Fishing for Fun? It Has a Bigger Environmental Impact Than We Thought

New research shows that recreational fishing can sometimes be a huge problem — especially for threatened species of marine fish.

Let’s go fishin’! After all, a lone angler fishing from a dock or a few friends going out to sea can’t have all that much of an effect on fish populations … right?

Think again.

“When you’re floating in the open ocean, it can be hard to imagine that your hobby will have an impact on the overall health of a fishery,” says Sepp Haukebo, who works on recreational fisheries conservation issues for the Environmental Defense Fund. “But multiply the number of fish a single angler catches and discards in a day by millions of anglers and you have a significant harvest on your hands.”

Haukebo echoes points made in two new studies, published in the journals Fish and Fisheries and Frontiers in Marine Science, that show recreational fishing has a much bigger collective effect on oceanic species than previously realized, with nearly one million tons of fish caught every year.

Far from being an insignificant drop in the proverbial ocean, this is a massive amount of fish — about 1% of total global marine fisheries catch, a much higher number than many scientists and managers used to believe.

Collective Impact

So how is it that the actions of individuals can have such a far-reaching effect? Recreational anglers usually catch just a few ocean fish in a whole day, while industrial-scale commercial fishing often uses miles-long gear and catches tons of marine life at a time.

Part of the answer is scale: Previous research has shown that there are a lot more recreational anglers than there are commercial fishing vessels — at least 220 million people go fishing for fun every year all around the world.

marina
The marina in Valencia, Spain. Photo: Mark Chinnick (CC BY 2.0)

That number is expected to grow as people and countries become more affluent, says Jessica Meeuwig, a professor at the University of Western Australia and a coauthor on the Frontiers in Marine Science paper.

Another part of the answer involves economics: For people and companies trying to make a profit from fishing — like with commercial fisheries — there’s an incentive to stop fishing when populations get low.

But if you’re fishing for fun, you’re paying for the experience, and the experience of catching a relatively rare fish is often considered worth paying extra.

Indeed there are many threatened populations of fish where commercial fisheries are banned but recreational angling continues.

Additionally, a subset of recreational anglers called trophy anglers intentionally target the biggest individuals in a population, often with the goal of getting a perceived-as-prestigious certificate that says they hold a record for catching the biggest fish of that species.

This can affect entire species populations, explains Meeuwig.

“Recreational fisheries targeting larger fish means they are taking the most fit individuals, the big breeders, out of the population,” she says. Bigger fish tend to reproduce more often and have a greater number of young at a time. This culling preference is different from commercial or subsistence fishing, which aim to catch as many fish as possible, but not necessarily the largest individual member of a species.

There are other factors are play, although those aren’t always as clear.

“Recreational catch of threatened species is an issue that’s poorly understood,” says Peter Kyne, a senior research fellow at Australia’s Charles Darwin University who was not affiliated with either of the new papers. “In Australia, this is a significant issue for the grey nurse shark on the east coast,” he says. “Their habitat is close to major cities where recreational fishing levels are high. Even in remote areas of northern Australia, catches of river sharks are an issue — although they are protected, they’re similar in appearance to a number of common non-threatened species and anglers may not recognize them.”

A Regulatory Failure?

The research also found that most nations don’t do a very good job managing their recreational fisheries — especially when compared to their commercial fisheries.

“Governments fail to recognize that recreational fisheries can decimate populations” or that they can be as important to monitor as commercial fisheries, says Warren Potts, a professor of fisheries science at Rhodes University and lead author of the Fish and Fisheries paper. “This ignores or underappreciates recreational fishing’s economic and ecological effects and causes governments to fail to prioritize regulating the practice.”

The paper looked at the global state of management regulations for recreational fishing and found that only 86 nations define recreational fisheries in their national fisheries-management legislation.

More than half of experts surveyed for the paper raised significant concerns about their nations’ recreational-fisheries management. No experts from developing nations, where the popularity of recreational fisheries has exploded as international tourists seek out “exotic” places to fish, believed that their countries effectively manage those fisheries.

But Robert Arlinghaus, a professor of fisheries management at Humboldt University in Germany who was not involved with either paper, points out that many countries do employ a basic fisheries-management regulation called a minimum size limit — in other words,  you can’t land a fish if it’s below a certain size and hasn’t had the chance to  reproduce yet. This isn’t exactly the cutting edge of adaptive science-based management, but it’s a lot better than nothing.

Arlinghaus feels that characterizing the majority of the world’s recreational fisheries as ineffectively managed may be taking things a little too far.

“Recreational fisheries might not be managed optimally,” he says, “and I do think the governance and management systems could be improved in many areas of the world, but I’m not sure that recreational fisheries are generally managed poorly.”

By the Numbers

Another major issue with recreational fisheries management boils down to numbers — or lack of them. In most places nobody knows exactly how many fish are caught.

That’s another difference from commercial fisheries — it’s just easier to gather data when you’re dealing with a limited number of fishing vessels than with hundreds of millions of individual people.

cod net
Cod in a commercial net. Photo: Derek Keats (CC BY 2.0)

“Some countries keep detailed data on their recreational fisheries catch, but others don’t,” says Daniel Pauly, principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia and a coauthor on the Frontiers in Marine Science paper. He adds that some countries use different agencies to collect data from recreational and commercial fisheries, and those groups don’t always speak with each other or consolidate their findings.

“If you know there are recreational fisheries in a country, but there’s no data, you have to be creative,” says Pauly. “You can’t say ‘there’s no data, so we’ll assume nothing has been caught.’”

To resolve this data gap and estimate the global catch of marine recreational fisheries, the paper used a method called “catch reconstruction” — a mix of computer analysis and good, old-fashioned detective work.

Catch reconstruction, he explains, assumes that fishing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Even if you don’t have data on how many fish are caught or brought to shore, there’s often other information showing things like how many boats used a marina, how much fuel they used, and how much seafood was for sale in local markets.

That’s where Pauly and his team came in. They consolidated information from a variety of sources and built a bigger picture.

Pauly provided an example of how they accomplished this.

“In West Africa, many people thought there weren’t any substantial recreational fisheries, because there’s no catch data available,” he tells me. “But there are fishing lodges there for tourism, and those lodges post images of what people catch on social media and websites. We know how many people go to those lodges, because tourists entering the country are reported and they fill in where they’re staying. If we know how many people visit, how long they stay and what’s usually caught, we can estimate catch even with an absence of official statistics.”

This isn’t foolproof. Potts points out that this kind of formulation can cause complications. He notes that the paper estimated the catch from one fishing lodge and extrapolated it to two others, including one lodge that exists on paper but hasn’t actually been built yet. Pauly responded to this concern by pointing out that “we were able to generate first estimates of the catch of West African recreational fisheries … but the fact these these estimates can be improved goes without saying.”

Even though the results are estimates, they suggest two potentially troubling trends. First, all recreational fisheries catch is significantly increasing in developing-world nations, especially in Africa and South America. For example, the number of recreational fishing licenses in Brazil jumped from 276,500 in 2011 to more than 400,000 just two years later.

