SHELL LEAVES ITS MARK

Oil cleanup in southern Nigeria still a 'long way' from target


Issued on: 07/10/2021 - 

Oil legacy: Soil from the banks of a polluted river in B-Dere, Ogoniland 

PIUS UTOMI EKPEI AFP


Abuja (AFP)

A much-touted cleanup of oil pollution in southern Nigeria has yet to start in parts of the hotspot Ogoniland, almost three years after contracts were handed out, and residents remain without proper drinking water, a report said Thursday.

Nigeria, Africa's biggest crude producer, has struggled with oil spills for decades, triggering social unrest and even militancy across the Niger Delta.

The kingdom of Ogoniland in Rivers state, home to about a million people, became an emblem of the problem after years of oil and gas exploration and production by a joint venure with Shell.

After mass protests led by activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and the so-called Ogoni Nine, Shell stopped production in 1993.

The Nigerian government pledged to restore the damage after a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) assessment of the area 10 years ago.

The UN said at the time that an initial cleanup would cost $1 billion and take five years. Cleanup activities finally started in January 2019.

But a report by two NGO monitors issued more than halfway through the five-year timeframe says the cleanup will probably take far longer.

"We can see some progress being made, and it’s important to recognise that," said Florence Kayemba, programmes director of the Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN), which co-authored the report with the Centre for Human Rights and Development (CEHRD).

Over 1,000 temporary jobs for community members with cleanup contractors have been created, the monitors said.

Thirteen out of 50 lots considered "simple" to clean have been certified as completed, they added.

However, "this is just a quarter... and we have yet to begin cleanup of complex sites, so this shows that we have really quite a long way to go," said Calvin Laing, SDN's executive director.

"That five-year target seems unrealistic now."

Emergency measures prescribed by the UN in 2011 "are yet to be delivered," the report noted.

"Communities which were identified as having highly contaminated drinking water sources in 2011 still do not have access to improved, safe drinking water sources," it said.

"Health screening of communities that would help understand the impact of pollution is yet to commence."

Cleanup activities need to happen "much faster" added Kayemba, but "without sacrificing quality."

SDN and CEHRD set up an interactive online dashboard on Thursday to help track progress.

The Ogoniland cleanup is "crucial" said Laing, as it "could also be a template for elsewhere in the Niger Delta."

Earlier this year, Shell agreed to pay around 95 million euros ($110 million) to Ogoniland communities over spills in the 1970s, although it has said damage to pipelines was caused by third parties.

© 2021 AFP

Giant ground sloths may have been meat-eating scavengers

The Ice Age beasts feasted on plants and meat, fossil hair analysis suggests

Some 12,000 years ago, the giant ground sloth Mylodon darwinii might have stopped outside Chile’s Mylodon Cave to take a few bites out of the carcass of a llamalike Macrauchenia, as shown in this artist’s rendition.
JORGE BLANCO


By Carolyn Gramling
5 HOURS AGO

Modern sloths may be dedicated vegetarians, but at least one of their massive Ice Age cousins chowed down on meat when it had the chance. Darwin’s ground sloth — which could grow to over 3 meters long and weigh as much as about 2,000 kilograms — may have been an opportunistic scavenger, chemical analyses of fossil sloth hair suggest.

Paleontologist Julia Tejada of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues analyzed the chemical makeup of two amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, within the fossil hair of two giant ground sloth species: Darwin’s ground sloth (Mylodon darwinii) of South America and the Shasta ground sloth (Nothrotheriops shastensis) of North America (SN: 4/25/18). The team compared these with samples from living sloths, anteaters and other modern omnivores.

Nitrogen isotopes, different forms of the element, can vary a lot among different food sources as well as between ecosystems. Those isotope values in one amino acid, glutamine, change significantly with diet, increasing the higher the animal is on the food chain. But diet has little impact on the nitrogen values in another amino acid, phenylalamine. By comparing the nitrogen isotopes in the two amino acids found in the sloths’ hair, the researchers were able to eliminate ecosystem effects and zoom in on diets.

The data reveal that while the diet of the Shasta ground slothwas exclusively plant-based, Darwin’s ground sloth was an omnivore, Tejada and colleagues report October 7 in Scientific Reports.

The findings upend what scientists thought they knew about the ancient animals. Scientists have assumed the ancient creatures were herbivores. That’s in part because all six modern species of sloth are confirmed vegetarians, and in part giant ground sloths’ teeth and jaws weren’t adapted for hunting or powerful chewing and tearing (SN: 6/20/16).

But Darwin’s ground sloth could have managed to ingest already-killed meat, Tejada and colleagues say. And that might help solve a long-standing puzzle: the apparent absence of large carnivorous mammals in South America at the time. Darwin’s ground sloth, the researchers add, may have filled a vacant ecological niche: the scavenger who wouldn’t say no to a meaty meal.

A magnetic field reversal 42,000 years ago may have contributed to mass extinctions

The weakening of Earth's magnetic field correlates with a cascade of environmental crises

Red ochre handprints dating to almost 42,000 years ago decorate a wall in the El Castillo cave in Spain. Red ochre has been previously suggested as an ancient form of sunscreen.
PAUL PETTITT, GOBIERNO DE CANTABRIA

By Carolyn Gramling

A flip-flop of Earth’s magnetic poles between 42,000 and 41,000 years ago briefly but dramatically shrank the magnetic field’s strength — and may have triggered a cascade of environmental crises on Earth, a new study suggests.

With the help of new, precise carbon dating obtained from ancient tree fossils, the researchers correlated shifts in climate patterns, large mammal extinctions and even changes in human behavior just before and during the Laschamps excursion, a brief reversal of the magnetic poles that lasted less than a thousand years. It’s the first study to directly link a magnetic pole reversal to large-scale environmental changes, the team reports in the Feb. 19 Science.

During a reversal, Earth’s protective magnetic field, which shields the planet from a barrage of charged particles streaming from the sun, can lose strength (SN: 1/28/19). So some researchers have suggested that these flip-flops may be linked to extinction events (SN: 11/19/20).

But evidence for this has proven elusive. In fact, “the general belief had been that geomagnetic changes had no impact on climate or anything else,” says Alan Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at BlueSky Genetics in Adelaide. One reason for that belief is a dearth of precise dates for the timing and duration of the geomagnetic event to correlate with environmental, ice core and magnetic rock records.

