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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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.”

Yellowstone to Yukon: Can a Model for Interconnection Save the Wild?

An ambitious initiative aims to protect a 2,000-mile segment of the Continental Divide ecoregion and change how we think of conservation.

Around the same time biologists realized that our definitions of nature had been too limited, ecologists began to see that the century-and-a-half-old practice of setting aside reserves here and there to safeguard nature was coming up short. It proved especially mismatched to the needs of big, mobile animals. Elephants, for example, and jaguars, wild camels, wolves, gazelles, bears, lions … name one of the sizeable fellow mammals we find especially compelling and most want to save.

When societies started establishing parks and preserves, much of the countryside around them remained more or less intact and able to provide important habitats at certain times of year and serve as travel routes to other vital habitats. That is no longer the case. Settlement and development have been fragmenting those landscapes, cutting reserves off from neighboring terrain and from each other. Many of the protected natural areas are turning into islands lapped by an ocean of humanity.

In 21st-century settings, animals traveling beyond refuges often struggle to find habitats with adequate food and security in adjoining terrain. Their chances for survival and reproduction there drop faster by the year. Increasingly isolated, the wildlife inside reserves becomes more susceptible to inbreeding and whatever natural disasters sweep through. Now add pressures from a global environment in the throes of a strong and accelerating warming trend. We already know that species on oceanic islands face an elevated risk of extinction. We also know that the smaller an island is and the farther away it lies from other areas with wildlife populations, the less variety of life it is able to support over time.

We owe earlier conservationists our praise for scrambling to save nature by placing intact chunks of it off-limits to most kinds of human disturbance. At the time, it wasn’t clear that separate, scattered tracts could not by themselves fulfill the promise of preserving our natural heritage into the future. Hardly anyone foresaw how crowded and busy the world would soon be. That left present-day conservationists with a problem. But there is a fix for it: connections, the very same quality I’ve been examining throughout this book as the essence of living systems large and small.

If you want to see connectivity being built into a region’s landscapes, you could grab a backpack and do some roaming of your own along the backbone of North America. There, you’ll find the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (or Y2Y, as both the region and the organization are nicknamed) at work. Its goal is to conserve the 2,000-mile segment of the Continental Divide ecoregion that stretches from Wyoming’s Wind River Range to the headwaters of the Peel River in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

Audacious? By past standards, definitely. In terms of what we know about conservation now? It’s what’s called for.

Look at the heritage at stake: half a million square miles of spectacular topography holding scores of reserves — among them, the world- renowned national parks of Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, Waterton Lakes, Banff, and Jasper. Y2Y is one of the very few large landscapes in a temperate climate zone that still has all of its native species. They include the greatest variety of wild plants in Canada and the highest diversity of big wild animals in North America. Not only have there been no extinctions recorded here, nearly all the region’s flora and fauna are doing reasonably well, which is unusual anywhere on the globe nowadays.

Recognized wildland strongholds with prime habitats and unspoiled scenery form the cores, or focal areas, in Y2Y’s design for regional conservation. Gaining protection for some of the biologically richest spots not already safeguarded as parks or preserves is part of the plan. The second part is securing connections — variously called linkage zones, habitat bridges, wildlife corridors, passageways, or just wildways — from one stronghold to the next, ideally through the least disturbed places left in between. The final part of Y2Y’s mission embraces a necessary third dimension of connectivity in the Anthropocene: trying to blend conservation needs with the interests of local human communities.

The Initiative has more than 218 current partners in the United States and Canada. They include businesses, private landowners, Native American groups, scientists, resource institutes, and environmental organizations. It will take a coalition of this breadth to assemble a network of cores and varied connections that collectively operate as a meta-reserve across portions of two territories and two provinces in Canada and five U.S. states. If this vision becomes a reality, the entire ecoregion could continue to function at nearly full strength as a natural system. Indefinitely. And if the network only gets partially completed, that may still be enough to keep the natural realm from having to keep giving way, again and again, until the remnants stand huddled in refuges where people go to see what used to run far, wide, and free.

In 1993, the year the Y2Y coalition was formally launched, its ambitions were viewed by some as pie-in-the-sky-class unrealistic and by others as a grave threat to the economy. Protected core areas made up 10 to 11% of the ecoregion at the time. A quarter of a century later, that figure has more than doubled. Some of the added acreage consists of new national parks and wilderness areas. Recently established buffer zones, special management areas, recreation areas, natural areas, ecological reserves, state and provincial parks, and similar administrative units within Y2Y’s vast stockpile of public lands also count toward the core areas total.

