Can the U.S. Slash Food Waste in Half in the Next Ten Years?

Emerging efforts by cities and the federal government show that progress is possible, but experts say systemic changes are still needed.

Can the United States make progress on its food-waste problems? Cities like San Francisco — and a growing list of actions by the federal government — show that it’s possible.

San Francisco passed the nation’s first mandatory composting law a little over 10 years ago, requiring residents and businesses to separate food waste for municipal trash collection. The city, which already had an enormously successful recycling program, incentivized composting through consumer education, a scalable fee structure and, as a last resort, penalties. It also streamlined its entire waste collection system by contracting with a single waste hauler. That company, in turn, now delivers food waste to a composting facility that converts it to rich fertilizer, which is sold to California’s vineyards and farms at a profit.

The result? Composting has helped San Francisco reduce its annual waste by a whopping 80%, taken pressure off local landfills, and reduced the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. And the city is now a global leader in municipal-waste reduction.

San Francisco’s success has inspired other local governments to take similar action. In recent years a dozen other cities and states have adopted their own mandatory composting laws. Although it’s still a growing movement nationally, experts say this composting shift represents an important way that the United States can tackle food waste.

Every year American consumers and businesses waste hundreds of millions of pounds of food. The EPA estimates that about 22% of the foods we produce end up in landfills, with another 22% burned for energy. This contributes to climate change and a host of other environmental and humanitarian issues.

Congress agrees on the national value of community composting as one element of solving this problem. The 2018 Farm Bill, which passed a little over a year ago, created a fund for new composting programs.

It was one part of an unprecedented suite of actions in the Farm Bill designed to curb U.S. food waste. The actions encourage systemic change in the country’s food system and support an ambitious government goal to slash domestic food waste by half in the next decade.

The Obama administration established that goal in 2015, and it continues today under the Trump administration. It mirrors a United Nations goal to halve food waste globally by 2030.

In the United States, the broader effort is spearheaded by the EPA and the Department of Agriculture. With help from the Farm Bill, the country now seems poised to bring about meaningful change.

However, experts caution that continued progress will depend on continued support from Congress and solid commitments from industry, government, nonprofits and even consumers.

The Promise of Reducing Waste

No matter which way you slice it, food waste is a significant issue. In the United States, up to 40% of all food is tossed in the garbage. It’s more than just the uneaten food you scrape off your plate. Food waste happens at every stage of production, from vegetables rotting on the vine to dumpsters full of unsold fruit and meat at your local grocery store.

“Our food system is operating with a 40% inefficiency,” says Katy Franklin, operations director for the nonprofit ReFED, a leading resource for food-waste research, data and solutions design. The organization works in support of both U.S. and UN waste goals.

rotting fruit — Photo: Scot Nelson (public domain)

It comes with a huge cost for the climate: This waste represents an enormous use of fossil fuel to grow, ship and refrigerate food that no one will ever eat. And as food products decompose, they release methane, a greenhouse gas with many times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide. Nearly all discarded food in the U.S. ends up in landfills, where it produces up to 14% of our country’s methane emissions.

Looking at production, distribution and disposal, the United Nations estimates that excess wasted food generates a full 8% of worldwide global carbon emissions.

If food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the United States.

And the waste contributes to a host of other problems, including deforestation, pollution from fertilizers and pesticides, and human-rights issues from forced labor or food inequality.

But recognizing that problem also creates the opportunities for improvement. Tackling food waste, Franklin points out, “can be a huge part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions” and solving other problems.

Franklin and others see a lot of reasons for optimism, especially the 2018 Farm Bill, the most important elements of which are just starting to take effect. Top food-waste experts at ReFED and the Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic collaborated on recommendations for the bill, which were mostly accepted by Congress.

“It was satisfying and really thrilling to see the bill provide both funding and intellectual investment in the issue,” says Franklin. “That’s a magical combination.”

The Farm Bill Creates Leadership

While the Farm Bill put a range of programs in motion, three specific elements showcase the systemic changes needed to achieve serious cuts in food waste.

First, the law set the stage for the creation of a high-level “food-waste liaison” under the Secretary of Agriculture, with specific duties for researching and cutting waste. Franklin calls the new position an exciting signal of government leadership, which can help galvanize participation throughout the business, consumer and government sectors. While the 2018 Farm Bill did not pay for this new position, preliminary funding was included in the 2020 appropriations bill that passed in December 2019. The provision was inserted in both bills by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), who in 2018 also launched Congress’ first-ever Bipartisan Food Recovery Caucus and has introduced other bills to curb food waste.

Until the liaison is hired, many of the duties assigned to the position by the Farm Bill fall to Elise Golan, the USDA’s director for sustainable development. She describes the role as a natural fit for USDA because reducing food waste addresses the department’s focus areas, including agriculture, nutrition, food safety and the environment.

Golan’s office is presently determining the best methods to define and measure U.S. food waste, an early task the Farm Bill laid out for the liaison.

“We need benchmarks to generate good statistics,” she says, “but even more importantly they help us identify the drivers of waste at every level, from farms to consumers.”

Although some broad national estimates exist, experts say a lack of more specific data limits the ability to track progress in reducing waste across the entire food system. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report reached similar conclusions. The report identified specific data gaps and pointed to inconsistent methods for measuring food waste among government agencies and others as a barrier to progress.

Golan says part of solving that problem requires greater coordination among federal agencies, another liaison role described by the Farm Bill. As an example of headway toward the goal, she points to an interagency strategy signed in 2019 by EPA, USDA and the Food and Drug Administration, which includes a commitment to improving food-waste measurement.

Other roles the liaison may eventually take on, as dictated in the Farm Bill, include raising public awareness, expanding existing programs, and nurturing both governmental and non-governmental partnerships, broad roles that experts say are best served by federal leadership.

Feeding the Hungry

In the second effort at establishing systemic change, the Farm Bill set the stage for removing hurdles that commonly prevent supermarkets, restaurants and farmers from donating unwanted food to charity.

According to the nonprofit Feeding America and other experts, food donations carry enormous potential for reducing waste while helping people in need. But getting companies to donate goods has been a problem. Surveys have shown that many retailers avoid donating surplus food because they fear potential lawsuits over less-than-optimal foodstuffs, even though they’d theoretically be protected by so-called “good Samaritan” laws.

City Harvest food-rescue truck. USDA Photo by Lance Cheung.

The Farm Bill took steps to fix that problem by clarifying protections established more than two decades ago under the 1996 Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act. The Act previously offered liability to individual donors, nonprofits and “gleaners” — people who gather excess food left behind on agricultural fields. The new bill expanded that liability protection to cover direct donations by retailers.

The Farm Bill also required whoever eventually takes on the food-waste liaison role to publish additional guidance on the Bill Emerson Act, something no agency has done in the decades since the law’s passage.

Experts say weeding out this confusion around liability protections can spur growth in commercial food donations. Toward that end, the Farm Bill also authorizes millions of dollars to help farmers participate in donation programs, especially for the perishables that comprise a high percentage of U.S. food waste. As one of the first examples, this September the USDA rolled out a new program that reimburses farmers for milk donated to low-income families.

More Composting

The third example from the Farm Bill is a new fund to support community composting programs, which provides a total of $25 million to jumpstart pilot efforts in at least ten states.

Franklin and others call this provision especially important.