Enter New Zealand’s kauri tree, among the most ancient in the world. The country’s swampy bogs preserve the relics of kauri trees dating as far back as the Laschamps excursion. Cooper and his colleagues obtained cross-sections from four ancient trees recovered from a swamp at Ng­āwhā Springs in northern New Zealand, and analyzed them for carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. (This is the first paper Cooper has led since he was fired from the University of Adelaide in December 2019 for misconduct, allegations which he has denied.)

Kauri trees (one shown) have grown in New Zealand for thousands of years. By analyzing tree rings of preserved trees in the Ngawha swampland, scientists identified evidence to suggest a magnetic pole flip around 41,000 years ago.

MARK MEREDITH/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES

In particular, one massive preserved log dating to about 41,000 years ago offered up a 1,700-year-long carbon-14 record. That record revealed major changes in carbon-14 during the time period running up to and including the Laschamps excursion, the team reports. That makes sense: Increasing incoming cosmic rays — as would occur with a weakened magnetic field — also produce more carbon-14 in the atmosphere, a carbon signature which would then become incorporated into the tree’s tissues.

The team simulated how a weakened magnetic field might alter atmospheric weather patterns. The computer analysis suggested that the increase of charged particles entering the atmosphere would also increase the production of atmospheric hydrogen and nitrogen oxides — molecules that tend to consume ozone. That would reduce the ability of stratospheric ozone to shield Earth’s denizens from ultraviolet radiation. The atmospheric changes would also affect how much sunlight is absorbed at different layers in the atmosphere, leading to large-scale changes in weather patterns that would have cooled the planet.

Such effects may have in fact occurred at that time. Using the carbon-14 dates from the kauri trees, the team examined sediment, pollen, and other data from before and during the Laschamps excursion that point to sudden cooling at locations from Australia to the Andes.

Surprisingly, the most intense effects did not occur during the actual pole reversal, the team found, but in the several hundred years leading up to it, spanning about 42,300 to 41,600 years ago. During the actual reversal, the field was only about 28 percent as strong as it is today. But during that transitional period, field strength shrank to about 6 percent of its current strength. The researchers dubbed this the “Adams Transitional Geomagnetic Event” — for Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Adams is often associated with the number 42, said in his books to be the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.”

Scientists have long debated whether climate change or human hunters were more to blame for extinction events that wiped such giant mammals as woolly mammoths and Diprotodon, a kind of super-sized Australian wombat. “It was actually one of the motivators for this study,” says study coauthor Chris Turney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

In a 2015 study by Cooper, Turney and colleagues, “we noticed that some of the megafaunal extinctions appear to cluster, and we started asking why,” Turney says (SN: 7/23/15). One such cluster of Australian megafauna extinctions, including the demise of Diprotodon and the giant kangaroo Procoptodon goliah, occurred around 42,000 years ago.

The team compared the dates of the magnetic event with previous records from ice cores that can reflect changes in solar activity. These data suggested the solar activity was at a minimum at the time. The combination of a weak magnetic field and this decrease in the sun’s output around the same time “created the perfect storm” of climate and broader environmental changes, placing a major stress on megafauna populations, Turney says. Those factors may also have led to increased competition between megafauna and human populations, as well as with Neandertals, he says.

Another possible line of evidence for a diminished ozone layer: an increasing abundance of red ochre handprints made by humans in cave paintings, the researchers note. Red ochre is thought to have been used as a sunscreen (SN: 7/3/20). There may also have been increasing use of caves between about 42,000 and 40,000 years ago, possibly as shelter from the more intense sun, the researchers report.

This is the first study to consider such a broad range of environmental consequences of extreme magnetic field changes, says Monika Korte, a geomagnetist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. “The suggested links seem conceivable to me,” Korte says. But, she adds, “the biggest value of the paper is that it’s putting out several ideas that should be investigated further.”

Whether other magnetic reversals may have prompted similar upheavals in the past remains unknown, but “we hope the community will look at biological and archaeological datasets through this different lens,” Turney says. Improving the precision of isotopic dating for these events will be key — and radiocarbon dates gleaned from the New Zealand kauri trees may be able to help with other recent reversals, such as a brief reversal event called the Mono Lake Excursion that occurred about 34,000 years ago.

What long-term environmental havoc may have been wreaked by much longer reversal events recorded in ancient rocks, such the 20,000-year-long Brunhes-Matuyama reversal that began 781,000 years ago, is an even more tantalizing question, Cooper says. “The impacts may have been enormous.”

The Climate Crisis Will Change the Way We Eat

It may not feel like it, but our food is already
grappling with the effects of climate change.

KE   By Koh Ewe

7.10.21

STAPLES LIKE COFFEE AND RICE ARE THREATENED BY A CHANGING CLIMATE. NOW SCIENTISTS AND FARMERS ARE TRYING TO SAVE OUR FAVORITE FOODS. 

This story is part of the VICE Creators Summit, a series of panels and workshops to co-create futures for a habitable planet. Find out more here.

The most compelling images of climate change—cracked, drought-devastated soil, raging wildfires, and flash floods—are all persistent reminders that the Earth is tunneling into the danger zone. But climate change is affecting us in more insidious ways, too. It may not feel like it, but our food is already grappling with its effects.

The Climate Crisis Is Not Just About the Environment, So Why Are We Acting Like It Is?
TAMMY GAN  30.9.21


Extreme weather patterns and increasingly frequent natural disasters are affecting crop production and all this spells inevitable changes in the foods and tastes that we have come to know and love.

If you want to keep your morning coffee routine, wine nights, and daily rice bowls, here are a few more reasons to care about climate change. Below are some staples that may be irrevocably affected.

Rice

RICE PRODUCTION IS BEING THREATENED BY RISING SEA LEVELS AND UNPREDICTABLE RAINFALL

Rice is the staple crop for over half of the world’s population, especially common in Asia. But because of rising sea levels, saltwater has been seeping into more fields around the world, turning the soil salty and making it nearly impossible to grow rice. Studies predict that coastal areas currently housing 1.3 billion residents will be inundated with seawater in the next 120 years.

Even where soil salinity isn’t high, rice production is also seriously affected by unpredictable rainfall—rice is a water-intensive crop. Scientists are now trying to develop rice strains that are more drought- and flood-tolerant.

At the same time, rice production contributes to global warming through significant methane emissions. Scientists are now looking at ways to keep cultivating rice, minus the greenhouse gases.

Coffee



DROUGHT AND “COFFEE LEAF RUST” FUNGUS ARE AMONG THE BIGGEST THREATS TO COFFEE PRODUCTION

Our obsession with a soul-satisfying cup of joe is both an intricate art and sometimes an anxiety-inducing pursuit. But global warming is seriously threatening coffee farms. We have already seen its effects through rising coffee prices this year, after a severe drought in Brazil drastically reduced crop yields.

