New research highlights ways to tackle our two greatest environmental challenges — at the same time.
Mass extinction lurks beneath the surface of the sea. That was the dire message from a study published in April in the journal Science, which found that continuing to emit greenhouse gases unchecked could trigger a mass die-off of ocean animals that rivals the worst extinction events in Earth’s history.
The findings serve as just the latest reminder that climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected crises — even if they’re rarely addressed in tandem by policymakers.
Toward that point, the Science study came with a dose of hopeful news: Action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius could cut that extinction risk by 70%.
Additional research published in Global Change Biology offers another encouraging finding. The study, by an international team of scientists, found that not only can we do better at addressing biodiversity issues — we can do it while also targeting climate change.
“Many instances of conservation actions intended to slow, halt or reverse biodiversity loss can simultaneously slow anthropogenic climate change,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Their work looked at 21 proposed action targets for biodiversity that will be the focus of this fall’s international convening of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China — a meeting delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found that two-thirds of those biodiversity targets also support climate change mitigation, even though they weren’t explicitly designed for that goal.
The best opportunities to work on these crises together were actions to avoid deforestation and restore degraded ecosystems. Of particular focus, the study found, should be coastal ecosystems such as mangroves, seagrass and salt marshes, which can store large amounts of carbon and support a diversity of animals.
A pelican enjoys a perch in a mangrove stand in the Galapagos. Photo: Hans Johnson (CC BY 2.0)
Also important is restoring forests and woodlands, but doing so with native species is critical. Planting monocultures of nonnative trees won’t boost biodiversity, the researchers point out, despite such endeavors being incentivized as a climate change solution.
Another target is reducing runoff into rivers, lakes and coastal waters from excess nutrients — including nitrogen and phosphorus — that cause algal blooms and oxygen-depleted waters. This eutrophication, combined with warming, may increase greenhouse gas emissions in freshwater bodies, in addition to harming fish and other animals.
Expanding and connecting the network of protected areas is another mutualistic target. Globally, we’ve protected about 15% of land and 7% of marine habitats. But we need to bump those numbers up considerably. As the researchers behind the Global Change Biology study put it, “There is a substantial overlap of 92% between areas that require reversing biodiversity loss and the areas needing protection for enhancing carbon storage and drawdown.”
Working on these issues in tandem can help boost the benefits.
We’re also spending large sums of money in all the wrong places. The study lists the reduction or elimination of subsidies that are harmful to biodiversity and the climate as “one of the most important and urgent reforms.”
We spend 10 times more on subsidies for environmentally harmful practices than on biodiversity conservation, the researchers note. Brazil, for example, spends 88 times more on subsidizing activities linked to deforestation than on those that may help stop it.
Other target areas to boost biodiversity and climate work include recovering and conserving wild species; greening urban areas; eliminating overfishing; reducing food and agricultural waste; and shifting diets to include more plant-based foods and less meat and dairy.
And, the researchers say, we need to “mainstream” the issues together — embedding both climate and biodiversity targets and metrics into policy, business and consumer practices.
Understanding these issues should start early, too. A study of school curricula in 46 countries found that fewer than half addressed climate change, and a paltry one-fifth referenced biodiversity. Both these subjects should be covered more and integrated together, the researchers say.
It’s not possible, after all, to tackle one crisis without addressing the other.
To fight climate change, we need fully functioning ecosystems with healthy populations of native plants and animals.
“And climate change is damaging this capacity,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a study coauthor and climate researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. “Only when we succeed in drastically reducing emissions from fossil fuels can nature help us to stabilize the climate.”
Decades of studying polluted Piles Creek led to advances in our understanding of how pollution affects crabs, fish and shrimp, including those that we eat.
It was the 1970s. The first Earth Day had happened, and there were new federal laws and a federal agency to protect the environment. Despite these important advances, a legacy of pollution still lurked in streams, marshes and other waterways. Stimulated by reports of terrible effects of mercury pollution in Japan, marine biologist Judith S. Weis, her husband, biologist Peddrick Weis, and numerous graduate students at Rutgers University set out on what would become a three-decade journey to understand how mercury and other chemical pollution affects estuarine animals, including those we eat.
They found that some species can tolerate mercury pollution, but that wasn’t entirely good news.
Weis, who taught for four decades at Rutgers, told The Revelator about the evolution of their ground-breaking research, what initially stumped them, and why pollution can change animal behavior.
How did your experiment start?
We decided to look at effects of methylmercury — an especially toxic form of mercury — on the development mummichogs, a small marine killifish. These fish, a few inches long, live in tidal creeks of salt marshes.
Our initial experiments, done at a marine lab in Montauk, N.Y., treated fertilized eggs with different concentrations of methylmercury over their two weeks of development. When they were getting ready to hatch, we examined all the embryos and saw a surprisingly large variation in responses of embryos that had been in the same concentration.
Embryos showed a variety of deformities, including abnormal head-and eye development. There were also problems in heart and skeletal development, which also ran the gamut from mildly affected to severely messed up.
Seeing such a huge variation was puzzling. What could cause such differences in response to the same concentration?
We considered ditching the project since the results were incomprehensible but decided to try to figure out why.
For the next experiments, we separated eggs from different females into different containers to see if the females might produce eggs with different susceptibility. Bingo! The variation in responses was because each female consistently produced eggs with specific susceptibility. (The male didn’t matter.) Females that produced susceptible eggs had different genetic traits from those that produced tolerant eggs.
Where did you go next?
We wondered how fish from an environment that was polluted with mercury might respond, and went to the polluted Newark Bay, N.J., area. There had been a lot of heavy industry there for a century, long before any environmental laws prevented them from dumping their wastes in the marsh and the water, so the sediments in the bay and creeks were highly contaminated with mercury, lead, cadmium and many other pollutants.
A sign at Piles Creek in the early 1980s. Photo: Peddrick Weis
We chose Piles Creek, a small dead-end creek that enters the Arthur Kill in Linden. The sediments in the creek were highly contaminated, and the level of mercury was particularly high.
When we repeated the same studies with fish from the creek, practically all produced embryos that showed only slightly abnormal development, an indication that the population was tolerant to methylmercury.
This was the first study showing evolution of pollution tolerance in an estuarine fish. One can imagine that this evolution would have happened quickly since there were already females in the clean site that produced tolerant embryos. However, we surprisingly found that larvae and adults weren’t tolerant to the mercury and furthermore showed signs of ill health, didn’t grow as well or live as long as fish from the clean site.
We investigated two other species in Piles Creek for methylmercury tolerance: grass shrimp and fiddler crab. Adults from Piles Creek and Long Island were examined for effects of methylmercury on limb regeneration and molting. In all cases, methylmercury slowed the rate of regeneration and delayed molting, but the Piles Creek crabs and shrimp were more tolerant — their regeneration and molting in methylmercury was not slowed down nearly as much as animals from the clean environment.
We found an interesting adaptation in fiddler crabs, especially from Piles Creek: They moved much of the mercury and lead from their internal organs into their shell (exoskeleton) shortly before molting it — a very efficient way of getting rid of contaminants quickly.
Is tolerance to pollution a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, it’s certainly good for the species that can achieve it, since it allows them to continue to live in a habitat that might otherwise be lethal.
Does that mean we can relax pollution laws? No! Not all species are able to evolve increased tolerance as these three did. Estuaries like Piles Creek and Newark Bay have fewer species than cleaner places. One commonly used measure of environmental health is biological diversity — how many different species live there. The more species, the healthier the environment. These three species found in Piles Creek are the survivors.
What other changes did you find?
Through an accidental observation by a graduate student that Piles Creek fish didn’t seem to catch shrimp well, we were able to find an explanation for their shorter life span and poor growth: abnormal behavior.
In lab experiments, unfed fish were put in tanks with grass shrimp (and a rock for hiding). Piles Creek killifish captured far fewer shrimp than the “clean” fish. If we put “clean fish” in tanks with Piles Creek food (shrimp) and sediments, within six weeks their prey capture ability declined to that of Piles Creek fish, showing that the environment is responsible for the impaired behavior. We examined stomach contents of fish from the field: The Piles Creek stomachs contained mostly detritus — decaying plant material — which was known to be non-nutritious for them. The poor ability to catch prey and their eating of non-nutritious detritus (“junk food”) could explain the poor growth and survival.
Mummichogs in a tank. Photo: Peddrick Weis
It’s not a big surprise that mercury would cause behavioral problems if you remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.