“There are so many valuable components of food-waste material,” says Franklin. “There’s really no reason they shouldn’t be part of a circular economy that helps produce energy, soil and other products.”

That’s just what San Francisco’s mandatory composting law has done, while also alleviating the burden on landfills and sharply cutting heat-trapping methane emissions.

There’s an economic benefit, too, says Franklin. Recycling food often creates more jobs than tossing it. That point holds true in Massachusetts, where recycling food waste supported over 900 jobs and $175 million in economic activity in 2016 alone, according to a recent report from the state government.

The three Farm Bill examples track well with a “food recovery hierarchy” developed by the EPA and others to guide thinking on food waste. It emphasizes that communities address waste prevention as their top priority, then move through a series of other solutions that include donating, repurposing and composting food, all before the least desirable practice of dumping it in a landfill.

Beyond the Farm Bill

Congress and government agencies are far from the only ones working on food waste. If anything, they’re late arrivals in a field where conservation and humanitarian groups have been toiling for years. They include the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ReFED, Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Feeding America and many others, as well as hundreds of local food rescue groups that connect unwanted food with people in need. In fact, the Farm Bill provisions reflect many of these organizations’ longstanding recommendations.

The groups have helped spur the food industry into action. For example, large retailers such as Walmart began efforts to standardize food expiration labels after a 2013 report by NRDC and the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic showed confusion over the labels leads up to 90% of Americans to toss perfectly good food. In 2017 they were joined by industry associations representing dozens of major firms, who volunteered to trim the more than ten date labels — including “best by,” “sell by,” and “expires on” — to just two: “best if used by” and “use by.”

The Food and Drug Administration approved their choice of “best if used by” to indicate optimal quality this past May but stopped short of sanctioning “use by” as a marker for when an item could be safely consumed.

Still, ReFED and others point out that voluntary industry efforts are not enough. They say a continuing mishmash of retailer approaches and state food safety laws have prevented the universal standardization of labels. That standardization, they say, is only achievable by federal legislation that includes oversight, comprehensive consumer education, and consistency between state and federal laws. That may still emerge: In 2019 Rep. Pingree of Maine introduced label reform legislation that matches ReFED’s recommendations.

But as label reform shows, major industry players are coming to the table to help fight food waste. The EPA and USDA encourage their efforts through the 2030 Food Waste Champions program, which highlights companies working toward the government’s 2030 goal. Members include Walmart, Campbells, Kellogg, Kroger and more than 20 other large retailers. Although the program is voluntary and doesn’t require independent verification, highlighting again the need for better overall measurement standards, supporters argue it incentivizes companies to reduce waste.

“We’ve been lucky,” says Franklin, “because reducing food waste has a lot of appeal among businesses right now.”

But as Franklin says, unexpected events or market shifts could temper efforts at any time. She also points to the need for greater consumer education, as she’s regularly reminded that most people remain unaware of the food-waste problem.

But she sees promising work there, too, and highlights the World Wildlife Fund’s Food Waste Warrior toolkit for school teachers. Similar experiential education is also included in a bill Rep. Pingree and others introduced in January, which would initiate a new federally supported food-waste program in schools.

Street sandwich — Enjoy every sandwich. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Taken together, all of these examples show legislators, agencies, nonprofits and industry collaborating to tackle food waste, with growing coordination around the government’s 2030 goal. Experts say such coordination is necessary for solving America’s — and the world’s — food-waste problem.

Ultimately consumer behaviors also need to change, but once again we can look to San Francisco for proof that this can work. Once the city government and industry put in place tools and incentives, consumer behaviors followed.

Franklin calls it a matter of fitting all the puzzle pieces together — and it’s almost like assembling a recipe to reduce food waste.

Experts agree we’re still a long way from meeting our 2030 goal, and caution that the years ahead will show if continued coordination and investment keep us moving forward, but they also say the hunger for solutions is another sign of progress.

Resources:

Roadmap to Sustainability: Food-waste Prevention Pathways

Divesting From What Was, Investing in What Might Be

Students successfully mobilized to pressure Georgetown University to divest from fossil fuels. What comes next?

When students first began organizing a fossil-fuel divestment campaign a few years ago at Georgetown University, where I teach environmental studies, they knew the road ahead would be mostly uphill. At a prestigious university with millions in investments, the bureaucratic realities were all too evident.

Still, that first wave of students persisted, staging colorful events and inspiring demonstrations on campus. In the process they garnered enough support to convince the university to divest from coal.

That was five years ago, and since then the stakes have only gotten higher — along with the temperatures.

Flash forward, and now the current incarnation of student activists has just achieved a remarkable victory: The university revealed this month that it will freeze and phase out all fossil fuel holdings over the next five to ten years.

The announcement came on the heels of a student referendum vote that passed by an overwhelming 90.7%. It quickly prompted a number of commentators to reflect on the enormity of the moment.

Holy holy holy heck! If I’m reading this right, @Georgetown Georgetown–one of the country’s great universities and premier Catholic institution–has divested from fossil fuel! Go Hoyas! and such thanks to all who fought to make this happen! @GUFossilFree https://t.co/oVwYZkL3vY

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 6, 2020

As critical as this decision is — and as influential as it may yet be to other educational institutions — a secondary aspect of the narrative has received less attention and could be the key component going forward: Georgetown will now also repurpose its funds and energies toward renewability.

“The board’s decision directs endowment funds to be invested in areas such as renewable energy,” the Washington Post wrote. This rare commitment to reinvest directly in alternative and renewable resources is an important development in the wider campaign.

That effort will start at home. The university’s press release on Feb. 6 touted its increasing efforts toward “reducing its carbon footprint, supporting education, research efforts and other measures.”

This ethos was reflected in the final policy language adopted by the board of directors that same day, including the reiteration of an overarching intention to contribute “to our transition to a more sustainable world.” The prospective nature of these sentiments is both promising and necessary.

As the GU Fossil Free (GUFF) site implores: “To truly invest in our future, we must divest from our destruction.” Looking at the “Why We Fight” section of the site evokes memories for me of the many dedicated students who have done this work, but it also serves to remind us all of the stakes.

These students haven’t just been working to address past actions and change current policies; they’ve also been futuring — planning for the days and years to come with a systematic approach. “I don’t want my legacy to be ‘the person who knew but did not act’,” Ezequiel Espiricueta said on the site. “It’s time to step up, stand for justice, and protect our futures,” observed Lucy Chatfield.

It is this piece of the puzzle — pointing toward the arduous road ahead while maintaining a sense of possibility — that ultimately may be the most effective and inspiring result of all. It validates a core premise of social change efforts more generally: the need to not only stand against, but for.

As GUFF member Sadie Morris described it, the major task at hand is no less than the urgent need for “recognizing and forcing the systematic, global change that needs to take place,” in order “to create a human system that is compatible with a healthy and happy planet and healthy and happy people.”

Knowing many of these students may serve to bias my views on all of this, but it’s equally the case that the overall momentum of future-oriented change efforts steadily has been tipping toward youth (as environmental systems approach parallel “tipping points”). I wrote as much a few months ago.

What comes next? For Georgetown, it will entail a strategic process to identify the right investments and places where the institution’s assets can have the most positive impact. Efforts toward greening the campus and promoting sustainability inside and outside the classroom will build on those already in place.

For GUFF and students around the world, the challenge now will be to replicate this success at other institutions, and to turn their investments away from the fossil fuel economy of the past and reinvest them in a renewable future.

