4 Major Environmental Treaties the U.S. Never Ratified — But Should

Most of the world’s countries support these global agreements on conservation and pollution, but the United States is noticeably absent.

In one of his first acts in the White House, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to have the United States rejoin the Paris climate agreement. It signaled an important step in the country recommitting to action to tackle climate change after the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the accord and worked to roll back environmental regulations nationwide.

Biden’s move was hailed by world leaders and applauded by environmentalists at home. But the climate convention wasn’t the only global environmental agreement from which the country has been conspicuously absent.

Here are four international treaties that have been ratified by most of the world’s countries, but not the United States.

1. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

The 1982 Law of the Sea helped set an international framework for managing and protecting the ocean, including by delineating exclusive economic zones and creating the International Seabed Authority, which is currently tasked with drafting regulations for deep seabed mining.

“Originally the U.S. government was on board with the treaty when it was being finalized in the late 1970s, but when President Reagan came into office he called for a review of the negotiations, fired the State Department’s head of negotiations and appointed his own people who created a new list of demands,” says Kristina Gjerde, an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a senior high seas advisor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Global Marine and Polar Program.

When the treaty wasn’t reworked to meet those needs, Reagan’s team didn’t sign it. It would take until 1994 to get a U.S. signature, but the country still has yet to ratify it. To do so, would require a two-thirds approval in the Senate.

“The Law of the Sea has been uniformly supported by everything from the U.S. Navy to the Department of Commerce,” says Gjerde. “There’s nobody who’s really against it — other than those who don’t like the U.S. to be engaged in multilateral institutions.”

Unfortunately there are enough people in the Senate with that mindset to hold up this treaty, and many others. But that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to push for the United States to accede to the Law of the Sea.

There are numerous reasons why it would be beneficial for the country, but Gjerde says one of the most important right now is that the United States has to take a back seat while regulations are being drafted on deep seabed mining.

“The United States doesn’t have a voice in helping to make sure that the regulations are appropriately environmentally precautionary,” she says. “And the country has a lot of islands and waters that would be subject to potential environmental impacts from seabed mining by other states.”

2. The Convention on Biological Diversity

The treaty, which garnered its first signatures at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, has been called the world’s best weapon in fighting the extinction crisis. It has three main stated objectives: the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the equitable sharing of benefits that arise from using genetic resources.

The United States was a big player in drafting the agreement, but when 150 nations stepped up to sign it, George W. Bush declined to do so. Bill Clinton signed the treaty after he took office in 1993, but it never received the necessary ratification vote by the Senate.

And it still hasn’t.

The United States is the only member of the United Nations that has yet to ratify it, “which is just a disgrace,” says Maria Ivanova, a professor of global governance and director of the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

This omission stands in stark contrast to the country’s history of commitment to conservation, she says.

“The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species was initially called the Washington Convention because the first meeting was in D.C.” says Ivanova. “The United States was a champion for that convention and the first to start national parks.”

But that commitment began to fade in the 1980s with “run-amok capitalism,” she says. “That means you can use nature with impunity without replenishing anything. “

The United States does still participate in the Conference of Parties that assemble for the Convention on Biological Diversity, but without having ratified the agreement, it’s relegated to “observer” status. This year it will get some extra muscle from a California delegation that will also be attending in the hope of ramping up the United States’ commitment to biological diversity.

podium and conference sign — Conference of Parties for the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2016. Photo: Biodiversity International, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

3. Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants

The Stockholm Convention, an effort to protect the health of people and the environment from harmful chemicals, was adopted in 2001. The treaty identifies “persistent” chemicals — those that stay in the environment for a long time and can bioaccumulate up the food chain.

Currently the treaty regulates nearly 30 of these chemicals, which can mean that countries must restrict or ban their use, limit their trade, or develop strategies to properly dispose of stockpiles or sites contaminated by the waste from the chemicals.

So far 184 countries have ratified the agreement. The United States signed it in 2001, but once again, the treaty has yet to be ratified by the Senate. That means that the United States is often behind the curve on banning harmful chemicals, such as the highly toxic pesticide pentachlorophenol.

4. Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal

The United States has also signed but not ratified the Basel Convention, which took effect in 1992. This international treaty limits the movement of hazardous waste (excluding radioactive materials) between countries. It was written to help curb the practice of richer, industrialized nations dumping their hazardous waste into less developed and less wealthy countries.

The convention is now taking on the global scourge of plastic waste, of which the United States is the largest contributor. A new provision went into effect this year that seeks to curb the amount of waste shipped to other countries that can’t be recycled and ends up instead being burned or escaping into the environment.

The Basel Convention has also worked to address electronic waste. The failure of the United States to ratify the treaty, experts say, has allowed companies to shift recycling of toxic computer components to developing countries. Outsourcing of plastic and e-waste recycling from the U.S. to developing countries has recently been linked to chemicals entering the food chain through eggs eaten by the world’s poorest people.

scrap heap of monitors — A pile of plastic casing for LCD screens near Sriracha, Thailand. Photo: Basel Action Network, (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Next Steps

If you’re seeing a pattern here of the United States signing — but not ratifying — treaties, you’re not wrong. “In the United States, the biggest hurdle is that ratification of a treaty has to go through the Senate,” says Ivanova.

Despite this roadblock, which has stopped the United States’ full participation in some international agreements for decades, some still hope for a different outcome. “I think it’s sort of the dream of most who are engaged in international action that the United States would join these important international processes,” says Gjerde.

When it comes to the Law of the Sea in particular, she says, “It’s an opportunity to show real, global leadership again in tackling the many challenges facing the ocean.”

There are others who might not agree.

“You hear the argument from a lot of the policymakers internationally that they’ve been doing fine without the United States in the negotiations,” says Ivanova. “So maybe it’s better that the United States doesn’t sign.”

That may be because the United States can object to a lot of things and be an obstacle as negotiations are worked out. Or because the country can negotiate from its own national interest point of view.

“The United States has disproportionate power in global governance,” she says. “Or it used to. It has to regain the credibility and the legitimacy that it lost.”

But, she says, there are likely more benefits to the United States ratifying the conventions and being a rightful actor on the world stage.

“All of these problems are global, and we need all countries engaged,” she says. “We need all hands on deck. And the United States is a powerful state and brings with it a lot of additional expertise and engagement.”

The United States, in addition to government representation, has top universities and NGOs that do research and advocacy. “And so when the United States is a part of an agreement, it brings with it all of the power that it has intellectually and financially,” says Ivanova.

Not participating leaves the country open to criticism, as well as reduces the likelihood some countries will improve their laws on their own. Most recently, the United States’ environmental shortcomings have been called out by China whenever its own record is questioned.

With this in mind, the best thing the United States can do to reestablish its environmental credibility internationally is to take action at home. The Obama administration got the narrative right, but it didn’t sufficiently match on action, Ivanova says. Now, it’s crucial to do better.

“A lot of people misunderstand the global part [of these international treaties],” she says. “You actually implement them at home — you don’t go and implement them in other states. To achieve those goals, you actually have to take action at home.”

Species Spotlight: Will the Panamanian Golden Frog Survive?

