’s design and overall cost. If all the details can be hammered out, including a treaty with Mexico for the water, he says the project would take about a year to 18 months to complete.
The North American Development Bank is recommending that the EPA fund a $75,000 technical study on how to address the Naco, Sonora, wastewater needs. “As part of the analysis, we will include the Bisbee treatment option as an alternative,” Manning, the bank’s project manager, says.
Manning calls Bisbee’s proposals “an interesting long-term option,” but she adds that there are several major hurdles to overcome, including obtaining presidential approvals to transfer water from Mexico to the United States.
“The high implementation costs for that option, along with structuring an affordable agreement between the two utilities, may also be significant challenges,” she says.
The political, financial and cultural challenges facing small communities like Douglas and the twin Nacos are repeated in many border communities that lack the financial ability to construct wastewater-treatment systems without assistance from the two federal governments.
“We’re coming at it from a public-health perspective that this is an issue that doesn’t matter what side of the border you live on,” says Hooper, the Cochise County environmental health specialist. “We need to live in a healthy community and this is what it is going to take to get there.”
Ecotourism brings valuable funds for conservation to the islands, but it also delivers a torrent of garbage that could damage this unique ecosystem.
The equatorial rays and humidity welcomed me after I stepped off the plane in Baltra, a small island in the Galápagos that, save for the airport, was otherwise deserted. Waves lapped up against the reddish-brown sand. Small lizards with red bellies darted between the prickly Opunti cacti that dotted the earth. After a short boat ride through the Itabaca Channel — during which I marveled at the opalescent, turquoise waters — I arrived on the island of Santa Cruz and hailed a cab to go to the town center.
Tourists who visit the Galápagos usually pass through Santa Cruz, the most populous and central island in the archipelago. As we made our way through the highlands, our driver kept pace with the cars in front. Suddenly the vehicles in front of us began to slow down. Our driver pointed to the small shoulder on the side of the road and said, “Tortuga.”
I turned my head just quickly enough to catch my first wild giant tortoise sighting in the wild and marveled at how majestically these creatures carried themselves. For the remainder of the ride, I stared intently out the window, hoping to spot another. Instead what I saw was disheartening. Instead of wildlife, empty bottles of sunblock, soda cans and Cheetos wrappers were visible, strewn alongside the road, even though ever-present red and blue signs instructed people not to litter.
Although the Galápagos is often hailed as one of the last remaining beacons of biodiversity, its trash problem has grown worse through the years as more and more tourists flock to see this unique ecosystem. In 2015 more than 220,000 tourists visited the islands — up from just 2,000 back in the late 1960s. “The generation of waste is directly proportional to the growth of the local population and tourism — [the Galápagos’] economic engine,” says Mario Piu, director of the Environmental Management Unit in Santa Cruz. And while there are strict measures to control the number of people who visit, the sheer number of tourists still increases pressure on the ecology of the islands.
The impact of this trash on wildlife — whether it’s litter on the side of the road, plastics swept along by marine currents, or waste generated on cruise ships — hasn’t gone unnoticed. Sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki) on the coast of San Cristobal Island have been found entangled in plastic bags, rubber rings, fishing gear and other debris. Researchers suspect that the waved albatross (Phoebastria irrorata) — notable for having the largest wingspan in all of the Galápagos — are ingesting floating plastic directly from the water, mistaking them for fish. And while there aren’t any recorded instances of giant tortoises choking on plastic debris in Santa Cruz, people have seen fragments of plastic in their poop, a clear sign that the tortoises are somehow ingesting the human-generated waste around them.
Beyond the direct impact, there’s also worry that floating plastics could carry invasive species from other parts of the world into the Galápagos, where they could compete with the native flora and fauna. “This type of invasion is especially disastrous in the Galápagos, with such a high proportion of endemic animals that rely on very specific conditions [for their survival],” says Jessica Howard, a researcher at the Charles Darwin Foundation in Santa Cruz who studies marine plastics as a vector for invasive species to enter the archipelago.
Howard’s worried that if the waste problem persists, it could hurt the same tourism that caused it. “The degradation of the beaches could impact tourism. The economy could be weakened, which would in turn decrease the funds available for research and policy enforcement,” she says.
In response to the amount of waste that’s generated, citizens and organizations are working together in a variety of ways. On another taxi ride into the highlands of Santa Cruz, I saw groups of people collecting roadside trash. Later I learned these were residents who self-organize to collect waste that would later be processed in the landfill. In addition to these community efforts, the World Wildlife Fund has worked with the municipality of Santa Cruz to develop an integrated waste-management system, which includes collecting all the waste in inhabited islands and live-abroad vessels, developing an efficient street-cleaning method, and reducing the use of disposable plastic bags in Santa Cruz. The Galápagos National Park Directorate, Conservation International and Coca Cola Ecuador have also teamed up to collect trash and limit the impacts of plastic waste on the islands. On an eight-day trash excursion along the eastern coast of Isabela Island, the team collected 2.5 tons worth of trash — approximately the weight of 10 adult male giant tortoises.
More broadly the Galápagos’ dirty problem highlights the need to weigh the benefits and costs of otherwise valuable ecotourism-oriented economies around the world. Juan Carlos Garcia, the conservation director for the World Wildlife Foundation in Ecuador, believes that curbing the number of visitors to the islands could reduce unwanted waste in the future. That would be accomplished by increasing the entry fee into restricted areas and revising the tourism standards of land-based hotels to match that of live-aboard vessels like cruise ships. “The existing management system was developed when most of the tourism in Galápagos took place on live-abroad boats. Nowadays, there are more beds in towns than berths in vessels, and this can represent a major threat to the conservation of the protected areas,” he says.
As someone who embarked on a land-based trip in the Galápagos, I was quickly confronted not only by my own ecological footprint but also that of the visitors before me. On a rather remote, 15-mile hike to the sulfur mines on Isabela Island, I was disheartened to find plastic ribbons, bottle caps, candy wrappers and plastic cups strewn alongside the trail. Because it was a path less traveled, it was jarring to think how long that waste must have sat there before I came along and picked it up.