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Fishing off the coast of Brazil, with dolphins swimming nearby. Photo: Felipe Vaduga (CC BY 2.0)

Second, recreational fisheries targeting sharks and rays are on the upswing worldwide. Sharks and rays represented less than 1% of total recreational catch in the 1950s, but about 6% today, and are especially increasing in South America, the Indo-Pacific and West Africa.

“This is a cause for concern given the threatened status of many species of sharks and rays,” Meeuwig says. Previous research has shown that about 24% of sharks and related species are threatened or endangered. “The capture of large sharks is particularly worrisome,” she adds, because of their importance as breeders.

Swimming Forward

Arlinghaus says he feels the Frontiers in Marine Science paper represents a “Herculean effort” to gather global recreational catch.

It’s also an opportunity to shift our attention to a previously invisible or ignored problem. Increasingly, as scientists and environmentalists have been raising the alarm about commercial and industrial overfishing, they’ve implicitly or explicitly sent the message that fishing for fun has so little environmental impact that it wasn’t worth considering.

And Arlinghaus cautioned that the papers’ recommendations about recreational fishing have already been misinterpreted in some circles. A widely shared Nature News article about this paper claimed “hobbyists’ harvest of sharks and rays have soared, and catch and release is no solution,”— despite the fact that the paper did not address catch and release. Additionally, some on social media claimed that this paper was proof that all recreational angling needed to be shut down, which was not a recommendation issued by the paper.

 

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Arlinghaus warned against making those leaps in logic based solely on the data from these papers. “We can’t learn much about the conservation concerns associated with a fishery just by looking at landings,” he points out.

But the Fish and Fisheries paper did contain some recommendations for improvement.

“There are some basic guidelines for improving governance that can be followed and should improve the quality of a governance of a country’s recreational fisheries,” Potts says. These include clearly defining recreational angling in national legislation and stressing how its management differs from commercial fisheries. The paper also calls for increased cooperation with stakeholders to gather more effective data and ensure compliance with rules, and scientific monitoring of populations of fishes targeted by recreational fisheries — all things that are currently done relatively well in the United States and Australia, but done relatively poorly in large parts of the developing world.

“I want to commend these authors for their recommendations,” Haukebo says. “This framework is a great reference for any nation that is aspiring to improve, or even just establish, responsible management of their recreational fishery.”

While Haukebo and other experts say you don’t have to feel bad about “goin’ fishin’” with family and friends just yet, the science presented in these papers makes it clear that in some places individual actions can collectively pose a significant threat to marine species — and that’s something governments and conservationists around the world, not to mention anglers, need to start to address.

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An Emerging Threat to Conservation: Fear of Nature

It’s called “biophobia,” a disconnection from nature that’s reducing our collective will to preserve species and habitats. But new research points toward some wild solutions.

What do we lose when natural spaces and species disappear?

Increasingly, research has shown that as species and ecosystems vanish, it also chips away at our ability to preserve what remains — because we no longer understand what we’re losing.

You probably see it all the time. The neighbor who puts pesticides on his lawn rather than deal with pesky bees. The kid who squirms and runs at the sight of a harmless garter snake slithering through the grass. The politician who votes against wildlife protection because she’s never seen a wolf in the wild. The corporation that wants to bulldoze the habitat of a rare frog, but frogs are gross, so who cares, right?

At best this can be termed “the extinction of experience,” where our cultural and natural histories fade from our memories and therefore our reality.

At its worst it becomes something even more concerning: “biophobia,” the fear of living things and a complete aversion to nature.

This isn’t the fiction of living in a cold, empty dystopia. Sadly it’s becoming a way of life for too many people — especially children.

A recent study in Japan paints a striking portrait of this problem. A survey of more than 5,300 school children in the Tochigi Prefecture examined their perception of local invertebrates — 14 insect species and one spider. The results? A collective “ew.” Most of the students saw the species as things to dislike, fear or abhor, or even as sources of danger.  The less experience the students had with nature, the more negative their feelings.

The results were published earlier this year in the in the journal Biological Conservation.

Lead researcher Masashi Soga with the University of Tokyo says the study stemmed from observations about today’s nature-deficient children.

“Humans inherently avoid dangerous organisms such as bees, but children these days avoid even harmless animals such as butterflies and dragonflies,” he says. “I have long wondered why so many of today’s children react like this.”

Butterfly
A butterfly photographed in the greenhouse at Igashira Park, Tochigi Prefecture. Photo by Takashi Hososhima (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Soga says their survey echoed findings from around the world. For example, a 2014 study of 1,100 students in China elicited similar emotional reactions — and, like the Japanese study, found that direct contact with nature helped to turn biophobia into biophilia, the term popularized by biologist E.O. Wilson to refer to human connection with other forms of life.

Although the children’s reactions were somewhat expected, the new study did contain an unexpected finding: Many of the surveyed children revealed that their parents also expressed fear or disgust of the same invertebrates. In fact these parental emotions were strong enough to overwhelm any positive experiences the children might have gained from direct experiences in nature.

As Soga and his coauthors wrote in their paper, “Our results suggest that there is likely a feedback loop in which an increase in people who have negative attitudes towards nature in one generation will lead to a further increase in people with similar attitudes in the next generation — a cycle of disaffection towards nature.”

And that’s possibly the greater threat posed by extinction of experience. Soga suggests the generational loss — a condition previously dubbed environmental generational amnesia — could chip away at our societal ability to preserve what we’re losing.

“I believe that increased biophobia is a major, but invisible, threat to global biodiversity,” Soga says. “As the number of children who have biophobia increases, public interest and support for biodiversity conservation will gradually decline. Although many conservation biologists still consider that preventing the loss of wildlife habitat is the most important way to conserve biodiversity, I think preventing increased biophobia is also important for conservation.”

What’s to be done about this? The paper makes several recommendations, the most obvious of which is that children should experience nature more often. The authors also suggest establishing policies to guide these natural experiences and increasing educational programs about the natural world.

Helping parents to see species around them in a new light would make a difference, too.

And, of course, maintaining support for preserving the wild spaces where these “scary” and “icky” creatures live is the most important thing of all.

That’s a point reinforced by another recent study, which found that wild spaces located within urban areas — and the plants and animals that thrive in them — are particularly important for human health and well-being.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, the study examined attitudes toward Discovery Park, the heavily forested 534-acre public park in Seattle, Washington. It found that the public had the most appreciation for — and gained the most value from — the wildest parts of the park.

“I have seen orca whales, seals, fish, eagles, herons, shorebirds and many other sea creatures in their natural habitat,” one survey participant wrote. “Going here with people has allowed me to connect and talk with them about conversation that simply does not happen in everyday life,” wrote another.

Orca
An orca dorsal fin seen from Discovery Park with West Point lighthouse in background. Photo via Seattle Parks, Discovery Park Staff (CC BY 2.0)

The participants reported that their most valuable experiences in the park included encountering wildlife, walking through open spaces, exploring the beach and finding beautiful views.

“We saw that a large majority of participants’ interactions, especially their most meaningful interactions, depended on Discovery Park’s relative wildness,” says lead author Elizabeth Lev, a master’s student in the University of Washington’s Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab.