These golden jewels have vanished from Panama’s streams, but there’s still hope for the critically endangered Panamanian golden frog.

Panamanian golden frogs were once reasonably common but have disappeared from their entire range, largely due to the deadly amphibian fungal disease known as chytridiomycosis. They now exist only in conservation breeding programs.

Species name:

Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki)

Description:

These small, fluorescent-yellow harlequin toads bred along cold, fast-moving forest streams. As the deafening sounds of the waterfalls drowned out their mating calls, Panamanian golden frogs evolved a unique semaphore-like means of communication — a limb-waving behavior — to attract the attention of potential mates. Their vibrant colors, however, don’t seduce potential mates but instead warn predators of their tremendous toxicity.

frog research extinction — Panamanian golden frog by Brian Gratwicke (CC BY 2.0)

Where it’s found:

The species lived in the Central Cordilleran rainforests and cloud forests of western-central Panama.

IUCN Red List status:

Panamanian golden frogs are critically endangered, with a drastic population decline of more than 80% over a 10-year period due to chytridiomycosis combined with habitat loss and pressure from the pet trade. Currently, it is known to survive only in captivity. If a population does remain in the wild, it likely contains fewer than 50 mature individuals.

Major threats:

Panamanian golden frogs have faced a multitude of human-caused threats. Due to their bright colors and the belief that they bring good luck, the frogs were once illegally collected in large numbers for sale in local markets and the international pet trade. On top of that, they lost suitable habitat to housing developments and agriculture. The amphibian fungal disease known as chytridiomycosis only added to the threats. In 2006 Panamanian golden frogs started experiencing severe chytridiomycosis-related declines, and the last confirmed observation in the wild was in 2009. Panamanian golden frog habitats are still affected by land-use changes, and the chytrid fungus is still present in its range, which has led many experts to believe they are extinct in the wild.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

Recognizing the chytridiomycosis threat, the first efforts to establish captive assurance populations of amphibians began in 2000 when Panamanian golden frogs were exported to zoos in the United States to be managed as part of a species survival program. This conservation project, called Project Golden Frog, established a healthy breeding colony of Panamanian golden frogs at the Maryland Zoo and later at other zoos around the United States. Additional colonies are maintained in Panama at the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center and at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project.

The moment that gave me hope:

Few people living in Panama today have ever seen a Panamanian golden frog in the wild, yet images of the frog are displayed everywhere. The golden frog, or rana dorada, is found on lottery tickets, T-shirts and festival posters, and each year on Aug. 14 thousands of people celebrate Golden Frog Day.

I never had the great opportunity to catch a glimpse of a wild golden frog, but I did come close at La Rana Dorada pub in downtown Panama City. Surrounded by hip golden frog artwork on the walls as I sipped an IPA adorned with another golden frog, I was reminded how this remarkable species has become such a huge part of the country’s culture. A flagship of Panama’s unique biodiversity, the golden frog is revered as a symbol of good luck and prosperity. I hope that good luck applies to them, too — that they’re still out there, waving their brilliant yellow limbs in the air, waiting for us to find them.

What else do we need to do to protect this species?

Fortunately for the Panamanian golden frog, its story may not be finished. The rediscovery of its sister species, the variable harlequin frog (Atelopus varius) in 2012 gave us hope that the Panamanian golden frog could still be out there, hanging on.

Meanwhile, captive populations of Panamanian golden frogs are doing well, and we’re optimistic they may be returned to the wild in the future. For any reintroduction program to be successful, however, there needs to be habitat for the frogs to return to. We need to take urgent action to conserve Panamanian golden frog habitat and to reduce the risk of chytridiomycosis infection to ensure they have the best chance of survival.

Key research:

Lewis C.H.R., Richards-Zawacki C.L., Ibáñez R., Luedtke J., Voyles J., Houser P., Gratwicke B. 2019 Conserving Panamanian harlequin frogs by integrating captive-breeding and research programs. Biological Conservation 236: 180–187.
Gratwicke, B., Ross, H., Batista, A., Chaves, G., Crawford, A.J., Elizondo, L., Estrada, A., Evans, M., Garelle, D., Guerrel, J. and Hertz, A., 2016. Evaluating the probability of avoiding disease‐related extinctions of Panamanian amphibians through captive breeding programs. Animal Conservation 19(4): 324-336.
Estrada, A., Gratwicke, B., Benedetti, A., DellaTogna, G., Garrelle, D., Griffith, E., Ibáñez, R., Ryan, S. and Miller, P.S., 2014. The golden frogs of Panama (Atelopus zeteki, A. varius): a conservation planning workshop final report. Apple Valley: IUSN/SSC Conservation Breeding Specialist Group.

Here’s What Climate Change Will Mean for Bats

A new study identifies threats facing dozens of bat species in areas of the world that are predicted to get hotter and drier.

The Isabelline Serotine bat (Eptesicus isabellinus) ranges across areas north of the Sahara and into the southern portion of the Iberian Peninsula. But it may be time for the species to start packing its bags.

A new study in Global Ecology and Conservation found that dozens of bat species living in parts of the world predicted to get hotter and drier with climate change will need to shift their ranges to find suitable habitat. For Isabelline Serotine bats that could mean a big move — more than 1,000 miles, the researchers determined.

They won’t be the only ones.

The study looked at two areas with high drought risk — western North America and the Western Palaearctic, which stretches across North Africa and Europe. They studied 43 species using three climate models and three emissions scenarios to determine where bats could move to “climate refugia” to find more suitable habitat, and which species are at the greatest risk of population decline if that journey isn’t possible or easy.

The news isn’t great. “All future emissions scenarios led to an overall reduction in predicted bat richness in both continents by 2080,” the researchers found. “Areas projected to support high species richness in the current climate coincided with greatest predicted species loss and greatest future drought risk.”

Already numerous bat species face threats to their habitat from development and degradation. In North America things are particularly dire. White-nose syndrome, a fatal disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, has decimated cave-dwelling bats there, including killing more than 90% of some populations in less than a decade.

Now climate change and changes to water resources pose a risk, too. All bats need water for basic survival, but some rely on aquatic prey or forage near the surface of water. Many species also roost or select foraging sites near water. And previous research has shown that reproduction declines dramatically during drought.

researchers in water — Scientists conduct bat surveys in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest. Photo: USFS

“While many species have evolved to survive in water-limited landscapes, an increase in the frequency, duration and severity of drought conditions may result in conditions too harsh for bat populations to persist, and is a threat to the long-term survival of many bat species,” the researchers wrote.

For about half the species studied, the area with a suitable climate would shrink, they found.

Coastal Europe and North Africa currently support the greatest amount of species richness, but are likely to see the highest number of species needing to leave. In Western North America, the low-elevation regions of the southwest U.S. and Mexico were predicted to lose the most species.

Those that may be able to extend their range to find more suitable climates will need to move fast to keep up with the changing climate. Not surprisingly, bats that are adept at traveling long distances are apt to do better in finding new habitat.

The factors driving these relocations vary by region, too, with temperature being the biggest factor for the Western Palaearctic populations and precipitation changes driving changes for bats in Western North America.