But at the same time, visiting the Galápagos gave me a glimpse of what’s at stake if the potential downfalls of ecotourism are not addressed. On a dive just off the coast of Santa Fe, a school of blue-striped snappers — small fish donning navy pinstripes and a yellowtail — emerged from an underwater cave. Careful not to get water in my ears, I turned my head slowly, only to see the shadows of white-tipped reef sharks moving in the distance. Elsewhere around us marine turtles, spotted eagle rays and pufferfish swam languidly in their home waters. I felt lucky to be immersed in such an untarnished ecosystem, and hoped places like this one could be preserved for generations to come.
Nearly half of all freshwater turtles and tortoises are at risk of disappearing forever, a new report warns.
It’s not easy to be a turtle in the 21st century. A new report warns that freshwater turtles and tortoises are among the world’s most threatened groups of species, with more than 40 percent at risk of extinction due to habitat loss, the illegal pet trade, and consumption for food and traditional medicine.
Among the most threatened species are the Yangtze giant Asian softshell (Rafetus swinhoei), which is down to its last three individuals in China and Vietnam; the ploughshare tortoise (Astrochelys yniphora) of Madagascar, which fetches enormous prices in the illegal pet trade and could disappear from the wild as soon as this year; and the three-striped box turtle (Cuora trifasciata), ownership of which “has become a financial investment and status symbol in China,” according to the report.
Also considered highly at risk: the Nubian flapshell turtle (Cyclanorbis elegans), not seen in the wild in at least 15 years and feared extinct by some conservationists.
All told about half of all tortoise and freshwater turtle species and subspecies are threatened or at risk of extinction.
The authors of the report, which was issued last week by a partnership of 10 turtle conservation organizations, call it “an effort to publicize the plight of tortoises and freshwater turtles by highlighting those species that are at the highest risk of extinction.” Sadly that’s obviously needed, as not much has changed since the previous edition of this report in 2011, which contained a very similar list of turtles. Conservation efforts have benefited a few of these species during that time period, but not enough to improve their overall outlook. In fact the only species from the 2011 list that doesn’t appear in the 2018 edition is the Pinta giant tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii) of the Galápagos, which went extinct in 2012 with the death of world-famous tortoise Lonesome George.
So why should we care? Well, other than the fact that this list contains some stunningly beautiful and interesting species, tortoises and freshwater turtles also serve vitally important ecological roles in their native habitats. As the report points out, various species help to shape rivers and waterways, assist plant populations by dispersing seeds and fungi, and even keep water clean by scavenging dead animals. They’re also significant in human culture and art — which is one of the reasons they’re at risk.
Here’s the list of the 27 most threatened tortoise and freshwater tortoise species. You can learn a lot more about each of them by downloading the full report here.
Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei)
Ploughshare tortoise (Astrochelys yniphora)
Yunnan box turtle (Cuora yunnanensis)
Northern river terrapin (Batagur baska)
Myanmar roofed turtle (Batagur trivittata)
Zhou’s box turtle (Cuora zhoui)
McCord’s box turtle (Cuora mccordi)
Geometric turtle (Psammobates geometricus)
Golden-headed box turtle (Cuora aurocapitata)
Dahl’s toad-headed turtle (Mesoclemmys dahli)
Nubian flapshell turtle (Cyclanorbis elegans)
Three-striped box turtle (Cuora trifasciata)
Burmese star tortoise (Geochelone platynota)
Roti Island snake-headed turtle (Chelodina mccordi)
Southeast Asian narrow-headed softshell turtle (Chitra chitra)
Bellinger River snapping turtle (Myuchelys georgesi)
A new study finds that the big cats and other endangered animals do best in places where there’s no phone coverage.
Jaguars are not impressed by your cell phones.
In fact, phones and jaguars just don’t go well together at all. A new study finds that the big cats and dozens of other threatened mammal species do best in areas where there isn’t much human disturbance — in particular, places where you can’t get any coverage.
The study, published last month in Biological Conservation, looked at the distributions of 45 medium and large mammal species in the Brazilian Atlantic forest and compared that data to the distribution of cell towers in the region. The results: Out of more than 18,000 animal observations (including everything from in-person sightings to tracks and camera traps), only 18 percent occurred in areas where there was decent cell-phone coverage. The relationship was even more striking for threatened species, like the jaguar: Only 4 percent of sightings occurred in locations where you could make a mobile phone call.
Now, it might seem obvious that the very presence of humans (and their phone networks) pushes out wildlife from their former habitats, but this is data that’s never really been used to make conservation decisions before. The study builds on a well-established project called the Human Footprint Index, which looks at factors such as roads, nighttime lighting and human population density to determine the impact of civilization on natural systems and help make conservationists to make strategic decisions about what habitats to protect. That index, though still incredibly useful, is based on data from 2005 and earlier and predates the vast worldwide proliferation of mobile devices. These past dozen years have made quite a difference, the researchers found; their study reveals that many sites which the Human Footprint Index ranks as “roadless” and therefore hospitable to wildlife actually have high levels of cell coverage, indicating they’re more degraded than the index alone would reveal. For example, they wrote, the maps that feed into the Footprint Index often poorly represent things like the accessory roads that lead to cell towers or the power-transmission lines that supply them — the types of things that carve up habitats and make them less suitable for healthy animal populations.
That means something like your mobile carrier’s coverage map might actually supplement the Human Footprint Index with newer, more rapidly accessible data than what many researchers are currently using to make conservation decisions. As the authors wrote in their paper, this “is the first study demonstrating that cellphone coverage can be used as a simpler, modern and unprecedented tool to assess human influence.”
