Largest-Ever Climate Poll Shows 64% of Global Public Believes Warming Planet Is an 'Emergency'

"The voice of the people is clear—they want action on climate change."

by

Kenny Stancil, staff writer

A young girl stands in Jiangtan park after it was flooded by heavy rains along

the Yangtze river on July 10, 2020 in Wuhan, China. (Photo: Getty Images)

Nearly two-thirds of people around the world think climate change is a global emergency that warrants a serious response, according to the results of the Peoples' Climate Vote, the largest survey of public opinion on the planetary crisis and policy solutions ever conducted.

"The results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender, and education level."
—Achim Steiner, UNDP

"Recognition of the climate emergency is much more widespread than previously thought," Stephen Fisher, a political sociologist at the University of Oxford and co-author of the report, said in a statement released Wednesday. "We've also found that most people clearly want a strong and wide-ranging policy response."

Fellow co-author Cassie Flynn, the strategic adviser on climate change at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told The Guardian that "the voice of the people is clear—they want action on climate change."

Survey data were gathered from 1.2 million respondents in 50 high-, middle-, and low-income countries covering 56% of the world's population, thanks to what the UNDP called a "new and unconventional approach to polling."

As the report explained, "Poll questions were distributed through advertisements in mobile game apps in 17 languages, which resulted in a huge, unique, and random sample of people of all genders, ages, and educational backgrounds."

The findings, Flynn noted, should be interpreted by elected officials as a call to take the robust action necessary to avert catastrophic warming and irreversible damage to ecosystems.

"If 64% of the world's people are believing in a climate emergency then it helps governments to respond to the climate crisis as an emergency," said Flynn. "The key message is that, as governments are making these high-stakes decisions, the people are with them."

Data were collected between October and December 2020, and even amid the Covid-19 pandemic, 59% of the people who believe there is a climate emergency also said governments should "do everything necessary and urgently" in response.

Though recognition of climate change as a global emergency was widespread in every region, there was some variation according to geographical and economic characteristics. Acknowledgement of the climate emergency was highest in Small Island Developing States (74%), followed by high-income countries (72%), middle-income countries (62%), then Least Developed Countries (58%).

Biggest ever survey finds two-thirds of people think climate change is a global emergency - 1.2 million people in 50 countries were polled. Politicians and business leaders: the time to act decisively is now! #climatecrisis https://t.co/NNgdmFtGVY pic.twitter.com/l7BmkTeJYj

— Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) January 27, 2021

Presented with 18 climate policies—spanning energy, economy, transportation, food and farms, nature, and protecting people from environmental impacts—survey respondents were asked which ones governments should enact to confront the climate emergency.

As The Guardian noted:

Even when climate action required significant changes in their own country, majorities still backed the measures.

In nations where fossil fuels are a major source of emissions, people strongly supported renewable energy, including the US (65% in favor), Australia (76%) and Russia (51%).

Where the destruction of forests is a big cause of emissions, people supported conservation of trees, with 60% support in Brazil and 57% in Indonesia.

Overall, the most popular actions to tackle the climate crisis were protecting and restoring forests, followed by renewable energy and climate-friendly farming. The promotion of plant-based diets was the least popular of the 18 policies in the survey, with only 30% support.

People between the ages of 14 and 18 expressed the greatest level of concern, with 69% in that cohort saying there is a climate emergency. A smaller majority—58%—of those aged 60 and over agreed.

"70% of people under 18 believe climate change is a global emergency"

Across all age groups it's 64%

So why are governments and the EU treating the #ClimateCrisis like something we can deal with in a few decades' time?https://t.co/0jDeNPZvlJ

— Greenpeace EU (@GreenpeaceEU) January 27, 2021

As Common Dreams reported late last year, pandemic-driven economic shutdowns have not deterred the climate emergency. Despite a slight downtick in annual greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures reached record levels and disasters continued to increase in frequency and intensity in 2020.

Yet there is a significant relationship between the coronavirus crisis and the U.N.'s global climate poll. As the UNDP explained, "Many of the policy choices in the Peoples' Climate Vote—whether relating to jobs, energy, protecting nature, or company regulation—speak to issues that countries are facing as they chart their recoveries."

"Many of the policy choices in the Peoples' Climate Vote... speak to issues that countries are facing as they chart their recoveries."
—UNDP

The survey reveals that a majority of the world's population is worried about and wants public policies to address the climate crisis at precisely the moment when governments have been given an opportunity to pursue transformative agendas to create more sustainable societies.

"The results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender, and education level," UNDP administrator Achim Steiner said in a statement. "But more than that, the poll reveals how people want their policymakers to tackle the crisis."

"From climate-friendly farming to protecting nature and investing in a green recovery from Covid-19, the survey brings the voice of the people to the forefront of the climate debate," Steiner added. "It signals ways in which countries can move forward with public support as we work together to tackle this enormous challenge."

With November's U.N. climate summit approaching, politicians must soon agree upon a more ambitious international plan to mitigate and adapt to the global emergency. 

"These perspectives are needed now more than ever as countries around the world are in the process of developing new national climate pledges—known as Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs—under the Paris Agreement," the UNDP wrote. "As the world's largest provider of support to countries for NDC design, UNDP has found that a key factor for countries raising levels of climate ambition is popular support for policies that address climate change."

President Joe Biden's climate envoy John Kerry on Monday told world leaders at the virtual Global Adaptation summit that countries should "treat the crisis as the emergency that it is" by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or else expect, "for the most vulnerable and poorest people on Earth, fundamentally unlivable conditions."

As The Guardian reported at the time, Kerry "warned that the costs of coping with climate change were escalating, with the U.S. spending more than $265 billion in one year after three storms."

"We've reached a point where it is an absolute fact that it's cheaper to invest in preventing damage or minimizing it at least than cleaning up,"  Kerry said. "We have to mobilize in unprecedented ways to meet this challenge that is fast accelerating, and we have limited time to get it under control."

"We are at a fork in the road," Flynn said, "and the poll says 'this is how your future generations are thinking, in specific policy choices'—it brings a way to envision the future."

Trump’s Last-Minute Attack on Clean Air Faces Legal Challenge

Cost-benefit requirements would discount public health and frontline communities.

WASHINGTON - Today, Earthjustice, on behalf of California Communities Against Toxics, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club, filed a challenge to an eleventh-hour Trump Administration rule that undermines the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect air quality and public health. Under the regulation, the EPA will be required to prepare an extensive cost-benefit analysis before proposing any significant protections under the Clean Air Act—even when Congress has prohibited the EPA from considering costs.

While the Trump Administration spuriously claimed that the rule is a good-government measure, it would in fact do significant harm by minimizing the non-monetary benefits of air-quality protections, such as reductions in mortality and chronic illness. The regulation poses a particular threat to low-income communities, whose health and well-being will be further marginalized as a result of the rule’s requirements.