This is only possible because the park is relatively wild. After all, you can’t enjoy watching birds if there are no birds to follow; gaze at the sunset if it’s obscured by skyscrapers; or stop and smell the flowers if they don’t have room to grow.

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Bald eagle at Discovery Park. Photo: Brandon Trentler (CC BY 2.0)

And yet even this long-protected space could someday become less hospitable to nature. Over the past few years a lot of people and organizations have suggested developing parts of Discovery Park or the neighboring area. Most recently a plan proposed building 34 acres of much-needed affordable housing and parking spaces adjacent to the park, bringing with them noise, traffic and pollution.

If anything like that happened, both the park and the people of Seattle could lose something vital. And that would continue the trend of chipping away at Seattle’s — and the world’s — natural spaces, leaving just tiny pocket parks and green-but-empty spaces that offer little real value to wildlife, plants or people.

“It is true that any interaction with nature is better than none, but I don’t want people to be satisfied with any small bit of grass and trees,” Lev says. “We have been in this cycle of environmental generational amnesia for a long time, where the baseline keeps shifting and we don’t even realize what we’re losing until it’s gone. If we can get people to understand how much meaning and value can come from having more experiences with more wild forms of nature, then maybe we can stop this cycle and move toward conserving and restoring what we have left.”

Building this understanding in an ever-more fearful and disconnected world may be the biggest challenge. Peter Kahn, the senior author of Lev’s paper and the director of the Human Interaction with Nature lab, made several suggestions for bridging this gap in this 2011 book, Technological Nature. They echo the recommendation about getting children into nature, but also include telling stories of how things used to be, imagining what things might be like in the future, and developing a common language about nature, “a way of speaking about wild and domestic interaction patterns, and their wide range of instantiations, and the meaningful, deep and often joyful feelings that they engender.”

No matter what techniques we use, this growing field of research illustrates that saving nature requires encouraging people to experience it more often and more deeply. That calls for additional research — Lev and her coauthors have published a toolkit that other municipalities can follow to study the value of their own wild spaces — and clear communication of the results.

“If we can continue to characterize and show people the benefits of these wild spaces,” Lev says, “maybe people will begin to see more value in keeping these areas undeveloped — for the sake of our mutual benefit.”

baby snail
Photo: Dirk (Beeki) Schumacher/Pixabay

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Study Finds Staggering Economic Benefit From Protecting Wetlands

For example, in Florida, the loss of just 3% of wetland coverage resulted in $480 million in property damage during just one hurricane.

Mangrove forests, marshes, and seagrass beds protect inland areas from storm surges and strong winds. Over long periods, coastal wetlands like these build up sediment that mitigates sea level rise and local land subsidence.

A new analysis of property damage from Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastal storms has shown that counties with larger wetlands suffered lower property damage costs than did counties with smaller wetlands.

“Starting in 1996, the U.S. government started to produce damage estimates for each tropical cyclone in a consistent manner,” explained coauthor Richard Carson, an economist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla. Before that, the data were collected only for hurricanes, which hindered past attempts to put a price on the marginal value, or price per unit, of wetlands, he said.

With the complete data set, the researchers examined all 88 tropical cyclones and hurricanes that affected the United States starting in 1996. That time period includes Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.

A Protective and Economic Boon

In addition to property damage data for tropical cyclones of all strengths, “our data set has considerably more spatial resolution,” Carson said, “which is a result of large amounts of information on storm tracks, property location, and wetland location all being digitized for use in a geographical information system basis.”

First author Fanglin Sun, formerly at UCSD and now an economist at Amazon.com, added that “areas subject to flood risk in a county are more accurately estimated, based on local elevation data and detailed information on individual storm trajectories” and wind speeds throughout affected areas.

The finer level of detail for the storm data let the researchers finally begin connecting wetland coverage and storm damage on a county-by-county basis, Carson said. “A storm track moving a couple of kilometers one direction or the other allows the amount of wetland protection to vary within the same county.”

In terms of property damage, Sun and Carson found that a square kilometer of wetlands saved an average of $1.8 million per year. Over the next 30 years, an average unit of wetlands could save $36 million in storm damage.

Some wetlands were valued at less than $800 per year per square kilometer and some at nearly $100 million. That marginal value depended on many factors, including a county’s property values, existing wetland coverage, coastline shape, elevation, building codes, and chance of actually experiencing damaging winds. And each of those variables fluctuated over the 20 years the team studied.

Overall, the highest-valued wetlands were in urban counties with large populations and the lowest-valued were in rural areas with small populations. However, wetlands provided a greater relative savings against weaker cyclones and in counties with less stringent building codes — areas that might not expect or plan for a tropical storm.

The team found no significant difference in the marginal value of saltwater versus freshwater wetlands or mangroves versus marshes. “Forested wetlands tend to be better at reducing wind speed and marshes tend to be better at absorbing water,” Carson said, “so the specific nature of the storm when it hits an area is likely to matter. [But] our results suggest that, on average, there is no difference.”

The team published these results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on March 3.

Wetlands at Risk

Most areas that have experienced storm-related property damage in the past 20 years have also lost wetland coverage, the researchers found. They calculated that Floridians would have been spared $480 million in property damage from Hurricane Irma alone had the state’s wetland coverage not shrunk by 2.8% in the decade prior.

Moreover, recent changes to the Clean Water Act have made the remaining coastal wetlands more vulnerable.

“The federal government, with respect to the U.S. Clean Water Act, took the position that the previous wetland studies were not reliable enough for use in assessing the benefits and cost of protecting wetlands,” Carson said.

“The value coastal wetlands provide for storm protection is substantial and should be taken into account as policy makers debate the Clean Water Act,” Sun said. “It’s also worth noting,” she added, “that storm protection for property is just one of many ecological services that wetlands provide. We hope our study will spur future research quantifying these other services as well.”

With tropical storms and hurricanes expected to happen more often because of climate change, the team wrote, wetlands will be more economically valuable than ever.

This story first appeared on Eos.

When the War on Science Really Began

A new book, The War on the EPA, tracks the history and importance of the government agency — and how efforts to undermine it began decades before Trump.

The New York Times keeps a running list of all the environmental regulations that the Trump administration has worked to trash since taking office more than three years ago.

It’s at nearly 100.

That’s just the start. The administration’s anti-environmental agenda has also involved undermining and unraveling key government agencies, most especially the Environmental Protection Agency.

There it’s been death by a thousand cuts, with EPA staff facing untenable contracts, positions left unfilled and budget cuts across the board — not mention an appointed leadership that’s opposed to the agency’s own mission.

As bad as all this sounds, there’s some important historical context to remember: It’s been bad for a while, according to a new book, The War on the EPA: America’s Endangered Environmental Protections, which tracks the “systematic propaganda campaign to discredit science” that began decades ago.book cover

The book comes from the keyboards of husband-and-wife writing team William and Rosemary Alley, also the authors of two other environmental books on nuclear waste and groundwater.