The authors caution that this still isn’t perfect — the ground-level data could be even finer, and there are certain cases when the technique isn’t particularly useful, such as when wildlife-friendly reserves are surrounded by cell-phone-heavy urban centers. Still, they say the fact that cell-tower data is updated very often means it could be used as an “early warning system” to help prioritize areas of high conservation value before too many more cell towers are built and people move in. “We may be able to distinguish areas free from cellphone coverage,” the authors wrote, “and, therefore, from human influence.” Locating these areas with no cell towers and no roads could allow governments to set them aside for conservation before any further degradation occurs.
The research earned quick praise from experts. “This paper provides a valuable contribution to the field of conservation biology,” says conservation biologist Richard Schuster, a Liber Ero fellow at Carleton University, adding he is “excited to see this develop further.” He did note that this approach could have limitations in other parts of the world, but “it seems to be doing a good job in identifying areas of high human impact” in the study area.
William F. Laurance, distinguished research professor at Australia’s James Cook University, one of several researchers involved in updating the Human Footprint Index, also praised the paper. “It’s just one more line of evidence showing that vulnerable wildlife species need places that are free of human influence. We keep thinking that we can have our cake and eat it too as far as nature is concerned, and that’s just not true. Nature needs part of the planet just to itself.”
That’s a message that needs to be heard, loud and clear.
With Youth v. Gov, the next generation of young Americans is stepping up to save itself from climate change and other threats.
It’s not that often you see dozens of lawyers give a standing ovation to a 12-year-old girl, but that’s exactly what happened this weekend at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Ore.
The attorneys, along with a room full of law students and activists, were gathered at the University of Oregon early Sunday morning to hear about a landmark federal climate-change lawsuit called Juliana v. the United States, filed in 2015 on behalf of 21 children from around the country. The case — better known as Youth v. Gov — asserts that the government’s actions and inaction have caused climate change, thereby putting the next generation of citizens at risk and violating their constitutional rights to enjoy life, liberty and property.
One of those youth plaintiffs, Avery McRae, appeared on the panel, where she shared her feelings on being involved in the suit for the past two and a half years.
“It is awesome and really concerning at the same time,” she said. “I get to have my voice heard and I get to be a part of this awesome lawsuit and I get to be around 20 other amazing students from across the country. That’s the awesome part. The not-so-awesome part is that we have to do this in the first place.”
Avery, looking alternately uncomfortable and at home in front of the audience, acknowledged the tremendous responsibility of being a part of such an important case. “I try not to let it dominate my life, because I’m a 12-year-old girl,” she said, “I just want to be a 12-year-old kid.” The pressures of keeping up with the suit, as well as her homework and her friends, haven’t stopped her, though. “I have a sense of needing to help the lawsuit. I’m a part of this, you know.”
Although the case is awaiting a trial date and therefore isn’t getting the same level of media attention as the gun-control Never Again movement inspired by the recent shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the two groups of children share something important: They’re both taking on the government and corporations in ways that could have more impact than anything accomplished by the older generations around them.
And that’s the point Avery made that brought the room to its feet: “Why is it,” she asked, “that the new normal is for kids to be doing our job, not adults to do theirs?”
For more on Juliana v. The United States, watch this recent lecture by co-lead counsel Julia Olson:
Panama’s Barro Blanco dam was supposed to help fight climate change. It ended up damning a culture.
President Trump’s determined pivot away from climate action probably means that the low-lying Maldives Islands will submerge sooner, droughts in sub-Saharan Africa will more rapidly intensify and urban heat waves will get hotter and more frequent. Around the world, failing to confront climate change will affect vulnerable people first. The rest of us won’t be far behind.
But sometimes the act of combating global warming can actually have its own victims, too. Few people understand this better than the Ngäbe-Buglé, the largest indigenous group in Panama.
Early last year Bulu Bagama, a Ngäbe-Buglé farmer, paddled the Tabasará River in a dugout canoe along the shore of his natal village, Kiad. He seethed. Followers of the indigenous Mama Tata religion were expected in the village soon. He said he’d be on dry land harvesting cassava and cooking fermented corn to feed them if the government hadn’t destroyed his orchards of bananas, oranges, mangos and avocados — if the Honduran construction company GENISA hadn’t flooded sacred petroglyphs chiseled by ancestors into boulders midstream in the river. Instead he was floating with a foreigner above flooded houses he’d built, flooded fields he’d planted and the flooded cemetery where he’d buried his parents. We paddled above it all on several yards of murky water.
“If God did this, if he filled this with water, it’d be one thing,” said Bagama, eyes ablaze under a hand-woven straw hat. “But it wasn’t God who did this. It was done by man, and someday, he’ll pay.”
The proximate cause of Bagama’s misery was not just one man, but Barro Blanco, a 20-story-tall hydroelectric dam three miles from where he canoed. The company Generadora del Istmo, better known as GENISA, had built it at the request of the Panamanian government — purportedly to help fight climate change.
The administration of Martín Torrijos, Panama’s president from 2004 to 2009, first proposed the Barro Blanco Dam in 2006. The project came to fruition under the administration of his successor, Ricardo Martinelli, a real estate mogul-turned-politician sworn in as Panama’s 36th president in July 2009. A man in the Trumpian mold, Martinelli promised to make Panama more business-friendly and improve the country’s infrastructure.
Meanwhile, a new sail-shaped building, Trump Ocean Club, was rising slowly into the sky above Panama City. It was Donald Trump’s first international real-estate venture. When the Panamanian president and American president-to-be met at the sky scrapper’s ribbon cutting, they traded public praise. “Everything you touch turns to gold,” Martinelli told Trump, according to The Christian Science Monitor. Trump called Martinelli a “great businessman,” and “a great president.” Trump invited Martinelli to his own inauguration in 2017, even though the former Panamanian leader was by then living in a luxury condo in Miami after fleeing embezzlement and wiretapping charges while in office. (He has since been arrested and is battling extradition from the Miami Federal Detention Center.)
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Martinelli’s administration staunchly championed the Barro Blanco dam. In fact, shortly after Martinelli took office, the government’s electricity regulator dramatically expanded the plan, increasing its capacity by 50 percent, to 29 megawatts, or 2 percent of Panama’s electrical needs. The enhancement also raised the level of the required reservoir behind the dam, preordaining the destruction of Bulu Bagama’s house and crops.