On its first day in office, the Biden Administration announced that the cost-benefit rule is one of the many Trump Administration policies that are currently under review.

The following statements are from Earthjustice and one of the plaintiff groups:

 “The Trump Administration’s cost-benefit rule is an unlawful attempt to undermine the protections of the Clean Air Act at the expense of frontline communities. It should be repealed, without delay, by the new administration,” said Sean Helle, Earthjustice attorney representing the groups.

“The Trump Administration’s rule seeks to minimize the critical importance of Clean Air Act protections. Air pollution has been linked to asthma, preterm birth, miscarriages, COPD, heart attacks, and mortality. The Biden Administration must protect the EPA’s ability to protect public health by repealing the regulation,” said Jane Williams, Executive Director, California Communities Against Toxics.

“This dishonest Trump-era rule should be revoked immediately, as it seeks to hinder the Biden Administration from protecting public health and cleaning up the air. This is especially egregious amid a global health crisis that hits people of color and low-incomed communities the hardest,’ said Emily Davis, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

###

For Immediate Release

Monday, January 25, 2021

Coal Communities Across the Nation Want Biden to Fund an Economic Transition to Clean Power

The president promised to create a task force on how best to help the communities. Advocates want that and new jobs, broadband internet and funding for health and education.

By James Bruggers
January 26, 2021

Coal is loaded onto a truck at a mine on Aug. 26, 2019 near Cumberland, Kentucky. Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Coal-state economic development groups, labor leaders and environmentalists are asking President Joe Biden’s administration to fund a “just transition” from coal to renewable energy, given his focus on climate change, environmental justice and racial and economic equity.

Thirteen groups from areas as diverse as West Virginia and Kentucky in Appalachia to the Navajo Nation in Arizona, along with their national partners, want the immediate creation of a White House Office of Economic Transition, focused on rebuilding the economies of coal communities.

They also asked the administration last week in a letter to create a task force on communities dependent for jobs on coal and power plants.

“What we are saying is we recognize the inevitable shifts in the energy economy landscape as a result of the measures we must take to address climate change,” said Peter Hille, president of the Mountain Association, a nonprofit that serves counties in the coalfield of eastern Kentucky and is working for a new economy there. “The justice we are calling for is represented by the new investments needed to help these coal-impacted communities.”

Biden entered the White House last week with the most ambitious climate agenda of any president, having put forth a $2 trillion plan that seeks to tie curbing heat-trapping greenhouse gases with economic growth in renewable energy sources like solar and wind power.

On his first day, the president moved to rejoin the Paris climate accord and directed his administration to review and begin rolling back more than 100 rules on the environment put in place by the Trump administration, many of which benefited the fossil fuel industry. Biden’s plan includes the goal of a “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.”

During the campaign, Biden also promised his administration would “invest in coal and power plant communities and other communities impacted by the climate transformation.” His campaign website said he would create a task force on how best to transition such communities.

What the coal state groups are doing is reminding Biden of his promises. They say that adding a voice in the White House for coal communities alongside those advocating for climate action will help to keep the communities a priority—especially as the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the decline of the coal industry.

“The economic uncertainty facing Main Street is destabilizing local economies and governments when services and support are needed most,” the groups wrote in their letter. “In many communities, this decline is hitting historically marginalized groups the hardest, including low-income people, Native (and) Indigenous people, Black people, and people of color. These workers and communities must be a central part of the new, clean economy.”

This economic collapse has begun setting off demographic trends. As the coal industry has declined, for example, West Virginia has been losing population.

“Too many people feel like they have to leave West Virginia,” said Natalie Rober, executive director of Generation West Virginia, an organization that works to attract, retain and advance young people in the state, including workforce development. “Our work is doing whatever it takes so people can find fulfilling careers here and live the lives they deserve here in West Virginia.”

There are solutions already “on the ground that can be scaled up with federal support,” she added, citing her organization’s efforts to train software developers.

The federal government could help by working with local communities to expand fast, broadband internet service to make remote learning and working accessible to more people.

Other groups that signed the letter included West Virginia-based Coalfield Development, Kentucky-based Appalachian Citizens Law Center, Montana-based Western Organization of Resource Council, the Colorado AFL-CIO, the Union of Concerned Scientists and two Native American groups, Tribe Awaken and Tó Nizhóní Ání.

A spokesman for the Biden administration declined comment on the letter.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, contacted through a spokesman, did not respond to a question about whether a White House position on coal transition would be beneficial. In comments on the Senate floor, McConnell criticized Biden for his decision to return the United States to the Paris Agreement, and his support for global efforts to reduce carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050.

McConnell called the Paris Agreement “a terrible bargain that would set us up to self-inflict major economic pain on working American families.”

Hille said the approach by McConnell and former President Trump to slash environmental regulations and promote coal did not save the coal industry. “That approach got a good hearing and a good trial and it didn’t work,” he said. “In fact, we continue to lose jobs in the coalfields.”

Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, did not comment on the group’s proposal for a coal transition. Earlier, in response to Biden’s initial climate moves, he said the president “must renew America’s leadership on climate change through innovation” and that efforts to address climate change “must create jobs in places like West Virginia and wherever traditional energy workers have been left behind.”

Because Manchin is expected to become the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and Democrats have only a razor-thin margin in the Senate, Manchin will likely have an oversized role in any climate legislation that might come out of Congress, including legislation to help coal communities.

Kentucky’s only Democratic Party member of the House, John Yarmuth of Louisville, said he would support “a task force or a special White House office—whatever it takes to get coal communities the help they need.”

He said, “President Biden and our Democratic Congress will tackle these issues head-on” and make “the strong investments needed, and that we will be honest to the families that have sacrificed so much to power our country for generations.”

The organizations that sent the letter, including the Just Transition Fund, told Biden they had some ideas on how to support those families.

They are among 80 organizations that last June unveiled a National Economic Transition Platform to support struggling coal mining cities and towns, some facing severe poverty, in Appalachia, the Illinois Basin, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona and elsewhere. Just Transition Fund drafted the plan with its partners.

The groups described their program as bottom-up economic development that builds on community members’ strengths and resources. Economic transition money has already been flowing to some of these communities, but they say much more needs to be done, as coal mining companies file for bankruptcy and the nation transitions from coal to cleaner and less expensive energy sources.

Coal production nationally was on pace last year to sink to its lowest level since the 1960s, as domestic and international demand declined, according to the U.S. Energy Administration. Hundreds of coal-fired power plants have closed and those that remain in operation are running much less often than before, and burning less coal.