And for the rest of us? Whatever else we invest in for the future, we need to continue to support the efforts of today’s youth to mobilize for change. It may be that investing in the work of these students will yield the greatest returns of all.

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.

Trump Budget Proposal Reveals Regressive Environmental Priorities

The White House’s 2021 federal budget proposal eliminates several important programs and slashes funding for others — like the Endangered Species Act.

President Donald Trump has unveiled his budget proposal for the next federal fiscal year, and it’s predictably harsh for wildlife and the environment — but great for oil, gas and coal.

Of course, the annual presidential budget is more spectacle than anything else. The real budget each year comes from Congress, which may or may not take up the president’s suggestions.

But whether White House budget proposal’s recommendations go any further, it reveals the dark truth about the Trump administration’s priorities, especially as they relate to environmental issues.

Here’s what we see in this year’s budget:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s budget would be slashed 26.5%, including a 10% reduction in the Superfund hazardous-waste cleanup program, a nearly 50% reduction in research and development, a $376 million take from efforts to improve air quality, and the elimination of 50 programs that the administration perceives as outside the “core” of the EPA’s mission (among them: clean-water grants for disadvantaged communities and the EnergyStar energy-conservation program). It would also reduce EPA staffing to its lowest levels in three decades, further hampering enforcement of existing regulations.
The Department of the Interior would lose 8% of its budget, including $587 million from the National Park Service and $80 million from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That includes an $11 million reduction in the Endangered Species Act listing program (which evaluates species for their extinction risk).
Federal land acquisition through the Land and Water Conservation Fund would be nearly eliminated through a 97% budget cut — after a long fight to reauthorize the program over the past two years.
The Multinational Species Conservation Fund would be cut by $9 million.
State and tribal wildlife grants would lose more than half of their funding.
The Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy funding would be cut by 74% and the Advanced Research Project Agency–Energy efforts would be eliminated as part of a larger trend toward defunding research and development and basic science.

More backward logic from the Trump Administration: While our nation faces a looming climate crisis, the #TrumpBudget proposes to slash EPA funding by 26.5%, slash DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy funding by 74%, & eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy pic.twitter.com/zlix6wbhj9

— House Budget Committee (@HouseBudgetDems) February 10, 2020

The U.S. Geological Survey would lose about half of its ecosystem funding, including a $36.6 million reduction for the Climate Adaptation Science Center and $37.2 million for the Species Management Research Program, which supports the recovery and conservation of hot-button species like the greater sage grouse and desert tortoise.
NOAA would lose several programs, including the Sea Grant, Coastal Zone Management Grants, education grants and the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund.
Also gone: the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures grants and the Highlands Conservation Act grant.
The Centers for Disease Control, as part of Health and Human Services, could lose 9% of its budget, while the U.S. contribution to the World Health Organization would be cut in half — although the administration says it won’t touch coronavirus-related funding.
U.S. funding for United Nations peacekeeping efforts would be cut by $447 million — just as the threat from climate change makes certain conflicts more likely.

Oh, and let’s not forget about the nearly $1 trillion in proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which came just two days after President Trump promised no changes to those programs.

Not even two days later, and Trump releases a budget that cuts $30 billion from Social Security and $850 billion from Medicare.

If you voted for this man because you took him at his word, your country needs you. Don’t be fooled again by our liar-in-chief’s broken promises. https://t.co/Su6EshDnz2

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) February 10, 2020

Meanwhile the budget increases some funding in unexpected places:

The border wall would get $2 billion in extra funding, with another $182 million devoted to hiring 750 new Border Patrol agents and 300 border processing coordinators and related support staff. That doesn’t even include the $544 million earmarked to hire 6,000 ICE personnel.
Infrastructure would get $1 trillion in funding, which is great, but development projects — notably pipelines and other energy-related projects — would also be subject to a sped-up permitting process designed to supersede pesky environmental regulations such as the National Environmental Policy Act.
Nuclear energy will get $1.2 billion in research and development funding (although the budget eliminates the money to license the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository).
The budget adds $188 million in funding to map the ocean floor — a precursor to coastal development and deep-sea mining.
It also adds an unspecified amount of money for the promotion of coal, including support of “extracting critical minerals from coal and coal byproducts as one of many non-thermal, non-power uses of coal.”
The Department of Justice’s Environment & Natural Resources Division has asked for an additional $4.8 million and five new attorneys to help it defend the administration’s antienvironmental policies, including the border wall, changes to the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, and other aspects of the “natural resource regulatory reform agenda.” DOJ says “virtually every significant agency action implementing this agenda has been or will be challenged.”
And the budget promises continued support for and increases in U.S. oil and natural gas development.

The budget also takes a quiet jab at the media by promising to cut money spent on “subscriptions.” This continues a trend the administration started last year when it cancelled White House subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post and promised to repeat this version of “cancel culture” throughout the federal government. The president has infamously called journalists the “enemies of the people.”

It’s doubtful that much of this will make the final budget — Congress reinstated many of the Trump administration’s proposed cuts when they wrote the official 2020 budget — but does that really matter? The administration has already shown its willingness to not spend congressionally allocated money on programs it doesn’t like. Earlier this month congressional Democrats revealed that the Department of Energy has held onto $823 in funding for clean-energy research and development — a program whose funding the administration had originally proposed cutting by 86%.

No matter what happens in Congress, we can expect the same type of budgetary actions from this administration in the future.

“We’re going to keep proposing these types of budgets and hope that at some point Congress will have some sense of fiscal sanity and join us in trying to tackle our debt and deficits,” Russ Vought, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said during a press briefing.

Speaking of that debt, the Congressional Budget Office last month projected that the federal budget deficit will reach $1.02 trillion this year due in large part to the Trump administration’s tax cuts. The national debt, meanwhile, rose to a record $23 trillion this past November. Experts say White House budget will not be able to address either of those problems.

Does the Trump budget propose anything beneficial? Ironically, it promises to tackle wasteful federal spending on things like travel. Whether that includes the $650 a night that the Secret Service has been paying to house its agents at the president’s luxury properties remains to be seen.

Help For Lemurs: How to Save the World’s Most Endangered Mammals

Habitat destruction is the biggest threat facing ruffed lemurs. But it's a problem we can fix.

The island of Madagascar off the southeastern coast of Africa hosts at least 12,000 plant species and 700 vertebrate species, 80% to 90% of which are found nowhere else on Earth.

Isolated for the last 88 million years and covering an area approximately the size of the northeastern United States, Madagascar is one of the world’s hottest biodiversity hotspots. Its island-wide species diversity is striking, but its tropical forest biodiversity is truly exceptional.

Sadly, human activities are ravaging tropical forests worldwide. Habitat fragmentation, over-harvesting of wood and other forest products, over-hunting, invasive species, pollution and climate change are depleting many of these forests’ native species.

Among these threats, climate change receives special attention because of its global reach. But in my research, I have found that in Madagascar it is not the dominant reason for species decline, although of course it’s an important long-term factor.

As a primatologist and lemur specialist, I study how human pressures affect Madagascar’s highly diverse and endemic signature species. In two recent studies, colleagues and I have found that in particular, the ruffed lemur — an important seed disperser and indicator of rainforest health — is being disproportionately impacted by human activities. Importantly, habitat loss is driving ruffed lemurs’ distributions and genetic health. These findings will be key to helping save them.