On the other hand, higher rainfall and humidity make coffee plants especially vulnerable to the fatal “coffee leaf rust” fungus, which debilitates the plants from yielding crops. A coffee leaf rust epidemic that swept across Central America cost the jobs of 1.7 million farmers from 2011 to 2017.

According to a 2016 report by the Climate Institute, the global area suitable for coffee production is expected to be halved by 2050—less than 30 years from now.

Chickpeas



HUMMUS MADE FROM CHICKPEAS. 

Another food that scientists are desperately trying to save is chickpea. Commonly found in hummus and dal, chickpeas are an important protein source for over a billion people, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. But due to deliberate cultivation of the crop over thousands of years, most modern chickpeas have been stripped of their genetic diversity. This makes the crop less resistant to droughts and extreme heat brought about by climate change—annual chickpea yields may be reduced by up to 50 percent because of drought, according to scientists. In an attempt to enhance global chickpea security, scientists have been trying to reintroduce genetic diversity to the beloved legume by hunting wild chickpeas.

Wine


FACED WITH INCREASINGLY SEVERE WILDFIRES, WINES MAY LOSE THEIR CHARACTERISTIC FLAVORS TO SMOKE TAINT. 

Environmental changes at vineyards are reflected in the taste of wine, and climate change is posing fresh challenges to grape growing, making it more difficult for famous wines to retain their characteristic flavors.

How Your Favorite Everyday Products Are Damaging the Earth
NANTICHA OCHAROENCHAI 27.9.21


For example, grapes that are exposed to wildfire smoke for extended periods of time may result in smokey overtones when they’re processed into wine. A hint of smokiness may be an interesting addition to its flavor, but too much of it can taste like “licking an ashtray,” according to Anita Oberholster, an enology specialist at UC Davis who studies the effects of smoke taint.

As wildfires become more frequent and extreme, winemakers and researchers in California are now working to protect vineyards from the effects of climate change, including smoke taint.

With reporting from Tammy Gan.

Follow Koh Ewe on Instagram.

CLIMATE

Rice feeds half the world. Climate change’s droughts and floods put it at risk

Scientists and growers will need to innovate to save the staple crop

In a severe drought, rice farmers in California’s Sacramento Valley have to leave some of their fields unplanted (upper left).
CALIFORNIA RICE COMMISSION, BRIAN BAER

By Nikk Ogasa
SEPTEMBER 24, 2021 

Under a midday summer sun in California’s Sacramento Valley, rice farmer Peter Rystrom walks across a dusty, barren plot of land, parched soil crunching beneath each step.

In a typical year, he’d be sloshing through inches of water amid lush, green rice plants. But today the soil lies naked and baking in the 35˚ Celsius (95˚ Fahrenheit) heat during a devastating drought that has hit most of the western United States. The drought started in early 2020, and conditions have become progressively drier.

Low water levels in reservoirs and rivers have forced farmers like Rystrom, whose family has been growing rice on this land for four generations, to slash their water use.

Rystrom stops and looks around. “We’ve had to cut back between 25 and 50 percent.” He’s relatively lucky. In some parts of the Sacramento Valley, depending on water rights, he says, farmers received no water this season.

California is the second-largest U.S. producer of rice, after Arkansas, and over 95 percent of California’s rice is grown within about 160 kilometers of Sacramento. To the city’s east rise the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, which means “snowy mountains” in Spanish. Rice growers in the valley below count on the range to live up to its name each winter. In spring, melting snowpack flows into rivers and reservoirs, and then through an intricate network of canals and drainages to rice fields that farmers irrigate in a shallow inundation from April or May to September or October.

If too little snow falls in those mountains, farmers like Rystrom are forced to leave fields unplanted. On April 1 this year, the date when California’s snowpack is usually at its deepest, it held about 40 percent less water than average, according to the California Department of Water Resources. On August 4, Lake Oroville, which supplies Rystrom and other local rice farmers with irrigation water, was at its lowest level on record.

Drought in the Sacramento Valley has forced Peter Rystrom and other rice farmers to leave swaths of land barren.N. OGASA

Not too long ago, the opposite — too much rain — stopped Rystrom and others from planting. “In 2017 and 2019, we were leaving ground out because of flood. We couldn’t plant,” he says. Tractors couldn’t move through the muddy, clay-rich soil to prepare the fields for seeding.

Climate change is expected to worsen the state’s extreme swings in precipitation, researchers reported in 2018 in Nature Climate Change. This “climate whiplash” looms over Rystrom and the other 2,500 or so rice producers in the Golden State. “They’re talking about less and less snowpack, and more concentrated bursts of rain,” Rystrom says. “It’s really concerning.”

Farmers in China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam — the biggest rice-growing countries — as well as in Nigeria, Africa’s largest rice producer — also worry about the damage climate change will do to rice production. More than 3.5 billion people get 20 percent or more of their calories from the fluffy grains. And demand is increasing in Asia, Latin America and especially in Africa.

To save and even boost production, rice growers, engineers and researchers have turned to water-saving irrigation routines and rice gene banks that store hundreds of thousands of varieties ready to be distributed or bred into new, climate-resilient forms. With climate change accelerating, and researchers raising the alarm about related threats, such as arsenic contamination and bacterial diseases, the demand for innovation grows.

“If we lose our rice crop, we’re not going to be eating,” says plant geneticist Pamela Ronald of the University of California, Davis. Climate change is already threatening rice-growing regions around the world, says Ronald, who identifies genes in rice that help the plant withstand disease and floods. “This is not a future problem. This is happening now.”

The top rice producers are in Asia

The world’s top rice producer is China, at 214 million metric tons. India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam are next. In Africa, Nigeria (6.8 million) is the largest producer. Brazil (11.8 million) and the United States (10.2 million) are also top producers, according to 2018 data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
Worldwide rice production, 2018
OURWORLDINDATA.ORG
SOURCE: FAO

Saltwater woes

Most rice plants are grown in fields, or paddies, that are typically filled with around 10 centimeters of water. This constant, shallow inundation helps stave off weeds and pests. But if water levels suddenly get too high, such as during a flash flood, the rice plants can die.

Striking the right balance between too much and too little water can be a struggle for many rice farmers, especially in Asia, where over 90 percent of the world’s rice is produced. Large river deltas in South and Southeast Asia, such as the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, offer flat, fertile land that is ideal for farming rice. But these low-lying areas are sensitive to swings in the water cycle. And because deltas sit on the coast, drought brings another threat: salt.