Under Martinelli’s watch the United Nations registered Barro Blanco in the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, a program encouraging investors in wealthy countries to finance carbon reduction in poor ones. CDM projects earn one Certified Energy Unit, for each ton of CO2 they displace, redeemable on carbon markets, such as the European Trading Scheme. Barro Blanco was projected to cut carbon dioxide production by 1.5 million tons in two decades of operation, according to UN documents.
Opponents of the dam say that without the UN stamp of approval and the income promised from energy units, Barro Blanco might never have been built. It most likely helped with the financing. Two European Banks, the Dutch Development Finance Company and the German Investment and Development Corporation, each invested $25 million. Ironically, Panama later withdrew from the CDM program in 2016 after facing criticism over misrepresentations in its paperwork.
By then, the dam’s concrete had long since dried.
In January 2017, while the U.S. presidential inauguration transfixed most of the world, the residents of Kiad were preparing for their own ceremony. Pilgrims from across Ngäbe-Buglé territory would arrive soon, as they do every year to pray and worship. But this time would be different. In past years several hundred guests had always arrived. Now no one knew how many would come or where they’d stay. The purpose of the event was to worship by the petroglyphs, but the carved boulders could no longer be seen. They’d been completely submerged when the reservoir was filled months earlier. The flat land along the previous shore was also underwater, leaving little good camping space.
Many Ngäbe-Buglé practice Mama Tata, an indigenous religion that combines Christianity and animism. They believe their ancestors encoded wisdom in the cryptic markings scored into the boulders in Kiad and elsewhere in their territory. Ricardo Miranda, a resident of Kiad and an ardent opponent of the dam, told me that the drawings connect them with forefathers before the Spanish conquest. They’re Mama Tata’s sacred texts and repositories of indigenous wisdom. The dam is “erasing our history,” he said angrily. “How can I talk about that with younger generations if I can no longer tell them, here it is.”
“Some people say, well, take the stones out elsewhere,” said Eduardo Vallarino of the boulders in a meeting in his Panama City office in January 2017. Vallarino is president and CEO of PanAm Development, which wants to build a smaller hydroelectric dam 15 miles from Barro Blanco, also in the face of indigenous protest. He was Panama’s ambassador to the United States in 1990 and once ran for president. He accused Barro Blanco’s detractors of making up spurious objections to the project. “They’re looking at everything they can in order to stop things.”
But the protests are nothing new. Panama’s indigenous people have long battled against incursions on their territories. Successive governments sought for decades to dam the Tabasará River before Martinelli’s administration succeeded. The indigenous people opposed every attempt, sometimes with demonstrations, construction-site occupations and blockades of the nearby Panama American Highway. Indigenous people were kept out from the first public meetings about Barro Blanco, in 2007.
At times the project has sowed divisions within the community. Still, the Ngäbe-Buglé have challenged the dam in Panamanian courts and — failing that — petitioned for help from international human-rights organizations. A 2014 report written by the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples admonished Panama that “Ngäbe people should not be flooded or adversely affected in any way without the prior agreement of the representative authorities of that people….”
GENISA had long insisted that that few Ngäbe-Buglé would even be inconvenienced, and that, in the words of its 2011 report on the social and environmental impacts of the project, the “land and riverbank that will be submerged by the reservoir is not currently under cultivation, nor used for any other productive use.” But by then, changes in the dam’s design guaranteed that some houses and crops would be flooded in many feet of water. And that, according to a study conducted on behalf of the project’s European funders, was a fact about which residents of Kiad and other communities were kept in the dark.
Opponents of Barro Blanco have exhausted legal options in Panama. But they continue fight the dam in the court of local and world opinion, by staging protests and by petitioning help from international rights organizations, such the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Last September they won a small victory when a Panama court acquitted three Ngäbe-Buglé leaders, including Ricardo Miranda, of charges that they’d disrupted activities at the dam during protests.
Ironically, the dam’s touted environmental benefits are increasingly in doubt. A growing scientific consensus says that dams are sometimes of marginal value for the climate. Rotting organic matter in the soil they flood releases methane, a gas that warms the planet many times more powerfully than carbon dioxide. A 2012 paper in Nature Climate Change called tropical dams “methane factories” that “can be expected to have cumulative emissions that exceed those of fossil-fuel generation.”
But tropical dams keep getting built anyway. Barro Blanco is only one of the latest, and even its lofty promises now ring hollow.
In January 2017, two days before the Mama Tata ceremony, Manalo Miranda put up an open-air pavilion made from spindly tree trunks and corrugated iron.
The reservoir had filled up several months earlier, after GENISA technicians had shut the dam’s flood gates. The rainy season was due any day and arriving pilgrims would need shelter. Goejet Miranda walked to a thatched hut above town, to charge his phone. A solar panel there provides Kiad’s only electricity.
But there was no room to plug in. The panel’s output was maxed out.
The one benefit that Barro Blanco might have provided the Ngäbe-Buglé — electricity — is in limited supply.
Grossman’s reporting in Panama was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Frank B. Mazer Foundation.
Eco-books coming out this March include volumes about Rachel Carson, environmental destruction, plant-based diets and radical resistance.
What do Rachel Carson, sea otters, toxic toads and the Gold King Mine disaster have in common? Easy: They’re all among the subjects of this month’s new environmentally themed books.
The full list — an amazing 18 titles — includes books for just about everyone, from dedicated environmentalists to foodies to nature-friendly kids. You can check them all out below (links are to publishers’ or authors’ websites). Then get ready for some long evenings of reading as the cool nights of winter give way to a hopefully not-so-silent spring.
Environmental History:
Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment by Rachel Carson — the book that sparked the modern environmental movement gets an archival collection from the Library of America, edited by acclaimed ecologist Sandra Steingraber.
This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent by Daegan Miller — a history of 19th century “radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress” (and who remain relevant today).