“We wanted to write a good, readable book giving people more understanding of why this agency is important, what they do, and the difficulties involved in doing their job,” says Rosemary.

They realized that in order to save the EPA, people need to know what it does — and a lot of people don’t.

“We are trying to get people to understand how this matters to them in their daily lives,” says William, who is also the director of science and technology for the National Ground Water Association and headed the office of groundwater for the U.S. Geological Survey for nearly two decades. “There’s a lot that EPA does, like when we drink water from the tap, we’re dependent on EPA.”

Unfortunately, when people do talk about the EPA, it’s usually misguided complaints.

“There’s been a long demonizing of the EPA for over-regulating things, but the reality is that it’s extremely difficult for EPA to regulate anything,” Rosemary says.

Case in point: Despite a slew of new chemicals in our daily lives, it’s been two decades since a new regulation addressed a drinking-water contaminant.

The Alleys also write about the complicated and time-consuming processes behind lots of other regulations — tracking how they were first established and what happened afterward. In many cases environmental regulations were loosened to accommodate industry after political pushback or legal challenges.

This plays out time and time again throughout the Alleys’ book. Among the cases they cover: why feedlots continue to pollute waterways; what went wrong in Flint, Michigan; the long battle to remove lead from gasoline and continuing efforts to make cars cleaner; the continuing fight over what constitutes “waters of the United States”; President Obama’s work to reduce mercury from coal plants and methane emissions from oil and gas operations — and Trump’s push to undo those and many other regulations.

It’s clear from the book that enacting protections to safeguard human health and the environment has always been an uphill battle — and that narrative runs alongside the agency’s own successful creation story, as the Alleys also explain.

The 1970s saw the establishment of the EPA with bipartisan support from Congress (after a veto by Nixon) and the creation of bedrock environmental laws including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

And for the first 10 years things went pretty well.

Part of the early success of the EPA came from strong public involvement, the Alleys say. In those days many environmental problems were incredibly visible — gray clouds of smog and trash dumped along riverbanks — and there was public pushback to fix them.

But in 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch to lead the agency, and she threw down every speed bump and roadblock she could to impede the agency’s work. Budgets were slashed, positions were cut and industry leaders were put in charge of environmental programs.

It’s nearly identical to the tactics the Trump administration has used in recent years.

Things improved slightly after William Ruckelshaus, the agency’s first administrator, was brought back in 1983. But when Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives a decade later, the anti-science work began again and has continued ever since.

With Trump’s election it kicked into high gear.

“We could have just as easily titled the book The War on Science, because science is just the absolute critical underpinnings of everything the EPA does, and that of course has been just tremendously damaged under the current administration,” says Rosemary. “The war on science, of course, didn’t start with Trump, but it’s been exacerbated tremendously.”

After detailing how this anti-science agenda influences making and enforcing environmental regulations, the Alleys’ book ends with a look at why it will be critical to rebuild the EPA and the importance of scientific integrity.

“A lot of talent has been lost from the agency and that will be impossible to turn around overnight,” says William. “If we have four more years of this, I have no idea how we’ll get past that. [The Trump administration] is still rushing to try to get as much as they possibly can done. Or undone, as it seems.”

Rosemary says she hopes that their book will provide an important jumpstart to conversations about the critical role of the EPA and efforts to fortify it.

“If you don’t see what the agency does, it’s hard to communicate the risk when it’s damaged,” she says. “We want people to understand why we need a strong EPA as much today as we did 50 years ago.”

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Nine New Environmental Books You Need to Read This Month

March’s best books examine how cities (and families) can fight climate change; look at the history of Earth Day; and reveal growing threats to the world’s wild spaces.

Existential threats to the planet call for practical solutions — along with heartfelt examinations of how we got here and where we’re going next.

revelator readsThose themes run strong through this month’s new environmental books, including an emotional memoir from climate activist Greta Thunberg and her family that’s sure to inspire discussions among other families around the world.

Also hitting bookstores this month: Hope Jahren and other writers tackle the realities of climate change, two authors offer municipalities proven tools to reduce their greenhouse emissions, and several books look back at key moments in environmental history to provide important insight for today.

You’ll find our list of March’s nine best new environmental books below (plus a few honorable mentions for good measure). Check ‘em out, share them with friends, and then put their lessons to good use.

Our House Is On FireOur House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis by Greta & Svante Thunberg and Malena & Beata Ernman      

The influential teenage climate activist teams up with her father, mother and younger sister to tell their family story. Our House shows how they fought through Greta’s immobilizing fear of an unlivable planet, exacerbated by her autism, to help her become a force for the future. Most of the book is told through mother Malena Ernman’s point of view, and she provides a heart-wrenching and honest examination of the pain Greta experienced — not just from the facts of climate change, but from the attacks by the denial industry — and the healing power of her activism.

Story of MoreThe Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here by Hope Jahren

The author of Lab Girl, 2016’s best science memoir, returns with a pocket-sized primer about the state of the planet. Researching the book took Jahren on a journey of discovery, and the result was illuminating. If you want to understand how we got here — and how we’re going to move forward — this book offers a concise, thoughtful and surprisingly hopeful message.

FootprintsFootprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier

An anthropological examination of the Anthropocene. Farrier’s deeply moving book examines what we’re leaving behind on the planet today — everything from plastic pollution to the extra gases in the atmosphere and the bones of our great skyscrapers — and speculates about what these fossils might reveal to future archaeologists studying the lives and deaths of the peoples of the 21st Century.

Earth DayEarth Day and the Environmental Movement by Christy Peterson

This fun, colorful and informative book for high-school age readers looks at the foundations of Earth Day and its continued relevance as we approach its 50th anniversary in a world full of disinformation and newly emerging threats to the environment. (Parents, you’ll get a lot from this book, too.)

Rule of FiveThe Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court by Richard J. Lazarus             

The complex story behind Massachusetts v. EPA, perhaps the most important environmental case to ever come before the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s not just a tale of unlikely triumph — it’s also an important look at the power of the courts that’s especially resonant as the Trump administration shapes (or perhaps misshapes) the future of the judicial system.

IrreplaceableIrreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places by Julian Hoffman

The best way to renew your drive to protect imperiled ecosystems is to visit wild spaces. The second-best way is to read impassioned reporting like this book, which takes readers on a journey to some of the world’s most imperiled places and the species that live in them.

American ZionAmerican Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West by Betsy Gaines Quammen

As the cultural influence of the Bundy family continues to grow among America’s right-wing militias and other extremist groups, it’s important to look back to see how their rebellion against the federal government got its start — and where it could go next.

Greenovation Remarkable CitiesGreenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change by Joan Fitzgerald

Remarkable Cities and the Fight Against Climate Change by Jonathan D Rosenbloom

How can cities reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions? That’s a big question, and an important one, since urban centers play an oversized role in the climate crisis — and since national governments around the world seem to be increasingly dropping the ball on solving the problems we’ve created. Fitzgerald’s book uses interviews and examples from 20 North American and European cities to identify the policies and strategies that work, especially as they relate to emissions-heavy buildings, transportation and energy systems. She also digs into how state and national governments sometimes hold cities back on their climate efforts and devotes an entire chapter to issues related to just transitions for low-income communities.