Salt’s impact is glaringly apparent in the Mekong River Delta. When the river runs low, saltwater from the South China Sea encroaches upstream into the delta, where it can creep into the soils and irrigation canals of the delta’s rice fields.

In Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta, farmers pull dead rice plants from a paddy that was contaminated by saltwater intrusion from the South China Sea, which can happen during a drought.

HOANG DINH NAM/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

“If you irrigate rice with water that’s too salty, especially at certain [growing] stages, you are at risk of losing 100 percent of the crop,” says Bjoern Sander, a climate change specialist at the International Rice Research Institute, or IRRI, who is based in Vietnam.

In a 2015 and 2016 drought, saltwater reached up to 90 kilometers inland, destroying 405,000 hectares of rice paddies. In 2019 and 2020, drought and saltwater intrusion returned, damaging 58,000 hectares of rice. With regional temperatures on the rise, these conditions in Southeast Asia are expected to intensify and become more widespread, according to a 2020 report by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

Then comes the whiplash: Each year from around April to October, the summer monsoon turns on the faucet over swaths of South and Southeast Asia. About 80 percent of South Asia’s rainfall is dumped during this season and can cause destructive flash floods.

Bangladesh is one of the most flood-prone rice producers in the region, as it sits at the mouths of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers. In June 2020, monsoon rains flooded about 37 percent of the country, damaging about 83,000 hectares of rice fields, according to Bangladesh’s Ministry of Agriculture. And the future holds little relief; South Asia’s monsoon rainfall is expected to intensify with climate change, researchers reported June 4 in Science Advances.

A hot mess

Water highs and lows aren’t the entire story. Rice generally grows best in places with hot days and cooler nights. But in many rice-growing regions, temperatures are getting too hot. Rice plants become most vulnerable to heat stress during the middle phase of their growth, before they begin building up the meat in their grains. Extreme heat, above 35˚ C, can diminish grain counts in just weeks, or even days. In April in Bangladesh, two consecutive days of 36˚ C destroyed thousands of hectares of rice.

In South and Southeast Asia, such extreme heat events are expected to become common with climate change, researchers reported in July in Earth’s Future. And there are other, less obvious, consequences for rice in a warming world.

One of the greatest threats is bacterial blight, a fatal plant disease caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae. The disease, most prevalent in Southeast Asia and rising in Africa, has been reported to have cut rice yields by up to 70 percent in a single season.

“We know that with higher temperature, the disease becomes worse,” says Jan Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Most of the genes that help rice combat bacterial blight seem to become less effective when temperatures rise, she explains.

And as the world warms, new frontiers may open for rice pathogens. An August study in Nature Climate Change suggests that as global temperatures rise, rice plants (and many other crops) at northern latitudes, such as those in China and the United States, will be at higher risk of pathogen infection.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures may bring a double-edged arsenic problem. In a 2019 study in Nature Communications, E. Marie Muehe, a biogeochemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, who was then at Stanford University, showed that under future climate conditions, more arsenic will infiltrate rice plants. High arsenic levels boost the health risk of eating the rice and impair plant growth.

Leaching in

When grown in a greenhouse at 5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures with elevated carbon dioxide levels (representing a future climate), California rice varieties absorbed more of a type of highly toxic arsenic from the soil, raising the rice’s arsenic levels above European Union safety thresholds.
Arsenic levels in rice grains

CREDIT: E. OTWELL
SOURCE: E.M. MUEHE ET AL/NATURE COMM.2019

Arsenic naturally occurs in soils, though in most regions the toxic element is present at very low levels. Rice, however, is particularly susceptible to arsenic contamination, because it is grown in flooded conditions. Paddy soils lack oxygen, and the microbes that thrive in this anoxic environment liberate arsenic from the soil. Once the arsenic is in the water, rice plants can draw it in through their roots. From there, the element is distributed throughout the plants’ tissues and grains.

Muehe and her team grew a Californian variety of rice in a local low-arsenic soil inside climate-controlled greenhouses. Increasing the temperature and carbon dioxide levels to match future climate scenarios enhanced the activity of the microbes living in the rice paddy soils and increased the amount of arsenic in the grains, Muehe says. And importantly, rice yields diminished. In the low-arsenic Californian soil under future climate conditions, rice yield dropped 16 percent.

According to the researchers, models that forecast the future production of rice don’t account for the impact of arsenic on harvest yields. What that means, Muehe says, is that current projections are overestimating how much rice will be produced in the future.
Managing rice’s thirst

From atop an embankment that edges one of his fields, Rystrom watches water gush from a pipe, flooding a paddy packed with rice plants. “On a year like this, we decided to pump,” he says.

Able to tap into groundwater, Rystrom left only about 10 percent of his fields unplanted this growing season. “If everybody was pumping from the ground to farm rice every year,” he admits, it would be unsustainable.

One widely studied, drought-friendly method is “alternate wetting and drying,” or intermittent flooding, which involves flooding and draining rice paddies on one- to 10-day cycles, as opposed to maintaining a constant inundation. This practice can cut water use by up to 38 percent without sacrificing yields. It also stabilizes the soil for harvesting and lowers arsenic levels in rice by bringing more oxygen into the soils, disrupting the arsenic-releasing microbes. If tuned just right, it may even slightly improve crop yields.

But the water-saving benefits of this method are greatest when it is used on highly permeable soils, such as those in Arkansas and other parts of the U.S. South, which normally require lots of water to keep flooded, says Bruce Linquist, a rice specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension. The Sacramento Valley’s clay-rich soils don’t drain well, so the water savings where Rystrom farms are minimal; he doesn’t use the method.

Building embankments, canal systems and reservoirs can also help farmers dampen the volatility of the water cycle. But for some, the solution to rice’s climate-related problems lies in enhancing the plant itself.

Fourth-generation rice farmer Peter Rystrom (left) stands with his grandfather Don Rystrom (middle) and his father Steve Rystrom (right).

CALIFORNIA RICE COMMISSION, BRIAN BAER

Better breeds

The world’s largest collection of rice is stored near the southern rim of Laguna de Bay in the Philippines, in the city of Los Baños. There, the International Rice Genebank, managed by IRRI, holds over 132,000 varieties of rice seeds from farms around the globe.

Upon arrival in Los Baños, those seeds are dried and processed, placed in paper bags and moved into two storage facilities — one cooled to 2˚ to 4˚ C from which seeds can be readily withdrawn, and another chilled to –20˚ C for long-term storage. To be extra safe, backup seeds are kept at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo., and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault tucked inside a mountain in Norway.