As the planet warms, mountain and coastal areas where things will be cooler are likely to see an influx of species.

Higher-elevation areas are predicted to retain the most species, including the mountains of Portugal, northern Spain, northern Italy, Mexico’s Sierra Madre, and mountainous areas of Arizona and New Mexico. Populations in some coastal areas were also expected to remain suitable, including coastal California and Mexico, and western France and southern England.

But those places could see additional climatic changes, too.

“While our models predict montane and coastal areas in both regions to remain climatically suitable for the majority of bat species it should be noted that these ‘refugia’ may be influenced by additional climate effects such as sea level rise (coastal areas) and increased incidence and severity of wildfires (montane areas),” the researchers wrote. “At the highest emissions scenarios, very few lower latitude areas retained their full complement of species.”

When it comes to shifting ranges, the researchers found that on average, bat species in the Western Palaearctic will have to move farther and faster than those in western North America.

For some species, there won’t be a lot of options.

The study found that 4-6 species in the Western Palaearctic are likely to have little overlap between current and future suitable areas, which could lead to population declines or extinction. Two of them, Mehely’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus mehelyi) and the greater noctule bat (Nyctalus lasiopterus), are already identified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. In Western North American, 1-3 species face similar concerns, including Myotis thysanodes, which is likely to lose 44% of its range and for which models show population declines of more than 90% by 2086.

Specialized bats that feed on nectar may also face additional threats in a changing climate, including landscape changes from wildfire.

“Additional factors that may determine the ability of bats to remain in landscapes with changing climates or colonize new areas include dispersal barriers, competition between species, prey and food plant availability, roost requirements, habitat fragmentation, disruption of migration phenology and influence of pathogens,” the study showed.

There are some things that can help ensure greater bat conservation success. Areas of refugia and water sources need to be identified — and protected. We also need to continue to strengthen global efforts to protect biodiversity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers say.

“Land managers can prioritize conservation and management activities to enhance existing protected areas and promote connectivity between current and future bat habitats,” the authors wrote. “Therefore, a commitment by world governments to significantly reduce carbon emissions should be urgently sought in order to avoid further deterioration of bat communities and the important ecosystem services that they provide.”

Links From the Brink: Trump Revoked, Confused Cougars and Wombat Butts

Plus what Maine did right (and wrong), billionaires in space, and rebranding invasive species.

Links — the connective tissue that binds us all together.

The brink — the edge of something you don’t want to fall over, or a tipping point we can be pulled back from just in the nick of time.

As the world burns (or floods), too many stories slip through the cracks. We’ve collected some of the most important stories you may have missed — and connected the dots to bigger trends and issues along the way.

Best News of the Month: Put down those chainsaws. The Biden administration this month proposed restoring protections to nine million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the latest in a thankfully long list of reversals of Trump-era policies. That’s great news by and of itself, but the Biden team went even further and moved to end large-scale old-growth logging within Tongass, while also adding $25 million to fund new sustainable development projects in Alaska. This would protect about 400 species in the region as well as people worldwide, since the forest serves as a one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. (That last part is especially important now that Amazon deforestation has flipped that region from a climate sink to a climate emissions source.)

A grumpy Western screech owl in Tongass. Photo: Don MacDougall/Forest Service

I’m Gonna Wash That Trump Right Out of My Hair: Speaking of Trump policy reversals, the standard for low-flow showerheads that the previous president flushed away is now on its way back to our bathrooms.

Trump’s standard rollback in this case was the watery equivalent of “rolling coal” — it was purposefully wasteful and done just out of spite. Luckily, consumers and corporations never agreed with this approach. Virtually all showerheads currently on the market already conform to or beat the old standard, which we expect will officially be in place again in a few months.

Worst News of the Month: In the latest in a long line of what can only be described as systemic failures, the government of Mexico announced it will once again allow fishing within the critically endangered vaquita’s habitat.

This ends the six-year-old “no-tolerance zone” that blocked fishing with the waters necessary for vaquita survival. With as few as nine of these porpoises left in the Gulf of California, and a long history of the animals dying in fishing nets, this change in policy could amount to a death sentence and eventual extinction.

Of course, things have been dire for the vaquita for two decades, and the species still manages to hang on. We can only hope that remains the case long enough for international pressure to force Mexico to change its mind once again.

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This Contradiction Makes My Brain Hurt:

- U.S. fossil fuel consumption fell by 9% in 2020, to the lowest level in nearly 30 years.
- U.S. crude oil exports reached record levels in 2020 and remain high in 2021.

What’s in a Name? Mountain lion, puma, panther, catamount … these names — and 78 others — are all commonly used to describe the same species, the big cat known scientifically as Puma concolor. New research finds that those wide and varied names “can obscure or deflect conservation communication,” making it harder to generate and maintain public interest in protecting these important predators (whatever you call them).

Speaking of Panthers: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed opening Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge to “off-road vehicles, mountain bikes, camping, fishing, drone-flying, commercial filmmaking, commercial tour groups, and, for three weekends a year, turkey hunting.” Journalist Craig Pittman (who literally wrote the book on Florida panthers) says the move is “not as bad as building golf courses in state parks, but it’s close.”

Gypsy moth — “Just call me Lymantria dispar.” Photo: August Muench (CC BY 2.0)

What’s in a Name, Part II: The push to decolonize species names made some key advances this month. The Entomological Society of America launched its Better Common Names Project to “review and replace insect common names that may be inappropriate or offensive.” Case in point: the gypsy moth, which is named after a slur against the Romani people.

Separately, Minnesota state Sen. Foung Hawj initiated an effort to rebrand the four species known as “Asian carp” plaguing the region to “invasive carp.” This is not a new idea, and it hasn’t been accepted in scientific circles yet, but it’s a welcome move in an era with so many hate crimes against Asian-Americans.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, an extinct saber-toothed cat species has been named Machairodus lahayishupup, with the second half of the taxonomic name using the words for “ancient wild cat” from the language of the Cayuse people, on whose ancestral lands the fossils were found. There are no fluent speakers of the Cayuse language today, so this name “gives the community an identity and recognizes the contributions of early generations of Cayuse people,” linguist Phillip Cash Cash, Cayuse-Nez Perce, told Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Richard Branson Can F*** Himself, and Jeff Bezos Can Put His Rocket Where the Sun Don’t Shine: It seemed like all the TV networks fell for the enormous PR stunts of rich people catapulting themselves into “space” this month. Few reported on the most shameful aspect of these missions: their terrible consequences for the planet.

“One Virgin Galactic launch produces >30 tons of carbon dioxide,” climate scientist Peter Gleick wrote on Twitter. “7x more than the average human produces in a year; twice what the average American produces in a year. Enjoy your 4 minutes of weightlessness.”

For the most part the true cost of these brief trips to our outer atmosphere did not attract much oxygen from the broader media. Heck, CNN even bumped climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe from a planned appearance in order to cover “breaking news” about Sir Richard Branson’s launch.

And it got worse from there. In the days after his flight, Branson himself doubled down on his excess, telling late-night TV host Stephen Colbert that critics calling for him to invest his billions into combatting climate change weren’t “fully educated” about space travel — a discussion the right-wing media leapt upon almost immediately as a way to criticize the “woke warriors” on the left.