Rosenbloom’s book, meanwhile, builds off of his work as founding director of the Sustainability Development Code project, which envisions the creation of sustainable and equitable communities. The book offers 43 proven regulatory examples that can help cities reduce their emissions by incentivizing progress or removing barriers to change. Taken together these two books present a powerful opportunity to build (or rebuild) the cities of the future.

But wait, there’s more!

Anthropocene RagOther notable books out this month include Cranky Uncle Vs. Climate Change by SkepticalScience.com founder John Cook; marine conservation pioneer Callum Roberts’ Reef Life: An Underwater Memoir; the apocalyptic science fiction novel Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine; and Adrienne Martini’s Somebody’s Gotta Do It, a book that aims to inspire readers to run for local office and create positive political and environmental change in their communities.

That’s it for this month. Stay tuned for another batch of books on April’s list in a few short weeks. Until then you can find dozens of additional eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.

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The Road to Zero-carbon Transportation Runs Through the Northeast

Three strategies can help transform transportation in America — and regional cooperation by states would take things further, faster.

Transportation is climate enemy number one in the United States, producing more carbon pollution than any other part of the American economy.

In fact the U.S. transportation system is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire economies of France and the United Kingdom combined. The average American drives roughly 10,000 miles a year, and too many of our vehicles are inefficient, burning gas like there’s no tomorrow. And because of the way we’ve built our communities and our lack of investment in public transit, most of us have few alternatives but to drive.

Despite the urgent need to act on global warming — and the fact that transportation is a leading source of air pollution that makes us sick — the federal government continues on its plan to roll back clean-car pollution standards.

To effectively address global warming, we need to change how we get around. We need big, ambitious goals to transform transportation and the means to achieve them.

A good place for policymakers to start is by following a three-point plan my organization, Environment America Research & Policy Center, outlined in a newly released report, Destination: Zero Carbon. The report provides three major strategies we need to follow to transform transportation in America:

1. Switch to all-electric vehicles

Given the number of miles Americans drive, shifting from gasoline-powered to electric vehicles is essential. To get this right, we need both incentives and infrastructure.

EV charging
An EV charging station in Virginia. Photo: Ken Hammond/USDA

Ambitious states have already started the transition. In Connecticut, for example, the EVConnecticut Electric Vehicle Charging Station Incentive Program has helped to fund 336 charging outlets at 214 locations, for both the public and private sector. A similar program in New Jersey awards charging-station grants through the state’s “It Pay$ to Plug In” program. And on the West Coast, California, Oregon and Washington, along with British Columbia, have collaborated on the “West Coast Electric Highway,” an extensive network of fast charging stations every 25 to 50 miles along major roadways. That will make it easier for folks to get around in electric cars. Other states need to follow or expand upon these models.

2. Electrify public transportation

We can’t be content just with electric automobiles. All modes of transit must be powered with clean, renewable energy: In Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced an initiative last year to use $20 million from the Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust to reimburse school districts for investments in electric school buses and charging infrastructure.

That’s just a drop in the bucket, but it’s a start, and it’s been echoed by communities across the country.

3. Drive less, live more

The least-polluting car is the one we don’t drive in the first place. We need to give more people the option to travel by foot, bike and public transit — more programs like those adopted by almost 1,500 communities across the country that have “complete streets” policies aimed at making streets safer and more accessible to people using a variety of travel modes. These features include raised medians, protected bike lanes and bus rapid-transit systems.

How we take these goals to the next level may depend on the actions of some of the country’s top state leaders.

This spring policymakers in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic will have the opportunity to take a big step toward meeting visionary goals and helping to solve the climate crisis. Governors from Maine to Virginia are part of a regional collaborative called the Transportation and Climate Initiative, which is considering a multistate policy to clean up transportation.

When it comes to the climate crisis, no state will solve the problem alone. That makes it important for states to collaborate and join forces to cut as much pollution as possible from the source. The strategies that this regional consortium puts forth can serve as examples for places across the country that need to prioritize cutting transportation pollution immediately.

The Transportation and Climate Initiative would create direct investments in clean solutions and help to forge a modern, healthy transportation system. It would get electric vehicles and chargers on the road, speed the electrification of the bus fleet, and expand non-driving options to get around.

Now is the time to act. Earth just had the hottest January ever recorded, and our climate will keep warming unless we accelerate our progress now. If supporters of the Transportation and Climate Initiative embrace and implement these strategies, it would offer important insights to the rest of the country on how to address the transportation crisis.

But full implementation of the initiative is far from a sure thing. The final memorandum of understanding is expected later this spring. At that point each governor in the region will have to decide whether to lead the way to zero-carbon transportation or get left in the dust.

We’re calling on governors to act through the Transportation and Climate Initiative. States and communities can, and should, take additional steps on their own, but the collective power of this larger, regional effort has the potential to produce real, deep change.

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

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‘The Story of Our Lifetime and Our Planet’ — Environmental Journalism in Troubled Times

Covering environmental issues these days can be tough. But it’s needed more than ever, says Society of Environmental Journalists president Meera Subramanian.

Journalist Meera Subramanian wants to tell you a story about the environment….

That’s getting harder and harder, though. The media landscape has become a version of “The Walking Dead,” with newspapers around the country closing, being acquired by hedge funds, or cutting their editorial staffs to the bone.the ask

And then there’s the constant barrage of claims of “fake news” from the Oval Office, corporate spokespeople and pundits. There’s a reason why “post-truth” became Oxford Dictionaries’ International Word of the Year in 2016.

What’s a journalist to do in a world where people are polarized and persuaded more by beliefs and opinions than objective facts?

For many, the answer is to dig deeper into storytelling.

That’s what Subramanian did in her award-winning InsideClimate News series, “Middle Ground: Conversations Across America.” Published in 2017 and 2018, the series told deeply personal and character-driven stories as it tracked climate effects in conservative communities.

In the process, the series revealed a far richer and more complex story than we often hear in narratives diluted to simply climate deniers versus believers.

Subramanian has made a career of unearthing stories that give people a better understanding of the natural world and each other. Her work has been widely published and anthologized in collections such as Best American Science and Nature Writing. She’s the author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka. And she’s currently the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron visiting professor in the environment and the humanities at Princeton University.

In December she carried her experience to a new arena as president of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), which works to support professional journalists and increase the public’s understanding of environmental issues. It’s a job that seems to get harder each day, with newsroom budget cuts and threats to journalists’ safety.

The Revelator talked with Subramanian about the challenges and opportunities environmental journalists face today, and how to deal with an inbox full of bad news every morning.

As president of an organization that helps support environmental journalists, what’s most concerning for you right now?

A number of things. We’re seeing more restrictions domestically in terms of press freedoms and access to information. SEJ has been really active working to defend the Freedom of Information Act.