All this is done to protect the biodiversity of rice and amass a trove of genetic material that can be used to breed future generations of rice. Farmers no longer use many of the stored varieties, instead opting for new higher-yield or sturdier breeds. Nevertheless, solutions to climate-related problems may be hidden in the DNA of those older strains. “Scientists are always looking through that collection to see if genes can be discovered that aren’t being used right now,” says Ronald, of UC Davis. “That’s how Sub1 was discovered.”

Over 132,000 varieties of rice seeds fill the shelves of the climate-controlled International Rice Genebank. Breeders from around the world can use the seeds to develop new climate-resilient rice strains.IRRI/FLICKR (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Sub1 gene enables rice plants to endure prolonged periods completely submerged underwater. It was discovered in 1996 in a traditional variety of rice grown in the Indian state of Orissa, and through breeding has been incorporated into varieties cultivated in flood-prone regions of South and Southeast Asia. Sub1-wielding varieties, called “scuba rice,” can survive for over two weeks entirely submerged, a boon for farmers whose fields are vulnerable to flash floods.

Some researchers are looking beyond the genetic variability preserved in rice gene banks, searching instead for useful genes from other species, including plants and bacteria. But inserting genes from one species into another, or genetic modification, remains controversial. The most famous example of genetically modified rice is Golden Rice, which was intended as a partial solution to childhood malnutrition. Golden Rice grains are enriched in beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A. To create the rice, researchers spliced a gene from a daffodil and another from a bacterium into an Asian variety of rice.

Three decades have passed since its initial development, and only a handful of countries have deemed Golden Rice safe for consumption. On July 23, the Philippines became the first country to approve the commercial production of Golden Rice. Abdelbagi Ismail, principal scientist at IRRI, blames the slow acceptance on public perception and commercial interests opposed to genetically modified organisms, or GMOs 

(SN: 2/6/16, p. 22).

Looking ahead, it will be crucial for countries to embrace GM rice, Ismail says. Developing nations, particularly those in Africa that are becoming more dependent on the crop, would benefit greatly from the technology, which could produce new varieties faster than breeding and may allow researchers to incorporate traits into rice plants that conventional breeding cannot. If Golden Rice were to gain worldwide acceptance, it could open the door for new genetically modified climate- and disease-resilient varieties, Ismail says. “It will take time,” he says. “But it will happen.”

Climate change is a many-headed beast, and each rice-growing region will face its own particular set of problems. Solving those problems will require collaboration between local farmers, government officials and the international community of researchers.

“I want my kids to be able to have a shot at this,” Rystrom says. “You have to do a lot more than just farm rice. You have to think generations ahead.”

Climate-resilient rice

To keep rice bowls around the world full, researchers breed new varieties of rice that can endure stresses like drought, floods and salt.

Sahbhagi Dhan: Traditional rice varieties take 120 to 150 days to harvest and require four irrigations. Sahbhagi Dhan is a drought-tolerant variety harvested after 105 days and just two irrigations. In normal conditions, it produces about twice as much rice (four to five metric tons per hectare) as other local varieties in India. Under drought conditions, it produces one to two metric tons per hectare; local varieties produce none.

Scuba rice contains a gene that enables the plant to survive several days underwater, important for areas that experience flooding.

IRRI/FLICKR (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Scuba rice: Sub1, a submergence-tolerance gene, has been bred into scuba rice varieties. Rice normally dies after three to four days of total submergence — many varieties will exhaust themselves to death trying to quickly grow to the water’s surface. Sub1 varieties (shown), however, refrain from this frenzied growth spurt, and can withstand over two weeks underwater, able to survive the sudden floods of the summer monsoon.

Salt-tolerant rice: Made by inserting an area of the genome called Saltol, salt-tolerant rice varieties are better able to regulate the amount of sodium ions, toxic in high amounts, in their tissues. Saltol has been incorporated into high-yield varieties throughout the world.

Astronomers Get Ready to Probe Europa’s Hidden Ocean for Life

Jupiter’s most enigmatic moon, one of a few ocean worlds in the solar system, will be the target of upcoming missions by NASA and the European Space Agency.

PHOTOGRAPH: NASA

BEYOND MARS AND the asteroid belt, half a billion miles from the sun, the solar system might seem frigid, bleak, and lifeless. But scientists believe there’s a chance tiny alien creatures could reside on a distant moon, and you might find them if you look in the right place. For many researchers, that place is Europa, below its thick, icy crust.

Planetary scientists are discovering more about Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, one of Earth’s nearest ocean worlds—places like Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus that have bodies of salty water and other liquids that could be amenable to the emergence of life. They’re presenting new findings this week about Europa’s cracked surface, hidden ocean, and geological activity at the biggest annual planetary conference in the United States, organized by the American Astronomical Society, held virtually for the second year in a row. The research serves as a prelude to tantalizing opportunities for new observations by upcoming NASA and European Space Agency missions.

“Europa is fantastic. Of anywhere in the solar system, outside the Earth, it has the greatest potential, I think, for maintaining a habitable environment that could support microbial life,” says Michael Bland, a US Geological Survey space scientist in Flagstaff, Arizona. After modeling the moon’s dynamic, rocky interior, Bland believes the conditions on its deep seafloor could be amenable to life, according to new work that he and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Catherine Elder presented at the conference on Monday.

Europa’s ocean is buried under about 10 miles of ice, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s too cold for life. As the moon orbits Jupiter, tidal forces generate heat that melts around 5 percent of the moon’s mantle, far below ground. Some of that magma could migrate up 100 miles through small cracks in the cold, rocky material above it, erupting onto the seafloor, Bland argues. If this process indeed happens, and frequently enough, it would function like hydrothermal vents do on Earth: These volcanic seafloor fissures provide the energy and chemical ingredients for life, far below the reach of sunlight and photosynthesis. Hardy organisms thrive in such dark, high-pressure environments on our world, and perhaps they do on others as well.

But for the process to work, the magma has to reach the underground sea quickly, before it freezes and hardens. Its upward velocity might be just barely fast enough for it to work out that way, Bland’s models show, meaning there’s a chance for life on Europa’s seafloor. “It’s plausible, but specific conditions have to be met, and it’s not guaranteed,” he says.

Europa is considered one of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, first spotted by Galileo Galilei with his pre-NASA telescope four centuries ago. Its compatriots include Io, a volcanic, sulfuric, radiation-bombarded wasteland close to Jupiter, and, orbiting further out beyond Europa, massive Ganymede and cratered Callisto. The latter two may harbor underground oceans, as well, but if so, the water would lie much deeper beneath even thicker crusts.