The Forest Is Disappearing

Madagascar has lost nearly half (44%) of its forests within the last 60 years, largely due to slash-and-burn agriculture — known locally as “tavy” — and charcoal production. Habitat loss and fragmentation runs throughout Madagascar’s history, and the rates of change are staggering.

This destruction threatens Madagascar’s biodiversity and its human population. Nearly 50% of the country’s remaining forest is now located within 300 feet (100 meters) of an unforested area. Deforestation, illegal hunting and collection for the pet trade are pushing many species toward the brink of extinction.

In fact, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that 95% of Madagascar’s lemurs are now threatened, making them the world’s most endangered mammals. Pressure on Madagascar’s biodiversity has significantly increased over the last decade.

Deforestation in Madagascar — Deforestation from slash-and-burn agriculture in the peripheral zones of Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar. Photo by Nina Beeby/Ranomafana Ruffed Lemur Project, (CC BY-ND)

Deforestation Threatens Ruffed Lemur Survival

In a newly published study, climate scientist Toni Lyn Morelli, species distribution expert Adam Smith and I worked with 19 other researchers to study how deforestation and climate change will affect two critically endangered ruffed lemur species over the next century. Using combinations of different deforestation and climate change scenarios, we estimate that suitable rainforest habitat could be reduced by as much as 93%.

If left unchecked, deforestation alone could effectively eliminate ruffed lemurs’ entire eastern rainforest habitat and with it, the animals themselves. In sum, for these lemurs the effects of forest loss will outpace climate change.

But we also found that if current protected areas lose no more forest, climate change and deforestation outside of parks will reduce suitable habitat by only 62%. This means that maintaining and enhancing the integrity of protected areas will be essential for saving Madagascar’s rainforest habitats.

Based on this analysis, we parsed out which landscape variables — including rivers, elevation, roads, habitat quality and human population density — best explained gene flow in ruffed lemurs. We found that human activity was the best predictor of ruffed lemurs’ population structure and gene flow. Deforestation alongside human communities was the most significant barrier.

In a study published in November 2019, my colleagues and I showed that ruffed lemurs depend on habitat cover to survive. We investigated natural and human-caused impediments that prevent the lemurs from spreading across their range, and tracked the movement of their genes as they ranged between habitats and reproduced. This movement, known as gene flow, is important for maintaining genetic variability within populations, allowing lemurs to adapt to their ever-changing environments.

Taken together, these and other lines of evidence show that deforestation poses an imminent threat to conservation on Madagascar. Based on our projections, habitat loss is a more immediate threat to lemurs than climate change, at least in the immediate future.

This matters not only for lemurs, but also for other plants and animals in the areas where lemurs are found. The same is true at the global level: More than one-third (about 36.5%) of Earth’s plant species are exceedingly rare and disproportionately affected by human use of land. Regions where the most rare species live are experiencing higher levels of human impact.

Crisis Can Drive Conservation

Scientists have warned that the fate of Madagascar’s rich natural heritage hangs in the balance. Results from our work suggest that strengthening protected areas and reforestation efforts will help to mitigate this devastation while environmentalists work toward long-term solutions for curbing the runaway greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.

Already, nonprofits are working hard toward these goals. A partnership between Dr. Edward E. Louis Jr., founder of Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership and director of Conservation Genetics at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo, and the Arbor Day Foundation’s Plant Madagascar project has replanted nearly 3 million trees throughout Kianjavato, one region identified by our study. Members of Centre ValBio’s reforestation team — a nonprofit based just outside of Ranomafana National Park that facilitates our ruffed lemur research — are following suit.

At an international conference in Nairobi earlier this year, Madagascar’s president, Andry Rajoelina, promised to reforest 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) every year for the next five years — the equivalent of 75,000 football fields. This commitment, while encouraging, unfortunately lacks a coherent implementation plan.

Our projections highlight areas of habitat persistence, as well as areas where ruffed lemurs could experience near-complete habitat loss or genetic isolation in the not-so-distant future. Lemurs are an effective indicator of total non-primate community richness in Madagascar, which is another way of saying that protecting lemurs will protect biodiversity. Our results can help pinpoint where to start.

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

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.

How to Make Climate Refugee Protections a Reality

The United Nations has taken a good first step, but here’s what needs to be done next to make sure climate refugees get the protections they deserve.

Imagine if you couldn’t feed your children and had to leave your home because of fossil fuels burned in a far-off country. That’s what people on the front lines of climate change face today.

The climate crisis is now creating more refugees than war. In recent years tens of millions of people around the world have been driven from their homes by drought, storms, flooding and fires. Over the next 50 years, climate change could cause a refugee crisis on an unprecedented scale.

Where will people go when their countries become inhospitable? Will the governments of the world accept them?

In January the United Nations recognized the severity of these questions and formally stated that it may be unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives would be put at risk by the climate crisis.

The United Nations should be applauded for standing up for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. And while this opens the door to establishing protections to ensure climate refugees receive the same legal protections as those fleeing war or persecution, it doesn’t yet guarantee that: We need a comprehensive international plan.

Climate, Conflict and the Universal Right to Life

Time is already running short for some.

Pacific island states, in particular, find themselves at imminent risk from climate change, as even moderate sea-level rise may swamp many beneath the waves.

It’s this threat that drove Ioane Teitiota, a resident of the Republic of Kiribati, to apply for asylum in New Zealand in 2015 — the first time a person identified himself as a climate refugee. Teitiota cited overcrowding, failing crops, contaminated water supplies, social tensions and violence as among the reasons he needed to leave his island home, which at its highest point isn’t even 10 feet above sea level.

Teitiota is far from alone. Around the world the climate crisis is making violence more likely by causing shortages of food, water and safe environments. This has had a role in multiple conflicts already, including the devastating Syrian civil war.

Despite the risk to his island nation, Teitiota’s application was rejected because the Supreme Court of New Zealand ruled his life was not in immediate danger. The 10-15 years before Kiribati will be underwater, the court found, would be enough time for other arrangements to come to light.

But Teitiota brought his case to the U.N. Human Rights Committee — the body of experts responsible for upholding international civil rights — which led to January’s decision. While the committee accepted New Zealand’s original judgment, there was one hopeful outcome: It stated that in the future countries may be acting unlawfully if they return someone to their country of origin when that person’s right to life is threatened by the climate crisis.

Essentially, this sets the stage to provide climate refugees a similar legal status to people fleeing war or persecution.

This is significant, but it raises even more questions.

We don’t know how immediate the danger should have to be for someone to be able to claim asylum because of the climate crisis, or how an individual might be required to prove their level of vulnerability.

We do know that individuals can still be returned to their home country if there’s any safe location in that country at all.

cyclone damage — The aftermath of Cyclone Idai, which displaced hundreds of thousands in Mozambique in 2019. Photo by Denis Onyodi: IFRC/DRK/Climate Centre (CC BY-NC 2.0)

This is important because few countries — for example, relatively small island nations — will be so affected by the climate crisis in the short term that no safe place exists for people to be sent back to within them. Forcing refugees from larger nations to stay in, or return to, their home countries will create that same overcrowding, tensions and competition for resources that Teitiota feared — situations we’ve already seen in Syria and other places. And the communities they’re resettled into may not remain safe much longer.