Although few of these other segments are as strictly protected as a national park, the regulations governing them still provide an improved level of security for the native flora and fauna. The same holds true for various portions of public land given enough safeguards against unchecked development to help tie the core areas to one another. Land trusts contributed still more linkage acreage by arranging conservation easements with the owners of private properties. According to Y2Y’s analysis, total connectivity along the length of the Yellowstone to Yukon landscape increased from 5 percent in 1993 to more than 30 percent today.

Negotiations are underway to begin setting up Indigenous Protective Areas on treaty lands in Canada claimed by First Nations people. Since the Protective Areas are to be managed by the tribes to conserve traditional natural resources, they may soon add tremendous amounts of territory with improved management of the region’s living resources.

Now I understand what the Initiative’s first coordinator, Bart Robinson, meant when I asked him in the early 1990s what Y2Y was actually doing besides announcing worthy intentions, and he replied, “We’re in year two of a 100-year plan.” He was telling me that a conservation effort at this whopping scale necessarily starts with wishful thinking. The Initiative did a lot of that in its early years and still does. Willful optimism, steadily supplied, can be contagious. It has already helped make Y2Y one of the best-conserved mountain ecosystems in the world, and we’re still only in year 28 as of 2021.

Another important transformation was taking place in much of the ecoregion during the same period. Recreation and tourism became major generators of jobs and revenue. The long-standing ideology that more protection for the environment hurts business started going the way of typewriters and rotary dial telephones as environmental progress and economic progress kept advancing arm in arm through districts from northern Wyoming well into British Columbia and Alberta. Figures from the Outdoor Industry Association recently showed outdoor recreation in Montana surpassing agriculture to emerge as the largest, most dynamic sector of the state’s economy.

People like the phrase “Build it, and they will come.” Here, though, the planet built the main attractions — the towering scenery, mountain-fresh air and water, plentiful wildlife, and other natural features that economists speak of as amenities. We need only to sustain them. The role of conservation as a strong stimulant to businesses is becoming a social and political game-changer.

Residents of the Mountain West had grown accustomed to picking sides in the seemingly endless polarizing arguments between pro-industry representatives and conservationists, each camp labeling the other as the enemy of a brighter future. These days, more politicians and voters are looking toward the middle, intrigued by planning efforts that enlist a wide range of interest groups.

Cooperative decision-making certainly sounds good. In practice, finding common ground on environmental issues qualifies as one of the hardest challenges disparate groups can take on when they are more used to condemning opponents than listening to them. Can humans and wildlife truly prosper together over time? Of course they could.

The underlying issue has always been whether people with different backgrounds and interests can work well enough with one another to make a better level of coexistence with nature possible. In a way, Y2Y is an experiment to find out how much better that level could be.

Seahorses Extinction Assessment Reveals Threatened Species and Knowledge Gaps

The charismatic animals could serve as flagship species for ocean conservation, according to researchers, but only if we understand their extinction risks.

Last month conservationists working with SeaLife Aquarium in Australia dropped 18 biodegradable “hotels” into Sydney Harbor and Port Stephens to help one of the region’s most endangered species: tiny White’s seahorses (Hippocampus whitei).

The hotels — which look like cages but have bars spaced out enough for the 5-inch seahorses to swim through — are sorely needed. Recent research indicates that some White’s seahorse populations have fallen by as much as 95% due to commercial destruction of their marine habitats. The manmade domiciles — up to 100 of which will be deployed — will replace some of that lost habitat for both seahorses and their food. “A lot of marine growth such as sponges and coral will accumulate, and that provides a lot of food and shelter for the seahorses,” David Harasti, a marine scientist with the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute, told Australia’s 9News.

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A post shared by SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium (@sealifesydneyaquarium)

White’s seahorses are not alone in their plight. Research published this May in the journal Oryx serves as the first comprehensive assessment of the extinction risk for syngnathiform fishes, which include seahorses, pipefishes, seadragons, trumpetfishes, shrimpfishes, cornetfishes and ghost pipefishes. (A few related groups, such as goatfishes and seamoths, weren’t assessed for the paper because recent research shows they belong to a different taxonomic order.)

Collectively, the news for these varied and colorful species isn’t good, nor is it complete. The researchers — including two members of the IUCN SSC Seahorse, Pipefish & Seadragon Specialist Group — found that seahorses and their relatives face persistent threats from industrial trawl fisheries and habitat destruction, and to a lesser extent from pollution and trade. The 300 or so species often have limited ranges in coastal regions and freshwater lakes and rivers around the world, and many require specialized habitats, making them susceptible to disturbance.