But Europa is unique. Not only is its crust relatively thin, but its surface is covered with thousands of narrow, criss-crossing ridges and crevices, some extending for hundreds of miles. By mapping currently available images, Michelle Babcock, a planetary scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, identified around 70 “tortuous ridges” among them: wiggly, irregular structures unlike the straight and arced ridges scientists can already explain.

While they're not yet sure what causes the ridges’ convoluted paths, all the laceration marks on the moon’s exterior could originate in some way from its slightly elliptical orbit, which repeatedly carries it closer to—and then farther from—Jupiter. “As it’s orbiting Jupiter, the shell is being stretched and pulled, and that tidal stress is causing fractures and cracks, contributing to a lot of surface features,” Babcock says. They presented their findings with colleagues Britney Schmidt and Chase Chivers on Monday.

Such geological activity might play a role in explaining another mystery: Europa’s seemingly young surface. Unlike its neighbors, which have pockmarked appearances thanks to being pummeled by comets and asteroids for eons, Europa has few craters to show for its age. Somehow the moon is continually giving itself a facelift, and its many ridges could be involved in covering or erasing such craters over time, Babcock and their colleagues argue.

Other Europa-focused researchers at the conference are exploring which telltale signs of alien bacteria might be there, how such pivotal evidence could bubble up onto the surface or be spewed into space in plumes, as well as the effects of Jupiter’s radiation zapping the surface, which could destroy these signs of life before they’re found.

To definitively answer any of these questions, however, requires new space missions. Europa was last visited by a dedicated spacecraft—named in honor of its discoverer, Galileo—two decades ago. It made close passes by the moon and its neighbors and took images with its cameras in the process. Before that, Voyager 2 snapped photos as it flew by in 1979. NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting Jupiter since its arrival in 2016, will make some observations during flybys over the next couple of years. The European Space Agency’s JUICE probe, scheduled to launch next year, will do so as well, though it will be spending more time around Ganymede.

After that, Bland, Babcock, and their colleagues look forward to NASA’s Europa Clipper, a mission years in the making that’s planned for launch in 2024. “The Europa Clipper will assess Europa’s habitability and how we might be able to use these investigations for other ocean worlds, thinking about the potential for life there as well,” says Kathleen Craft, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore, who will be presenting at the conference on Thursday.

The car-sized orbiter, with 100-foot solar panels unfurled on each side, will use radar, radio signals, and gravity science to study the structure of the moon, including measuring the thickness of the ice shell and the depth of the underground ocean. It will also try to snag samples from its plumes, which could include droplets from the ocean itself that might reveal information about how conducive to life it really is, Craft says. A baguette-sized instrument will ingest gas and vapor, analyze and classify the contents, and then beam the crucial data back to scientists at home.

Its mission also includes conducting aerial surveillance for a potential lander mission to Europa, which could scoop up material on the surface, or drill down for it, looking for that coveted evidence of extraterrestrial lifeforms.

To prepare for a future lander, researchers are scoping out somewhat similar places on Earth, such as in Greenland. Satellite imagery of proxy places like these will give them a realistic idea of what Europa’s terrain will be like, and that’s crucial, because right now their photos don’t have high enough resolution. And that could be dangerous: An icy region that might suggest a smooth landing place could hide a more complexly structured glacier, with smaller, unseen hazards. “But it’s a completely alien environment,” says Curt Niebur, NASA’s lead scientist for Planetary Science Flight Programs and Europa Clipper program scientist.

They will have to weigh the scientific value of a landing site—one with good odds of showcasing signs of life—versus the risk involved in touching down there. “Invariably, scientists say, ‘The most interesting spot to land is over there,’ and the engineers say, ‘We will blow up if we try to land there,’” he says.

Before Niebur and his colleagues can nail down the details of where the lander will go and how it will touch down, they need high-resolution images, better than anyone has yet, because landing in the wrong spot could scuttle the long-term investment in research and development leading up to such a flagship mission. Imagine, he says, if aliens sent a poorly placed probe to Earth, which sampled the wrong part of the ocean and only got a teaspoon’s worth of lifeless water. That’s why, he says, “everything hinges on Europa Clipper.”

 

Scientists find oxygen levels explain ancient extinction slowdown

by Josie Garthwaite, Stanford University

Brachiopod and crinoid fossils from the Late Ordovician, about 445 million years ago. 

Credit: Seth Finnegan

Not long after the dawn of complex animal life, tens of millions of years before the first of the "Big Five" mass extinctions, a rash of die-offs struck the world's oceans. Then, for reasons that scientists have debated for at least 40 years, extinctions slowed down.

A new Stanford University study shows rising oxygen levels may explain why global extinction rates slowed down throughout the Phanerozoic Eon, which began 541 million years ago. The results, published Oct. 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, point to 40 percent of present atmospheric oxygen levels as a key threshold beyond which viable ocean habitat expands and the global extinction rate sharply falls.

"There's a whole set of high-magnitude extinctions earlier in the history of animal life, and then they taper off until there's just these huge mass extinctions. And there's never been an explanation for why we have all those high-magnitude extinctions early on," said senior study author Erik Sperling, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

The new study reveals that even five degrees of warming—extreme for our current climate but common in Earth's deep past—would be more than enough to trigger mass die-offs early in the Phanerozoic. The research shows this is because, in a low oxygen world, marine animals were already on the razor's edge of their ability to breathe and maintain their body temperatures. The finding has implications for understanding the fate of ocean creatures in today's warming world.

Virtual oceans

The authors used computer models of Earth's climate to simulate seawater temperatures and the amount of oxygen that would be dissolved in the ocean as atmospheric carbon dioxide and oxygen fluctuated throughout the Phanerozoic. They paired these simulations with mathematical models of interactions between animal physiology and local environments, then estimated the proportion of marine animal types that would be lost with every 5 degrees Celsius of ocean warming, as would be expected from roughly every fourfold increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Such warming events are extreme but not infrequent throughout Earth history.

The approach allowed the authors to effectively populate virtual oceans with realistic organisms, then crank up the heat to see who would survive. "These are fully three-dimensional models with the physics of the water circulating around the continents in different configurations and all the biogeochemistry," Sperling said. "That's a huge computational advance."

Twin threats

The results are consistent with a series of major extinction events during the first 50 to 100 million years of the Phanerozoic being a direct consequence of low oxygen levels and physiological responses to heat. "We don't need to invoke something outside of climatic change to explain these anomalously severe extinction rates and anomalously common mass extinctions early in the animal fossil record," said lead study author Richard Stockey, a Stanford Ph.D. student in geological sciences.