But that also had an effect on prey.
Grass shrimp in Piles Creek were overall larger, and more numerous, than shrimp from the “clean” site. Since their major predator, killifish, are ineffective predators and less abundant, Piles Creek shrimp experience reduced predation, so more of them can live a long happy life, resulting in larger size and greater population density. That’s an important finding because it shows the importance of “top down” effects — if your predator is affected worse than you from the pollution, you can benefit.
Piles Creek fish were also more vulnerable to predation. We examined how many fish were captured by blue crabs in the lab. Over two weeks crabs from a seafood store, kept in an aquarium with Piles Creek fish, captured far more of them than crabs kept with “clean” fish. The greater likelihood of Piles Creek fish to be captured and eaten could account for their shorter life span. Impaired prey capture and predator avoidance can result from being generally “slow,” which we confirmed by studying overall activity levels.
We also looked higher up the food chain and studied bluefish. They spawn in the ocean, and the juveniles move into estuaries in the spring to grow over the summer, then return to the ocean in the fall. We collected early juveniles from a clean site and raised them in large tanks, feeding them frozen killifish or menhaden from either clean or polluted estuaries. We found that initially both groups grew comparably, but those fed food from the polluted estuary gradually ate more slowly, ate less, swam more slowly, and grew less. By the fall, they were much smaller and lighter than those fed clean food. Many fish collected from the polluted site had empty stomachs — highly unusual for this species. This would put them at a disadvantage in the fall when they go back to the ocean.
We found a similar result in studying blue crabs. Those from the clean site caught more active prey than those from the polluted one, and “switching” their habitats changed their prey capture ability. Like the killifish, the crabs in the polluted environment ate a lot of detritus, surprising for a “carnivorous” crab. The behavior changes in these species show that the killifish impairments (reduced activity, poor prey capture) aren’t unique to them but are seen in other species, including ones that are commercially important.
What did we learn from all of this?
In the years since these studies were performed, scientists have studied killifish from other polluted areas and have found tolerance to other pollutants such as PCBs and dioxin. Also “behavioral toxicology” has become a recognized field, studied mainly in the lab on animals exposed to selected concentrations of a chosen toxic chemical.
Our studies were with animals exposed naturally to the contaminants in their environment and focused on predator/prey behavior that is ecologically important. These real-world findings show that animals in nature can have their behaviors affected in ways that make their lives more difficult and shorter, and that altered behavior can change ecological relationships in the system.
Overall, in our work, it appears that the crustaceans are managing better than the fish.
We learned two major lessons through this: If data don’t make sense, don’t give up but try to figure out why, and accidental observations can lead to a new fruitful direction of research.
Uncovering environmental harms and crimes, and holding those responsible accountable, has never received enough priority. We need to correct that problem.
“What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.” —P. D. James
How do we protect communities — especially long-neglected communities of color — from environmental harms caused by corporate polluters, lax oversight, and poor enforcement of existing laws?
This country desperately needs new eco-detectives — trained employees and citizens who can identify and uncover pollution, poaching and other eco-threats that harm people, wildlife and the planet.
Photo: Pixabay
Like most nations the United States has never taken these types of crimes and assaults seriously. This was especially true during the Trump administration, which saw enforcement of environmental regulations fall to an all-time low. But that neglect built upon a systemic flaw, which sees the perpetrators of environmental crimes receiving punishments that amount to little more than a slap on the wrist — if they’re prosecuted at all.
It’s time to fix that, not just for the past administration’s four years of malfeasance but to correct a history of injustice.
Let’s start with the Environmental Protection Agency, which needs more investigators to detect and stop corporations from poisoning our air, water and bodies. Under Trump the EPA shed thousands of staff members and dramatically reduced its enforcement of existing laws. Those people need to be back on the beat. President Biden’s 2023 budget proposal aims to create the equivalent of more than 1,900 new full-time positions. That’s a start, but it barely makes up for the 1,500 jobs the EPA shed during the first year and a half of the previous administration. Let’s double that number of new hires.
American Federation of Government Employees rally outside of EPA headquarters. Photo: Chelsea Bland (CC BY 2.0)
But why stop there? We also need more investigators at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and other agencies to protect our wildlife and endangered species — our natural, cultural heritage — from poachers, corporate development and climate change. The Fish and Wildlife Service only has about 250 special agents probing wildlife crimes, many of which require multiyear investigations, while the BLM has just 70 people dedicated to criminal investigations. That’s hardly enough to serve a country our size.
Similarly, we need more inspectors at our chronically understaffed ports and borders to detect illegal wildlife trafficking and protect endangered species from exploitation and the rest of us from introduced diseases and invasive species. To accomplish this, the Border Patrol’s history of racism and brutality needs to be systematically transitioned into a future of science and service. And it’s not the only federal law-enforcement branch that needs reform — I’m looking at you, U.S. Park Police.
Centers for Disease Control staff inspect bushmeat being imported into the U.S. (Photo: CDC)
Of course, once we discover a crime, we need to do something about it. That’s why, on top of investigators, we also need more environmental prosecutors at the Department of Justice, to make sure these types of crimes are properly punished. That’s especially true now, when the DOJ is already stretched beyond capacity as it prosecutes the more than 700 individuals arrested during the Jan. 6 insurrection. Again, Biden’s 2023 budget proposes some of this, with an additional $6.5 million for DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, but that’s a long way from becoming official. The EPA and DOJ also announced several initiatives to address environmental justice on May 5, so hopefully that will kickstart some effort and action.
Meanwhile, it’s not just about the federal government. States also need more environmental crime-busters to address local crimes that federal laws don’t cover. If someone sells an endangered animal, pollutes a river, or chops down a forest but doesn’t cross state lines to do it, they still need to be found and punished.
All of this is essential, but we can go even further. In addition to addressing environmental crimes through the legal system, we need more environmental journalists, especially in underserved communities. We need these watchdogs to serve as eco-detectives more than ever — the United States has lost more than 2,000 local newspapers since 2004, turning many towns and communities into “news deserts.” Life in a participatory democracy depends on a vibrant free press, and studies have shown that as newspapers die the amount of local fraud and abuse soars — like in coal country, for example.
Photo: Jeff Eaton (CC BY-SA 2.0)
We also need more scientists working at every public-health agency to better understand the crimes being perpetrated against the planet and its denizens. They can help find crimes — for example, by using satellites to detect unreported emissions — or push the legislatures to regulate threats we’re just uncovering, like the health risks from PFAS chemicals. Those researchers need to come from and live in every community, which means we need more commitment from academia to integrate the ivory tower, even as we all must commit to fighting systemic racial injustice wherever we see it.
And that gets us back to those affected by environmental crimes the most: the people. Since most environmental crime takes place in our communities, we need to train people as citizen scientists so they can look for signs of harm themselves. Volunteer efforts like this have a long and important history of detecting pollution, declining wildlife populations and other crimes or damage.
This also requires more citizen whistleblowers and activists, not to mention more laws to protect them when they tell the stories that wouldn’t be told without their eyes and ears. In recent years states around the country have passed a rapid succession of anti-protest laws related to fossil fuel projects, along with ag-gag laws to shroud factory farms in secrecy and other regulations designed to minimize public participation and knowledge. Those need to go, so that citizens themselves can study, monitor, publicize and stand up to the threats affecting their own lives.
And importantly, all these people — the detectives, prosecutors, scientists and whistleblowers — need to be listened to by those in power. Folks have been speaking up in “Cancer Alley” and other environmental justice communities for decades with no changes to public health regulations: Much of the environmental harm perpetrated against these communities is currently legal. That means we need yet one more level of new environmental crime-buster: politicians who will listen, act, and finally pass the tougher laws people have demanded for far too long.
Of course, nothing I’m proposing here serves to erase the sins of the past. But adding more eco-detectives to address environmental crimes at every level of society would improve our present and put us all on the path toward a brighter future. Without them we’ll remain locked in a polluted prison of our own making.
Shrinking tidal flat habitats in eastern China threaten critical stopover sites for migratory shorebirds.
The place:
The Linhong tidal flat in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, is on the east coast of China. Jiangsu is one of the wealthiest provinces in the country, so there has always been serious tension between economic development and environmental protection.
Asian dowitchers at Qingkou tidal flat, Lianyungang. The birds were in beautiful chestnut-red breeding plumage. Photo courtesy of Ziyou Yang.