As a result, researchers found, at least 6% of these species and up to 38% are threatened and at some risk of extinction.

Why the wide range? Despite seahorses’ popularity and charismatic qualities — like their prehensile tales and egg-carrying males — many of the 300-plus syngnathiform species remain cryptic. No one knows how well they’re doing or if they’re at risk. The researchers labeled 97 species “data deficient,” meaning they “could potentially be threatened.”

Of the species that could be assessed, the researchers found that 14 out of 42 seahorse species were at risk, including one endangered species and 12 considered “vulnerable to extinction.” Four additional seahorse species were discovered after the paper was submitted and aren’t included in that count. Pipefishes — which look like seahorses but have straighter bodies — have five species at risk, including one that’s critically endangered.

pipefish — Pipefish by Jayvee Fernandez (CC BY 2.0)

Luckily, the researchers evaluated 61% of these fishes as being of “least concern,” meaning they’re doing okay for now, but they still caution that this entire group of species needs targeted conservation efforts, especially in the estuaries of East and Southeast Asia and South Africa, where they face the most threat. The paper recommends “robust long-term monitoring programs … to evaluate population dynamics, fisheries, trade and habitat quality.” The researchers also call for dedicated coastal surveys, potentially using community science efforts such as iSeahorse.

All of this, the researchers wrote, would not only help seahorses and their relatives but also neighboring species: “Limiting fishing mortality, in particular by constraining bottom trawling and other nonselective fisheries, and ensuring healthy habitats is important both for the syngnathids and for other aquatic species. Given that the order is nearly global, there is potential for syngnathiformes, many of which are highly charismatic, to act as flagship species for ocean conservation.”

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A post shared by Sam Martin (@seaweed_sam)

That’s a tall order for these tiny fish, but perhaps this research can serve to round up the support necessary to conserve both the species and their coastal habitats — or at least to fill the knowledge gap so we can learn how those 97 data-deficient species fare around the world, and then protect them before it’s too late.

6 Things to Know About Climate Change and Heat Waves

The deadliest weather event is often the most overlooked.

It’s hard not to think about how hot it’s been — even if you live somewhere that has escaped the heat in the past few weeks. When British Columbia clocks temperatures of 121 F, it gets the world’s attention. As it should.

Here are six reasons we need to be paying more attention to heat waves.

1. Deadly Numbers

Heatwaves may seem to lack the drama of other weather events with named storms and categorized wind speeds, but they’re actually the most deadly severe weather event.

Last week’s heat dome that locked the Pacific Northwest in a sweltering vice is an apt reminder. The prolonged stretch of record-high temperatures in British Columbia is estimated to have claimed around 300 lives. Another 76 deaths were reported in Washington and Oregon.

Across the world, things have been heating up — with deadly results. Between 1998 and 2017, heatwaves killed 166,000 people, the World Health Organization reports. That includes 70,000 who perished in Europe’s 2003 heatwave.

2. Yep, Climate Change

Not surprisingly, climate change is making things worse. An increase in global temperatures has resulted in a rise in the frequency of heatwaves. In the years to come, climate change is expected to also make heatwaves more severe and longer lasting.

As people pump up the air conditioning and stay indoors, that also puts increased pressure on the electrical grid. New research found that these extreme weather events are triggering more failures of critical infrastructure.

Power failures, for example, have jumped 60% since 2015. The combination of excessive heat and blackouts in major U.S. cities would have calamitous results. In Detroit, the researchers found in their modeling, that could mean 450,000 exposed to dangerous temperatures and a whopping 1.7 million in air conditioning-reliant Phoenix.

3. The Dangers of Humidity

The most recent deadly heatwave hit the arid West, increasing concerns about wildfires.

aerial view of fire — An aerial image of the McKay Creek fire in British Columbia acquired by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 on June 30, 2021 during the region’s record-breaking heatwave. Photo: NASA

But heatwaves in more humid regions have doubled in the last 40 years, which poses another kind of threat.

Our bodies sweat to help keep us cool. But when the relative humidity is too high that moisture from our skin can’t evaporate as well and we don’t cool down. Scientists have identified the related wet bulb temperature of 95 F as the upper limit of what we can tolerate when conditions are both hot and extremely humid.

By midcentury, models predict, climate change will make wet bulb temperatures near 95 F a reality. But new research shows that areas in South Asia, the coastal Middle East and the coastal southwest of North America are already hitting that critical point.

4. Inequity Makes it Hotter

Not all people will face the same risks — even if they live in the same cities. Neighborhoods that lack tree canopy and green space, and have more road surfaces and large buildings, could be as much as 20 F hotter.