Okay, culture wars aside, we agree with Branson on one point: Space travel and technology are — in many ways — essential to this modern world. We wouldn’t, for example, be able to monitor the damage we’re doing to the planet without space-based satellites and sensors. But do we need to do more damage along the way for a mission that accomplishes nothing scientific or practical? Even Jeff Bezos acknowledges that we don’t — not that that stopped him.

The Maine Event: The Pine Tree State made innovative progress on three critical environmental issues recently. First, Maine required its pension system and state treasury to divest from the fossil-fuel industry over the next five years, a move that will put at least $1.3 billion of investments into more climate-friendly industries. Activists say other states should follow this model.

After that, Maine became the first state to ban PFAS “forever chemicals” in products (effective in 2030), a move strongly associated with the state’s famous/infamous paper mills. It also passed the first law extending producer responsibility law, requiring big corporations to pony up for the recycling of their own packaging.

Unfortunately Maine failed on two other major fronts. Gov. Janet Mills signed a law banning wind farms in state waters (forcing them further offshore) and vetoed legislation to shift its electricity networks to community ownership, a move proponents said would have further sped up the transition to renewable energy.

Unexpected Conservationist of the Month: Cartoonist Matthew Inman, better known as the mind behind The Oatmeal and books like How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, turned in a hilarious comic strip about wombats, focusing (rightly so) on their square poop and evolutionarily marvelous butts.

But that’s not all: When he published the strip, Inman also donated $10,000 to wombat conservation (that averages out to about $1k per poop joke) and provided resources for others to follow in his footsteps. With as few as 80 northern hairy-nosed wombats remaining, every dollar (and poop joke) counts.

What’s Next? August will undoubtedly see more tragic fires, floods and destruction. Will the month also bring any action on the infrastructure bill, which may or may not end up containing legislation to address climate change? We’ll be watching this topic closely.

We also expect the arrival of the next climate assessment from the IPCC, more action on voting rights (which strongly affect environmental legislative outcomes), and news about wolves. We’ll also celebrate Cycle to Work Day on Aug. 6 and World Elephant Day on Aug. 12.

What are you watching or waiting for in the months ahead? Good news or bad, drop us a line anytime.

That does it for this edition of Links From the Brink. For more environmental news throughout the month, including bigger stories you won’t find anywhere else, subscribe to the Revelator newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Vanishing: Song for the Bobolink

In the diminishing refrains of a bird’s call, signs of our world disappearing around us.

What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.

Our small family knew bobolinks from a bird refuge four hours away. Each spring my partner and I made the trip to Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge with our daughter in hopes of seeing the 90-plus species of migratory birds we typically spotted over the course of a binoculared weekend. As we headed West we anticipated the winnowing, sky-dance displays of Wilson’s snipe, the oranges of Bullock’s oriole flashing high in the cottonwoods, and the bright spots of sunshine that dart through riparian thickets — the yellow warbler.

But the bobolink was like a sentinel, the first to greet us each year.

When we found the bobolink’s tuxedoed back and rambling song rising from the fields alongside the dirt road leading to our campground, we knew we’d arrived just where we should be — and right on time. This moment marked not merely the end of our drive but also the bobolink’s astounding feat of flying over 12,000 miles since we’d last heard his call. Bobolinks, who tend to be seen singly, attested to the braiding of wings and land and sea, to the astonishing rhythm of spring’s abundances, and to the persistent migrations of birds, songs and birders.

One year, just after a bobolink greeted us, we pitched camp at dusk beneath the cliff where hundreds of nesting cliff swallows performed their evening skyward wheelings. As our 5-year-old daughter worked, her little arms pounding tent stakes, she began to sing for the bobolink. Inspired by the bird’s flitting from grassy perch to golden ground, by his piccolo song, we three found ourselves crafting a round.

You know rounds, those woven songs — three layered voices, each joining a line or two after the last until a trio of distinct melodies harmonizes in circling chords. The round ends in a perfect reversal of its beginning, the first voice departing the plaited strain, then the next, until final notes resolve into silence. Early in life, our daughter learned to hold her part as we sang rounds in the car, on the trail, paddling the canoe. We sang popular ones like “Dona Nobis Pachem,” the elegiac notes of that repeated phrase evocative of a wood thrush fluting in pine forest: Give us peace, give us peace, give us peace. Other times, we made up the songs.

That night at the refuge, tent secured, we practiced new harmonies as the sun set in bronze browns over the distant squawks and trumpeting of sandhill cranes. Our completed round rang staccato notes rising and falling, like the bird’s twinkling call (Allegro!):

Bobolink-link-link-link-link-link-link,
Bobolink-link-link-link-link-link-link,
You will miss Bobolink if you blink.
Bobolink, you make me think!

Bobolink made us think because we worked hard to find the bird as we drove into camp. Each breeding male requires a broad territory of tall-grass meadow, so we scanned a wide swath for yellow-backed head, black chest, black-and-white back. We surveyed fence posts and the heads of tall grasses. We rolled down the windows, batting back mosquitoes, hoping bobolink’s chattering call might draw our ears and then our eyes. We had to pay attention.

In the years that followed, our bobolink round became a ritual we performed while setting up camp, celebrating his sentinel welcome and garrulous song. But then one year our song went unsung, our round vanishing with the bird.

We didn’t see bobolinks that spring. Or the next. Maybe our timing was off, we thought. Most likely bobolinks were absent from those fields because they were suffering, their status “declining.” During my lifetime alone, the global population of bobolinks has fallen by more than 65% — this according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which includes bobolinks in a list of species “most at risk of extinction without significant conservation actions.” So we sat in silence at the campground, our daughter wondering how a song no longer suited its own habitat.

Sure, we could sing other rounds, like the one made up of the words for numbers, each numeral corresponding to a note of the scale, complex in its dissonance but perfect for distracting little legs tired from hiking on mountain trails. Or growing girls mourning missing birds in quiet fields. There’s also the funny round her dad made up, something about magpies sitting on fenceposts until they eat animal roadkill. (“Yuck, Dada,” our daughter says before she joins in, too.) Yes, our daughter knows about nature red in tooth and claw, or beak and talon. She knows, too, about species death — that passenger pigeons, for example, were driven extinct across generations, disappearing entirely in the course of someone’s childhood-still-in-progress.

In recent years the bobolinks have returned to the refuge fields. A wildlife biologist reports that their numbers are actually increasing there, but both she and I know better than to give up our concern, because the birds’ presence at this one protected location belies their globally diminishing numbers. Without the deliberate preservation of more prairies, fields and meadows, without changes to the frequency of agricultural mowing across wide swaths of land, bobolinks may die off entirely.

Our daughter, now a teen prone to raising her eyebrows when we start singing rounds and to issuing occasional dramatic outbursts, says, “Nature is dying!” But her sentiment isn’t just teenage angst. How can I express to her my grief over the very real possibility that her melodies will soon have no referents in the landscapes that inspired them? Will she become so accustomed to forms of life falling away that she thinks living means witnessing countless losses due only to human disregard? If so, how can she possibly feel safe loving her world? How can she feel safe loving anything?