Why it matters:
Every summer shorebirds on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway arrive at the Arctic tundra to attract mates, breed, and care for their young. Then they follow an inner biological clock and head south. They spend the winter in regions at lower latitudes, including East Asia and Southeast Asia. The journey is long and arduous, often covering distances of 3,000 to 5,000 miles.
Most shorebirds must take a break somewhere to rest and refuel during these travels. That’s why Lianyungang’s tidal flats, on the west coast of the Yellow Sea — located near the midpoint of many shorebirds’ migratory journey — are critically important stopover sites for many species. The tidal flats were previously fed by two of the longest rivers in Asia, making them rich in benthic organisms that serve as valuable fuel for the long-distance flights.
Asian dowitcher. Photo courtesy of Luke Tang.
There’s one bird that relies most heavily on Lianyungang: the Asian dowitcher (Limnodromus semipalmatus), a shorebird about 12-14 inches in size. It breeds in steppe regions in Mongolia and northeast China and winters mainly in Indonesia. The current estimated global population of the species is 23,000 — nearly all of whom fly to Lianyungang’s Linhong and Qingkou tidal flats each year.
Asian dowitchers (center) congregate near the Linhong tidal flat during high tide. Photo courtesy of Ziyou Yang.
Unfortunately this makes them extremely vulnerable. Anything that threatens their habitat in Lianyungang could devastate the entire global population.
The threat:
The Linhong tidal flat is being reclaimed by a so-called “ecological restoration” project. The project is ostensibly aimed at restoring the natural environment of a “dirty” wetland, but in fact it converts nearly 6 square miles of natural muddy tidal flats into sandy beaches and deep water for human recreational activities.
The new habitat is completely unsuitable for the Asian dowitcher and many other seabird species. If the project goes ahead, it will destroy one-third of the Asian dowitcher’s foraging habitat here.
Meanwhile Linhong and Qingkou tidal flats are also being encroached upon by an invasive species called the smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora). The plant spreads quickly, turns mudflats into dense meadows, and kills most benthic organisms, so the area and quality of the remaining habitats for Asian dowitchers are also decreasing.
A patch of invasive smooth cordgrass in the United States. Photo: USDA
My place in this place:
I remember the day we first discovered the huge number of Asian dowitchers at Lianyungang’s Linhong and Qingkou tidal flats. Back then we split the waterbird surveyors into two groups and counted the number of Asian dowitchers at the two locations simultaneously. When both groups reported their count number in the radio, none of us could believe our ears. While we were still processing the record-breaking count result, the tens of thousands of Asian dowitchers were calling beside us as if cheering our discovery.
The moment felt so miraculous. We really hope more people will get to experience something like this in the future.
With its chestnut-red breeding plumage and sewing-machine like feeding behavior, the Asian dowitcher is beautiful in its own way. But it’s still unlike charismatic species such as giant pandas or spoon-billed sandpipers that can instantly catch people’s attention.
That hasn’t stopped my colleagues and me from dedicating a tremendous amount of effort to improving awareness about this species and its highly concentrated population in Lianyungang. For example, we made a series of outreach products, including an adorable plush toy.
We spent an entire year developing the design to ensure the toy is likeable while accurately mimicking the species’ key characteristics. We were short on funding at the beginning and unfortunately fell far short of the minimum order quantity. Luckily, our conservation work gained recognition from several foundations and companies, and they all helped contribute to the toy’s production.
After all the challenges we’d faced and conquered, the toy was finally launched at the end of 2021 and it was a hit in the market. The public — and I’m not only talking about us birdwatching people — absolutely love it.
The cute Asian dowitcher plush toy near its natural habitat in Lianyungang. Photo courtesy of Yongxiang Han.
While it’s exciting that more people will get to know the Asian dowitcher through this toy, my colleagues and I do have mixed feelings. With the project construction being carried out at a fast pace on the species’ most important foraging ground, we fear that the species’ population will decrease precipitously not long after people get to know these birds and their precious stopover site — and the foraging ground will deteriorate or even disappear.
Who’s protecting it now:
Friends of Nature is a Chinese NGO specializing in environmental protection using public-interest litigation. In early 2021, after several rounds of unsuccessful negotiation with the local government departments and the project construction company, Friends of Nature led an environmental litigation against the project construction company and the environmental impact assessment company. The judge is still processing the evidence. Meanwhile, the project construction is being carried out at an unprecedented pace and it’s looking likely to be completed by June 2022.
In addition, the nonprofit Spoon-billed Sandpiper in China (my employer) is dedicated to the conservation of waterbirds living on the Yellow Sea tidal flats. The team has provided valuable data to support the global importance and irreplaceability of Lianyungang’s Linhong tidal flat. These data serve as critical evidence for the public interest litigation case.
What this place needs:
We have enough data and solid science to prove that the construction project will cause considerable damage to the Asian dowitcher population.
Currently many self-proclaimed “ecological restoration” projects are being undertaken across China, and a good majority of them are doing more harm than good to the environment. We need better legislation and stricter project assessment standards to prevent similar tragedies elsewhere.
In 2020 the green peafowl case in China’s Yunnan province became the country’s first preventive public-interest litigation concerning wildlife protection. Our Asian dowitcher case is the second of its kind. Unlike green peafowl, who live in forests, Asian dowitchers inhabit coastal tidal flats. We hope our case can set a precedent for other coastal “ecological restoration” projects in China and draw people’s attention to gaps in the current legislation.
Lessons from the fight:
Take action early: It’s best to discover such projects early and nip them in the bud.
Try collaborating: It’s always helpful to talk to different stakeholders (e.g. media, politicians, chief scientists). They may help support your case from a different angle.
Fossil fuel interest groups are telling New Mexicans: Let us keep drilling or the state’s education system will collapse.
This story is part of “Climate Crimes,” a special series by The Guardian and Covering Climate Now focused on investigating how the fossil fuel industry contributed to the climate crisis and lied to the American public.
The oil and gas industry wants to play a word-and-picture association game with you. Think of four images: a brightly colored backpack stuffed with pencils, a smiling teacher with a tablet tucked under her arm, a pair of glasses resting on a stack of pastel notebooks, and a gleaming school bus welcoming a young student aboard.
“What do all of these have in common?” an April 6 Facebook post by the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association (NMOGA), asked. “They are powered by oil and natural gas!”
Source: Facebook
Here in New Mexico — the fastest-warming and most water-stressed state in the continental United States, where wildfires have recently devoured over 120,000 acres and remain uncontained — the oil and gas industry is coming out in force to deepen the region’s dependence on fossil fuels. Their latest tactic: to position oil and gas as a patron saint of education. Powerful interest groups have deployed a months-long campaign to depict schools and children’s wellbeing as under threat if government officials infringe upon fossil fuel production.
In a video spot exemplary of this strategy, Ashley Niman, a fourth grade teacher at Enchanted Hills elementary school, tells viewers that the industry is what enables her to do her job.
“Without oil and gas, we would not have the resources to provide an exemplary education for our students,” she says. “The partnership we have with the oil and gas industry makes me a better teacher.”
The video, from September of last year, is part of a PR campaign by NMOGA called “Safer and Stronger.” It’s one of many similar strategies The Guardian tracked across social media, television and audio formats that employs a rhetorical strategy social scientists refer to as the “fossil fuel savior frame.”
“What NMOGA and the oil and gas industry are saying is that we hold New Mexico’s public education system hostage to our profit-motivated interests,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center. “There’s an implied threat there.”
Last year New Mexico brought in $1.1 billion from mineral leasing on federal lands — more than any other state. But the tides may be turning for the fossil fuel industry as officials grapple with the need to halve greenhouse gas emissions this decade. Prior to mid-April, the Biden administration had paused all new oil and gas leasing and the number of drilling permits on public lands plummeted.
In response, pro-industry groups are pushing out what some experts have called “sky is falling” messaging that generates the impression that without oil and gas revenue, the state’s education system is on a chopping block. (NMOGA did not respond for comment).
Since February NMOGA has flooded its social media pages with school-related motifs like buses and books, but also with images of empty, abandoned classrooms accompanied by reminders about how the state’s schools “rely on oil and gas production on federal land for more than $700 million in funding.”
Elected officials have parroted this framing.
“This is a matter of critical importance to all, but especially to New Mexico’s schoolchildren, who have suffered greatly during the pandemic,” state representative Yvette Herrell co-wrote in the Santa Fe New Mexican in February.