“It’s pretty clear that the decline in coal use is sustained, it’s big and it’s real, and it’s coming mostly from the big drop in natural gas prices we’ve seen in the last decade,” said Catie Hausman, a University of Michigan professor whose research focuses on energy and climate policy.

The Appalachian Regional Commission has identified 78 counties across its area as economically distressed, meaning they rank among the most impoverished 10 percent of counties in the nation. Eighteen are in West Virginia and 42 are in eastern Kentucky.

In Wyoming, the coal mining sector has shed tens of thousands of jobs since 2014.

Hundreds of high-paying mining and coal burning jobs were lost in the Navajo Nation with the 2019 shut down of the Navajo Generating Station, the nation’s largest coal-fired power plant, after nearly 50 years.

The groups have called on the Biden administration to, among other things, invest in local leadership and long-term economic development planning, boost local clean-energy economies and reclaim and clean up mine sites and the environment.

They would like to see the administration invest in broadband internet service and improve water and wastewater systems and roads. They want payments for workers while transitioning to jobs that can sustain their families, as well as funding for health and education improvements.

The coal communities, the groups said in their letter to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, “supported our country when we needed it most, and now they deserve our support when they need it most.”

James Bruggers
Reporter, Southeast, National Environment Reporting Network
James Bruggers covers the U.S. Southeast, part of ICN’s National Environment Reporting Network. He previously covered energy and the environment for Louisville’s Courier Journal, where he worked as a correspondent for USA Today and was a member of the USA Today Network environment team. Before moving to Kentucky in 1999, Bruggers worked as a journalist in Montana, Alaska, Washington and California. Bruggers’ work has won numerous recognitions, including best beat reporting, Society of Environmental Journalists, and the National Press Foundation’s Thomas Stokes Award for energy reporting. He served on the board of directors of the SEJ for 13 years, including two years as president. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Christine Bruggers.

Our Growing Food Demands Will Lead to More Corona-like Viruses

As agriculture expands, habitats will shrink. That will likely lead to higher numbers of the species that transmit deadly diseases.

By Georgina Gustin
March 24, 2020

White cattle spread on pastures cultivated in the rainforest next to the Xingu river in Sao Felix do Xingu in Para state, northern Brazil. Many zoonotic diseases originate in wild animals whose forest habitats are being lost, often for agricultural use like raising and feeding cattle. Credit: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images

As panicked consumers flock to grocery stores, emptying shelves in preparation for homebound quarantines that could last for weeks, the coronavirus pandemic is revealing an alarming longer-term concern about the world’s growing appetites and the stresses they impose on a warming planet.

Zoonotic diseases—those that spread between animals and humans—represent the biggest proportion of new, emerging diseases like COVID-19, which scientists believe originated in bats.

Most of these diseases originate in wild animals whose forest habitats are being destroyed, largely for agriculture and mostly for cattle or the crops used to feed them.

As global population climbs, and demand for food along with it, these habitats will continue to disappear or change. And the animal species that proliferate in these transformed landscapes, especially bats and rats, are uniquely good at passing on deadly viruses, researchers say.

In other words, our growing global appetite will stoke populations of the very species best designed to kill us with new viruses.

Climate change presents one of the greatest challenges to global food production, with drought, flooding and increasingly unpredictable weather being only the most obvious problems. It will also force agriculture into new areas, as some regions become too hot or wet, which probably will mean yet more conversion of natural habitat into crop land.

With the global population expected to soar to 11 billion people by 2100, humans will need much more food and much more land to produce it, accelerating the loss of biodiversity that helps shield people from zoonotic disease.

“Population growth is on steroids and we’re blowing the hinges off the doors in terms of risk,” said Dennis Carroll, a prominent “virus hunter” who has led government programs tracking viral epidemics. “Land-use change is the biggest driver of risk.”

Carroll helmed the U.S. Agency for International Development’s emerging threats unit for 15 years, and also launched the agency’s Predict program in 2009 in response to the 2005 avian influenza outbreak. The project, which investigated the sources of new zoonotic diseases, discovered 2,000 new viruses and worked in 30 countries in Asia and Africa.

The Trump administration ended funding for the project in 2019, along with shelving other key efforts for studying the spread of infectious diseases.

But researchers, including Carroll, say even had it continued, the program and other efforts underway are inadequate to the task of tracking and managing these viral outbreaks, which requires a coordinated global response

“There was a lot of good work done,” said Christopher Whittier, a specialist in infectious diseases and wildlife at Tufts University, who was involved in the Predict project. “But it’s a relative drop in the bucket compared to what the world needs to be doing.”

The shuttering of the program at USAID is part of a broader pattern in which the Trump administration has attempted to sideline research into zoonotic diseases, like COVID-19.

In an analysis released Tuesday, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the “nation’s flagship disease fighting agency,” has suffered a “slow but corrosive decline in available resources” under the Trump administration, with the yearly budget dropping 4 percent between 2016 and 2019.

The administration’s annual attempts to cut the CDC’s budget have mostly been turned back by Congress, but the Trump administration has taken direct aim at the agency’s Emerging and Zoonotic Disease program every year since Trump took office. Though the budget for the program has nearly doubled, to about $635 million over the past decade, Trump proposed cutting it by 20 percent in the current fiscal year and in 2021. The administration also sought to stop funding for a global health security program co-run by the CDC and USAID, and successfully got rid of most of CDC’s staff working on global health security in China, the analysis found.

‘Climate Change is a Stressor’

Last year, in a landmark report on the state of global ecosystems and biodiversity, the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), projected that 1 million species could be extinct within decades. The report called the loss of biodiversity as great a threat to the planet as climate change—and pointed to agriculture as the key driver.

“We have a population problem and a consumption problem. It’s not either or,” said Felicia Keesing, an ecologist at Bard College who has written extensively on biodiversity and infectious diseases.

A changing climate complicates the situation. “Climate change is a stressor. If a species has reduced range because of habit conversion or fragmentation, and then that species experiences atypical climate signals—like spring happening earlier—that limited range may be beyond its tolerance, so climate change can be a driver of biodiversity loss,” Keesing explained.

She added, “The connection with disease is: The species that thrive when biodiversity declines are the species that are best at transmitting diseases.”

Larger animals, especially predators, need bigger ranges to survive, so when their habitat shrinks or fragments or disappears altogether, they die off. These animals typically have fewer offspring and live relatively long lives.

But “weedy” species, like rats and bats, breed rapidly.

“They have a live-fast-and-die-young history. They crank out tons of babies and then they drop dead,” said Richard Ostfeld, an ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, in Millbrook, New York. “They tend to allocate their energy into breeding rather than living a long time, and they tend to have permissive immune systems and are breeding grounds for pathogens.”

As species’ habitats shrink or change, the animals move into new and closer quarters.