Meera Subramanian
Journalist and SEJ president Meera Subramanian. Photo by Ashley Garmon

And then there are safety issues for journalists. On the international level, it’s a frightening time. People who are covering the environment are increasingly being targeted by governments. This is happening online in terms of social media harassment, doxing and that kind of activity. (Editor’s note: Shortly after this interview, the Department of Justice announced arrests of violent extremists in four states who had made threats against American journalists.)

But it’s more than that. Just last month SEJ was writing letters to help free a Mongabay editor who was detained in Indonesia. And you’re hearing about journalists, some of them not just being detained, but being murdered, for their activity exposing environmental stories. So there’s personal-safety issues for journalists.

I think the other huge challenge is that just being a journalist has always been demanding and financially challenging. Now more than ever. We also have a 24-7 news cycle you’re constantly responding to. It’s harder to do the slow-burn stories — the stories that are not as immediate as the entire continent of Australia being on fire but are just as critical to put those stories into context.

What do you see as some opportunities?

I feel like we’re at a very interesting point because the climate change issue is affecting so many realms. People are thinking about covering energy and the environment in a very different way than they did even five years ago.

There’s a lot of opportunity there in terms of other beats that are not traditionally thinking about the environment. There’s climate fiction happening in the arts section. The business pages are writing about BlackRock divesting. There are journalists who didn’t do environmental stories before and now they do. I think that’s really positive.

It seems like every week we read stories about newspapers shutting down, layoffs and consolidation in the media industry. What are the risks to our understanding of environmental issues?

Shrinking newsrooms and these expansive news deserts are getting even worse. The mission of SEJ is to inform the public on environmental issues and to keep them engaged. And that can be challenging when there are newsrooms in particular states that don’t have a single environmental reporter.

But when there are these news deserts, hopefully journalists who wouldn’t normally be thinking about environmental issues can come to SEJ and can find the resources to figure out how to cover those stories better.

I’ve also seen a lot of responses to the news deserts. The Knight Foundation is putting money into getting people in newsrooms. SEJ has the Fund for Environmental Journalism to support journalists who would otherwise not have the funding or the institutional publishing support to do these stories.

Each time there seems to be a crisis within journalism, there are creative responses that rise up to try to deal with it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re fundamentally gaining ground in terms of getting good, robust journalism out there in the world. But people are still trying to figure out new models to make this work.

I think that there has to be a recognition that there will need to be a continual process of being creative, of figuring out what works and what doesn’t. And then don’t get too used to it, because it will change.

As environmental journalists we constantly face bad news, and this can be emotionally tough, as The Revelator has covered recently. Do you feel the weight of that?

Yeah, I feel it. I’ve been amazed at how much I’m hearing it from other people as well.

I’m teaching now, so I’m also hearing it from my students who are 20 years old and they’ve got a lot more life ahead of them than I do. And it’s looking really precarious in many respects. If you have watched the lack of action happening for decades, it’s totally understandable that they don’t have much faith that something is going to shift.

But on the other hand, there’s also been incredible activism coming from the younger generation in terms of just getting engaged with these issues. And I’m completely impressed with how many of my students are interested in journalism and are eager to do it, despite the challenges.

I feel like there’s a whole new generation of journalists who are coming up who are thinking about these issues in a different way than prior generations. They are thinking about how it’s not just a science issue or a policy issue. But it’s about human rights and equity. They’re thinking about all these much more integrated ways of looking at a problem. That gives me great hope.

What drives you to keep doing this work?

It can be hard staying up to date on all the information. And it’s mostly bad news, pretty much every morning, in your inbox. So that’s not easy.

But I feel like this story is really the story of our lifetime and our planet. It’s the story that crosses every boundary that we humans have artificially put upon the world. Anybody who can be engaged in dealing with it, on any level, should do that. And so, being a journalist, I feel it’s my responsibility to tell these stories.

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Last Chance to Voice Support for Key Environmental Law

The Trump administration wants to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, a move that would silence community criticism of destructive projects and give more power to industry.

One of America’s primary environmental and community health laws is under attack.

For half a century, the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, has effectively protected air, water, forests, and the health and vitality of countless communities. But sweeping changes proposed by the Trump administration would eviscerate the law’s implementation by undermining environmental protections, public health, and citizen input on local projects.

A public comment period about the proposed changes is open through March 10, 2020.

NEPA was signed by Republican President Richard Nixon 50 years ago, at a time of startling environmental degradation. New York City suffered fatal smog episodes, California’s scenic beaches were fouled by oil, and Midwest rivers burst into flames from chemical pollution. “Freeway revolts” erupted as interstate highway construction sliced through communities and landscapes.

When Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson described these conditions in February 1969, while introducing NEPA to Congress, he said lax federal policy allowed “haphazard urban growth, the loss of open spaces…deforestation, faltering transportation systems, a proliferation of pesticides and chemicals” and other problems harmful to the public interest.

Urged by a concerned public, Jackson and other legislators negotiated the nation’s first comprehensive environmental policy. NEPA passed the Senate unanimously and faced only 15 opposing votes in the House. At its 1970 signing, President Nixon called it an opportunity to reclaim the nation’s environmental health. Since then more than 100 nations have emulated the law.

NEPA greatly improved government transparency and accountability. It required federal agencies to first review environmental and human impacts before beginning projects needing government funds, permits or other support. The process, in the form of an environmental impact statement for the largest projects, applied to highways, airports, pipelines and many actions affecting public lands. For the first time officials had to analyze a range of project alternatives and ensure community input through public hearings and comment periods.

NEPA’s results are written across today’s landscape. Highway upgrades, wildfire mitigations, power plant expansions, and proposals for mining and grazing on public lands — among thousands of other projects — have moved forward, but often with public health and environmental mitigations gained through NEPA reviews.

And the law has never been more relevant. In my home state of Alaska, NEPA is enmeshed in several high-profile public lands debates, including Trump administration efforts to increase old-growth logging on the Tongass National Forest, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and pave the way for the massive Pebble Mine in the salmon-rich Bristol Bay region.

No doubt NEPA presents a bureaucratic hurdle for industry, as environmental reviews cost time and money. And few deny there’s room for improvement in implementing NEPA. But Trump’s proposal overwhelmingly tilts the NEPA process in favor of industry, while curtailing public participation. An extreme example in the new rules allows companies to conduct environmental reviews for their own projects, weakening the role of federal biologists and others trained to fairly consider the public’s interest.

Public participation would also be undermined by allowing officials to dismiss citizen comments lacking scientific references and other technical requirements. This puts lay people at a disadvantage. Here in Alaska, as in other parts of the country, it would leave no room for input from indigenous people and others raising cultural values or traditional ecological knowledge. This disservice to communities is also a lost opportunity, as citizen input can improve project design.

The new rules would also arbitrarily limit the timelines and number of pages for environmental reviews, forcing agencies to rush projects affecting drinking water, endangered species and other complex matters. And by shrinking the scope of reviews, the administration would allow industry and government to ignore issues tied to biodiversity and climate change, essential considerations for the welfare of today’s young people.