Cane Toad Wars by Rick Shine — the true tale of the ecological nightmare caused by the introduction of this toxic species to Australia.
The Monarchs are Missing: A Butterfly Mystery by Rebecca E. Hirsch — a book offering grade schoolers insight into why monarch butterflies are in trouble and what they can do to help.
Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale by Matt Hern and Am Johal — a horror-filled road trip through the polluted tar sands of northern Alberta. Features art and additional material by journalist/cartoonist Joe Sacco.
Introduced rabbits threatened the unique birds of Chile’s Humboldt Penguin Natural Reserve. But after a century of devastation, hope has returned.
Penguins and rabbits frolicking around coastal cacti may strike you as a charming scene, but one of these species does not belong. On Choros and Chañaral islands, located off the coast of Chile about 600 kilometers north of Santiago, penguins and cacti are a great fit. But the flash of a white tail and brown fur in the undergrowth? That spells trouble.
A rabbit hole out of place is bad news for birds
A tale of destruction began in the Humboldt Penguin Natural Reserve 100 years ago, when European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) were introduced to Choros and Chañaral, two of the reserve’s three islands. The rabbits quickly proliferated and began to munch away at the desert islands’ sensitive plants. Even the sharp spines of the native cacti weren’t enough to deter these voracious herbivores. As damage to cacti accumulated, shady areas for nesting Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus humboldti) and their chicks grew scarce. Considering that the reserve supports 80 percent of the world’s Humboldt penguin population, this habitat depletion was alarming to seabird researchers and Chilean authorities.
Penguin with cactus. Tommy Hall/Island Conservation
To make matters worse, the invasive rabbits also discovered that seabird burrows made great dens. When the invasive rabbits moved in, the native seabirds lost their homes.
A foxhole isn’t any better
One problem sometimes creates another. Foxes were introduced to Chañaral Island in the mid-20th century to help control the invasive rabbit population. Not surprisingly, the plan backfired. Instead of taking care of the rabbit problem, the introduced foxes preyed on another bird, the native Peruvian diving petrel (Pelecanoides garnotii). Chañaral is thought to have been home to as many as 100,000 pairs of the endangered petrels before invasive species arrived. Today there are none.
The strategy of releasing one invasive species into a habitat to control another invasive species has repeatedly proven to do more harm than good, and the disarray of the reserve reflected the inadequacy of that approach. In 1994 the Peruvian diving petrel was listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. In 2000 the Humboldt penguin was listed as vulnerable.
The decline of native species and growing threat of extinction in the reserve were not only problematic in an ecological context. Nearby fishing communities depend on an ecotourism industry to make up for declining fishing opportunities. People don’t travel far to see nibbled cactus and hundreds of rabbits; they’re a lot more likely to travel to see a thriving diversity of plants and wildlife. If the lagomorphs continued to dominate the reserve, an important source of income would be lost. The local communities had no obvious backup industry available.
Conservation intervention returns hope to the region
Luckily a change for the better was in the cards for the reserve. In 2013 the Chilean National Forestry Corporation, in collaboration with the organization I work for, the international nonprofit Island Conservation, initiated a project to remove invasive species from Choros Island.
Every removal project is different and comes with its own complex set of challenges. There’s no “one size fits all” removal method. To ensure success a variety of removal options was evaluated in coordination between the partners. In this case, systematic placement of rodenticide across the island was deemed the strategy most likely to be effective. More than 1,500 successful island eradications have been completed worldwide using this approach.
Implementation on Choros occurred from July to September of 2013. Following that, camera traps were placed on the island to confirm the island was free of invasive rabbits. In 2016, after months of monitoring, conservationists set out to determine the results of the project with the aid of Finn, a detection dog trained to support this kind of conservation effort. Finn, to everyone’s relief, sniffed out no rabbits on Choros, and the partners confirmed the project’s success.
Finn (with protective booties). Photo: Karen Andrews/Island Conservation
Island Conservation project manager Madeleine Pott tells me the results of the restoration on Choros Island were almost immediately evident across the island, with “fields of seedlings, hillsides covered in the threatened flower Alstroemeria philippii, and Peruvian diving petrels looking to nest in former rabbit burrows.”
The success on Choros paved the way for a similar intervention on Chañaral Island in 2016. A team of 30 people conducted fieldwork over a 20-month period, covering over 6,680 kilometers; they powered through the harsh desert sun and the strong southern winds that rip up from the Antarctic to complete the project.
In 2016, after the final phase of monitoring Chañaral for signs of remaining rabbits, the island and the entire reserve were declared free of invasive vertebrate pest species. Conservationists are now optimistic that the petrels will eventually return to the rabbit-free island.
Aarón Cavieres, executive director at the Chilean National Forestry Corporation, pointed out that the restoration of the reserve supports Chile’s biodiversity goals and builds momentum in the movement toward global environmental health, as well as improving ecotourism opportunities for local communities.
The success of the projects also holds promise for similar conservation efforts currently underway and planned for the future.
Helping our planet thrive one island at a time
The successes on Choros and Chañaral reinforce the growing evidence of the efficacy of invasive-species removal on island ecosystems. This form of conservation intervention is key to supporting biodiversity and preventing extinction.
Pott notes that the rebounding vegetation and wildlife of Choros and Chañaral are testament to the power of invasive-species removal. She expressed to me that the restoration of the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve offers hope for continued conservation success in the region and around the world.
Building on this success, the Chilean National Forestry Corporation and Island Conservation are looking to restore other islands in Chile with high biodiversity benefits, including Alejandro Selkirk Island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago.
Prospects are good, not only for the region but for islands in need of restoration around the world. What makes the Earth so incredible is the great variety of plants and wildlife that live here, with the Humboldt reserve being a prime example — cacti and penguins thriving together on a coastal desert island isn’t something that happens on just any planet. With continued and enhanced efforts, we can look forward to more and more unique island ecosystems returning to health, and ultimately, thriving.