The need, rather, is to consider how oxygen scarcity hindered the ability of animals to cope with heat. That's because as oceans warm, their oxygen content declines while animals' need for oxygen grows. This is particularly true for cold-blooded species that rely on the external environment to regulate body temperature and metabolism. "The way we looked at things puts oxygen change and temperature change in a common currency and evaluates them at once," Sperling said. "We're treating fossils as ancient living organisms and thinking about how they feed, live and breathe—how they get through a day."

The researchers found several additional factors that influenced the proportion of species that died out during warmer periods over the past 541 million years, including the configuration of Earth's continents, the efficiency of carbon cycling between ocean and atmosphere and the state of the climate at the start of a given warming event. However, "atmospheric oxygen is the dominant predictor of extinction vulnerability," the authors write. "Changes in atmospheric oxygen were likely much more important than those other factors," Stockey said.

The study reinforces previous findings from Sperling's group that underline oxygen and temperature as interlocking keys to understanding extinction and survival patterns in ancient oceans. "The geological and paleontological record is telling us over and over that it is the combination of oxygen and temperature change that are the big killers for marine animals," Sperling said.

In areas of today's oceans that have low oxygen levels, including deeper waters of the continental margin off the California coast, any further drop in oxygen or change in temperature may be catastrophic for organisms that are already pushing the limits of their aerobic capacity. "Those are some of the places that are potentially in the gravest danger as climate change drives further ocean warming and deoxygenation," Sperling said. "For the first hundred million years or so of animal evolution, almost the entire ocean was like that."Researchers find oxygen spike coincided with ancient global extinction

More information: Richard G. Stockey et al, Decreasing Phanerozoic extinction intensity as a consequence of Earth surface oxygenation and metazoan ecophysiology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2101900118

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Provided by Stanford University 

Brookfield among bidders for $15 billion stake in Saudi Aramco pipeline

One of the global energy giant's largest divestments

Bloomberg News
Dinesh Nair and Ben Bartenstein
Publishing date:Oct 05, 2021 

Saudi Aramco is seeking more than US$15 billion for the gas pipeline stake in one of the largest divestments by the energy giant, sources said. 

PHOTO BY REUTERS/MAXIM SHEMETOV/FILE PHOTO

Apollo Global Management Inc. and Brookfield Asset Management Inc. are among parties that made first-round bids for a potential multibillion-dollar stake in Saudi Aramco’s natural gas pipeline network, according to people familiar with the matter.

BlackRock Inc., EIG Global Energy Partners LLC and Global Infrastructure Partners also submitted non-binding offers for the asset late last week, the people said, asking not to be identified as the matter is private.

Aramco is seeking more than $15 billion for the gas pipeline stake in one of the largest divestments by the energy giant, the people said. The state-owned company will inform suitors whether they made it to the next round of bidding in the coming days, according to the people.

No final decisions have been made and Aramco could still decide to retain the asset, the people said. Other contenders could also emerge for the stake, with some of the bidders likely to join forces given the size of the asset, the people said.

Representatives for Aramco, BlackRock, Brookfield, EIG and GIP declined to comment, while a spokesperson for Apollo didn’t immediately provide comment.

The world’s largest oil company is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars by selling more stakes in its businesses as it seeks to maintain a US$75 billion annual dividend, a key source of funding for Saudi Arabia’s government. A group of investors led by EIG Global agreed to invest US$12.4 billion in Aramco’s oil pipelines in June, in one of the largest infrastructure transactions this year.

A deal involving the gas pipeline could be structured in a similar way to the oil pipeline transaction, where investors bought a minority stake in a new Aramco subsidiary with leasing rights over the assets, people with knowledge of the matter have said.

Aramco’s Master Gas System is a network of pipelines connecting its production with processing sites throughout the kingdom. The infrastructure has a capacity of about 9.6 billion cubic feet of gas per day, according to Aramco’s annual report.

Bloomberg.com

'We just gave'r': Inside the Totten Mine rescue from a kilometre below the earth


BY LIAM CASEY, THE CANADIAN PRESS
POSTED OCT 5, 2021 

The Totten Mine in Sudbury, ON where 39 miners were trapped underground for over 24 hours. CREDIT: VALE

Danny Taillefer and Jason Leger were in the middle of a first aid refresher course when the phone rang.

Shawn Rideout, the chief rescue officer with Ontario Mine Rescue, was on the other end. There were 39 miners stuck underground at Totten Mine near Sudbury, Ont., after the mine shaft was compromised, he said.

There was another way out: climbing a complex warren of ladders at the Vale-owned mine from about a kilometre underground.

Taillefer and Leger – mine rescue officers with the non-profit who were based in Timmins, Ont.– were told they were needed for a complicated mission, and instructed to bring several hundred kilograms of rope and other gear. Not long after the call on Monday last week, they got in a truck and motored to the mine in Worthington, Ont.

The operation that ensued turned into what Taillefer and Leger called the most stressful event of their lives.

“You just couldn’t control the tears coming out,” Taillefer told The Canadian Press when recalling some of the most intense moments of the mission. “You just walk away, wipe your eyes, get it together and then get back at it.”

Ontario Mine Rescue had been in touch with Vale’s emergency response team since Sunday, Sept. 26, when the workers became stuck underground.

A scoop bucket had dislodged and tumbled down part of the mine shaft, causing major damage, Vale said. The repairs could take weeks, said Ted Hanley, vice-president with Ontario Mine Rescue.

A secondary escape route, required by law in Ontario, would be the miners’ way out.

RELATED: 39 trapped miners now safe after rescue out of mine near Sudbury

Taillefer and Leger arrived at the mine around 4:30 p.m. Monday. By that point, part of the 60-person rescue team was already about 564 metres underground, where four miners were in a refuge room.

The team was setting up a series of ropes to go deeper – 960 metres down – where 35 other miners waited, passing the time watching videos on their phones using the mine’s Wi-Fi system.

The rescuers believed able-bodiedminers could climb out without much trouble, harnessed to ropes like mountain climbers. But it was clear four miners in the group farthest below the surface would need significant help, Hanley said.

It took about a day to set up the ropes that would help the miners climb out, the rescuers said. Not long after midnight on Tuesday, the workers gradually began their journey up.

“We just gave’r,” Taillefer, 39, said.

The miners closest to the surface climbed out first, in about three hours. Below them, groups of three miners set out with one rescuer above them and one below.

Meanwhile, Taillefer and other rescuers devised a plan for the final four.

“They had been down there for well over 40 hours at that point, they were all exhausted, and some of these guys just physically couldn’t climb a ladder due to old injuries or ailments,” said Taillefer.