“Creatures big and small, on land and in sea, are being pushed to the poles to get out of the heat,” said Aaron Bernstein, the interim director of The Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health “That makes them come into contact with animals that they wouldn’t otherwise.”

Given that scientists believe the new coronavirus came from bats, Bernstein added: “If you took a bat and gave it lots of places to call home, the odds of it spreading a virus to its fellow bats is relatively smaller than if you locked it up in a phone booth with 100 other bats.”
Researchers Link Agriculture to ‘Spillover’

All of these pressures—growing population, increased demand for food, shrinking habitat, species movement and climate change—will lead to more “spillover,” with animal diseases spreading to humans.

“Feeding 11 billion people—and the associated increase of land converted to agricultural production and livestock grazing—is expected to cause a surge” in contact between humans and animals, “increasing the likelihood of ‘spillover’ events,” Ostfeld and co-authors wrote in a paper in Nature Sustainability last year.

Ostfeld and his co-authors reviewed scientific studies going back to 1940, finding that agricultural drivers were responsible for 50 percent of zoonotic diseases that emerged in human populations—“proportions,” they wrote, “that will likely increase as agriculture expands and intensifies.”

And agriculture will do just that, researchers say.

Global population has climbed in the past 60 years, but so have global appetites for livestock-based foods, including beef and dairy, which have a bigger carbon footprint.

“There’s this insidious cycle. Climate change is driven, obviously, by changes in gases. Those are driven by animals, both directly and indirectly, as you clear out space for them to graze or for the grains you feed them,” Carroll said. “That’s a very strong connection between climate change and these diseases.”

Projections suggest that the appetite for meat will only climb more, especially in the developing world.

Those predictions underlie recent suggestions, in reports from academic and government sources, including the United Nations, for people to consume less beef and dairy, especially in developed countries—for reasons of both climate and biodiversity.

Researchers continue working to identify just how the new coronavirus originated and spread, but they know that it stems from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, and mostly likely spread from a bat through an intermediary, possibly the widely-trafficked pangolin.

Like the avian influenza of 2005, it can be traced to places where humans consume or slaughter animals that have been crammed together in unnatural ways.

“People were responsible for transporting animals into brand new habitats, meaning a wet market, where species that never, ever come into contact in nature, come together in proximate and very unhygienic situations, surrounded by gazillions of people,” Ostfeld said. “It was human activity, clearly, that created the species jump.”

And the more human appetites and climate change interfere with natural habitats, the more that will occur.

“We’re not doing anything at rates to suggest anything will get better,” Keesing said. “The assumption is that we’ll only see this happening at a greater rate, because we’ll continue to see habitats disappear.”

Biodiversity loss, much like climate change, can feel like an abstract problem to the humans causing it. But experts hope that the immediacy of COVID-19 could at the very least help reinforce how dangerous these intertwined problems are.

Georgina Gustin
Reporter, Washington, D.C.
Georgina Gustin covers agriculture for Inside Climate News, and has reported on the intersections of farming, food systems and the environment for much of her journalism career. Her work has won numerous awards, including the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism and the Glenn Cunningham Agricultural Journalist of the Year, which she shared with Inside Climate News colleagues. She has worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Conn., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and CQ Roll Call, and her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and National Geographic’s The Plate, among others. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Video: Covid-19 Will Be Just ‘One of Many’ New Infectious Diseases Spilling Over From Animals to Humans

Three-quarters of emerging illnesses come from animals and a new report identifies climate change as a primary driver of many of them.

By Anna Belle Peevey
August 13, 2020

As the new coronavirus continues to turn the world upside down, crashing economies and overextending health care systems, epidemiologists and infectious disease experts are increasingly focusing on how to prevent the next pandemic, rather than solely reacting to the current one.

Covid-19 has already taught many lessons about response and resilience to disease, but perhaps chief among them is that if we do not significantly alter our relationship with the natural world, the next pandemic could be not just around the corner, it could be worse.

A report released by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) last month makes the case for focusing on the causes of pandemics instead of treating the diseases as they emerge, an argument echoed by many in the field, including Dr. Hana Akselrod, an infectious disease specialist, and author David Quammen, who has written extensively about so-called zoonotic diseases.

“There have been literally thousands of reports on Covid,” according to Dr. Delia Grace Randolph, a veterinary epidemiologist and lead author of the report, “but many of those are focused on the response. We’re looking at rather more fundamental things—why and where did this pandemic come in the first place?”

What is a Zoonotic Disease?

The term “zoonoses” may be new to many people, but it has been around since the 1800s. A zoonotic disease is one that transmits, or “spills over,” from the animal world into the human world. Covid-19 is a zoonotic disease, as are Ebola, HIV/AIDS, MERS, and even Lyme disease. Nearly 6 out of every 10 known infectious diseases are transmitted by animals, and a staggering 75 percent of new and emerging diseases are zoonotic in nature.

David Quammen, author of the bestselling 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, was not surprised when he heard that a novel coronavirus had appeared in China early this year.

“It is peculiar to have published a book on this subject in 2012 that essentially predicted this pandemic,” Quammen said. “Not because I was prescient. But because the scientists that I talked to saw it coming.”

Hana Akselrod, an infectious disease doctor at George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, spent this spring on the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis. An HIV specialist by training, she was also unsurprised by the arrival of Covid-19. “An event like this is something scientists have been warning about for, literally, decades,” she said.

The reasons for the emergence of zoonotic diseases, Akselrod, Quammen and Randolph said, are written in the way we interact with the animal world and the impact we have on our environment.

“When human and animal populations are both stressed, if that’s from disease, from lack of food, from crowding and from changing living conditions and ecology that’s related to a changing climate,” Akselrod said, “that kind of puts us and them together in a pressure cooker environment as far as disease transmission is concerned.”

Because globalization has increased international trade and travel, it’s also far easier for diseases from wild animals to spread quickly around the globe.

“We are disrupting wild ecosystems at a scale far beyond anything that we have ever done, and we are traveling more quickly” said Quammen. “So when a new virus gets into a human population in some remote corner of the world, it doesn’t stay there as an obscure affliction of the people in that village. In more cases than not, it gets to a town, it gets to an airport. And in some cases it gets around the world.”

He added, “So the spillovers that happen are happening probably with greater frequency, but they’re also more likely to turn into big events than ever before.”

Climate Change and Other Causes of Zoonotic Diseases

The UNEP/ILRE report outlined seven “deadly drivers” of zoonotic diseases, all of which have to do with the ways humans interact with animals and encroach into the natural world. That list includes climate change, which Randolph said is both a facilitator and a driver of disease. But global warming is indirectly related to the other drivers, as well, including increasing demand for animal protein, unsustainable agricultural intensification, unsustainable utilization of natural resources and increased travel and transportation, all of which also contribute to climate change. Others, such as the increasing exploitation of wildlife, are more likely to occur in a warming world.