For now, she knows two types of bobolink song. I hear them too sometimes, wafting from the occasional bird in the fields or from the reluctant lips of our teenager, who’s thriving and becoming more complex. Unlike her earth.

I find myself mixing notes and phrases in my head, straining to make verses that fit her world, old refrains merging with new into a song more requiem than round:

Give her peace, give birds peace, make us think.
We will miss bobolink if we blink.

Explore the rest of the Vanishing series and discuss these and other #VanishingSpecies on Twitter.

Five Shifts to Decolonize Ecological Science — Or Any Field of Knowledge

European “explorers” left their mark not only on the environment, but also in knowledge systems.

By Jess Auerbach, North-West University; Christopher Trisos, University of Cape Town, and Madhusudan Katti, North Carolina State University

The COVID-19 pandemic will change a lot about the way knowledge is produced, especially in the fields of science, technology, engineering and medicine. Social movements such as Black Lives Matter have also increased awareness of significant economic inequalities along racial and geopolitical lines. People have new tools and new ways of working, many of which have heightened awareness of systemic inequalities in everyday life, work and research.

Ecology, the study of the relationships between organisms and the environment, is one field in which knowledge production needs to change. Facing pandemics and climate collapse, the old ways of working in divided silos will not solve challenges between humans or with the earth.

Ecology has developed through a western knowledge production process that has gone hand in hand with extraction, violence and imperialism. Early European explorers and collectors were integral to the systems of colonial land management, and insights from what would become ecology have been used to justify social and environmental control.

Recognizing that science is not free of power and violence is a step towards improving knowledge systems and making them fit for purpose for an inclusive world.

In a recent paper we explore what is needed to change knowledge production in ecology, but our arguments also have further reach. We reflected on ecology as a subject of scientific inquiry and on the research process, and argue that it needs to change.

An approach that continues to center western-trained scientists in understanding the world restricts research and limits ecology’s ability to address environmental crises, because it fails to recognize a diversity of people, knowledge systems and solutions.

From climate and environmental justice to conservation movements and global environmental assessments, including a diversity of worldviews on human–environment relations is necessary for a just transition to a more sustainable world.

Visualizing Colonialism

In our paper we used the graphic reproduced below to show an example of how the growth of western scientific knowledge is rooted in colonialism. This example is about naming birds, but similar graphs could be made for a host of plant, animal and even urban entities. We show the number of bird species named after European surnames, and how there are more and more of these the further one gets from Europe itself.

European “explorers” left their mark not only on the environment, but also in knowledge systems. What the birds were called “before” or by the people living with them was simply not considered. We also pointed out that the way maps have been drawn, with north “up”, puts emphasis on Europe and North America. This is a choice of power rather than necessity. It can change.

bird name map — Bird species named after European surnames. Author supplied

We’ve outlined five ways to help change and decolonize ecology. These are: decolonizing minds; understanding histories; improving access to knowledge; recognizing expertise; and working in inclusive teams.

Decolonizing minds: We argue that the minds of researchers, students, academics and activists must be “decolonized” to be open to forms of understanding that do not stem only from western scientific practices. This requires recognizing how language, biography, social networks and exposure give individuals particular understandings of what counts as “knowledge”. These understandings are often as limiting (for example, by being restricted to English) as they are enabling. Opening one’s mind to different frameworks of knowledge is a critical first step.

Understanding histories: The second step is to understand the histories of the places, people, environment and knowledge systems that shape a given field. Each place is particular, and understanding what has happened, between whom, and how, is critical when finding lasting solutions to current challenges. In an era where the humanities are largely underfunded, everyone should defend the need for deep historical knowledge so that we do not repeat mistakes of the past. History itself must show how indispensable it is to every field.

Access to knowledge: This means a commitment to equitable access to knowledge infrastructure such as journals, servers and conferences. It includes attention to exclusionary visa regimes, open access, and sharing.

Recognizing expertise: The western academy has made experts in its own image: largely white, largely male, largely based in the global North. These individuals have proclaimed their expertise and the planet has had little choice but to agree with them, whether or not they understand the realities of other places. We suggest that the idea of expertise needs to be vastly expanded. Today’s “experts” might not have as much power and influence tomorrow. If the systems were working, we wouldn’t need to change them. Yet we see widening inequality, social polarization and environmental destruction all around us.

Inclusive teams: Finally we argue for the practice of ecology in inclusive teams – and diversity in almost any field and process. Mutual translation and co-production at every step of the research process is critical. Biases must be deconstructed constantly. And it helps to recognize how complicated (or “intersectional”) the process is. Inclusive teams need to go beyond surface-level diversity to include individuals with different training, networks and neurological functioning.

We think our five shifts to transform ecology could be helpful to anyone working in university, policy or even corporate environments, and that the insights apply beyond ecology. It’s easy to criticize systems – and we must – but we also need to come up with practical ways to improve them.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

Decolonizing Species Names

Closing the Tree Equity Divide

A project in Los Angeles could help communities that lack tree canopy and provide a much-needed tool to protect residents from dangerous temperatures.

As heat wave after heat wave scorches the West this summer, it may feel like there’s no escape from the record-breaking temperatures. But mounting research shows one way to help beat the heat: Urban communities with more tree cover fare much better than those that lack a green canopy.

This lack of “tree equity” strongly correlates with race and income. A study of more than 3,000 communities across the United States determined that poor communities with a majority of people of color tend to have less green infrastructure and fewer trees than well-to-do, white areas.

That disparity can be deadly. Heatwaves kill more people than any other natural disaster — some 12,000 a year in the United States. That number is likely to climb as climate change increases the frequency and severity of heat waves.

Los Angeles is among the cities identified as having glaring inequities in green cover for communities of color. But a new project, the USC Urban Trees Initiative, could help cool things off. The project combines advanced mapping technology, air quality research, and landscape architecture, to show the best places to plant new trees. So far it’s been put to use in two neighborhoods that lack shade, with more to follow.

The Revelator spoke to one of the initiative’s researchers — geographer John P. Wilson, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of the Spatial Sciences Institute — about how a city known as the “car capital” could instead be a leader in trees.

How did this research come about?

There’s a story in this month’s National Geographic that makes the case that you need trees if you’re going to combat climate change and you need trees if you’re going to address equity. And I think that both of those things have motivated our desire to work in this space.

John Wilson. Photo: Courtesy of USC

Cities are not well positioned to cope with the [rising] heat. How could you mitigate those heat impacts? Obviously one option is to build more controlled indoor environments and increase the amount of air conditioning. But [from an energy and climate standpoint], that’s problematic.

A simple solution would be to have a larger and more sustainable [urban] forest.

Last summer in Los Angeles we had two weeks where the temperature every day was in the 100s. On one of those days a colleague of mine went out with a handheld thermometer. The official temperature that day was 103 F and in the middle of the street the temperature at body height was about 135 F. And then if you walked to the sidewalk and stood underneath a mature tree with a large canopy, then the temperature was in the high 80s, low 90s.

Here in Los Angeles under the leadership of Mayor Eric Garcetti there’s a sustainability plan that includes planting 90,000 trees with an eye to looking at the parts of the city that have the least tree cover now.