Thriving cacti. Photo: Diego Tabilo/Island Conservation
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
President Trump and Congress ignore the nation’s poorest residents along the U.S.-Mexican border, where an environmental health crisis threatens millions of lives.
IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif.— U.S. Border Patrol Agent Christopher Harris steers his truck along the hilly road next to the border fence separating this beach community in the extreme southwest corner of the U.S. from Tijuana, Baja California’s largest city.
On a late November afternoon, Harris tours three different canyons along the border. At the bottom of each canyon, a ribbon of dark wastewater originates in Tijuana and flows into the wetlands of the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge on its way to the Pacific Ocean.
Drainage to Pacific Tijuana Slough. Photo: John Dougherty
No one in the United States is certain whether the effluent is coming from Tijuana’s failing wastewater-treatment system or if it is illegally dumped in the canyon creek beds in Tijuana. On this day, it flowed through dry creek beds, where Harris says it hadn’t rained in many weeks.
The saltwater estuary has long been a hotspot for drug smuggling and human trafficking. Harris says Border Patrol agents conducting patrols and apprehensions of illegal immigrants are routinely exposed to contaminated mud and effluent. Harris, the secretary for the National Border Patrol Council Local 1613, says more than 80 agents have suffered from contamination, injuries and illnesses — including encountering chemicals that sometimes eat right through their boots.
Harris holds up a pair of fairly new work boots and says they belong to an agent who suffered chemical burns on his feet after the rubber soles were melted by chemicals in the effluent.
Melted boots. Photo: John Dougherty
“We’re breathing it in,” Harris says. “It gets in your mouth, you’re ingesting it. It gets in your mucous membranes. We’ve had people with what they believe is methane burns to the lungs.”
During heavy rains there’s no doubt that Tijuana’s wastewater-treatment system routinely fails, sending hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage flowing into the Tijuana River from Mexico and then into the U.S. The floods of sewage force health officials to close public beaches on Imperial Beach — where 25 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and 60 percent are nonwhite — and sometimes further north, toward the Silver Strand State Beach and ritzy Coronado.
Even when there’s no heavy rain, 40 million gallons a day of treated — but mostly raw — sewage is dumped into the Pacific Ocean from Tijuana’s sewage treatment plant, located less than five miles south of the border, says Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina.
The sewage can drift north during southern swells, forcing U.S. public beaches to close. Dedina has led a crusade to try to get desperately needed funds to help Tijuana make emergency repairs to fix collapsing sewer lines and failing pump stations and upgrade its primary wastewater-treatment plant.
An avid surfer, Dedina has repeatedly fallen ill after surfing off Imperial Beach. He says there have been more than 320 sewage spills in the past two years. “It’s like a horror show,” he says during an interview on a picnic bench overlooking the beach. “It’s horrendous.”
The serious health problems and environmental contamination are not isolated to Tijuana. The lack of adequate wastewater treatment occurs all along the 1,954-mile U.S.- Mexico border, and the problems don’t just originate in Mexico.
A three-month-long investigation by The Revelator reveals thousands of underserved communities on the U.S. side of the border that lack basic environmental and health infrastructure such as sanitary sewer systems and utility-provided drinking water. Most of the people living in these unplanned communities, called colonias, are poor and of primarily Hispanic descent. Environmental infrastructure problems also afflict several larger U.S. cities, including Nogales, Ariz., Calexico, Calif., and Laredo and El Paso, Texas.
While so much of the discussion in Washington, D.C., revolves around Trump’s proposed $25 billion border wall, a longstanding humanitarian crisis is going unaddressed along the nation’s southern border — home to some 14 million people.
The Revelator traveled to some of the hardest-hit communities in California, Arizona, Texas and in Mexico and spoke with residents, politicians, health workers and others living among a failing and largely forgotten infrastructure system. We found poverty, sickness and environmental contamination plaguing both large and small communities straddling the U.S.-Mexico border — a region that experiences poverty rates double the national averages and has some of the highest rates of infectious disease in the United States.
In the coming months, our “Border Betrayed” series will take readers to those border communities and examine the profound health and environmental effects of a region whose infrastructure has been systematically neglected by both countries — leaving millions of people to suffer the consequences far from the view of politicians and most of America.
Investing in Mexico Helps Americans
To understand the crisis is to understand its roots in money, power and political decisions.
Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the United States and Mexico together have invested more than $10 billion in constructing an international network of wastewater treatment plants, potable water connections, modern landfills, hazardous waste collection sites, recycling centers and renewable energy facilities that benefit the citizens of both countries.
But the money has been nowhere near enough to stem the rising tide of environmental health problems afflicting both sides of the border.
The outlook is even worse.
President Trump’s proposed $25 billion border wall comes at the same time his administration wants to eliminate funding for the most important Environmental Protection Agency grant program used to construct environmental infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico border including Tijuana.
The administration also opposes an increase in funding for the North American Development Bank, which provides infrastructure development loans to border communities in the United States and Mexico. Without additional capital, the bank’s ability to make loans will be sharply reduced.
Trump’s anti-Mexican statements further inflame relations between the countries and come at a time when Mexico is recovering from two major earthquakes that require significant public investment, reducing money for border projects.
“The rhetoric is bad and the policy is zero,” Dedina says of Trump’s statements and the administration’s recommendations for spending on border environmental infrastructure. “They have made it really very clear how they feel.”
Concentrating on hot-button issues of immigration ignores the basic human-rights problems that affect citizens in both countries.
“The Trump administration, with all of its hyperbolic rhetoric, has so obscured and clouded the issue that people aren’t thinking straight,” says Steve Mumme, a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where he specializes in comparative environmental politics and policy with an emphasis on Mexican government and U.S.-Mexican relations.
“They are suddenly retreating to their corners of the ring and thinking that they don’t have to engage anymore and the problems will somehow magically solve themselves and people will go away,” he says. “Good luck with that.”