Climate change rearranges the distribution of pathogens and the vectors that can carry a disease from one species to another, as it tends to make the world “wetter, warmer and more unpredictable,” according to Randolph. That can create new breeding grounds for vectors like mosquitoes, which, in 2015 and 2016, carried the Zika virus to much of North and South America, and as far away as parts of Europe and New Zealand.

“Insects are exquisitely sensitive to environmental changes,” said Akselrod, pointing out that Lyme disease is another zoonosis that shows signs of a climate change-driven spread. As the world warms, ticks have moved northward from New England into Canada.

Climate change can have other impacts on zoonotic disease transmission, Randolph said. It “makes people more vulnerable, and more vulnerable people are poorer and less able to seek and pay for health care and to take good good care of themselves and their children,” she said.

History clearly shows this trend, Akselrod said. “The people who don’t have access to resources to control their surroundings and their own lives have been on the deep end of every epidemic through the ages,” she said.
Staunching the Spillovers

Today, a vision of even deadlier, more frequent and, possibly, simultaneous disease outbreaks haunt people around the world, but Akselrod, Quammen and Randolph said that future doesn’t have to come into being.

“We continue drawing resources out of the natural world: we cut down trees, we go into tropical forests, we build timber camps, we extract minerals, we extract fossil fuels,” Quammen said. “As we suck these resources from the natural world, we draw the viruses of the natural world toward us too.”

But, he added, “We have the money, we have the resources, we have the science, we have the public health expertise. If only we have the individual willingness and the political will collectively to stop these things, then we can prevent future spillovers and outbreaks from turning into future pandemics.”

The UNEP report provides something of an instruction manual for breaking the chain of transmission, much of it in an approach called One Health, which essentially sees pandemics as interconnected between many layers of society—from rural villagers and veterinarians to agricultural workers and physicians—with the prevention of outbreaks requiring coordination and participation across all of them.

Another way to look at it, Randolph said, is “if you can prevent the disease in the animal, and if you can prevent the disease in the environment, it will never get to the person.”

This approach can not only save countless human lives, Randolph said, but will be cost-effective in the long term. A recent report in the journal Science estimated that the cost of preventing the next pandemic would be just 2 percent of Covid-19’s economic damage.

Ultimately, these experts agree, averting the coming pandemics requires no longer thinking of Covid-19 as a one-off event.

“If we continue on the track we are on today,” Askelrod said, “there will be more and more events like this and they will be devastating and they will define us.”

Anna Belle Peevey a New York City-based videographer and producer. Before joining ICN, she worked on projects ranging from an exposé with Bill Moyers to PBS FRONTLINE investigations. She has filmed and produced for the New York Times and Al Jazeera English, among others. She co-produced a four-part science series for PBS with a grant from the National Science Foundation, where she reported in the slums of India and the trout streams of rural Pennsylvania, looking at the ways smart technologies have aided in the collection of scientific data. She has her master’s from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Animals Can Get Covid-19, Too. Without Government Action, That Could Make the Coronavirus Harder to Control

Veterinarians say they worry the virus could take up residence in animal species in the US. But public health officials only want to talk about people.

By Liza Gross
January 27, 2021

An Amur tiger at the Bronx Zoo on Dec. 14, 2017 in New York City. Credit: James Devaney/Getty 

When several tigers and African lions at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for the coronavirus last April, Tracey McNamara was not surprised.

The big cats fell ill a little more than a month after New York City reported its first Covid-19 case. But McNamara, a veterinary pathologist at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California, knew as early as January 2020 that zoo animals might be at risk: A senior Chinese health official had warned the public that the virus spread between mammals and that they should quarantine any pets that might have encountered an infected person.

Soon after the virus infected the zoo’s felids, Chinese scientists reported in the journal Science that cats were “highly susceptible” to the coronavirus. SARS-CoV-2 (short for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), the virus that causes Covid-19, “can replicate efficiently in cats,” the authors wrote. And, perhaps more importantly, they noted, the virus can transmit “between cats via the airborne route.”

The pandemic has claimed more than 2 million human lives worldwide, more than 418,000 of them in the United States, even as governments spend billions to contain it. And now an expanding list of species have contracted Covid-19, including lions, tigers and gorillas in zoos, mink on farms and in the wild, and pet dogs and cats. Studies show that other animals can be infected in the lab, including ferrets, hamsters, rabbits, mice, monkeys and raccoon dogs.

Scientists like McNamara say there’s an increasingly urgent need to figure out which animals can not only contract but also transmit the virus. It’s clear that small carnivores like mink, raccoon dogs and cats do so, though so far only mink have infected people. But if enough animals become reservoirs of infection, and allow the virus to move easily between animals and people, it will be much harder to control the pandemic.

Dedicated efforts to monitor captive and wild animals that could be susceptible are essential, said Christine Kreuder Johnson, director of the EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics at the University of California, Davis One Health Institute. Otherwise, they could become sources of transmission after the outbreak is controlled in people.

Over the past few decades, international health agencies have recognized that controlling infectious diseases requires focusing on the interconnections between people, animals and their environment. With this “One Health” approach, explained Ann Hohenhaus, staff veterinarian and hospital spokesperson for the Animal Medical Center in New York City, “if you have a problem in one, you’re going to cause problems in the others.”

Covid-19, she added, is “a horrifyingly excellent example” of that.

The novel coronavirus revealed the folly of ignoring a One Health approach, Johnson and her colleagues argued in a commentary published in Health Affairs last week, calling the U.S. response “unprepared, overconfident and inept.” They urged the incoming Biden administration to create an interagency One Health task force to improve U.S. pandemic preparedness by forging domestic and global collaborations that target “key drivers of disease emergence, including climate and global environmental changes.”

It’s a massive undertaking. But with zoonoses—pathogenic diseases that spill over from animals to humans—accounting for three-quarters of emerging infectious diseases, it’s one that public health officials cannot afford to ignore. At the least, it will require better coordination between public and animal health agencies. Ideally, McNamara and others say, it would involve launching a comprehensive animal and environmental health surveillance network.

McNamara has urged public health officials to do both ever since the West Nile virus caused scores of crows to drop dead around the grounds of the Bronx Zoo more than two decades ago, when she was the zoo’s lead pathologist.

In the summer of 1999, McNamara feared she was seeing something new to veterinary medicine when wild crows, and then flamingos and other birds at the zoo, started keeling over. Around the same time, city health officials reported an unusual cluster of cases and deaths associated with a strange encephalitis, or brain inflammation, after a record-breaking heatwave and torrential rains—perfect breeding conditions for mosquitoes. McNamara’s gut told her the animal and human illnesses were linked. She shared her concerns with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but officials there told her they saw no connection between dying New Yorkers and birds. The CDC dealt with human health, she was told, not flamingos. That “jurisdictional straitjacket,” she argued in a 2018 Ted talk, blinded officials to a novel public health threat.