The goal of the effort would be increasing tree canopy by 50%, because canopies are going to provide shade, transpiration, muffling or abatement of noise, and support more wildlife. It also has the capacity to take air pollution out of the atmosphere. And of course, at the end of the day, a large forest could help sequester carbon.

There’s a series of commentators, particularly in Europe, who have argued that given all that’s happened or not happened in the last 20-30 years, we actually need carbon negative cities, not carbon neutral cities now.

How are you seeing these climate impacts in Los Angeles?

The benefit of living along the coast in Los Angeles is that you have the sea breeze every day and a land breeze at night. Nature sort of provides air conditioning for free. That was until the real estate agents realized that was the case, and now you need $6 or $10 million to buy a house in those locales.

As a consequence most people live between 10 to 50 miles inland. In our study neighborhoods of El Soreno and Lincoln Heights, research indicates that in the last 20 years, they’ve had on average three or four days a year with temperatures above 95 F. But that number is likely to grow to 40 to 60 days by 2050 given current trends.

Humans have the capacity to withstand all kinds of challenges but if we had 60 days that were really, really toasty, then that’s going to compromise people’s physiological and mental health, and their wellbeing.

What did you find about equity and tree cover in your research neighborhoods?

Our initial work was to look at a small, very well-established part of the city, about five square miles, not far from downtown. The area has very modest incomes, a mix of renters and homeowners, mostly Hispanic. The second biggest group were Asian Americans. Over half had lived in this particular part of the city for 10 years or more.

maps of neighborhoods — Map of the initial study area. Image: USC Urban Trees Initiative

We did a census of all the trees, both on public and private property, and lo and behold there were 57,000 residents, but only 38,000 trees.

If we were to drive 10 miles west to Beverly Hills, that’s not the counts we would get. For every 50,000 people, there’s probably 250,000 to 750,000 trees. So that means that the local climates are different. It’s also the case that residents of Beverly Hills can likely go anywhere in the world they want to escape the heat. But in the neighborhoods that we examined, about 15 or 20% of the population don’t have a vehicle. So they’re going to rely on pedestrian movement or mass transit to get around.

In our study area there were also 19 public parks, and I think we had on average about four or six trees per acre, but the citywide average for all its public parks is something like 12 to 14 trees per acre. So first in this particular part of the city, we actually found there were less park acres per thousand people. And then with less acres, we still had less trees per unit area compared to the whole of the rest of the city.

What did you propose as potential solutions?

We produced some visualizations of scenarios that ultimately would lead to a more vibrant urban forest that could provide some much-needed benefits to the people who live in these neighborhoods.

We used five examples. Two were elementary schools, including one that currently has few trees and one that had a fair number of trees. But in both cases, we were able to illustrate how you could add trees and dramatically change the temperatures when children are in school and outside during recess.

And then we looked at a local park. Apparently the logic for parks and recreation in Los Angeles is that we need large open spaces to encourage people to participate in activities. But in Los Angeles for six or eight months a year now it’s so hot that nobody’s going to want to be out in the middle of an unshaded field.

What we did was we kept all of the facilities in the park and we showed how you can fill in some of these spaces such that people could still use them, but for large parts of a day there would be areas people could play and recreate that were partially shaded.

And then we did the same thing for a very narrow street where we would have to reimagine what part was used for traffic and what part was used to plant trees. And then we looked at the potential for doing that on a wide street.

Since COVID we’ve seen “slow streets” and streets where lanes have been taken away to support alfresco dining. Los Angeles is the capital of cars, and before COVID I never would have thought that possible. So, I think we’re seeing a moment of understanding that we can still support mobility, but the terms of engagement about what else we can do as well is changing. Certainly that’s my hope.

What are the next steps for your project?

I think an important part of our work has been to try and find other parts of the city that could benefit the most from these kinds of interventions and to focus our attention and energy on them. So in our next phase, we’re going to go south to the neighborhoods of Boyle Heights and City Terrace, and then to South Central.

One aspect that’s also continuing is looking at the ability of mature trees to help mitigate air pollution. What we want to try and understand is, what’s the effect of one tree [on air quality]? What’s the effect of two or three trees close to each other? What would be the effect of 50 trees?

Another thing we’d like to do in a larger project would be to establish urban forest laboratories. After we plant trees, we’d install soil moisture sensors with Wi-Fi so we could collect data in real time. That way we could understand more about the performance of the trees relative to the water we had available or we thought was available naturally.

And then the other part of our work is to better engage people to understand how they use their neighborhood, or how they would like to use their neighborhood, so we can plant trees in a way that connects with them and their everyday lives.

If we can do that, there are health advantages that would follow in terms of people being enabled to live more active lifestyles, breathe cleaner air, and have places close to where they live or work where they can take refuge from the heat.

We also hope to engage with the city and a group of nonprofits so that we can partner in both doing the science I’ve been talking about, and begin the task of planting trees in neighborhoods that lack green cover. We hope that the nonprofits can be the engine that plants those trees and that they can do it in a way where they grow a local workforce to maintain that forest.

Species Spotlight: The Straw-Headed Bulbul Sings About Extinction

Rampant capture for the songbird trade threatens to silence the forests of this species’ evolutionarily marvelous melody.

Coveted for its rich, melodious song, the critically endangered straw-headed bulbul continues to decline across its range due to relentless trapping for the cage-bird trade. Lax enforcement of existing laws has made the problem worse.

Species name and description:

The straw-headed bulbul (Pycnonotus zeylanicus) is a large, brown bird with a yellow crown and cheeks, thick white streaks on its breast, and two prominent facial stripes. It’s best known for its bubbling, lyrical song.

Where it’s found:

The straw-headed bulbul is a Sundaic species primarily found in the lowland scrub and woodland of southeast Asia, including secondary and disturbed forests, most often near rivers and other open water bodies.

Until the latter part of the 20th century, it was widespread in lowland riparian areas from Tenasserim, Myanmar, south through peninsular Thailand and peninsular Malaysia and Singapore to Sumatra, Java and Kalimantan, Indonesia, Brunei and Sabah and Sarawak (Malaysia). Common throughout its range in the 1950s, it is now extinct in Thailand and most likely extinct in Myanmar and Java; it’s very close to extinction on Sumatra, as well.

The bird now lives wild only in Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore. Singapore is considered a stronghold — the only population that appears to be increasing — but elsewhere extirpations are evident throughout the bulbul’s range. In Indonesia it likely survives only in remote parts of Kalimantan. Surviving populations in Malaysia and Singapore are under severe threat from poaching for the cage-bird trade.

IUCN Red List status:

Critically endangered

Major threats:

The straw-headed bulbul is among Asia’s most threatened songbirds due to seemingly unabating demand for the cage-bird trade. The culture of bird-keeping is strong in some Southeast Asian countries, particularly Indonesia, and this bird’s rich melody makes it very popular in songbird competitions and with hobbyists. The demand has resulted in intense trapping of the birds, which are then sold in bird markets, and more recently, online using social media platforms. Demand from the trade has devastated bulbul populations.