The Trump administration is clearly aware of the acute sewage contamination issues in Imperial Beach. Dedina says he met with EPA Director Scott Pruitt’s senior adviser, Ken Wagner, last fall and discussed the issue. Nothing tangible resulted from their meeting, Dedina says.
Diverting billions of dollars for the wall while at the same time slashing funds to invest in environmental infrastructure — such us helping to finance improvements to Tijuana’s wastewater treatment system — ultimately hurts Americans, border experts say.
“Investing on the Mexican side of the border really improves the quality of life for U.S. residents,” says Paul Ganster, chairman of the Good Neighbor Environmental Board, a federal advisory committee that makes recommendations to Congress and the White House on environmental infrastructure needs on the U.S.-Mexican border.
“It’s absolutely clear,” says Ganster, who is a social scientist at San Diego State University specializing in Latin America. “There is no doubt about it.”
America’s Forgotten People
The environmental health crisis stalking millions of people living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border has been steadily unfolding for decades but has become more acute in the past 20 years as the population along the border continues to surge.
In a strange twist, it is the American side of the border that is substantially poorer when compared to the rest of the United States. Meanwhile, the Mexican border cities are relatively well developed compared to many areas of their country, where basic services like electricity, running water, paved roads and sanitary sewers can be extremely limited or nonexistent.
“The border region tends to be the poorest area in the United States,” says Ganster. “And at the same time, across the border in Mexico, is an area where there has been explosive demographic growth and urbanization and manufacturing development.”
The Mexican border cities, for the most part, are much larger than their U.S. neighbors. In addition to NAFTA, which greatly increased trade between the two countries, Mexico and the United States have passed laws that encourage U.S. companies to build factories in Mexican border towns. The factories, called maquiladoras, import parts from the U.S. and assemble products in Mexico, taking advantage of $2 an-hour wages. The finished goods are then re-exported back into the United States at reduced tariffs.
Trade and manufacturing have attracted millions of Mexican workers and families to border communities. There were approximately 6,171 maquiladoras employing 2.5 million workers in 2014, according the University of Arizona’s Economic and Business Research Center. The mass migration of workers to fill these jobs has overwhelmed the ability of Mexican border cities to keep up with basic services.
Mexico is still a developing nation, and its border cities have relatively small amounts of per capita income to pay for basic services. Mexican border cities have focused primarily on providing electricity and potable water at the expense of other systems that people in the United States might take for granted, Ganster says.
“Sewage has not been the highest priority,” he says.
This allocation of limited resources has a direct impact on the United States. Mexican border cities — including Tijuana, Mexicali and Nogales — are upstream from their U.S. neighbors. So when the overwhelmed wastewater system in Tijuana fails, public beaches close in Imperial Beach and border agents get sick. When Mexicali’s sewage system collapses, the New River is polluted as it flows north to the Salton Sea in California. And when the Nogales, Sonora wastewater and storm water systems can’t handle heavy flows, the Santa Cruz River valley in Arizona is contaminated.
Farther east in Texas, there’s no escaping the serious health impacts of millions of gallons of raw sewage being dumped every day into the Rio Grande, regardless of which flag flies over your border town.
Border cities in both nations draw their drinking water from the river. In some cases, like in Nuevo Laredo, located just across the Rio Grande from its namesake in Texas, the city’s drinking water intake sits within a quarter-mile downstream of two untreated sewage outfalls.
None of these problems are new.
They have persisted for generations and will continue as more people move to towns and cities located adjacent to the border that simply don’t have sufficient resources to provide basic environmental infrastructure.
About 14 million people live in 38 Mexican municipalities and 23 U.S. counties adjacent to the border. The population in these municipalities and counties is expected to more than double to 29 million by 2045, according to a 2013 comprehensive analysis of the U.S.-Mexican border by the Border Research Project.
More people means more needs for basic sanitary services, including sewage treatment plants, sanitary landfills, potable water connections, toxic waste management, renewable energy, clean vehicles and road paving to reduce dangerous levels of air pollution that engulfs border communities.
The North American Development Bank, which is owned and jointly operated by the United States and Mexico, estimates that $10 billion is needed just to provide first-time connections for wastewater and/or potable water for communities on both sides of the border, with $8.5 billion just in the United States.
And that doesn’t include upgrading collapsing sewer lines and modernizing sewer treatment facilities. Officials estimate that Tijuana alone will need $400 million to overhaul its crumbling wastewater treatment system.
These environmental health problems have been brewing for decades.
Twenty-five years ago the Sierra Club estimated that $20 billion was needed for basic environmental infrastructure along the border — and that was before NAFTA went into effect.
“There certainly is a higher cost now given that NAFTA included incentives for corporations to shift their pollution to border communities,” says Ben Beachy, director of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program.
The World’s First Green Bank
Obscured in the raging debate over President Trump’s proposed border wall and the ongoing contentious negotiations over whether the United States will withdraw from NAFTA is another crucial trilateral initiative between the United States, Mexico and Canada that created the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation.
During the NAFTA debate in the early 1990s, Congress, environmental groups and other nongovernmental organizations demanded that the trade agreement include environmental and labor protections to address the already serious environmental problems along the U.S.-Mexican border that most agreed were only going to get worse with increased trade.
The environmental cooperation agreement was created to address the ongoing environmental disaster, making NAFTA the first trade agreement that explicitly linked trade to environmental protection.
When NAFTA went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994, only 21 percent of wastewater in Mexican border cities was being treated, causing widespread pollution in shared watersheds including the Tijuana River, the Colorado River, the New River, the Santa Cruz River and the Rio Grande. That number is now close to 90 percent.
In addition to the environmental cooperation agreement, the United States and Mexico also established the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission and the North American Development Bank, widely considered the world’s first “green bank,” to help Mexican and American border communities finance the construction of wastewater and potable drinking-water projects.
Mexico and United States each contributed $225 million to provide capital for the development bank to make loans and each pledged an additional $1.3 billion in callable capital reserves. The bank’s charter created a board of directors with an equal number of representatives from each country.