But tax, budget and public education funding experts say linking the federal leasing pause to a grave, immediate risk to public education is deceptive.
“Any slight reductions stemming from pauses or other so-called ‘adverse’ actions would have zero immediate effect on school funding overall, much less whether students get the services they need to recover from the ill effects on their learning from the pandemic,” said Charles Goodmacher, former government and media relations director at the National Education Association, now a consultant. The sale of leases does not lead to immediate drilling, he said. Often, companies sit on leases for months or years before production occurs.
And as it happens, New Mexico currently has a budget surplus from record production.
Industry attempts to convince New Mexicans that the state’s public education system is wholly dependent on oil and gas are based on a tough truth: decades of steep tax cuts have indeed positioned fossil fuels as the thunder behind Democratic-led New Mexico’s economy. In 2021, 15% of the state’s general fund came from royalties, rents and other fees that the Department of Interior collects from mineral extraction on federal lands. Oil and gas activity across federal, state and private lands contributes around a third of the state’s general fund of $7.2 billion, as well as a third of its education budget.
Commissioner of public lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, herself a former classroom teacher, has been at the forefront of efforts to diversify the New Mexican economy since she was elected to manage the state’s 13 million acres of public lands in 2018.
“When I ran, in my first campaign, we talked a lot about how a schoolteacher really understands what every dime that this office makes means to a classroom.”
Garcia Richard takes pride in being the first woman, Latina and teacher to have been elected to head the office, which oversees around $1 billion in revenue generation each year. Since 2019 she’s launched a renewable energy office and outdoor recreation office to raise money from those activities, though Garcia Richard doesn’t believe that money will ever fully make up for oil and gas revenue. “I don’t want anybody ever to think that I have some notion that the revenue diversification strategies we’re pursuing right now somehow make a billion dollars.”
New Mexico attorney general Hector Balderas, a Democrat, is another top state official charged with managing the state’s energy and economic transition.
Given the same geographic features that make New Mexico the “land of enchantment,” the state is positioned to become a national leader in solar energy, Balderas said. But four of the state’s major solar farms are severely behind schedule.
Balderas, who has accepted $49,900 in campaign contributions from oil and gas over seven election cycles, said that a sudden disruption in new oil and gas leasing — such as the blanket moratorium the Biden administration originally proposed in January last year — would have an outsized impact on New Mexico’s most vulnerable.
“You would cut out nearly a third of the revenue that we rely on to fund our schools and our roads and our law enforcement community,” he said. “I don’t think environmental activists really think about that perspective: How progressives have cleaner air but then thrust original Americans like Native American pueblos into further economic poverty.”
Some on the receiving end of oil and gas revenue stress that not all educators and students embrace fossil fuel industry money in public schools. Mary Bissell is an algebra teacher at Cleveland high school in Rio Rancho, who cosigned a letter in November, along with more than 200 educators, asking NMOGA to “stop using New Mexico’s teachers and kids as excuses for more oil and gas development.”
Bissell says in spite of how cash-strapped schools may be, many of her colleagues don’t want oil and gas money.
“I’m not going to teach my kids how to find slope based on fracking,” she said of her math courses. Bissel characterized NMOGA’s attempt to portray educators as a unified force beholden to oil and gas funding as “disgusting.”
In some states, including Rhode Island and Massachusetts, state attorneys general have taken it upon themselves, as the leading law enforcement and consumer protection officials, to sue oil and gas companies for deceiving consumers and investors about climate change through their marketing. Balderas’s office said it is not actively pursuing that strategy at this time.
Seneca Johnson, 20, a student leader with Youth United for Climate Action, is from the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma. Johnson grew up in New Mexico and knows first-hand about the state’s underfunded schools.
“I remember in elementary school we would have a list: bring three boxes of tissues, or colored pencils,” she said, speaking of Chaparral Elementary School in Santa Fe. “As students and as teachers, [you’re] buying the supplies for the classroom.”
Johnson remembers being told as a child that the schools she attended ranked second worst in the nation. If New Mexico’s education system is indeed that bad, she said, how can officials continue to think that accepting a funding structure that delivers such a consistently poor result is a good idea?
“At the end of the day the system that we have now that is being paid for by oil and gas doesn’t work, and we know it doesn’t work,” Johnson said. “It’s the whole ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ kind of mentality,” she said, linking the industry’s patronizing messaging around its support for schools to a direct legacy of colonization.
“I don’t want to have to rely on this outside entity. I don’t want to have to rely on this broken system. I want better for my kids and their kids and my whole community.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered fears of another nuclear power disaster in the region, 36 years after the world’s largest nuclear accident.
It took less than a minute after an unexpected power surge for one of the nuclear reactors at Chornobyl (Chernobyl in the Russian spelling) to explode on April 26, 1986, ripping the roof off and spewing dangerous chemicals into the air.
The event, and emergency cleanup that followed, left 30 workers dead, thousands exposed to cancer-causing nuclear material, and a legacy of radiation. Now, 36 years later and with war raging, Ukraine is desperate to prevent another nuclear disaster.
Nuclear reactors generate more than half of the country’s power. Ukraine is the first country with such a large and established nuclear energy program to experience war, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The country’s 15 nuclear reactors, housed in four power plants, have layers of safeguards to prevent core meltdowns like the one that happened in 1986, when Chornobyl was part of the Soviet Union. But wartime is far from normal conditions, and experts warn that Russian military action poses numerous threats to these facilities.
Andrey Ozharovsky, a Russian engineer turned anti-nuclear activist, said Ukraine’s nuclear infrastructure is “quite vulnerable” to the chaos surrounding military attacks.
Chornobyl, Again
Those attacks have already begun.
The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the 20-mile exclusion zone around it, set up to limit further spread of radioactive material following the 1986 disaster, were captured by Russian forces on Feb. 24. It was in their control until they withdrew from the site on March 31.
Although Chornobyl is not an active nuclear power plant, the massive cap covering the reactor that exploded decades ago still needs to be maintained to prevent further radiation leakage.
Aerial view Chornobyl nuclear power plant with sarcophagus. Photo: Vadim Mouchkin / IAEA (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Sensors put in place by the Ukrainian Ecocentre in case of an accident reported a spike in radiation levels shortly after the capture, likely due to Russian military vehicles stirring up radiation in the environment.
The IAEA said the rise wasn’t enough to pose a public health hazard.
Ozharovsky, who was one of the first to raise an alarm about the recent spike at Chornobyl, said he’s concerned that radioactive dust from the site could spread across the continent.
“The most dangerous thing is that they can bring radioactive particles in their hair, in their clothes and their boots,” he says.
Olga Kosharna, a member of the Ukraine Nuclear Society, urged experts to create an updated map of radioactive contamination in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and to restrict movement in the area.
Ukrainian officials released footage, recorded since Russia’s withdrawal, which appears to show that Russian troops had built trenches and other fortifications in parts of the exclusion zone. Those actions may have further disturbed radioactive material in the soil and plants.
On April 26 Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the IAEA, and a team of agency experts arrived in Chornobyl “to conduct nuclear safety, security and radiological assessments, deliver vital equipment and repair the agency’s remote safeguards monitoring systems,” according to a statement from the agency.
Grossi says radioactivity levels at Chornobyl have returned to “normal” after the “very, very dangerous” Russian occupation of the site.
Nuclear Plant Captured
Chornobyl isn’t the only concern. Ukraine’s active nuclear-power facilities are also at risk.
On March 4, Russian forces captured Europe’s largest active nuclear-power plant, Zaporizhzhia, located in southeastern Ukraine. During intense fighting one of the site’s buildings caught fire, but didn’t harm the plant’s six reactors, and no radiation was released.
Ukrainian technicians continue to monitor Zaporizhzhia, but the country’s regulators have claimed that Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear power company, has engineers at the plant who are giving orders to staff. Further, Ukraine reports that plant management actions require approval from the Russian commander, according to the IAEA.
“Who is now in charge of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant?” asks Ozharovsky. “The Russian army is around, but armies aren’t nuclear engineers.”
Rosatom released a statement on March 12 and denied that they’re managing the operation of Zaporizhzhia. They characterized their staff’s presence at the plant as “consultative assistance” that takes place “on a regular basis.”
Grossi expressed “deep concern” about the situation in a statement last month.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, IAEA Director General, holds a press conference as he briefs the international press and media upon his return from the South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant. April 1, 2022. Photo: Dean Calma / IAEA (CC BY 2.0)
Further Threats
Since then, there’s been more reason for alarm.