With no electricity and only light from their headlamps, the rescuers used the rope system – and a lot of muscle – to pull three of the final four up about 61 metres.

It became clear they needed a better way, Taillefer said.

The crew then employed an AZTEK pulley system, which helped offset the weight of the miners, he said. A single system wasn’t long enough so the rescuers used two, giving them a mechanical advantage that made 10 kilograms feel like one, Taillefer explained.

“It was slow, but it was working extremely well,” he said.

Leger said the double pulley system made a significant difference. “It was a big change and made things go a lot faster,” said the 49-year-old.

The operation was nonetheless exhausting. It would take three minutes to raise a miner up a six-metre ladder, Taillefer said.

“Then we’d rest for 15 minutes,” he said, adding that he’d lie down and try to sleep.

The rescue crew would then reset the pulley system, and start all over again with the next ladder.

“Our very last guy took us probably about eight or nine hours to get them up 30 of the 67 landings,” he said.

The miners weren’t hurt when the mine shaft was compromised and it was up to the rescue crew to ensure they stayed uninjured – that responsibility eventually took a toll, the rescuers said.

“There were times where the stress would just boil over and you would just start to cry for really no good reason at all,” Taillefer said.

For Leger, it was the first time he “felt physical stress turn into mental stress.”

But both said they took inspiration from the miners.

“A lot of these people had kids around the same age as ours and it was really important for us to get them home,” Taillefer said.

The last phase of the operation proved the most daunting.

At about 564 metres underground, the final four miners and the rescuers faced a 122-metre stretch of ladder, at an angle of 78 degrees, with “small landings that you could just sort of scooch over to rest your bum on,” Taillefer said.

The crew set up a two-rope system that three miners clipped into and climbed up, but the last miner was unable to scale that stretch.

The rescuers then set up a winch, placed the final miner in a basket and hauled him up as Taillefer climbed the ladder beside him.

Two hours later, near the top of that section, cold groundwater pouring through fissures in the rock hit the group.

“It was like somebody had a fire hose wide open on you,” Taillefer said.

Wet, cold and exhausted, the group returned to the AZTEK pulley system for a final 61 metres to get to an elevator that took them to the surface, Taillefer said.

It was shortly after 4 a.m. on Wednesday when the final miner and seven rescuers got to that point.

“You would have thought there was 100 people down there screaming, laughing and crying,” Taillefer said of the celebration that broke out.

“And there wasn’t as much as a Band-Aid on anybody,” Leger said.

Worker shortage or shift in work? Hamilton businesses struggle to hire, retain staff during pandemic

AP
By Alessia Passafiume

The Hamilton Spectator
Wed., Oct. 6, 2021

For the last while, Bettina Schormann has closed the James Street restaurant she co-owns one day a week.

Not because the demand isn’t there at Earth to Table Bread Bar, but because her overworked staff need a break.

During the fourth wave of the pandemic, Schormann, like others, has been experiencing a worker shortage, even with a raise for new hires working in the kitchen.

Between potential employees not showing up for interviews or new hires quitting after one shift, it’s been hard on the business, she said.

“There’s usually a stack of resumes to pull from, and now we don’t have that,” she said.

The new buzzword during the pandemic seems to be “worker shortage.”

For the hospitality industry, the shortage looks like a lack of employees applying for positions or folks switching industries completely.

In Hamilton, some businesses closed their doors — both temporarily and for good — citing this shortage as at least one reason behind the decision.

Last month, Suzanne Keast, co-owner of the now-closed Cat ‘N’ Fiddle Pub, was struggling to hire new staff in preparation for a busy fall season.

With some potential employees not showing up for their scheduled interviews, it was “frustrating,” she told The Spectator.

At the time, she said she didn’t expect the labour shortage to improve any time soon, and other businesses are now reporting the same issues.

Hamilton Meat Pie Co. said in an email to The Spectator that it has temporarily closed its Westdale location due to staffing shortages.

According to a recent report from the Business Development Bank of Canada, 61 per cent of employers had to increase their own hours or their employees’ hours as a result of the labour shortage. In addition, 49 per cent of business owners have had to postpone or have been unable to deliver orders.

The question is: Should this trend be defined as a worker shortage, or is it something else?

Viktor Cicman, the senior consultant of projects and data at Workforce Planning Hamilton, isn’t too quick to jump on the “worker shortage” explanation for what is happening in the labour market. “It’s a bit more complicated,” he said.

A worker shortage is typically defined as a situation where there are low unemployment rates and no one to fill open positions, Cicman said, and that isn’t what’s happening here. It seems instead of a worker shortage, Hamilton is seeing more of a work shift.

The most hard-hit industries are those not categorized as “high skill,” he said, including manufacturing, warehousing and transportation. On the other hand, high-skill job sectors are actually growing in the city, like scientific and technical services, programming, finance and insurance.

Part of the problem is employers aren’t necessarily enticing folks to return to the workforce with higher wages, benefits, child care and growth opportunities, he said.

Without these perks, workers may decide it’s not worth it and look to higher-paying industries or use this time to re-skill, Cicman said.

What isn’t a factor causing the so-called labour shortage is federal government support, he said, referencing the Canada Recovery Benefit, which is set to expire before the end of October. “We’re still in a pandemic and these supports are needed. They’re almost public safety measures,” said Cicman.

When you do the math, the support given is less than minimum wage, he added.

The president of the Hamilton and District Labour Council, Anthony Marco, echoed some of Cicman’s reasoning for the shortage, citing a problem with minimum wage, a shift in jobs needed during the pandemic and safety concerns around front-line positions.

For hospitality workers, it can be fear of violence, verbal assault and abuse for asking folks to show their proof-of-vaccination certificates, said Marco. “Workers just don’t want to face that.”

Marco said workers may also wish to leave minimum-wage jobs to look for better employment, especially when minimum wage doesn’t match up with the cost of living in the city.

The Hamilton and District Labour Council is calling for a $16.45 per hour living wage, but also notes $19 is more representative of the cost of living in the city. Ontario’s minimum wage, in comparison, is $14.35 per hour.

And it’s evident that workers can be enticed with higher pay, even if that means working remotely for a company abroad.

Keanin Loomis, the president and CEO of the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, said some local talent is being scooped up by American- or Toronto-based companies, especially with architects and folks in the legal industry, as the pandemic has changed attitudes around remote work.

A slowed immigration system may also be to blame, said Loomis. “We’re certainly not letting in as many people as we used to (pre-pandemic),” and those folks could help fill in the gaps.