Three Key Next Steps

These outstanding questions — what makes someone a climate refugee, the immediacy of danger required, and how to assess the safety of whole countries — must form the fundamental building blocks of an international agreement on tackling the climate crisis and the changes in migration patterns it will bring.

This new international agreement, separate from the Geneva Convention, should provide a legal definition of climate refugees, and how they should be protected, as the first step to a global agreement. If countries can agree on what being a climate refugee means, then people forced to leave their homes because of rising seas, unbearable heat, or related threats will get the protection they deserve.

Beyond these direct effects, climate breakdown often acts to magnify and multiply conflicts and resource shortages. An international agreement on climate refugees must recognize the complex and multifaceted nature of climate change and its related societal threats.

On the topic of the safety and integrity of entire countries, a new international agreement must also resist the temptation to buy a small amount of time by sending people to areas that are only temporarily safer than the ones they left. It must seek long-term solutions that can secure notions of sovereignty and cultural identity alongside the economic, social and environmental needs of forced migrants.

The United Nations has laid down the first stage of the theory. Now all nations must come together to make climate justice a reality.

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.

Will Voters Welcome Wolves Back to Colorado?

Residents will vote on a ballot measure to reintroduce endangered gray wolves. There’s a strong ecological argument for why they’re needed, says biologist Joanna Lambert.

This November voters in Colorado will get a chance to do something historic: vote on a ballot measure that proposes the reintroduction of gray wolves into the wilds of their state.

It’s the first time the question of reintroducing an endangered species has been placed in the public’s hands at the ballot box.

With or without a public vote, wolves seem to be reintroducing themselves: Last month Colorado Parks and Wildlife confirmed that a pack of six wolves has settled in the state for the first time in 80 years. But they’ll need political support to thrive there.

And an official reintroduction program could take wolves’ return further by encouraging the state to establish additional populations by the end of 2023. Proponents believe it could be a big ecological boost for Colorado, and they point to Yellowstone as proof.

Gray wolves were reintroduced in the national park 25 years ago, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. The wolves trimmed deer and elk populations, which had over-browsed vegetation. Riparian areas flourished again and attracted songbirds, beavers, foxes and other animals. It was proof that bringing a top predator back into an ecosystem has a beneficial ripple effect.

We spoke with University of Colorado Boulder ecology professor Joanna Lambert about the science of wolf reintroduction and what previous efforts have taught us about coexisting with apex predators as they recolonize a landscape.

What are the ecological arguments for returning wolves to Colorado?

Gray wolves evolved in North America, probably somewhere in western Alaska about 800,000 years ago. There were a lot of wolf species in North America and Eurasia at that time. The one that prevailed is the one that we know today as Canis lupus.

They dispersed throughout North America, and in so doing, they evolved alongside all of the other species that were there — all of their prey species, and all of the plant species that their prey were eating. But as a result of the concerted effort by the federal government to remove these apex predators that co-evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, the ecological interactions have been knocked out of balance.

We have huge populations of whitetail deer, mule deer and elk that can be a real issue. We saw that with thousands of elk in the northern parts of Yellowstone that the National Park Service had to cull every year. Over the decades, upwards of 75,000 elk were removed by the National Park Service before wolves were put back in.

So the argument is that by putting back in wolves — an apex predator that has evolved alongside their prey species — we’re putting things back into ecological balance.

Is this the first time that the public will vote on a ballot measure to determine whether an endangered species will be reintroduced?

It is and that’s why this is such a profound moment if it does pass.

And if it does — I’m not advocating one way or another — the conversation doesn’t end there. Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission would then have to officially request a permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife. This is all outlined in section 10 of the Endangered Species Act.

Ultimately this will be a conversation among scientists. And the scientists will determine where the wolves would be reintroduced. How to do it and where to do it will not be mandated or dictated by citizens, who aren’t trained in ecology. What we do know is that there are vast tracts of public lands in the form of national forest and BLM lands throughout the western slope of Colorado. There’s ample room for wolves.

Because gray wolves are an endangered species, we can think of this as another tool in the toolbox of conservation measures. But because this is a measure about wolves, people have extremely strong opinions one way or another. I think that’s adding to the significance of this. There have been several surveys, and one that just went online indicates over 80% of Colorado citizens want this measure to go through.

What is the opposition’s point of view?

Certainly there are folks that don’t want it. Very similar issues that arose in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem are occurring here, namely stakeholders from the ranching industry have concerns. It’s not an insignificant thing to have an apex predator suddenly put back into a system.

There are myriad ecological benefits, but there will be some costs, and those ranchers who have a permit to graze their cattle on public lands will lose some cattle for sure. Ignoring that fact would be naive.

The good news is that there’s language in the initiative to address that directly. And in addition to that, we’ve learned a lot already from wolf reintroduction in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. A tremendous amount of knowledge exists on how to ranch with wolves and grizzly bears.

What we’re all hoping for is a landscape where we can coexist with the species that were originally here, but also acknowledging that humans need to make a living and that the costs of this initiative will be felt by some folks more than others.

But humans evolved alongside large-bodied predators, and we have had livestock alongside them for hundreds and hundreds of years. We can regain that knowledge. There are other examples from Europe where livestock owners are learning how to live with wolves. People are learning how to use guard dogs and increase vigilance. There are some fairly simple things that we can do.

If we’re not just going to kill everything that comes into our backyard or kill everything that comes into our rangeland, then we’ve got to learn how to live with them and how to seek mechanisms of coexistence, and I think we can do it.

Is the reintroduction effort in Yellowstone a primary model, or other areas guiding planning on how wolves could be reintroduced in Colorado?

In terms of just scientific documentation, Yellowstone has received the most attention because it was wildly successful. Wolves did incredibly well and they started dispersing out of Yellowstone at a rate that no one expected.

But that’s not the only place. Since 2000 we’ve had, globally, over 200 reintroduction initiatives of predators back into their native habitat. So this has been done elsewhere for sure, including in Africa where cheetahs are being put back into areas. We’ve got a lot to rest this on it — it has been done not just in Yellowstone but around the world.

What’s most exciting to you about wolves?

I have a yearning for wild places and wild things. And I have a yearning for putting things back together again. Humans have transformed this planet into a system that we view as just serving us. And in so doing, we have dismantled ecosystems and native species assemblages.

There’s a lot of grief around the world about what we’ve done. In fact, this has been documented in a phenomenon known as ecological grief. As we lose wild places, the very landscapes that we ourselves evolved in, we are feeling the emotional burden.

I guess that’s how I view this initiative: It’s a way of rewilding. It’s rewilding landscapes and putting a wild thing back into a wild place that used to be there, but that we’ve lost in the last hundred years because of unchecked human growth.

Pesticides Are Killing Off the Andean Condor

Livestock owners needlessly fear these massive South American birds — and lure them to their deaths with illegal poisons. That puts the entire species at risk.

It starts with the whiff of death.

High above the Argentinian plains, an Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) — one of the world’s largest flying bird species — catches the distinctive aroma of decaying flesh on the wind. It’s quickly joined by other condors, perhaps a dozen or more, who start circling in the familiar pattern of all carrion-loving vultures.

Soon the massive condors spy the source of the delicious smell: a dead sheep or goat lying in a field. The hungry birds quickly angle in for descent, land around the body and begin to feed, tearing into the skin and meat with their sharp beaks.

Then the condors also begin to die.