On April 16, three missiles flew over the South Ukrainian nuclear power plant, Yuzhnoukrainsk, according to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-run nuclear power company.
Then on April 26 Energoatom reported that two cruise missiles flew over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
“The flight of missiles at low altitudes directly above the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant site, where 7 nuclear facilities with a huge amount of nuclear material are located, poses huge risks,” says Petro Kotin, Energoatom’s acting president, in a statement released on the company’s Telegram channel. “After all, missiles can hit one or more nuclear facilities, and this threatens a nuclear and radiation catastrophe around the world.”
The day before, Energoatom reported that Russia fired missiles over the cooling pond of the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant in northwest Ukraine.
Khmelnitskiy Nuclear Power Plant, 2013. Photo: Rluts (CC BY 3.0)
Russia hasn’t commented on Energoatom’s claims.
Kosharna wrote in an email that if a missile would’ve hit one of the plants the consequences would have been “catastrophic” for the world.
A stray missile damaging the plant could cause an explosion that would disrupt the power supply. Power is needed to ensure continuous cooling of the fuel rods to prevent a meltdown.
Typically nuclear plants use back-up generators to maintain power with a grid disruption and keep the cooling systems functioning normally. In wartime fuel shortages are common, and this risks the stability of the generators. Ukraine’s current shortage is only getting worse, according to the Gas Transmission Operator of Ukraine, a gas pipeline operator.
If the grid goes down and the generators are out of fuel and the cooling systems fail, there’s a last resort to prevent radiation from spreading. Containment structures around the reactors are designed to block any release of radiation, but they’re also vulnerable to missile attacks.
Reactor failure isn’t the only significant risk to the operation.
Staff operating facilities under extreme stress also poses a problem, Ozharovsky says, because any mistake they make on the job could be calamitous.
There are also other onsite dangers. Spent nuclear fuel storage pools that are a part of the waste-disposal system contain radioactive material. If they’re damaged the liquid could be released from containment, causing a massive spread of radiation. Japanese scientists considered this to be the “worst-case scenario” of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which had a series of meltdowns after a tsunami struck the plant in 2011.
Ozharovsky said he doesn’t believe the Russian military would deliberately sabotage one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants because it would threaten their interests. But he added that even the possibility that the nuclear power plants could be harmed accidentally should trigger worldwide alarm.
“For me it’s scary,” he says. “All the other nuclear power plants, like Khmelnytskyi, like Rivne, like South Ukraine (Yuzhnoukrainsk); they can be damaged during this war. And the international community needs to take care of that.”
Any attack on a nuclear plant is a breach of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Convention’s Article 56 considers attacking a nuclear power plant a war crime.
“I hope that many other countries who still have nuclear energy on their territory will rethink physical safety, military safety,” Ozharovsky says. “That’s a challenge no one country can solve.”
Building millions of needed residential units could destroy vital wildlands. We can house people and protect the environment at the same time.
California was born in the valleys. Like a sheltered bay amid stormy seas, valleys drew the first inhabitants of this land of topographical upheaval. They remained the center of human habitation even as subsequent arrivals forcibly transformed existing settlements, from Miwok village to Spanish mission, cattle ranch to suburban subdivision. Because the surrounding hills were explored but rarely occupied, they largely retained their character. Today they provide the last remnant of wildness in most of the state, as in much of the West.
In three years as a California land-use attorney, I saw this crisis unfold due to market forces and outdated approaches. And I continue to observe from afar how current policies meant to solve the problem promote unsustainable development in the wildlands, beyond existing boundaries.
Eleven million Californians already live in this wildland-urban interface. Meanwhile the only solution to the housing crisis is building millions of residential units — 3.5 million by 2025, according to Gov. Newsom.
As the gap between demand and supply widens, shooting prices beyond affordability for so many, appetites for building in the wildland-urban interface grow — not just in California but across the West. You see it everywhere — new homes in the hills above Orange County, the desert beyond Phoenix, the woods of western Oregon and southern Washington.
Given the rapid rates of growth reflected in the latest census, the problem only stands to worsen. But building in the wildland-urban interface is not the answer to the housing crisis. It cannot be.
Wildfire is only the most visible of the many harmful repercussions of development. More people living in or near the forest means more sources of ignition and more fires. It also means more life and property are at risk when fires inevitably spark, requiring budget-busting resources to quench them. Letting a fire burn out naturally and consume what is often decades of tinder buildup ceases to be an option, raising the likelihood and intensity of future fires.
The Thomas Fire burns in the hills above Los Padres National Forest on December 20, 2017. (Forest Service photo by Stuart Palley)
Building farther out from population centers also strains other public resources. As demand expands for energy, emergency services and water, so must the infrastructure to provide them. Longer commutes increase both conventional air pollution and the atmospheric carbon responsible for climate change, while construction in the wild fringes inevitably destroys habitat for non-human life. And while some people acquire their own personal green space, one single-family parcel at a time, the rest of us lose the breathing room so fundamental to life in the West.
Savvy developers and their political supporters are now using the housing shortage to promote projects and associated policies in the wildland-urban interface, even as they resist more beneficial measures like affordable housing requirements and limits on short-term rentals. Yet their efforts to undo environmental protections — particularly the much-maligned California Environmental Quality Act — long predate the housing crisis. It may be hard to blame them for using the situation to their advantage — and there’s some logic, however cynical, in their positions — but the choice they present, between open space and housing, between sustainability and affordability, must be called out as a false one.
This is not to say that the status quo is acceptable, only that there are better, more equitable solutions. Among them are building on vacant or underutilized parcels in city centers. Another involves converting empty office buildings to mixed use, since remote working has emptied many of these locations. Suburban areas, especially those connected to public transit, can increase density through construction of apartments, condos and townhouses that are more affordable to middle-income households. Investment in additional public transit is essential because it allows for denser development in areas where parking is hard to come by. Upgrading parks and other green space amenities is also critical — otherwise it will be hard to attract new residents to these developments.
Youth Spirit’s Tiny House Village in Oakland in 2021. Photo: Daniel Arauz (CC BY 2.0)
These are hardly novel suggestions, but they remain the best way to close the housing gap while limiting environmental impacts. Only by making communities more centralized and connected can we relieve the pressure to build ever outward.
Enabling the market to produce solutions, rather than hurdles, requires significant policy change. A recent University of California study identifies zoning regulations and discretionary local review as the biggest obstacles to the kind of infill development California needs. And while the California Environmental Quality Act serves a vital function, adjustments could ensure the law does not discourage projects that ultimately benefit the environment. Of the many legislative fixes proposed in recent years, only the more modest have been adopted — including SB 9, the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (HOME) Act, which streamlined the process for subdividing single-family lots and allowed construction of up to four units in place of one. Proponents of more dramatic measures — such as mandatory upzoning of neighborhoods near public-transit stops or job hubs — still seek the public and political support needed to get over the hump.
The time for large-scale change is here. Our current course leads to a future where a home is a luxury good, where all but the wealthy live hopelessly distant from green space. California, long touted for the boldness of its policies, has the chance to show the rest of the West that there are solutions to this insidious crisis. It won’t be easy, but it must be done. There’s more at stake than just the wildness of the hills.
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.
A new book explains why “Slow Water” projects can help us tackle our climate, water and biodiversity crises.
The world got a reminder of the beauty and importance of going slowly with the advent of the Slow Food movement that kicked off in Italy in the 1980s and spread throughout the world. Ditching fast food for locally sourced meals comes with myriad benefits for people and the planet.
The same can be said for embracing slow water, although the concept hasn’t achieved the same international recognition just yet. As we face a future of climate worsened droughts and floods, of continuing water pollution and crashing biodiversity, rethinking our relationship to water is central to thriving — and even surviving.
Science journalist Erica Gies found that many innovative projects working to solve our most challenging water problems all have a central premise in common: slowing water down. She explains how that’s done in her new book Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (available to U.S. readers in June), which tracks the work of “water detectives” enacting these changes across the world.
The Revelator spoke with Gies about what’s required to make Slow Water projects successful, who benefits, and why we’ll need to rethink more than just our engineering.
What does Slow Water mean?
In our attempt to control water we’re often trying to eradicate the slow phases and move it a lot more quickly. We’re putting up levees so that it won’t settle on floodplains. We’re filling in wetlands so that we can build or farm on top of them. We’re cutting down mountain forests that act as water towers, generating water and releasing it slowly.