As wildlife traders increasingly weaponize social media by advertising protected species for sale, national legislation lags in many range states. Malaysia, for instance, still does not have laws pertaining to cyber wildlife crime and online wildlife trade remains a convenient loophole, despite being flagged as an issue by conservation organizations.

Wild populations are increasingly difficult to locate, and as numbers of specimens in the wild decrease, the prices commanded by traders have increased, putting further pressure on the remaining birds.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

While the species is protected in most of its extant range states, it is not currently protected in Indonesia. Protecting it in Indonesia is of critical urgency, as the country is its most significant consumer. In June 2018 the Indonesian government launched a revised list of protected species to include the straw-headed bulbul, previously only protected by a zero-harvest quota. But this positive conservation action was tragically short-lived. The Indonesian government buckled under pressure from a coalition of bird hobbyists and traders and removed the straw-headed bulbul and four other songbird species from the protected species list in August 2018 — ironically, the very same month that the species was categorized as critically endangered on the Red List.

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A zero-harvest quota remains in place in Indonesia, prohibiting capture and trade. While in theory this should be adequate protection, in reality no penalties for transgressions are evident, rendering the policy completely ineffective.

Breeding for commercial sale of this species is legal in Indonesia. But allowing trade in captive-bred birds while failing to adequately monitor their operations, and not closing the open bird markets found throughout the country, simply creates a convenient loophole for wildlife laundering.

My favorite experience:

Eighteen years ago I had the privilege of hearing the song of the straw-headed bulbul for the first time, just minutes away from where we lived in Malaysia. I was fortunate to observe them in that same forest reserve several times afterward, as well as by the rivers in Malaysia’s premier national park, Taman Negara. But it has been years since we have seen or heard them. I know it’s not too late for the species in Malaysia — and on a rather personal note, I hope that one day, my daughters will see and hear the song of wild straw-headed bulbuls here.

What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?

First and foremost, Indonesia should reinstate full legal protection and put effective measures in to place to ensure breeders are not laundering wild-caught birds into the trade under the guise of being captive-bred.

Cross-border commerce also needs to be addressed. To accomplish this, the species should be uplisted from Appendix II to Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which would ban all international trade. This would also strengthen efforts made by range states to prevent illegal international trade and further highlight the urgency of the issue.

Protecting where these birds live will also help. The straw-headed bulbul’s habitat is shared by other, higher-profile species, such as tigers, orangutans and elephants. As such, existing efforts to protect those species could be taken advantage of to better protect the birds. Patrols should be made aware of the straw-headed bulbul and its protection status and be on the lookout for bird trappers and traffickers, especially in areas where this highly threatened species still persists.

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A post shared by Gan Lee Hsia (@leehsia_gan)

Trade in physical and online markets must be continually monitored, especially with increased shipments of songbirds being intercepted from neighboring Malaysia and Indonesian songbirds becoming increasingly scarce. Offenders caught trapping, trading or keeping this species should be punished to the full extent of the law to ensure a deterrent is in effect.

Finally, the public needs to be made aware of the plight of the straw-headed bulbul and encouraged to get involved in the effort to ensure this melodious songster is not silenced forever.

Key research:

- Shepherd, C.R., Shepherd, L. A. and Foley, K-E. (2013). Straw-headed Bulbul Pycnonotus zeylanicus: legal protection and enforcement action in Malaysia. BirdingASIA 19 (20): 92-94.
- Leupen, B. T. C. and Shepherd, C. R. (2018). The Critically Endangered Straw-headed Bulbul Pycnonotus zeylanicuslacks full legal protection in Indonesia – the main source of its problems. BirdingASIA (30): 12-15.
- X., Chiok, Ng, E. Y. X., Tang, Q., Lee, J. G. H. and Rheindt, F. E. (2020) A distance sampling survey of the Critically Endangered Straw-headed Bulbul Pycnonotus zeylanicus in Singapore. Bird Conservation International.

End Subsidies That Drive Overfishing and Threaten Ocean Health

Harmful fisheries subsidies push species to extinction, fuel food insecurity, and worsen the climate crisis.

For every day that passes without an agreement to end subsidies that drive overfishing, fish populations shrink, coastal communities lose vital livelihoods and food security, and the ocean suffers.

Harmful fisheries subsidies mean industrial fishing can continue well beyond the point of over-exploitation. Over 60% of the $35 billion spent every year on fisheries subsidies is harmful, meaning it’s linked to overfishing, overcapacity or illegal fishing. This results in industrial trawlers hoovering up the catch of small-scale fishers who can’t compete with the artificially low operating costs of these vessels.

In fact, other nations provide twice as much funding for their vessels to fish in African waters as African nations do themselves, transferring the risk of overfishing to the countries that can least afford it.

By 2010 we’d already wiped out 90% of large fish like tuna, salmon and halibut. But the smaller fish people depend on are also being driven to the point of collapse. These fish populations are vital to the food security of coastal communities and entire nations. In Liberia, for example, 80% of people are dependent on fish for essential dietary protein.

Our investigations at the Environmental Justice Foundation have found that the nations subsidising the ongoing exploitation of collapsing fisheries are directly driving food insecurity, unemployment and, in some cases, illegal fishing in regions already under the most pressure from the crisis in our ocean.

In Ghana we’ve documented Chinese-owned vessels, which receive subsidies from China’s government, fishing illegally in the nation’s waters. This brings additional layers of destruction and exploitation to a country already experiencing extensive illegal fishing — endangering livelihoods, food security and national security.

Global Ramifications

However, it would be a grave mistake to assume that this is only a problem for specific nations. By keeping fishing fleets out in over-exploited parts of our ocean, and by consistently keeping the pressure up in waters that have long since run out of economically viable fishing opportunities, harmful fisheries subsidies drive key fish populations closer to disappearing forever.

This threaten more than the sustainability of fisheries; there are broad implications for the climate crisis. The big fish extracted from fisheries would otherwise sink to the deep ocean on death, sequestering the carbon in their bodies away from the atmosphere. Globally, 43.5% of the extraction of this “blue carbon” comes from areas that would be unprofitable to fish without subsidies, to say nothing of the climate impacts of the fuel burned to reach them.

Ultimately, this is self-destructive, short-term thinking. The nations funding harmful fisheries subsidies are paying to make themselves, and all of us, worse off in the long run. We’re all poorer if the ocean is stripped of life. Bringing it back to sustainability is a global challenge for all nations — one they can and must solve together.

Taking the leaden weight of harmful fisheries subsidies from struggling fish populations would allow our ocean to recover, boosting the abundance of fish in the sea with positive outcomes for our ocean and for the people who depend on it.

An Opportunity for Leadership

Ambassador Peter Thomson of Fiji, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean, has highlighted that ending harmful fisheries subsidies is the single most effective short-term action we can take to turn around the decline of ocean environments.

And there’s an opportunity to do just that right now. At the World Trade Organization meeting this month, negotiators have an unrivalled opportunity to showcase their leadership and vision by sealing a deal to end these subsidies and protect our ocean.

By doing so they can advance the Sustainable Development Goals, and make progress on resolving the climate crisis, the defining ecological, economic and social emergency of our time.