At first they appear merely disoriented. Then they start to stumble, convulse and fall around the dead sheep. A few may try to fly, flapping mighty wings that span 10 feet — only to crash to the ground just a few yards away.

Eventually the field is littered with dead condors. Few, if any, escape.

This gruesome scene has played out several times in Argentina in recent years. In one incident that made worldwide headlines, 34 Andean condors died at a single site in 2018 — a major blow to a species with an estimated population of just 6,700 mature individuals, about 2,500 of which live in Argentina.

What’s killing these birds? Tragically, it’s a case of persecution by pesticide. Livestock owners who needlessly fear the imposing condors — which only eat carrion (not live prey) — attract the birds with dead sheep and other animals laced with powerful, illegal neurotoxin pesticides such as carbofuran and parathion. They know that anything that eats the carcasses will quickly die — in theory, leaving the rest of nearby livestock “safe” from predators.

Andean condors aren’t the only target. Farmers also use the pesticide-laden bodies to lure in pumas, foxes, lynx, eagles and other predators that really do occasionally prey upon livestock.

But it’s condors that have been hit hardest by the practice. A new paper published Jan. 15 in the journal Biological Conservation calls the poisonings “the greatest threat to the Andean condor.”

“We conclude that this problem can lead to the extinction of the species if we do not take action urgently,” says the paper’s lead author, Carlos I. Piña, a biologist with Universidad Autonoma de Entre Rios.

Piña and his fellow researchers — Rayen Estrada Pachecoab, N. Luis Jácome, Vanesa Astore and Carlos E. Borghi — studied 301 birds treated or collected by the Andean Condor Rescue Center in Argentina between 2001 and 2018. Using records and necropsies, they identified 21 poisoning events in Argentina that killed a total of 99 condors — 77 deaths in 2017 and 2018 alone (the paper does not include data from 2019). They also identified another 29 incidents of possible poisoning. In some cases the rescue center located birds suffering symptoms of poisoning that died a few hours after discovery.

The researchers also found that the poisonings occur throughout Argentina, have increased in frequency since the beginning of 2017, and now represent 79% of deaths reported to the rescue center.

An Andean condor in the conservation breeding program at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The deaths are particularly alarming because condors already face a range of other threats, including illegal hunting, lead poisoning (similar to California condors) and collisions with power lines.

On top of that, their populations grow slowly under the best of circumstances.

“Condors have a very low reproductive rate,” Piña explains. They don’t reach sexual maturity until they’re 9 or 10 years old, and then they only nest every two years and raise a single chick at a time.

It’s now likely that more Andean condors are dying than are being born.

“These deaths occur at a rate and on a scale that does not allow the natural recovery of individuals to the population,” says Piña.

And it’s not just the condors being killed. The bodies of animals from eight other species have been found near dead condors, according to the paper. These include American black vultures (Coragyps atratus), kelp gull (Larus dominicanus), Molina’s hog-nosed skunks (Conepatus chinga) and pumas (Puma concolor).

The poisons are also potentially harmful to humans. “There are oral records of cases of people poisoned by the placement of these poisons,” Piña says. This poses a risk for officials tasked with cleaning up kill sites. The EPA links acute short-term parathion exposure to central nervous disorders, depressed red blood cell activity, nausea and other health risks.

And then there’s the big picture: the environmental cost of not having condors on the landscape if this problem persists.

“Vultures occupy a fundamental role in the ecosystem, since they eliminate the carcasses of dead animals which, if not removed, become sources of infection and can affect human health,” Piña says. “They’re like great natural cleaners.”

In additional to fulfilling that ecological role, condors also have cultural importance.

“For the native peoples of South America, it is the sacred bird that connects the world we live in with the cosmos,” Piña says. “We see condors on the emblems, shields and flags of the Andean countries. The loss of these birds also represents a great cultural loss for our society.”

Andean condor wings — An Andean condor spreads its wings at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

With the condors fulfilling so many important roles, and the frequency of poisonings increasing, how do we solve this problem?

Piña and his fellow researchers recommend a three-tier approach.

The first involves educating livestock owners about the importance of condors and the health risks from the pesticides. “We believe that working on education about the dangerousness of the use of these toxic baits is one of the lines of action needed to address this problem,” Piña says.

That won’t solve everything, he acknowledges, because some people already know the poisons are dangerous but use them anyway.

That brings us to the second solution: protecting livestock. “It’s essential to find ways to reduce predation without affecting environmental health,” Piña says. “An example could be the incorporation of cattle protection dogs, which have been shown to considerably reduce predation in Patagonia Argentina.” The researchers have started studies with cattle breeders to understand various techniques already in use in different parts of the country, as well as how ranchers perceive livestock losses they experience.

The third tier involves the law. These pesticides are already illegal — parathion was banned in Argentina in 1993, and a new law banning carbofuran and four other pesticides went into effect this past October — but they’re widely used anyway. Piña says adding one more law could help address that. “We believe that it would be better to have a national law on traceability and prescription of agrochemicals so that their trade is regulated, and sales of these products are under a professional’s prescription,” he says. “This way the easy access of these products would be diminished a little.”

Argentina, meanwhile, isn’t taking the problem lightly. In addition to the recent pesticide bans, the country and a partner foundation recently launched the Estrategia Nacional contra Cebos Tóxicos (“National Strategy Against Poisoned Carrion”). “The [program] aims to improve the detection and treatment of cases of poisoning, minimizing the risk to personnel involved in these processes,” Piña reports. “The plan also aims to generate a more precise knowledge of the sites of greatest conflict in order to guide conservation efforts and community outreach and education.”

A lot of work remains to be done to save the Andean condor from this emerging threat, but with more than 1% of all Andean condors killed since 2017, researchers say it’s time for Argentina — and perhaps neighboring countries — to act. Otherwise the great birds may become just another faint waft of death on the wind.

The Shocking Number of Florida Manatees Killed by Boats Last Year

Manatee deaths from watercraft strikes have doubled in the past five years. But that’s not the only threat they face.

Florida manatees had another deadly year in 2019.

An estimated 531 manatees died in Florida waters in the past 12 months. That’s a significant decrease from the number of deaths in 2018, when 824 manatees died, but it still represents a nearly 10% loss to their population in the state.

Some manatees die from natural causes each year, but most of this year’s mortalities were caused by a particularly human element:

Boats.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which keeps track of manatee mortality, at least 136 manatees died last year after being struck by speeding watercraft. That’s nearly two times the number of manatees killed by boats in 2014. The number of boat strikes started to climb in 2016 — the same year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed downlisting the species’ conservation status from “endangered” to the lesser category of “threatened.”

As a result of this and other threats, manatee populations appear to be on the decline again. The most recent annual synoptic survey, conducted at the beginning of 2019, found 5,733 manatees in Florida waters — down from 6,620 just two years earlier. (Florida uses these surveys to provide a general view of manatee populations and but does not use them to assess long-term trends.)

What else killed manatees this past year? Watch our video below to learn more.

Is Iceland Losing its Taste for Whaling?

No whale hunts in Iceland last year were just one sign of the public's fading appetite for whale meat.

One of the most important global conservation events of the past year was something that didn’t happen. For the first time since 2002, Iceland — one of just three countries that still allow commercial whaling — didn’t hunt any whales, even though its government had approved whaling permits in early 2019.