It took several weeks and misdiagnoses at state and federal labs before scientists finally identified the culprit as West Nile, a mosquito-borne disease previously unknown in the Western Hemisphere. The bungled approach to the outbreak inspired a congressional report on lessons for public health preparedness. The report stressed recognizing that many emerging diseases affect both animals and people, and the importance of bolstering the links between public and animal health agencies to prevent future spillovers.

More than two decades later, however, nothing has changed, McNamara said, even though yawning gaps in surveillance have opened the door to several new deadly viruses. And even though SARS-CoV-2, like West Nile, jumped from animals to people, she added, “all anybody wanted to look at was people.”

All the species in closest contact with humans in crowded urban centers—dogs, cats, zoo species, shelter animals, non-game wildlife—still do not fall under the jurisdiction of any federal agency and are not under surveillance, she said.

So instead of catching potential threats to human health in animals, she added, “the only time we find stuff is when we have dead people.”

Missed Surveillance Opportunities

Bats host many different coronaviruses, and SARS-CoV-2, like the first deadly SARS virus to emerge nearly 20 years ago, is likely to have originated in bats. Despite theories that it escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, most scientists believe the virus evolved in a bat and then somehow acquired the ability and opportunity to infect people. Of the seven coronaviruses known to infect humans, four typically cause the common cold. It wasn’t until outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002 and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012 that coronaviruses started killing people.

Researchers traced the original SARS virus to masked palm civets in live animal markets, and later found it in bats. Genetic analysis suggests that it jumped from bats to civets (commonly called civet cats, though they’re more weasel than cat) before infecting humans.

“Within civets, the virus acquired just a couple mutations that enabled it to use the human receptor,” said Cody Warren, a virologist at the multidisciplinary BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “It’s almost like the civet cat was a mixing vessel that allowed for this jackpot set of mutations that then enabled the virus to jump into humans.”

Scientists still don’t know exactly which genetic changes allowed the novel coronavirus to jump from animals to people or to infect different species. But identifying an intermediate host, or a more closely related bat virus, Warren said, would go a long way toward solving the mystery.

Like the original SARS, SARS-CoV-2 hijacks proteins called ACE2 receptors on the surface of cells found in people and other mammals. It seems to have found a perfect reservoir in people, Warren said, because it can spread without killing most of its hosts and even without making people sick. “It’s pretty exceptional in terms of its ability to transmit and not cause overt disease,” Warren said.

And a recent study in PLOS Biology shows that the virus has the ability to infect a broad range of ACE2 receptors in mammals, which the authors warn “confirms the potential risk of infection to a wide range of companion animals, livestock, and wildlife.” Veterinarians have been discouraged from routinely testing animals for Covid-19 to save scarce resources for people. That recommendation has not changed since the start of the pandemic, even though last spring Chinese researchers reported preliminary evidence that the virus can efficiently replicate in cats, cause severe disease in young cats and spread via droplets to other cats.

McNamara first raised concerns about the need to test companion animals in February, as part of the “Red Dawn” team of government and academic health experts who were monitoring the pandemic. A few months later, she approached the Department of Homeland Security for testing support.

“I begged for $300,000 to do transmission studies,” she told me. “It kills me to even talk about transmission studies (with pets), but we’re talking about a novel zoonotic potentially pandemic threat, and people sleep with their dogs and cats.”

But McNamara said she could not find federal funding to do the studies. The evidence so far indicates that dogs are not as susceptible as cats. Experts feared that cats might not show obvious symptoms and could serve as a silent intermediate host, but no case of cats passing the virus to people has been reported so far.

Most infections in animals are caught when they show symptoms and are in close contact with someone who’s tested positive. It’s still not clear whether, like people, many animals who have been infected have no symptoms, Warren said. “When we’re catching these infections in animals, is it just the tip of the iceberg?”

McNamara said she’s now seeing the same reluctance to test pets and other animals that people encounter every day as she did during the West Nile outbreak. After Chinese researchers established that cats in Wuhan tested positive for the coronavirus, it raised several important questions, she said. “How much virus do they exhale? How do they shed the virus? What routes of transmission might there be? Do they shed sufficient virus to infect a human being?”

All those questions, McNamara said, should have been answered a year ago.

But the United States has no infrastructure to mount a coordinated response to a rapidly spreading respiratory pandemic in companion animals, she said. She submitted a proposal to Homeland Security with a colleague to address that gap in 2011. “They basically laughed at us,” McNamara said, adding, “No one’s laughing now.”

Tracking Susceptible Species

The first evidence that mink could contract the new coronavirus and infect people was reported in May by Dutch researchers studying fur farms in the Netherlands. The study, published the following month the journal Eurosurveillance, showed that humans probably infected the mink, which then infected each other. Stray cats near the farms also tested positive.

The cats most likely contracted the virus from the mink, said study coauthor Wim van der Poel, a professor of emerging and zoonotic viruses at Wageningen University, because the cats’ viral RNA closely resembled viral RNA taken from mink in the same location.

A mink travels along the water’s edge in a South Carolina salt marsh. Minks can contract and transmit Covid-19 to and from humans and each other. Credit: Kit MacAvoy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The Dutch ended up killing hundreds of thousands of mink and the government announced plans to accelerate plans to ban the country’s fur farms. In November, Denmark culled millions of the animals after an outbreak sparked fears that the virus was establishing a new animal reservoir. So far in the United States, several mink have escaped from fur farms in Oregon, and last month the first infected wild mink was caught near a mink farm outbreak in Utah.

Why mink have proven so susceptible and can infect humans, Warren said, is the “million dollar question.”

Beyond the risk of mink or other animals infecting people, Warren worries that a virus circulating in animals that can infect humans might undergo mutations that allow it to escape a vaccine.

So far, there’s no evidence that the mink mutations will dampen the available vaccines’ effectiveness, though, and researchers are working to ensure that current vaccines protect against the new variants that have emerged.

In January, van der Poel’s group provided additional evidence in a study published in Science that showed mink were the most likely source of human infection. “It is imperative that the fur production and trading sector should not become a reservoir for future spillover,” the authors wrote.

Many of the small carnivores raised for their fur could potentially become reservoirs. Last month researchers reported in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that raccoon dogs, bred in China by the millions for their fur, could transmit the coronavirus after being exposed in the lab. The animals, which like civets were considered potential intermediate hosts for the original SARS, could eventually pose a similar threat with the new coronavirus, the authors warned.

It’s becoming clear that many different carnivores are susceptible to the virus, just as they were to the original SARS virus, said Johnson of UC Davis. “There are a lot of lessons to be learned there,” she said.