In all of the cases I looked at, the water detectives were trying to give water access to its slow phases again, whether that meant restoring or protecting wetlands, or reclaiming floodplains, or protecting wet meadows, or in a city, creating something like bioswales.
Slow Water is really giving water access to its slow places as much as possible within our human habitat or near our human habitat. It’s thinking of water as an entity with its own agency. It’s systems thinking.
How do we begin to do this? It seems like it’s about more than just changing engineering.
There’s a kind of a fundamental attitude shift behind the concept of Slow Water, which is instead of having this sort of hubris or human supremacist attitude, the water detectives are looking at water as an entity that has its own relationship with rocks, microbes, beavers and humans across the ages.
Erica Gies. Photo by Jill Beale
That idea is very common in many Indigenous cultures around the world. That’s why you hear water protectors say things like “water is life.” Some people will talk about water as a relative, as a grandmother. That kind of attitude has a real strength when it comes to interacting with water, because water is part of a very complex system. There’s the water cycle, of course, but also all of these relationships with the different ecosystems and animals, including us.
The problem with our control-of-water mindset is that we’re often focused on single-minded problem solving. If we live in a dry area and we want to have water for later, we build a dam and a big reservoir. Or if we want to stop a town from flooding, we build a levee.
But if you’re only focused on solving that one problem, you’re not considering the system in which it works. And that’s why you have a lot of these unintended consequences, like building a levee that then pushes the water to another community nearby that doesn’t have a levee. And dams are an environmental justice issue as well.
It’s also very place-specific. This isn’t a solution that you want to scale up and stamp out in a real cookie-cutter kind of way. There are definitely commonalities in different projects, but every single place is unique in its hydrology, its ecology, its rocks, its people, and what its people need.
Slow Water projects are bespoke and, ideally, they’re local. They are more like [distributed] renewable energy — like solar panels on everybody’s roof where a lot of panels add up to a meaningful amount of electricity.
You traveled all over the world for this book. What common threads did you see?
I think the common thread is that you have to try to understand water rather than just try to make water do what you want it to do. You have to understand what water was doing before we dramatically altered the landscape. What is water likely to want to continue to do?
And how can we accommodate that within this landscape?
One of the places I talk about is Chennai, which is on the southeast coast of India. The people who live there are Tamils. They have this incredibly innovative water system that they’ve been doing for at least 2,000 years. But in the last 40-50 years, they’ve really gone down the kind of mainstream development path, as their city has expanded massively.
They have three rivers that go through the city and wetlands, backwaters, salt marshes and a whole series of human-built ponds that were relics of the great Tamil water infrastructure. But as they expanded, they built over many of those, and the city has begun to flood more and more regularly.
I was there in December and there was a small rainstorm and it immediately started flooding. During monsoon season there is nowhere for the water to go. But like us, their impulse now is to move water away — we can’t have it lingering here. We can’t have it flooding.
That’s created another problem. After the monsoon season is a long dry season when they need water. Now they’re drilling lots of groundwater and their groundwater is dropping and they’re talking about building really expensive desalination. But Chennai actually gets one and a half times the amount of water it needs via the rain. It’s going to these extreme lengths to get more water when it doesn’t need to.
What are the ways in which plants and animals can benefit from Slow Water projects?
The biodiversity question is critical, and it comes back to systems theory. The thing about Slow Water projects is, if you’re doing it right, you’re restoring or recreating or mimicking to some degree a healthy ecosystem that’s doing all of the nutrient and pollution and food cycling that healthy ecosystems do. And what you need, to do all that, is critters and plants.
We’ve altered 75% of the world’s land area. That’s one of the reasons why we’re having a biodiversity crisis. There’s a lot less habitat for all of these critters. I believe it’s a moral issue that we continue to coexist with other creatures, but there is also a self-interest angle to it. The more that we can do to help restore these ecosystems that modulate the water cycle, the more we also have space for these critters. And then we also need these critters to perform the work of modulating the water cycle.
I go into that in some detail where I talk about the hyporheic zone, which is an area that’s not groundwater and not surface water. It’s an ecotone that’s in between and has a lot of unique critters. It’s a lot like our human gut microbiome. If we don’t have healthy collections of microbes, then we suffer from various illnesses. It’s very much the same with waterways. So that biodiversity is really a fundamental piece.
The main focus of the book is how Slow Water projects can be an adaptation measure to help buffer human communities from floods and droughts. But in fact, because these are whole systems, there’s also a lot of “blue carbon.” Wetlands store incredible amounts of carbon, as do peatlands and high-altitude forests. So they are also a mitigation measure.
Maybe we’re not going to measure exactly the amount of carbon that’s stored in this complex system. But maybe we don’t have to. Maybe we can say, “Look, our city’s not flooding, and our stream is running in the summer, even though we’re in the dry west.” Maybe that’s a good enough sign that this investment has been worth it.
What can people do to get engaged in this work?
As people see floods or droughts in their backyards, they’re beginning to understand that climate change is water change.
But the really empowering thing about Slow Water is that there are things that you can do to protect yourself from flood and drought as a city, as a region, as a watershed. It’s not easy, right?
You have to cooperate with people, you have to share a vision. But people are doing it. I think that’s a really hopeful message. Water is local and there are things that you can do locally to have a much better relationship with water.
Mounting studies highlight greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs, and now a coalition of environmental groups has called for regulatory action.
This month regulators greenlighted a transmission line that would bring power generated from Canadian hydroelectric dams to New York City. New York’s plan to achieve a zero-emissions grid by 2040 depends on hydropower, and it’s not alone.
Globally hydropower is the largest source of renewable energy. In the United States it makes up 7% of electricity generation, and 37 states allow some form of hydropower in their renewable portfolio standards, which establishes requirements for the amount renewable energy that must be used for electricity generation.
As U.S. states and countries across the world work to reduce fossil fuels and boost renewables, hydropower is poised to play an even bigger role.
There’s just one problem: A growing body of research published over the past two decades has found that most reservoirs, including those used for hydropower, aren’t emissions-free.
“Hydroelectric reservoirs are a source of biogenic greenhouse gasses and in individual cases can reach the same emission rates as thermal power plants,” Swiss researchers found in a 2016 study published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Hidden Emissions
Despite the green reputation of hydropower among policymakers, some reservoirs emit significant amounts of methane, along with much smaller amounts of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide.
That’s bad news because we already have a methane problem. This short-lived but potent gas packs 85 times the global warming punch of carbon dioxide over 20 years. If we hope to stave off catastrophic warming, scientists say we need to quickly cut methane. But new data show that despite this warning it’s still increasing at record levels — even with a global pledge signed by 100 countries to slash methane emissions 30% by 2030.
Methane can rise from wetlands and other natural sources, but most emissions come from human-caused sources like oil and gas, landfills and livestock. We’ve known about the threat from those sources for years, but emissions from reservoirs have largely been either uncounted or undercounted.
In part that’s because tracking emissions from reservoirs is complicated and highly variable. Emissions can change at different times of the year or even day. They’re influenced by how the dam is managed, including fluctuations in the water level, as well as a host of environmental factors like water quality, depth, sediment, surface wind speed and temperature.
But recent scientific research provides a better framework to undertake this critical accounting. And environmental groups say it’s time for regulators to get busy putting it to work.
A Paucity of Policy
In the United States “there are no policy requirements and no regulatory requirements that reservoir emissions be assessed and reported,” says Kelly Catlett, director of hydropower reform at American Rivers.
And that’s concerning, says Daniel Estrin, general counsel and advocacy director at Waterkeeper Alliance. “We think hydropower is a totally false solution to the climate problem and would really dramatically exacerbate problems for our rivers’ biodiversity.”
Dams disrupt free-flowing rivers and cause a well-documented list of harms to fish, freshwater mussels and other animals.
Alewives returned by the millions after the Edwards and Ft. Halifax dams in Maine were removed. (Photo by John Burrows/ASF)
Gary Wockner, executive director of the river advocacy group Save the Colorado, likens the current push for more hydropower to fracking, which was once thought of as a low-emissions “bridge fuel” to ease transition between fossil fuels and renewables.
“But as the science evolved, we now know that’s not true,” he says. “In some cases, with all the leaks of methane, fracking can be worse than coal. And so here we are again in essentially a similar situation with hydropower as the science continues to evolve.”