Many people may think of whaling as a 19th-century industry in which men threw harpoons at their quarry by hand. But humans are still killing whales today in other ways. Thousands of whales are struck by ships, entangled in fishing lines and harmed by ocean noise every year.

However, most nations support a commercial whaling ban that the International Whaling Commission, a global body charged with whale management, imposed in 1986 to prevent these creatures from being hunted to extinction. Iceland, Norway and Japan have long been exceptions to this international consensus.

I study marine ecology and conservation and spent the 2018-19 academic year on a Fulbright fellowship in Iceland. It is encouraging to see countries come to realize that whales are worth more alive than dead — for their spiritual value, their role in tourism and the ecological services that they provide. As more Icelanders adopt this view, it will be good news for ocean conservation.

The Ecological Value of Large Marine Mammals

For years, ecological studies of whales focused on how much fish they ate or krill they consumed, which represented costs to fisheries. Starting around 10 years ago, my colleagues and I took a fresh look at whales’ ecological role in the ocean.

Whales often dive deep to feed, coming to the surface to breathe, rest, digest — and poop. Their nutrient-rich fecal plumes provide nitrogen, iron and phosphorous to algae at the surface, which increases productivity in areas where whales feed. More whales mean more plankton and more fish.

Whales also play a role in the carbon cycle. They are the largest creatures on Earth, and when they die their carcasses often sink to the deep sea. These events, known as whale falls, provide habitat for at least a hundred species that depend on the bones and nutrients. They also transfer carbon to the deep ocean, where it remains sequestered for hundreds of years.

Whales are economically valuable, but watching them brings in more money than killing them. “Humpbacks are one of the most commercially important marine species in Iceland,” a whale-watching guide told me one morning off the coast of Akureyri. Whale-watching income far outweighs the income from hunting fin and minke whales.

whale watching — Whale watching in Skjálfandi Bay, Iceland. Photo by Daniel Enchev, (CC BY 2.0)

The End of Icelandic Whaling?

For years after the international moratorium on whaling was adopted in 1986, only Norway allowed commercial whaling. Japan continued hunting in the Antarctic under the guise of “scientific whaling,” which many whale biologists considered unnecessary and egregious.

Iceland also allowed a research hunt in the 1980s, with much of the meat sold to Japan, but stopped whaling under international pressure in the 1990s. It resumed commercial hunting in 2002, with strong domestic support. Iceland was ruled by Norway and then Denmark until 1944. As a result, Icelanders often chafe under external pressure. Many saw foreign protests against whaling as a threat to their national identity, and local media coverage was distinctly pro-whaling.

This view started to shift around 2014, when European governments refused to allow the transport of whale meat harvested by Icelandic whalers through their ports, en route to commercial buyers in Japan. Many European countries opposed Icelandic whaling and were unwilling to facilitate this trade. Whalers no longer looked so invincible, and Icelandic media started covering both sides of the debate.

In May 2019, Hvalur — the whaling business owned by Kristján Loftsson, Iceland’s most vocal and controversial whaler — announced that it wouldn’t hunt fin whales, which are internationally classified as vulnerable, this year, citing a need for ship repairs and declining demand in Japan. In June, Gunnar Bergmann Jónsson, owner of a smaller outfit, announced that he wouldn’t go whaling either. These decisions meant that the hunt was off.

During my year in Iceland, I met for coffee every couple of weeks with Sigursteinn Másson, program leader for the local whale-watching association IceWhale and representative of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. At times he seemed animated about the prospect that no whaling permits would be allotted. At others, he looked gloomy because whalers and their allies in the Icelandic government had co-opted the conversation.

“I worked on gay rights in Iceland, which was opposed by the church, and mental health for 10 years,” he told me. “They were peanuts compared to the whaling issue.”

Campaign Whale led a protest in 2009 outside of the Icelandic Embassy in London demanding an end to whale hunts. Photo by Campaign Whale, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

At first, both companies insisted that they would start whaling again in 2020. But Jónsson’s outfit no longer plans to hunt minkes, and Másson doubts that whaling will continue. “Nobody is encouraging them anymore — or interested,” he told me last summer.

Now trade is getting even tougher. In 2018 Japan announced that it would leave the International Whaling Commission, stop its controversial Antarctic whaling program and focus on hunting whales in its coastal waters, reducing the demand for Icelandic whale meat.

Tourist behavior in Iceland is also changing. For years, tourists would go out whale watching, then order grilled minke in restaurants. After the International Fund for Animal Welfare started targeting whale watchers in 2011 with its “Meet Us Don’t Eat Us” campaign, the number of tourists who ate whale meat declined from 40% to 11%.

A Generational Shift

For many Icelanders, whale meat is an occasional delicacy. Over dinner a few months ago, I met an Icelandic woman who told me she thought whale was delicious, and she didn’t see why whaling was such a big deal. How many times had she eaten whale? Once a month, once a year? “I’ve had it twice in my life.”

About a third of Icelanders now oppose whaling. They tend to be younger urban residents. A third are neutral, and a third support whaling. Many in this last group may feel stronger about critiques of whaling than about hvalakjöt, or whale meat. Demand for hvalakjöt in grocery stores and restaurants has started to dry up.

Although few observers would have predicted it, whaling may end in Iceland not through denial of a permit but from lack of interest. How long until the world’s remaining commercial whalers in Japan and Norway, who face similar shifts in taste and demographics, follow a similar course?

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

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.

5 Things You Should Know About the Earth’s Warming Ocean

Climate change has caused record-breaking ocean temperatures, and that means more dangerous storms, trouble for coral reefs and big changes for our marine ecosystems.

Part of Joellen Russell’s job is to help illuminate the deep darkness — to shine a light on what’s happening beneath the surface of the ocean. And it’s one of the most important jobs in the world right now.

Russell is a professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona. From that dry, landlocked state, she’s become a leading expert on how the climate is changing in the Southern Ocean — those vast, dark waters swirling around Antarctica.

“This is an age of scientific discovery,” she says. But also, “it’s very scary what we’re finding out.”

Researchers like Russell have been ringing alarm bells in report after report warning that the world’s ocean waters are dangerously warming. Most of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gas emissions we’ve spewed into the air for decades has actually been absorbed by the ocean. Over the past 25 years, that heat amounts to the equivalent of exploding 3.6 billion Hiroshima-sized atom bombs, according to Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of a new study on ocean warming.

Now we’re beginning to witness the cascading repercussions of that oceanic warming — from supercharged storms to dying coral reefs to crashing fisheries.

There’s still a lot left to learn about these problems, but here’s a look at some of the top findings from researchers, along with what they hope to uncover next.

1. Yes, It’s Definitely Getting Warmer

There’s no doubt among scientists that the ocean is heating and we’re driving it.

The latest confirmation is the study by Cheng and colleagues, published this month in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which bluntly stated, “Ocean heating is irrefutable and a key measure of the Earth’s energy imbalance.”

The study found ocean waters in 2019 were the warmest in recorded history. And that follows a pattern: The past decade has also seen the warmest 10 years of ocean temperatures, and the last five years have been the five warmest on record.

“Every year the ocean waters get warmer, and the reason is because of the heat-trapping gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere,” says John Abraham, one of the study’s coauthors and a professor in mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas. “It’s concerning for sure.”