A 2020 study of 108 cities published in the journal Climate found that areas with higher temperatures are almost always the same neighborhoods that have experienced historic racist housing policies such as “redlining.”

“This study reveals that historical housing policies may, in fact, be directly responsible for disproportionate exposure to current heat events,” the researchers wrote. Another recent study in Nature Communications found that people of color have a higher risk than whites of high heat exposure in all but six of the largest 175 cities in the United States.

5. Wildlife at Risk

People aren’t the only ones feeling the heat. The Pacific Northwest’s recent heatwave also threatens cold-water-loving salmon. The Columbia and Snake rivers this year are seeing temperatures within two degrees of the “slaughter zone” that killed 250,000 sockeye in 2015, The Seattle Times reported.

When water temps rise above 62, #salmon are “more vulnerable to disease, and as temperatures climb higher, they will stop migrating altogether.
Water temperatures are already at dangerous levels despite an earlier start to cold-water releases.”
👇https://t.co/Y9mFN9UDlb

— NWF – Idaho (@NWF_Idaho) June 29, 2021

The heatwave hit at the peak of the sockeye run, and also when spring and summer chinook and steelhead are migrating. Some fish are being pulled out of the river and trucked to hatcheries for spawning.

“We are crossing the line to temperatures that can be disastrous for fish,” Michele DeHart, manager of the Fish Passage Center, told The Seattle Times. “I would say the outlook is pretty grim.”

6. Vicious Circle

The hotter it gets, the more fortunate people who have air conditioning crank up the dial and the longer they’ll need to leave it running. In a fossil-fuel driven world, that means even more emissions that will continue heating the planet.

Already 10% of global electrical use is from people trying to stay cool with air conditioning and electric fans, according to the International Energy Agency. Expect that number to climb as temperatures get hotter and more people become able to afford A/C.

The International Energy Agency reports that over the next 30 years, air conditioning may be one of the top drivers of electricity demand. “Without action to address energy efficiency, energy demand for space cooling will more than triple by 2050 — consuming as much electricity as all of China and India today,” the agency reports.

That makes the need for high-efficiency cooling extremely vital. Not to mention more widespread use of renewable energy and, of course, drastically curbing climate emissions.

Species Spotlight: The Elusive Snow Leopard

Efforts to broaden local participation for the conservation of this rare cat are currently ongoing across its global range.

Wildlife photographers have been known to wait weeks for the opportunity to capture the mysterious snow leopard on film. Climate change and other threats may soon make these beautiful cats even harder to spot, but a wide coalition has established a mission to protect them.

Species name:

Snow leopard (Panthera uncia)

Description:

Shy and elusive by nature, the snow leopard is found across the mountain ecosystems of Central Asia. This medium-sized cat has a tail as long as its body and thick, smoky-gray fur patterned with rosettes that allows it to survive in extreme cold.

Where it’s found:

Throughout the mountains of Central Asia in Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

snow leopard — © Bishwarup Paul, some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC). Via iNaturalist

IUCN Red List status:

Vulnerable, with a decreasing population trend

Major threats:

Snow leopards have survived alongside pastoral and agropastoral communities that inhabit the mountain ecosystems of Central Asia for generations. Conflicts between herders and leopards all too often lead to retaliatory killings, which are a persistent threat to the species. Decreasing numbers of prey species across their global range also threaten snow leopards’ survival. They’re vulnerable to illegal hunting, as well, due to a demand for their fur and body parts used in traditional Asian medicine. Large-scale changes in land use across snow leopard range and emerging threats triggered by climate change are likely to compound these risks to the species in the future.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

The Global Snow Leopard & Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP) is an alliance of all 12 snow leopard range countries, nongovernmental organizations, multilateral institutions, scientists and local communities, all united by one goal: saving the snow leopard and its habitat. Key targets include securing 20 large landscapes across the global snow leopard range, initiating a global effort for population assessment of the world’s snow leopards (PAWS), and building capacity for conservation across range countries by working with local communities.

My favorite experience:

I remember an incident when a snow leopard was often seen close to a village where we work. This particular old individual was attacking livestock, since it was no longer capable of finding prey in the wild. While villagers faced losses, they were patient and did not harm the animal, as they recognized its advanced age and knew that a lot of visitors and tourists frequented the village to see this animal. When the leopard died of old age after a couple of weeks, the villagers retrieved its carcass and gave it an honorable cremation, fit for any respected resident of their community. The relationship people share with nature and wildlife is layered and hard to define.