That’s why this March his organization, along with outdoor retailer Patagonia and the nonprofit Earthjustice, started pushing regulators for more accountability. The groups, along with more than 100 other signers (including The Revelator’s parent organization, the Center for Biological Diversity), have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to begin a rulemaking that would add dams and reservoirs under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.
The program currently requires 8,000 facilities to report their greenhouse gas emissions — but none are hydropower plants or other reservoirs. The United States currently has 90,000 dams, 2,500 of which provide hydropower.
“Just like we require coal-fired power plants and natural gas power plants to report their emissions, I think we should require hydropower systems to report theirs,” says Mark Easter, a senior research associate at Colorado State University studying greenhouse gas emissions and a backer of the petition effort.
Mounting Evidence and Better Methods
It’s hard now to sidestep the issue of reservoir emissions if you’re serious about cutting greenhouse gases.
The first studies digging into the topic took place in Canada and Brazil in the 1990s. Research continued in the years following, with a 2000 study being the first to take a more global look at the issue. In 2013 another study found that 10% of reservoirs have emissions factors larger than equivalent carbon dioxide emissions from gas-powered plants.
The issue got a big bump in the public’s consciousness in 2016, when major media outlets picked up a study of global reservoir emissions published in Bioscience that found that previous research had underestimated methane emissions, which we now know to be the second biggest contributor to climate change.
The researchers urged policymakers across the world to take note and concluded that global reservoirs account for just under a gigaton of annual carbon dioxide equivalents — about 1.3% of all global emissions.
They also cautioned that their numbers still likely underestimate reservoir emissions. Most studies analyze emissions over a 100-year time frame, but methane has a much larger impact in the short term. There are also multiple pathways for methane to reach the atmosphere from reservoirs, some of which weren’t captured in their research but could be major contributors in certain places.
When areas are flooded to create a reservoir, microbes decompose the submerged organic material, a process that can lead to methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions depending on the water chemistry and other factors. A lack of oxygen triggers methane production.
Early studies tracked the release of methane as it diffused from the surface of reservoirs. But recent research has found that it can also bubble to the surface sporadically — a process that’s enhanced when reservoir levels are lowered. New acoustic tools have made it easier to capture these variable fluxes. Additional emissions can occur downstream after water passes through dam turbines, which usually draw water from the deepest, most methane-rich parts of a reservoir.
“Much more methane either bubbles out of reservoirs or is emitted just downstream from reservoirs than was previously known,” found the researchers of a 2021 study that focused on developing a new framework for calculating reservoir emissions, called the G-res tool.
When taking these factors into consideration, they found global reservoirs emit around 29% more greenhouse gas emissions per area than previously calculated.
Methane emissions are a bigger concern in tropical climates where there’s more biomass and warmer temperatures, the study found. But additional research has revealed that more temperate climates like the United States aren’t immune from the problem, either.
A 2014 study of an Ohio reservoir led by EPA scientist Jake J. Beaulieu found that mid-latitude reservoirs can have comparable methane emissions to those in the tropics. “We estimate that CH4 [methane] emissions from agricultural reservoirs could be a significant component of anthropogenic CH4 emissions in the U.S.,” the researchers wrote.
William H. Harsha Lake in Batavia, Ohio. Site of the 2014 study on reservoir emissions. Photo: USACE / Christopher Bass (CC BY 2.0)
Six years later Beaulieu and other researchers found that methane emissions from reservoirs in Ohio were the state’s fourth largest source of human-caused methane. That’s because nutrients continually wash into reservoirs from the upstream watershed. For reservoirs near developments and agriculture, the nutrient runoff can cause algae blooms that lead to more methane production.
“Reservoirs draining watersheds that are subject to high levels of nutrient loading, such as fertilizer application to croplands, tend to have higher methane emission rates than reservoirs draining undeveloped watersheds,” Beaulieu explained in an email to The Revelator.
That finding also means we can expect methane emissions from reservoirs to increase with climate change. Warmer waters produce more algae, and increased storms and runoff will send more nutrients into rivers and the impoundments created by dams. That creates a vicious cycle: more algae, more methane emissions and more warming.
A Global Concern
The work scientists have done to advance the methods used to calculate these greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs is helping to push real-world action. And it’s coming at a critical time.
Governments and utilities have planned thousands of new dams throughout the world. And many of these would be built in tropical and subtropical areas likely to have the largest emissions.
“What you could be worried about is the fact that there are hydropower building booms going on in South America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa,” says Tonya DelSontro, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo and a co-author of the 2016 Bioscience study. “If you build these large water surfaces for reservoirs, then we’d be increasing emissions.”
One thing that could help is action from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A 2006 report from the IPCC on climate change included an appendix “that gave some crude method to estimate greenhouse gases from reservoirs,” says Yves Prairie, an aquatic ecologist and the UNESCO chair in global environmental change at the University of Quebec at Montreal. “But because it was in an appendix, it was never formerly adopted as a method and countries didn’t have to report their greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs.”
However, the large body of scientific research done since then — including the G-res tool developed by Prairie and colleagues — led the IPCC to adopt a new methodology in 2019 that draws on these advances. It’s expected that soon countries will be required to report their reservoir emissions in their annual greenhouse gas inventories, he says.
Trung Son hydropower project site in 2012, Vietnam. Photo: Mai Ky / World Bank (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
U.S. Action
Wockner, who started the EPA petition, hopes to see counting and reporting of emissions begin soon in the United States, too.
“Then you can start talking about what to do about it,” he says. “How do you regulate emissions or how do you stop them?”
It may be months before the EPA responds to their petition, and even then it could decide not to take action. Although Beaulieu reports the agency is already at work on the issue from other angles, including conducting a nationwide survey of greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. reservoirs.
The four-year project, scheduled to be completed next year, “will improve our understanding of how reservoir greenhouse emission rates vary,” he says.
And the EPA has also included reservoirs in its national greenhouse gas inventory for the first time in a newly-published report.
This is promising news. “Emissions must be fully accounted for in the U.S. greenhouse gas inventory and evaluated in the context of regulatory compliance,” says Easter.
Having this information on emissions available to other agencies would help them to make decisions on whether to permit new dams, or remove or relicense existing ones, and contribute to a more complete understanding of the environmental impact of dams. It could also inform the action of states like New York that plan on boosting its clean energy portfolio with hydropower.
“Having a peer-reviewed scientific process for tracking emissions would help not just dam operators, but regulatory agencies and the public, too,” says Easter. “That way they can understand where the issues are — and where they aren’t — to be able to make informed decisions about whether to maintain these systems or if alternatives need to be found.”
The most remote inhabited island in French Polynesia is the habitat for several rare indigenous plants and animals, but it’s severely threatened by invasive introduced species.
The Place:
Rapa is the most southeastern island of the Austral Archipelago in French Polynesia. Ten islets, ranging in size from two to 64 acres, surround the main island, with a total land area of just 15.6 square miles (about 40 square kilometers). Rapa is sometimes called Rapa Iti, or “Little Rapa,” to distinguish it from Rapa Nui (better known as Easter Island). As of 2017 Rapa had a population of 507 people, a unique community that still follows old Polynesian traditions and speaks its own Polynesian language, Rapa. There are three main villages — Ahurei, Tukou and Area — all located around the central bay. It’s the only island in the country that has a winter season, usually between May and October, when the temperature can go down to 37 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). That temperature difference is one reason there are seabirds and plants living here that don’t live in other parts of French Polynesia.
Caption: Rapa Island, courtesy SOP Manu/BirdLife.
Why it matters:
Rapa is a place of extraordinary biodiversity, with at least 300 endemic species. The main inhabited island has one terrestrial endemic bird species, the endangered Rapa fruit-dove (Ptilinopus huttoni, local name Koko), which is the country’s largest fruit-dove.
Rapa Island is also a very important site for seabirds, with 11 species, mainly rare petrels, shearwaters and storm-petrels. Three species breeding on its uninhabited islets are now in danger of extinction: the Rapa’s shearwater (Puffinus myrtae or more locally as Kakikaki), white-bellied storm-petrel (Fregetta grallaria titan) and Polynesian storm-petrel (Nesofregetta fuliginosa) — the latter two locally named Koru’e. These species are very rare, difficult to observe, and of significant scientific interest. It’s suspected that the Rapa’s shearwater and white-bellied storm-petrel are endemic to this island — an exception among seabirds, who normally have large reproductive areas and breed in many different countries.