2. The Southern Ocean Has Been Hit Worst

Much of this warming occurs between the surface and a depth of 6,500 feet. It’s happening pretty consistently across the globe, but some areas have experienced higher rates of warming. One of those is the Southern Ocean, which has acted as a giant sink, absorbing 43% of our oceanic CO₂ emissions and 75% of the heat, scientists have concluded.

That’s because the ocean basin functions like an air conditioner for the planet, says Russell. Strong winds pull up cold water from deep below, and then the cold surface water takes up some heat from the air. When the winds slow, the water sinks, more cold water rises, and the process repeats.

“The sinking water isn’t warm, per se, just a bit warmer than it was when the wind pulled it up,” she says. “In this way the Southern Ocean can sequester a lot of heat well below the surface.”

For that reason what happens in the Southern Ocean is globally important. And it makes new findings all the more concerning.

Antarctic Waterfall — Melt water from the Nansen ice shelf fracture in Antarctica. Photo by Stuart Rankin (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Normal upwelling of waters from deep in the Southern Ocean has traditionally brought nutrients to the surface, where they then get moved by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world’s strongest ocean current, to feed marine life in other areas. But new research from Russell and colleagues found that this process will be disrupted as warm waters cause the Southern Ocean’s ice sheets to melt even faster. This will change the historical upwelling and could trap nutrients instead of pushing them out.

That, she says, will “begin to starve the global ocean of nutrients.”

3. A Lot of Changes Are Happening

As bad as that sounds…there’s a lot more.

One of the most obvious results of ocean warming is higher sea levels. That’s caused in part because water expands as it warms.

But there’s also the effect on sea ice. The warmer the water gets, the more ice melts — as is happening in Antarctica. Not surprisingly rates of global sea-level rise are accelerating. This means more property damage, storm surges, and waves lapping at the heels of our coastal communities.

Warmer waters also mean more supercharged storms. An increase in heat drives up evaporation and adds extra moisture to the atmosphere, causing heavy rains, more flooding and more extreme weather events.

The aftermath of Cyclone Idai, one of the deadliest storms in history, in Mozambique, March 2019. Photo by Denis Onyodi: IFRC/DRK/Climate Centre (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In some places it can make drier conditions worse, too. When air rises and cools below the dew point, it turns into clouds or precipitation. “But in places like Arizona or Australia, where rain is generally formed when air is pushed upward over mountains, “the warmer atmosphere might not be cold enough to cause rain,” explains Russell. “This is how a warmer atmosphere carrying more moisture might actually rain less in some places — contributing to drought and therefore fire.”

The recent study in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences identified warming waters as “one of the key reasons why the Earth has experienced increasing catastrophic fires in the Amazon, California, and Australia in 2019 (extending into 2020 for Australia).”

And that’s not all.

Warming ocean waters also contribute to the rise of colonies of algae that can produce toxins deadly to wildlife and sometimes people.

These harmful algal blooms pose a problem even way up in the Gulf of Alaska, where the annual algae season has gotten longer, says Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“That’s all, of course, due to warmer water,” he says.

The biggest change in the region may be along the coast of the Bering Sea, where water temperatures have historically been too cold for the blooms to occur — but that’s starting to change.

“Now the water temperatures are getting up to the point where they’re warm enough to support these harmful algal blooms,” Thoman says. Toxins from the blooms can work their way up the food chain and have even shown up in some marine mammals in the areas. “People are concerned about whether it’s safe to eat their staple foods,” he says.

4. Marine Heat Waves Are Getting Worse

While temperatures are rising across the world’s oceans, some areas are also seeing dangerous short-term spikes known as marine heatwaves.

Scientists anticipate that these heatwaves, which can be fatal to a long list of sea creatures, will continue to get more severe and more frequent as the ocean warms. By the end of the century, conditions in some areas may be akin to a permanent heatwave.

That’s likely to be bad news for everything from seaweed to birds to mammals, and it could result in fundamental changes for food webs and the animals and coastal economies that depend on those resources.

“Collectively, and over time, an increase in the exposure of marine ecosystems to extreme temperatures may lead to irreversible loss of species or foundation habitats, such as seagrass, coral reefs and kelp forests,” a December 2019 study in Frontiers in Marine Science found.

And these changes likely aren’t far off. These marine heatwaves “will emerge as forceful agents of disturbance to marine ecosystems in the near-future,” the researchers wrote.

We’re already seeing what that would look like.

Marine heatwaves off Australia have spurred oyster die-offs and losses to the abalone fishery, and one event in 2016 caught the world’s attention when it caused severe bleaching of the biodiverse Great Barrier Reef, triggering mass coral deaths.

Great barrier reef bleaching — An aerial view of widespread coral bleaching in the northern Great Barrier Reef, 2016. Photo: Terry Hughes, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CC BY-ND 2.0)

And scientists now believe that “the blob,” a mass of warm water that persisted off the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska from 2014 to 2016, led to the starvation of an estimated 1 million common murres (Uria aalge) — a normally resilient seabird. The warm waters likely reduced and changed phytoplankton communities — an essential part of the marine food web. But that’s not all. The warm waters increased the metabolism — and the appetite — of big fish like pollock and salmon. That demand spike crashed populations of forage fish that murres usually find plentiful.

Tufted puffins, Cassin’s auklets, sea lions and baleen whales also suffered losses, although the murres were hit worst.

Most recently a prolonged marine heatwave off the coast of Alaska led to the closure of region’s commercial Pacific cod fishery for 2020 — the first time that’s ever happened.

“When you cancel whole fisheries, that really impacts people’s lives and livelihoods,” says Thoman.

5. What We Don’t Know

Scientists have enough information now to tell us that we need to quickly change course. But there’s still a lot to learn about how warming temperatures will affect myriad species in the sea, not to mention weather patterns and coastal economies.

One current line of research is to better understand how ocean warming affects weather.

“We know that a warmer ocean means more water evaporates into the atmosphere,” says Abraham. “Consequently, it makes the weather more severe because humidity drives storms. We would like to quantify this. So how much worse is weather now and how bad will it be?”

Some of that information will come from existing systems.

“We live in a time of great change, and the ocean is telling us these stories mostly through our incredible Argo floats,” says Russell. This global network of nearly 3,900 floating sensors can measure temperature, salinity and pressure at varying depths across the world’s oceans.

But in the Southern Ocean, Russell works with an even more advanced group of biogeochemical sensors. They measure nitrates, which can tell researchers about the building blocks of nutrients for the food web. They also measure oxygen, “how the ocean is breathing,” she says, and pH, which helps tell the carbon content of the water.

Russell says she’d like to see this technology put to use in more waters around the world.

“We’re trying to get a global biogeochemical Argo array, but so far haven’t gotten funding for it,” she says. “I’m desperate to see the rest of the ocean because it’s all connected and it’s mixing quickly.”

The Arctic, she says, is one place where this technology would play a particularly valuable role.

“It’s so shallow in many places, and under ice for so much of the year, that we haven’t really been able to get a big float array up there,” she says. “But the Arctic is critical to our national interest and it’s relatively unstudied. Can you imagine that, in this day and age?”

There’s plenty to keep researchers busy, but the rest of us also need to act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because, the researchers of the Advances in Atmospheric Sciences study concluded, the oceans are so vast that they’ll require years to dissipate all of this excess heat and register the changes we’re starting to make today. Cutting emissions, they wrote, is the only way to reduce “the risks to humans and other life on Earth.”