If the virus proves as contagious in other small carnivores as it is in mink, Johnson said, “there’s going to be widespread distribution in farmed animals as well as in free-ranging wild animals.”
Taking ‘One Health’ Seriously

If we want to understand what’s driving the emergence of novel diseases like Covid-19, McNamara said, we should look in the mirror.

Zoonotic diseases exploit openings created by clear-cutting forests, intensive farming, the exotic animal trade and other human activities that displace wildlife. Deforestation, one of the major causes of habitat loss, also contributes to climate change. And, while there’s no direct evidence that climate change is affecting the coronavirus pandemic, several studies, including a 2019 review of outbreaks following a recent El Niño event, have linked infectious disease outbreaks to climate anomalies that created weather conditions favorable to pathogens.

Rising temperatures have also forced animals to shift their ranges, increasing their likelihood of encountering people. The more species a virus can infect, the better its chances of acquiring mutations that allow it to spread more easily, escape detection, evade vaccines or therapies, cause more severe disease and infect new hosts.

Figuring out which viruses are circulating in wildlife populations is critical, said Johnson, and that requires understanding how animals are affected by human encroachment.

For a study published near the start of the pandemic, Johnson and her colleagues found that spillovers were directly related to human activities that affected animals and their habitat, with bats and primates at greatest risk of harboring zoonotic viruses. “It’s the mammal species that are in decline globally because of exploitation and habitat loss that have shared more viruses with us,” Johnson said.

Human activities—from habitat destruction to hunting and the wildlife trade—have eroded the social distancing between people and wildlife that prevented disease transmission.

For McNamara, the best way to avoid spending trillions of dollars responding to a pandemic is to focus on prevention by closing jurisdictional gaps and investing in cross-species surveillance. “I would hope one of the lessons to be learned here is that the next time we face another novel, zoonotic threat, you need to get some veterinarians in the room.”

Veterinarians already work at the frontier of novel diseases and have access to a rich library of archival biological samples that could help identify species that could drive spillovers.

But the “ultimate in real-time detection,” McNamara said, would be harnessing technology like satellites and climate models that can predict conditions that favor outbreaks before they even infect animals.

“This all happened so fast,” McNamara said, “but it’s not like people weren’t warned.”

Global Ice Loss on Pace to Drive Worst-Case Sea Level Rise
A new study combines ice melt data from all sources to reaffirm one of the most serious climate change threats.

By Bob Berwyn
January 25, 2021

The Jökulsárlón glacial lake is seen in Iceland in 2015. New research shows that Earth's ice is melting faster than ever. The annual melt rate grew from 0.8 trillion tons in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons by 2017. Credit: Bob Berwyn

From the polar caps to the glaciers of Europe, Asia and South America, global warming is melting the planet’s ice faster than ever and speeding the inundation of the world’s coastlines.

New research shows the annual melt rate grew from 0.8 trillion tons in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons by 2017, and has accelerated most in the places with the most ice—the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves and sheets.

Those massive systems of land and sea-based ice are melting as fast as the worst-case climate scenarios in major global climate reports, said Thomas Slater, a co-author of the new study in The Cryosphere that measured the meltdown from 1994 to 2017, which covers a timespan when every decade was warmer than the previous one and also includes the 20 warmest years on record.

It’s one of the first studies to gather estimates for all the planet’s ice, except permafrost. Previous research has typically focused on single elements of the cryosphere, like glaciers, sea ice or ice shelves, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute, who was not involved in the new study.

Slater said that evaluating the data didn’t numb him to the staggering amount of ice that melted during the study period, describing it as a mountain towering higher than Mount Everest and covering Manhattan—enough to raise global sea level 1.4 inches in 23 years.

“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” he said. “Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century.”

Sea level has gone up about eight or nine inches since 1880. It’s likely to rise at least 12 inches, and could rise by as much as 8.2 feet by 2100, according to recent estimates by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates a rise of between two and three feet by 2100 if global warming is kept well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or three to five feet if temperatures rise past that.
Sea Level Rise is a Matter of Life and Death

Getting the projections right is critical because, by some estimates, every centimeter of sea level rise threatens to displace about 1 million people from low-lying towns and croplands. For cities near sea level, knowing whether the ocean will rise two feet or five feet is literally a billion dollar question, and in worse case scenarios, a matter of survival and dislocation.

Mottram said the new findings don’t necessarily mean that global sea level will continue to track the most dire predictions because there are other factors involved, mainly the expansion of the oceans as they warm, which until recently accounted for most of the sea level rise that’s been measured.

Various studies show an “acceleration in sea level rise the last five years or so, from about 1.2 inches per decade, to a rate of 1.9 inches per decade,” she said. “We know it does vary a lot from year to year and things like El Niño, or if Greenland has a warm summer, can have an effect. But the deeper ocean is also getting warmer and that continues to add thermal expansion too. So sea level rise will continue for centuries.”

Analyzing glacial and polar ice melt at the same time helps distinguish how much of the melting is caused by atmospheric warming compared to ocean heat. The atmosphere reacts relatively quickly to changes in its concentrations of greenhouse gases, which warm the Earth, and other pollutants that can reflect heat away from the planet. Oceans respond much more slowly to the drivers of global warming. Understanding those dynamics sharpens projections of sea level rise, he said.

University of Liége ice researcher Xavier Fettweis, who was not involved in the research, said the findings help reduce the uncertainties around ice melt and sea level rise by adding new information from satellites to update the datasets used in previous studies.

It covers a key period for the planet’s climate because the big surge in polar ice melting started during the 1990s, “likely because we have exceeded the temperature threshold of 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) over large areas. The cryosphere is starting to change as soon as this temperature threshold is reached,” he said. Climate models looking back to 1950 robustly show there was “no significant and durable change in melt,” before the 1990s.

The Numbers are Huge and Scary

However you measure it, the global ice loss numbers add up to trouble, said glaciologist Heïdi Sevestre, who was not involved with the study.

The numbers are “becoming so huge and so astronomical, what more do we need to act?” she asked. “We need to understand the human cost and the economic cost of every ton of ice. I think if we knew the true cost of every ton of ice that’s lost, if people knew this, we’d stop immediately.”

Sevestre worries that policymakers are seeing the accelerating melting of the world’s ice as an opportunity rather than a threat.

“Last week I had a chance to speak to the French decision-makers, and they see the Arctic as a big pie they want to get a piece of, the fisheries and energy,” she said. “They believe it’s going to be an Eldorado for fisheries, but as we lose sea ice and the Arctic Ocean becomes more acidic, that’s definitely not going to happen.”

In her presentation to the decision-makers, she emphasized that a worst-case sea level rise means that “we’re going to lose the main French harbor, and we’re going to lose the cold water from glaciers that we need to cool our nuclear power plants.”