Today the bank provides environmental infrastructure loans within the borderlands region that straddles both sides of the border. The borderlands includes the area from 62 miles (100 kilometers) north of the border to 186 miles (300 kilometers) south and stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
The bank’s lending has expanded to include wind farms and solar energy to reduce border air pollution and desalinization plants in Mexico to reduce reliance on declining groundwater supplies and over-allocated surface water.
Mexico supports doubling the bank’s capitalization, which would allow it to increase annual lending to $350 million by 2024, but the United States has not yet agreed. Without additional capital, the bank’s projected annual lending will drop from $250 million to below $90 million, the Treasury Department stated in 2017.
“Strengthening [the development bank] would be tangible demonstration of the United States commitment with Mexico to build a stable and prosperous region,” the Treasury Department stated during President Obama’s last year in office, adding the bank’s “environmental infrastructure projects help promote greater regional stability and diminish migration flows.”
Providing the bank with the ability to make more loans would also increase investment opportunities for U.S. companies to build wastewater treatment plants and other environmental infrastructure.
But under the Trump administration, the Treasury Department recommended no increase in the bank’s capitalization for fiscal 2018. “Treasury is not requesting funding for the North American Development Bank due to budget constraints,” the department stated in its 2018 budget request to Congress.” The Trump administration’s proposed 2019 budget, was released this month, however, calls for a $10 million contribution to the bank’s capital, matching what Mexico had already put in.
Other sources of funding are also at risk. The EPA’s Border Environment Infrastructure Fund plays a key role in supporting the North American Development Bank’s operations. The grant fund was created in 1996 and was allocated $170 million in the first two years. Funding remained at $50 million a year or more through 2007 before beginning a steady decrease to below $10 million in fiscal year 2017. Trump and House Republicans now want to eliminate funding for the program.
The fund’s grants have played a crucial role in financing development projects by helping make it affordable for financially strapped communities to pay for construction projects. The North American Development Bank, meanwhile, provides construction loans, grants for technical assistance and helps attract money from other public and private sources.
The development bank has awarded $650 million in Border Environment Infrastructure Fund grants since 1996. For every dollar spent, the grants attract $3 in additional funds from other public and private sources, including North American Development Bank loans. Mexico has matched $2 for every $1 in grant funds for environmental infrastructure projects south of the border.
In the past 22 years, the EPA grants have helped finance construction of 59 wastewater treatment plants that are now treating sewage generated by 8.5 million people a day. Thirty-three of the plants were built in Mexico, eliminating 353 million gallons of raw sewage a day that was directly impacting 1.7 million U.S. residents and another 2.3 million indirectly.
“We certainly could use a lot more grant funds,” says North American Development Bank managing director Alex Hinojosa. “There is a huge need.”
Not only is there demand for new projects, many of those initial projects are now coming to the end of their lifespans, spurring a need for a second wave of construction at a time when financing options are evaporating and population increasing.
Old Infrastructure is Collapsing
An as-yet undetermined amount of money is needed to replace collapsing sewer lines, worn out sewage pump stations, antiquated sewer treatment plants and safe drinking water systems on both sides of the border, border financing experts say.
“So, once again we have an infrastructure crisis for basic sewer, water and so on,” says Paul Ganster, the Good Neighbor Environmental Board chairman. “And that’s beginning to have negative effects such as in the Tijuana area. We are a seeing a number of failures in the sewage treatment infrastructure which results in contaminated water flowing downhill and affecting the U.S. side.”
Last November the North American Development Bank approved $1.2 million in EPA grant funds for the rehabilitation of 2.8 miles of a major sewer line in Tijuana. Frequent collapses of the sewer trunk line have contributed to sewage spills into the Tijuana River. Mexico has committed another $1.8 million for the project.
Construction will take two years to complete. The project is just one step in the massive overhaul of Tijuana’s sewer system. There are more than 40 major sewer collectors in Tijuana with failing pipes that contribute to pollution flows into the U.S., bank officials say. Mexico, so far, has only requested funding assistance to repair five sewer lines.
Tijuana is just one of a long list of critical infrastructure projects that need to be built or repaired. The North American Development Bank has 61 projects currently requesting $295 million in funds on both sides of the border.
“We know this is just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the needs that exist,” says Jesse Hereford, a bank spokesman. At the same time as infrastructure needs continue, the EPA grant fund has declined to only $15 million, Hereford says.
There is strong support from border state members of Congress to provide funds for the Border Environment Infrastructure Fund and to increase the development bank’s capitalization. Legislation pending in the Senate includes $10 million for the grant fund for 2018 and doubling the bank’s capitalization. In late January, Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-CA, requested the grant fund receive $20 million. But there is no similar legislation in the House.
A bipartisan group of border state House members has requested House leaders to restore funding for the grant program that was eliminated from a spending bill in committee last year.
“These funds play a crucial role in protecting public health, including those tasked with protecting our borders by reducing sewage runoff and human exposure to bacterial and viral pathogens,” states a Dec. 8 letter signed by 13 House members requesting the House Appropriations Committee include $10 million for the grant program.
Rep. Scott Peters, D-CA, has requested the administration to include much stronger environmental provisions during the ongoing NAFTA negotiations between the US, Mexico and Canada.
“The continued lack of enforceable environmental standards in our trade agreements is no longer tenable,” Peters stated in Dec. 8 letter sent to Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative leading the U.S. negotiations on NAFTA.
“Recognizing that environmental hazards do not stop at transnational borders, it is of the utmost importance that any renegotiated or future trade agreements with Mexico include high-standard, enforceable environmental provisions that empower the United States to stand up for communities through meaningful dispute resolution,” stated Peters, whose district includes San Diego.
But ultimately it comes down to money invested in environmental infrastructure and whether the Mexican and the U.S. governments are willing to spend billions of dollars to protect the health of citizens on both sides of the border.
For communities along the border, the help can’t come fast enough.
Next up:
Our “Border Betrayed” series continues with a look at two small Arizona border communities, each struggling with dangerous environmental health issues.
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