Rapa Island also has a unique human community. It was first settled by Polynesians, most likely in the 13th century. Their dialect developed into what is today the Rapa language. It’s believed that the depletion of natural resources on the island resulted in warfare, and the inhabitants lived in up to 14 fortified settlements (pa or pare, a type of fort, similar to the Māori pā) on peaks and clifftops.
Contact with Europeans brought liquor and disease, and between 1824 and 1830 over three-quarters of the local population died. Peruvian slavers raided the island as well. When a handful of their victims were returned to the island, they brought smallpox, which caused an epidemic. In 1826 there were almost 2,000 inhabitants; forty years later, there were fewer than 120.
The independent island kingdom was declared a French protectorate in 1867 and formally annexed on March 6, 1881. Subsequently the local monarchy was abolished. But the Rapa Island community still follows the old traditional ways — even if it has a governing town hall and an elected mayor.
The land belongs to the community and their descendants, so it can’t be bought by any exterior landowners. There is an elder council (Tohitu) that decides who the land goes to; if the land isn’t used for more than two years it can be taken away and redistributed to another local that needs it. There is also a Tomite Rahi (leaders from different factions of the island — religious groups, fishermen, taro planters, school teachers, etc.) that decides on rahui delimitations (protected marine areas where people are not allowed to fish, to protect food resources in the long term). These groups are not recognized in France or French Polynesia governments, but on Rapa Island their decisions are law.
On the island almost every plant, bird and fish species has a unique local name. That’s part of why it’s so important to protect these species: If they were to be lost to extinction, Rapa’s local community would also lose a part of its cultural heritage, which was already close to disappearing in the 1800s.
The threat:
Due to its large number of uninhabited islets and remoteness, Rapa is an ideal site for the protection of endemic animals and plants. But they’re threatened by invasive species.
Non-native species were introduced to Polynesia by humans and have profoundly altered the ecosystems where they settled. Invasive plants, for example, can gradually occupy a space and squeeze out local species. Other species can cause significant habitat destruction: Goats consume native plants and cause significant erosion, while predatory species like rats and feral cats directly attack chicks and eggs.
Threats to Rapa’s flora and fauna have increased dramatically. Twenty years ago overgrazing and extensive degradation of the endemic forests was caused by the introduction of cattle, goats and horses. Now the invasion of strawberry guava (Psidium cattleyanum) and Caribbean pine (Pinus caribaea) has worsened the situation. Introduced plants had already invaded 64% of the island in 2005, including most of the forested areas. A local environmental NGO, Raumatariki, has tried to reverse the situation since 2012 by installing a fence around important native forest areas to prevent further grazing by domestic stock and setting up a native plant nursery. Further measures are needed to avoid this ecological disaster.
All offshore sites are affected by invasive grass species, especially Comelina nudiflora and Melinis minutiflora. These can form dense patches, restricting the growth of native endemic plants, which can consequently affect the breeding success of seabirds since they provide less protection against the weather conditions and make it more difficult for burrowing seabirds to nest.
Of the nine islets first surveyed in 2017, three are invaded by Pacific rats — a major problem for seabirds nesting in burrows or on the ground, as they eat chicks and eggs. Unstopped this will eventually cause the birds to disappear. For example, the Rapa shearwater population (a burrow-nesting species) has collapsed from 1,000 pairs in the 1990s to fewer than 200 pairs today.
The restoration of the important indigenous forest areas on Rapa main island and offshore islets are essential projects for the Polynesian Ornithology Society, or SOP Manu, and its partner BirdLife International. The disappearance of the Koko and these seabird colonies would constitute a significant loss of the Polynesian cultural heritage and undoubtedly serious damage to our environment.
My place in this place:
I work for SOP Manu as an island restoration project manager, and my projects take place in multiple islands across French Polynesia. With the help of BirdLife International, I’m in charge of organizing restoration projects on uninhabited islets that are biodiverse or have populations of rare bird species. Rapa was of course identified as one of the hotspots, especially for seabird colonies. Since it’s very remote, there have not been that many visits from scientists — for birds especially. The last ornithological work was done in the 1990s.
The first time I went onto Rapa was during school holidays in 2017, when I joined one of the special ship rotations for children of the island to go home for two weeks every six weeks. There’s only one primary school on the island, so kids need to leave home when they’re 11 years old for schooling.
To go there, you really need to be prepared. A week before, you have to send all your gear and food onto a ship named the Tuhaa Pae, take a flight to an island the ship will stop at before going on to Rapa, and then spend 36 to 48 hours at sea.
With a team of scientists from SOP Manu and BirdLife International, we had to survey the fauna and flora on 10 different islets. It was a lot of work — during very bad weather. The town hall lent us a very old small boat. Sadly, while we were camping, we lost it! The rope broke during the night due to tumultuous waves and it floated away. We had to have a team of locals come pick us up in a bigger boat. The scariest part was jumping off the islet into the waves to catch the buoy and be pulled onto it. Of course, BirdLife helped us compensate the loss of the boat with a new one, so we could continue to have a good relationship with the town hall and the local community.
The second time I went, during school holidays in 2018, everyone remembered me: “You were with the group who lost the boat!” I met more locals than I had the time before, as my role was to start training them on biosecurity: We’d discovered on the previous trip that ship rats were absent from the island, and we wanted to keep it that way. Again, it was super fun, but bad weather limited what we could do.
I thought then that if I wanted to do more, I’d have to spend more time on this island. With the president of Raumatariki and my other colleagues from SOP Manu, we decided to form a team to do more work on the restoration project and applied for the Young Conservation Leadership Award.
I remember going for the third time in 2019, alone, to join Tiffany, Raumatariki’s president, and help her with the YCLA project for six weeks. At that time, I was in a slump because my SOP Manu projects on other sites weren’t working out. It had just been so discouraging to even be in this field. But the third trip saved me. I got to know more about Rapa and its local community, and it made me passionate about conservation again. Their involvement in our project and their views on nature are what I think of when I think of how our Polynesian society should be: protectors of our island resources for future generations and protectors of our cultural heritage.
I’ve returned three times since then. Each time I visit, people recognize me — they’ve kind of adopted me as their own bird expert. I’m often invited to village meetings and events. I get so much help from them, both in the field and when I’m staying in the village. They like to share everything, and if we walk around we never go home without a gift like fish, fruit or vegetables.
At each public meeting we organize to share our progress, a lot of people attend and give their opinions. In 2020, during my fifth time on the island with Raumatariki, we brought school kids onto islets to see birds and onto the main island restored forest sites to remove invasive plants. I learned a lot of their culture and we helped kids know more about their birds and plants.
I’m now very attached to this community and this beautiful island, and I really hope I can continue to help them restore the sites. Each time we arrive, we get flower crowns; each time we leave we receive necklaces of local blue seeds (which means you will come back). Life on Rapa isn’t perfect, and sometimes our visions clash with public opinions, but having the mayor, his employees and the tohitu (elder council) support our projects has made my experience a joy. I feel I’ve learned a lot more about the Polynesian way of life than during my lifetime in Tahiti, which has become modern and individualistic.
They probably won’t read this, but Tongia maitaki (thanks a lot!) to everyone on Rapa Island. You’re the best.
Who’s protecting it now:
Raumatariki protects the environment and cultural aspects related to the nature of the community. They produce indigenous plants in their plant nursery, remove invasive plant species, and plan to restore important archeological sites such as fishing pools (Paeka) and forts (Pa). They’re our local partners in protecting the birds of the island, so we train volunteers and staff to identify birds and invasive species, as well as in biosecurity and related subjects. In exchange they help us communicate with the population and give us logistical support.
What this place needs:
Funding is of course essential. Volunteers would be welcome, if they’re ready to spend months in remote conditions. But paying someone local to oversee these tasks full-time would be ideal.
We also need more scientific help in researching rare birds, their habits, and ways to protect them and restore their habitat. Some plant species, too, are so rare we just don’t know how to produce them on a larger scale for replanting at restored sites.
Lessons from the fight:
I’ve learned that the local community must be involved in conservation projects. Without their support, you can’t effectively protect these sites in the long term. Even though community dialogue can slow down the projects — since there are always diverging opinions — you learn to adapt your methods. Having everyone working together is better for the future of the island’s environment and for the future generations of these remote communities.
The Linhong tidal flat in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, is on the east coast of China. Jiangsu is one of the wealthiest provinces in the country, so there has always been serious tension between economic development and environmental protection.
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