“There have been so many studies about ice loss and sea level rise that it’s easy to get numbed by the numbers,” she said. “But, of course, they should never feel normal, and the fact that climate change is accelerating should never feel normal.”

The new research is another warning that warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) will push the world’s ice past a tipping point, leading to irreversible melting and destabilization of ice sheets, she said.

“We should act as quickly as we can to prevent going beyond these thresholds,” Sevestre said. “We’re in uncharted territory. We can’t afford to lose one more ton of ice. We don’t have any other options.”

Bob Berwyn
Freelancer
Bob Berwyn an Austrian-based freelance reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.

Simulating 800,000 years of California earthquake history to pinpoint risks

by Aaron Dubrow, University of Texas at Austin

3D view of one especially complex multi-fault rupture from the synthetic earthquake catalog developed by the Southern California Earthquake Center using a new earthquake modeling framework. Credit: Kevin Milner, University of Southern California

Massive earthquakes are, fortunately, rare events. But that scarcity of information blinds us in some ways to their risks, especially when it comes to determining the risk for a specific location or structure.

"We haven't observed most of the possible events that could cause large damage," explained Kevin Milner, a computer scientist and seismology researcher at the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) at the University of Southern California. "Using Southern California as an example, we haven't had a truly big earthquake since 1857—that was the last time the southern San Andreas broke into a massive magnitude 7.9 earthquake. A San Andreas earthquake could impact a much larger area than the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and other large earthquakes can occur too. That's what we're worried about."

The traditional way of getting around this lack of data involves digging trenches to learn more about past ruptures, collating information from lots of earthquakes all around the world and creating a statistical model of hazard, or using supercomputers to simulate a specific earthquake in a specific place with a high degree of fidelity.

However, a new framework for predicting the likelihood and impact of earthquakes over an entire region, developed by a team of researchers associated with SCEC over the past decade, has found a middle ground and perhaps a better way to ascertain risk.

A new study led by Milner and Bruce Shaw of Columbia University, published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America in January 2021, presents results from a prototype Rate-State earthquake simulator, or RSQSim, that simulates hundreds of thousands of years of seismic history in California. Coupled with another code, CyberShake, the framework can calculate the amount of shaking that would occur for each quake. Their results compare well with historical earthquakes and the results of other methods, and display a realistic distribution of earthquake probabilities.

According to the developers, the new approach improves the ability to pinpoint how big an earthquake might occur in a given location, allowing building code developers, architects, and structural engineers to design more resilient buildings that can survive earthquakes at a specific site.

"For the first time, we have a whole pipeline from start to finish where earthquake occurrence and ground-motion simulation are physics-based," Milner said. "It can simulate up to 100,000s of years on a really complicated fault system."

A randomly selected 3,000-year segment of the physics-based simulated catalog of earthquakes in California, created on Frontera. [Credit: Kevin Milner, University of Southern California]

Applying massive computer power to big problems

RSQSim transforms mathematical representations of the geophysical forces at play in earthquakes—the standard model of how ruptures nucleate and propagate—into algorithms, and then solves them on some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. The computationally-intensive research was enabled over several years by government-sponsored supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, including Frontera—the most powerful system at any university in the world—Blue Waters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Summit at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

"One way we might be able to do better in predicting risk is through physics-based modeling, by harnessing the power of systems like Frontera to run simulations," said Milner. "Instead of an empirical statistical distribution, we simulate the occurrence of earthquakes and the propagation of its waves."

"We've made a lot of progress on Frontera in determining what kind of earthquakes we can expect, on which fault, and how often," said Christine Goulet, Executive Director for Applied Science at SCEC, also involved in the work. "We don't prescribe or tell the code when the earthquakes are going to happen. We launch a simulation of hundreds of thousands of years, and just let the code transfer the stress from one fault to another."

The simulations began with the geological topography of California and simulated over 800,000 virtual years how stresses form and dissipate as tectonic forces act on the Earth. From these simulations, the framework generated a catalog—a record that an earthquake occurred at a certain place with a certain magnitude and attributes at a given time. The catalog that the SCEC team produced on Frontera and Blue Waters was among the largest ever made, Goulet said. The outputs of RSQSim were then fed into CyberShake that again used computer models of geophysics to predict how much shaking (in terms of ground acceleration, or velocity, and duration) would occur as a result of each quake.

"The framework outputs a full slip-time history: where a rupture occurs and how it grew," Milner explained. "We found it produces realistic ground motions, which tells us that the physics implemented in the model is working as intended." They have more work planned for validation of the results, which is critical before acceptance for design applications.

The researchers found that the RSQSim framework produces rich, variable earthquakes overall—a sign it is producing reasonable results—while also generating repeatable source and path effects.
A randomly selected 3,000-year segment of the physics-based simulated catalog of earthquakes in California, created on Frontera. Credit: Kevin Milner, University of Southern California

"For lots of sites, the shaking hazard goes down, relative to state-of-practice estimates" Milner said. "But for a couple of sites that have special configurations of nearby faults or local geological features, like near San Bernardino, the hazard went up. We are working to better understand these results and to define approaches to verify them."

The work is helping to determine the probability of an earthquake occurring along any of California's hundreds of earthquake-producing faults, the scale of earthquake that could be expected, and how it may trigger other quakes.

Support for the project comes from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the W.M. Keck Foundation. Frontera is NSF's leadership-class national resource. Compute time on Frontera was provided through a Large-Scale Community Partnership (LSCP) award to SCEC that allows hundreds of U.S. scholars access to the machine to study many aspects of earthquake science. LSCP awards provide extended allocations of up to three years to support long-lived research efforts. SCEC—which was founded in 1991 and has computed on TACC systems for over a decade—is a premier example of such an effort.

The creation of the catalog required eight days of continuous computing on Frontera and used more than 3,500 processors in parallel. Simulating the ground shaking at 10 sites across California required a comparable amount of computing on Summit, the second fastest supercomputer in the world.

"Adoption by the broader community will be understandably slow," said Milner. "Because such results will impact safety, it is part of our due diligence to make sure these results are technically defensible by the broader community," added Goulet. But research results such as these are important in order to move beyond generalized building codes that in some cases may be inadequately representing the risk a region face while in other cases being too conservative.

"The hope is that these types of models will help us better characterize seismic hazard so we're spending our resources to build strong, safe, resilient buildings where they are needed the most," Milner said.


Explore further  Q&A: Behind the scenes with an earthquake scientist

More information: Kevin R. Milner et al, Toward Physics-Based Nonergodic PSHA: A Prototype Fully Deterministic Seismic Hazard Model for Southern California, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (2021). DOI: 10.1785/0120200216

Journal information: Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America

Provided by University of Texas at Austin
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