Trump claims the proposal benefits “new roads, bridges, tunnels, [and] highways,” aligning with an industry narrative that NEPA is somehow responsible for the nation’s aging infrastructure. But the comments ignore the proposal’s broader impact of gutting oversight on fossil fuel pipelines, fracking, offshore drilling and other projects deserving careful analysis. After losing dozens of court cases due to shoddy environmental reviews of such projects, the administration now seeks to hobble the law.

Today’s environmental concerns dwarf the conditions that in 1970 inspired NEPA. Plastics pollution, declining forest health, failing biodiversity and of course climate change are dire problems affecting all Americans, but young people, minorities and low-income communities are especially vulnerable. We need environmental and public health safeguards more than ever, not a return to the bad old days of a half-century ago.

The public can learn more about the NEPA changes and submit comments here. And we should continue to speak out about the changes after the public comment period ends. The Trump administration’s proposal is an attempt to silence our voice; we should make sure to tell them how we feel about that.

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

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The Call of the Wild: Using Sound to Help Imperiled Species and Ecosystems

Noise pollution has harmed species across the planet. Could social recordings help bring them back to their habitats?

It’s a quiet May morning on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. We’re high on a cliff inside the fences of the Nihoku Ecosystem Restoration Project, with only the sound of the wind rushing past our ears and the crash of waves breaking on the shoreline far beneath. Only the slightest hints of animal cries reach our ears — until ecologist Lindsay Young turns on a loudspeaker. Then the air fills with the breathy squawks and raucous chirps of seabirds.

It’s hardly Barry White, but for Pacific seabirds, it’s music to their ears.

“These guys are so cued into the sound, at our other sites we have birds mounting the speakers, doing bad things to them,” Young says as she tromps back up the hill from the loudspeaker.

As the executive director of Pacific Rim Conservation, Young has made it her mission to protect endangered seabirds. On this site that means Newell’s shearwaters and Hawaiian petrels, known as ʻaʻo and ʻuaʻu on the islands. Both nocturnal species have declined due to predation by invasive species and the lure of artificial lighting, which often causes fatal collisions with power lines and other urban obstacles.

Young’s organization and a handful of others began working on the Nihoku nesting site in 2014, after all the resident birds had been wiped out. They started by constructing a predator-proof fence to prevent everything from mice to feral cats from getting inside. The team also planted native shrubs and installed 50 artificial burrows to enhance the habitat. Then, beginning in 2015, they used helicopters to translocate chicks from mountain colonies down to Nihoku, where they raised them on a slurry of squid and fish, hoping  the chicks would imprint on the night sky from this new location and return to it in three to five years when they reached breeding age.

But in the meantime, the conservation team saw the need to lure additional adult birds to this newly predator-free habitat.

There was just one problem: silence.

Hawaiian seabirds are social animals — they need to know the party has started before they’re willing to settle down in a new colony. With no adult birds at Nihoku, passing birds had no one to listen to and invite them in.

Enter the seabird stereo. It plays every night, sundown to sunup, from March to November, and is audible up to about a half-mile away.

And it works, to a degree. When I followed up with Young nine months after our trek to the site, she told me that some other bird species have been attracted to the site, but not the target birds — at least, not yet.

“Most seabird species nest in multi-species colonies,” she explains, “so I think regardless of what species calls you’re playing, it is going to be attractive on some level to closely related species.” One of the species that did come to Nihoku, wedge-tailed shearwaters, is more abundant than Newell’s shearwaters, so Young says it’s not surprising that they might arrive sooner.

She’s still hopeful the target species will arrive, lured in by the daily broadcasts. In the meantime it’s a waiting game: When will any of the several dozen chicks that have fledged here return to look for mates? Young’s listening for their calls.

Echoes and Questions

Nikoku and other degraded habitats are the flip side of the story of noise pollution. While human-generated sounds have harmed wildlife and ecosystems around the planet, the absence of natural sounds also causes cascading ecological problems.

Scientists around the world have started to investigate the soundscapes — or lack of them — for a range of species, and they’re realizing just how crucial critter calls are for healthy ecosystems. Planting native vegetation and removing sources of pollution aren’t necessarily enough to get an ecosystem functioning again. For that wildlife needs to fulfill key ecological roles such as pollination and seed dispersal — and eating, or being eaten by, other animals.

Darren Proppe has been investigating the role of sound in habitat restoration for years. He’s currently the research director at the Wild Basin Creative Research Center of St. Edward’s University in Texas, but he previously studied songbirds in Michigan and the effect that birdcall recordings might have on conservation efforts.

“One of the challenges that drove this whole thing initially is that there were areas where people had restored habitat and it looked great, but it was left vacant,” Proppe says.

Previous research had already established that broadcasting sounds of bird calls could attract individual songbirds to a specific area. Proppe wanted to test whether that technique could be expanded for a larger number of species. In a key 2015 study, his research group used recordings of six different songbirds in northern Michigan to see whether playing those calls together would attract more birds to a given tract of forest. The speakers, camouflaged as rocks and powered by solar-charged batteries, broadcast the calls on daily playback loops between May and July.

ovenbird
An ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapillus), one of Proppe’s target species. Photo: Grayson Smith/USFWS

The study was a resounding success. Multiple species nested in higher densities near the playback speakers than in other parts of the forest. The only problem was that birds of related species whose calls weren’t broadcast seemed to be avoiding the areas with the speakers, perhaps because they feared the area was already overpopulated by competitors.

In addition to understanding the reasons for that avoidance, Proppe says there are plenty of other questions that need to be answered. Researchers don’t know what happens when the recordings are no longer played, or whether there might be ecosystem-wide impacts they haven’t yet noticed. They also want to make sure that birds moving into the sound-scaped environments are also doing well over the long term, that the habitat provides them with the right living conditions.

And they want to find out what these sounds mean for the next generation of birds.

“What we’re working on now is, what does this do for reproduction? This is breeding season. If we bring them into certain areas, do they reproduce poorly? If that’s the case, this isn’t a conservation methodology we want to use.”

The Sounds Heard ‘Round the World

Birds aren’t the only species that could benefit from this emerging research. The possibility of using sound as a conservation tool is being explored across species and habitats. In Kenya researchers have used broadcasts of hyena and lion vocalizations to draw the carnivores to certain locations in order to more easily  conduct population surveys. A similar technique was used in Zimbabwe to count African wild dogs.

And more recently, biologists in Australia have turned to a different medium to fill with sound: the ocean.

“We’ve recently discovered that as coral reefs degrade, their biological soundscape gets quieter,” writes marine scientist Timothy Gordon, with the University of Exeter, by email.

Because some fish species spend parts of their life in the open ocean, they need a way to eventually navigate back to the reef. That’s where sound comes in, and why it’s such a problem when cyclones or mass bleaching cause reefs to empty out.

“The animals that usually make a symphony of crackles, snaps, pops, grunts and whoops are dead, and in their absence the reef turns ghostly quiet,” Gordon says. “This is tragic to hear, and also concerning — without these sounds, there’s a real danger that fishes can no longer hear their way home.”