If they fail to take action, ending harmful fisheries subsidies should continue to be a global priority. By keeping more fish in the sea, coastal communities would be supported, more carbon would be retained in the ocean, and marine ecosystems could start to regenerate.

The solution is clear, and the need is urgent. To support people, to let fish populations recover and to ensure a level playing field for everyone, it’s long past time to end harmful fisheries subsidies.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or its employees.

Study: Financial Markets Ignore Environmental Damage

Credit-rating agencies say they can discipline companies that behave badly, and they have in some cases, but research reveals negligible progress.

Can the financial industry help rein in environmentally destructive corporations? That’s what the industry’s statements might have you believe.

Take this comment from Robert Fauber, president and CEO of Moody’s Corporation, the credit rating giant: “Sustainability has become an integral part of who we are and how we operate at Moody’s,” Fauber wrote in the company’s 2020 sustainability report, released in June 2021. “Together, we are leveraging our expertise, resources and values to drive positive change for better business, better lives and better solutions.”

Moody’s is not alone. Statements and reports like these have become common in the corporate world, as companies and sectors vie to show consumers and the public that they can be part of the solution to climate change and environmental degradation.

And their efforts appear to be paying off. In the United States, the value of sustainable investing assets grew by 38% between 2016 and 2018.

But does this growth truly reflect any pressure from the financial industry to continue the “greening” of the world’s businesses? New research published this March in the journal Global Environmental Change butts up against that industry positioning.

“There is a narrative in the financial markets that the financial markets on their own are very well capable of disciplining erring, fraudulent or stupid CEOs,” says study co-author Bert Scholtens, finance professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “Well, we doubt that.”

The companies responsible for environmental and health disasters may not see much of a negative response at all from investors and credit-rating agencies, the researchers concluded.

“The financial community seems unable to discipline the economic agents behind the controversies,” they wrote.

The authors examined 98 environmental and health controversies and disasters between 2010 and 2018, including events like oil spills at Exxon Mobil and Shell and corruption scandals like the one surrounding Volkswagen’s cheated emissions tests. When researchers analyzed the reaction from investors and credit-rating agencies, they found a lackluster response. For investors the response was quite small, but noticeable. Credit-rating reactions, meanwhile, were not statistically significant.

smoke and flames on the water — A controlled burn of oil from the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill sends towers of fire hundreds of feet into the air over the Gulf of Mexico on June 9, 2010. Photo: Coast Guard Petty Officer First Class John Masson, (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Some companies do pay the price from the finance sector for their negligence. A noteworthy example occurred after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which dumped 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and killed hundreds of thousands of birds, fish and marine mammals. In the months after the spill, energy company BP saw its stock shares fall along with its credit rating, which agencies downgraded as the cleanup attempt took a toll on the company balance sheet.

But that may not be happening across the board.

The Sustainability Debt

The finance sector’s rhetoric around environmental sustainability is in part driven by clients, consumers and employees, says Geoffrey Heal, professor of economics at Columbia University’s business school, who was not affiliated with the new study.

“A lot of [the sector’s] clients — individuals and funds — want to invest in a more sustainable way,” Heal says. “The fund managers, who don’t know anything about sustainability and in most cases were never particularly interested in it, are having to come up with some ideas about what sustainable investing means.”

For credit-rating agencies, the calculus is slightly different. The impetus to incorporate nonfinancial environmental, social and governance factors — known as ESG factors — into ratings is driven by the recognition that they affect a firm’s ability to pay back its debts. For example, Pacific Gas & Electric saw its credit ratings fall after being held liable for wildfires started by poorly maintained equipment. The company filed for bankruptcy soon after.

Those risks have been incorporated to some degree throughout the history of credit ratings, says Carmen Nuzzo, senior consultant for the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment. But, experts say, those factors have historically been undervalued.

Nuzzo says credit rating agencies have made a lot of progress toward making that valuation more explicit and transparent by clarifying how ESG factors feature in their methodology. More than 170 investors and 26 credit rating agencies have signed on to PRI’s ESG in Credit Risk and Ratings Initiative. All of them now have sustainability finance departments that work with credit analysts, she said.

In the past few years, signatory agencies have published reports on how they are incorporating environmental and climate factors into analysis. S&P Global Ratings, for example, adjusted 56 ratings for these factors between 2012 and 2015 and 106 ratings between 2015 and 2017.

But incorporating these factors is more about debt than sustainable values per se, Nuzzo says, and won’t mean agencies necessarily give better ratings to greener companies. Analysts are still agnostic on anything that goes beyond likelihood of default. If a company can still pay back its debts, a credit agency remains unlikely to lower its rating and, effectively, punish it for a less-than-ideal environmental record.

The Marketplace of Information

While sustainable investing has become en vogue, Heal says efforts remain in part hampered by bad data.

“If I want to know about a company’s environmental performance it’s actually hard to find hard data on that,” he says.

To attempt to address this information gap, a slew of “ESG rating” firms and products have cropped up claiming to evaluate how advanced companies are in environmental and social measures. But some research suggests their results may be often unreliable and inconsistent. In some cases, Scholtens says, the agencies may look more carefully at whether a firm has signed on to certain agreements or ticked certain boxes than with actual performance, which can be difficult to quantify. And while they may investigate the emissions a company generates in its personal facilities, agencies often don’t look at other indirect emissions.

That’s not surprising, the experts say, because there are standardized forms for financial results, but not environmental ones.

“The companies don’t have to disclose their environmental performance, they don’t have to file it with anybody,” says Heal. “It would be helpful to have more standardized disclosure of basic environmental impacts that companies have.”

Environmental advocates have also been pressuring the finance industry to standardize and require climate risk disclosures, which can serve in practice to move money away from projects that may not hold their value as climate change advances.

More Pressure Required

Rachel Cleetus, policy director for climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says voluntary action by the industry will likely not be enough to avoid costly and inequitable outcomes.

“If the market is left to handle this on its own, we could get this world where those who have fungible assets and can move them around and have these proprietary datasets where they can understand the risk, they are able to come out on top,” she says. “And many other folks, people who might be low-income families and households, fixed-income retired folks, people who don’t have a lot of money and say their home is their single biggest asset and is in a flood-prone area, they might be left holding the bag in terms of some of these negative outcomes.”

The finance industry’s statements and efforts show that it’s beginning to understand the importance of environmental sustainability, not only to stakeholders, but also to improving the work the sector does.

Whether the industry is very good at implementing its promises, or if its disciplinary measures can be a key part of the solution to environmental degradation, remains to be seen.

“It’s pretty clear that the risks are not just distant risks, they are here and now,” says Cleetus. “There’s no question that the market will not do this on its own.”

Scholtens says that despite its progress, the industry hasn’t lived up to its rhetoric. And it may take a long time — perhaps too long — for financial disciplinary actions to synch with promises.

“I often refer to financial accounting, which took 60 years to become what it is right now and is still far from perfect,” he says. Integrating environmental and social accounting “will also take several decades to become a reasonable standard. You cannot expect that to happen overnight, because it is related to how we see the world. That will take at least a generation to adjust. And I don’t know whether we will have that time.”