Gordon and his colleagues wanted to see if they could develop a solution for this problem. Working on the northern Great Barrier Reef, they used underwater loudspeakers to broadcast the sounds of healthy reefs onto coral-rubble patch reefs. Unlike the environment hosting birds, coral reefs are filled with a jumble of sounds. Gordon says it would be almost impossible to disentangle the sounds to target one individual species, since healthy reefs feature a cacophony of sounds (he compared the noise of moving sea urchins to “sizzling bacon”).

And it worked: Compared to the parts of the reef without any fishy noises being projected onto them, the artificially loud reefs doubled in overall abundance and had a 50% greater species richness.

“That’s good news for reef restoration,” Gordon says, since previous research has shown that healthy fish populations can help facilitate recovery of damaged reefs. “At the stage in life that fish are being attracted back to reef habitat from the open ocean, many species are very site-attached and territorial. That means if we can persuade them to settle somewhere, and they’re able to survive, they are likely to stay put.”

Ghost Sounds

The biggest challenge with all these cases is the lack of high-quality habitat in the first place. Neither Gordon nor Young were particularly optimistic about using animal soundscapes as a panacea for an enormous, multifaceted problem.

“No reef restoration can work without simultaneous dramatic action on carbon emissions to reduce global warming and prevent further damage,” Gordon says. “But if we can limit our emissions to stop ocean warming, new understanding like this gives us a real chance of helping our heavily damaged reefs to recover.”

For Hawaii’s seabirds, Young says, the solution must go beyond the sounds of a restored habitat. Although they’re making progress with expanding the number of safe spaces for the birds, and have even created a website to catalogue seabird restoration and social attraction recordings from around the world, they still have to deal with the predators and artificial lights that decimated bird populations in the first place.

“The restoration only creates another safe site, it doesn’t address why they’re going extinct on their colonies,” Young says. “We’re creating a new safe space for them, but it doesn’t mean the threat doesn’t exist at all the other colonies. And until we really get that addressed, it’s not going to be optimistic.”

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Water Conflicts Will Intensify. Can We Predict the Worst Problems Before Conditions Boil Over?

A new online resource combines economic and environmental data to help prevent deadly conflict. It could be a vital tool in the age of climate change.

In 2015 an estimated 1.8 million migrants crossed into the European Union, fleeing countries gripped by violence, political upheaval and resource scarcity like Syria, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Eritrea and Nigeria. Many made their trips in flimsy, overcrowded boats. Thousands drowned along the way. E.U. governments struggled to deal with the influx of new arrivals, and the confluence of humanitarian and political crises that resulted — including a surge in right-wing anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Advance warning, experts say, could have helped world governments and aid workers anticipate and adapt for these problems, and probably save lives in the process. But how do we predict future conflicts on a rapidly warming planet?

The Netherlands, which has experienced sharp rises in both immigration and far-right populism, decided to try to answer that question by funding a project to model which areas of the world were likely to face upcoming conflicts.

The result — the Water, Peace and Security Global Early Warning Tool — was released in December. It’s an online interface that analyzes data on violent conflicts, as well as dozens of economic, environmental and social indicators, to help pinpoint hotspots where worsening conditions — like food shortages or drought — are likely to shift to violent conflict within the year.

“We used a number of traditional indicators of predicting conflicts, such as economic strength, political, stability, demographic trends and past conflict, which is actually a predictor of future conflict,” says Charles Iceland, director of global and national water initiatives at the World Resources Institute. The organization partnered with IHE Delft, Deltares, The Hague Center for Strategic Studies, International Alert and Wetlands International to develop the tool.

refugee camp
A camp hosting Syrian refugees in Turkey. Photo © European Union 2016 – European Parliament, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

When it comes to determining where problems could erupt, water is a key part of the equation.

“We put in a number of water-risk variables on the assumption that no conflict is caused by water alone,” Iceland says, “but water may be present as an exacerbating or contributing factor along with a lot of other features of society.”

Most recently, drought was one of the driving factors in the unrest that led to Syria’s civil war and increasing destabilization in Mali. It was also an underlying contributor to the deadly conflict in Darfur in 2003 and has bolstered the efforts of terrorist organizations like Boko Haram.

The link between water stress and other resource pressures, Iceland warms, is becoming more acute as global environmental crises worsen.

“When you look at the big picture, we’re consuming a lot more resources now then are replenished by our natural systems,” he says. “Just that alone is enough to cause a lot of problems. And then on top of that you’ve got a changing climate that’s further exacerbating the situation.”

The links between climate change and global security are fast becoming a top concern.

A new report released this week by U.S. national security, military and intelligence professionals at the Center for Climate and Security mapped future climate change scenarios and their effects on security. Not surprisingly, the findings are troubling. Competition for dwindling resources, they predict, will increase social tensions and could topple already-fragile states. Natural disasters, social unrest and shrinking economic opportunities will push people from their homes and heighten migration pressures.

The report found that “even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades… Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century.”

Iceland hopes that the early warning tool could help play a role in averting some crises that could come from these and other scenarios that lead to violent conflict.

filling water jugs
Habiba Hossen collects water from a rehabilitated distribution point in Ethiopia during a drought in 2012. Photo by Pablo Tosco / Oxfam, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But it’s a complicated picture.

“It would be wonderful to have a perfect tool to predict something as inherently complex as violent conflict,” says Peter Gleick, president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, which along with Oregon State University and New America are also affiliated partners of the project. “We’ll never have such a tool. But the more information we have about the many factors that contribute to violence the better, especially given the new, real and growing threat of climate disruption.”

How successful the resource ultimately is also depends on how, and by whom, it’s used. Simply knowing where trouble is brewing is only the first step. Iceland says the resource is geared for decision-makers like foreign-affairs ministries and intelligence departments, as well as development and disaster-relief experts at non-governmental organizations.

“A lot of these governments and non-government entities could use this information to try to figure out where the next problems can occur and get ready for it,” he says. “Or the global community could approach those national leaders in developing countries [where problems are predicted] and say, ‘We see that you’re likely to have a water-related problem in the near future, what are some strategies that we could develop with you to try to address this problem?’”

The system isn’t just available to diplomats and international NGOs, though — anyone can use it and download relevant data.

“You can look at a lot of other datasets on the website that might be used as contextual information,” says Iceland. “Things like where are the roads and reservoirs with respect to predicted conflict. Or where the population is very dense in relation to these predicted conflict areas.”

One area currently on the map as an emerging area of concern, he says, is Iran. The country has a dry environment with a rapidly growing population and is working toward being food self-sufficient.

“But they really don’t have enough water to do that and so a lot of these lakes and rivers are drying up,” says Iceland. That’s forcing people to abandon farms to move to cities, and those who’ve remained in agricultural communities are beginning to protest the government’s water allocations.

Other areas of concern include the eastern coast of South Africa and southern Iraq, he says, but it’s too soon yet to show any on-the-ground results from the early warning tool there or elsewhere.

Even so, the resource has started to reveal things that could soon help mitigate future conflicts or allow communities to adapt to upcoming problems.

“This new effort has already given us insight into areas where more efforts at smart water policies, improved management and environmental diplomacy are needed,” says Gleick.

And the more data we collect, the more we’ll be able to learn.

“I hope and expect the tool to improve over time,” he adds.

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