Turning hazelnut shells into potential renewable energy source

Wood vinegar and tar fraction in bio-oil produced from hazelnut shells pyrolysis at 400 C to 1,000 C

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS

 

IMAGE: TUBE FURNACE PYROLYSIS REACTOR view more 

CREDIT: AIHUI CHEN, XIFENG LIU, HAIBIN ZHANG, HAO WU, DONG XU, BO LI AND CHENXI ZHAO

WASHINGTON, August 24, 2021 -- Biomass is attracting growing interest from researchers as a source of renewable, sustainable, and clean energy. It can be converted into bio-oil by thermochemical methods, such as gasification, liquefaction, and pyrolysis, and used to produce fuels, chemicals, and biomaterials.

In Journal for Renewable and Sustainable Energy, researchers from Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Machinery Sciences in China share their work on the physicochemical properties and antioxidant activity of wood vinegar and tar fraction in bio-oil produced from hazelnut shells pyrolysis at 400 degrees Celsius to 1,000 C.

Wood vinegar is often used in agricultural fields as insect repellent, fertilizer, and plant growth promoter or inhibitor, and can be applied as an odor remover, wood preservative, and animal feed additive.

"After these results, wood vinegar and tar obtained from residual hazelnut shells could be considered as potential source of renewable energy dependent on their own characteristics," said author Liu Xifeng.

The researchers found the wood vinegar and tar left over after burning the shells contained the most phenolic substances, which laid a foundation for the subsequent research on antioxidant properties.

The experiments were conducted in a tube furnace pyrolysis reactor, and hazelnut shells samples weighing 20 grams were placed in the waiting area of a quartz tube in advance. When the target temperature was reached and stable, the raw materials were pushed to the reaction region and heated for 20 minutes.

The biochar was determined as the ratio of pyrolytic char and biomass weight, and the bio-oil yield was calculated by the increased weight of the condenser.

To separate two fractions of bio-oil sufficiently, the liquid product was centrifuged at 3,200 revolutions per minute for eight minutes, and the aqueous fraction was called wood vinegar. The separated tar fraction remained stationary for 24 hours without the appearance of the aqueous phase.

The wood vinegar and tar were respectively stored in a sealed tube and preserved in a refrigerator at 4 C for experimental analysis, and the gas yield was calculated by considering their combined volume.

The researchers found the pyrolysis temperature had a significant effect on the yield and properties of wood vinegar and tar fraction in bio-oil obtained from hazelnut shells. Wood vinegar was the dominant liquid fraction with maximal yield of 31.23 weight percent obtained at 700 C, attributable to the high concentration of water.

This research sets the groundwork for further applications of bio-oil from waste hazelnut shell pyrolysis, and its application in antioxidant activity has been extended.

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The article "Influence of pyrolysis temperature on bio-oil produced from hazelnut shells: Physico-chemical properties and antioxidant activity of wood vinegar and tar fraction" is authored by Xifeng Liu, Aihui Chen, Haibin Zhang, Hao Wu, Dong Xu, Bo Li, and Chenxi Zhao. The article will appear in Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy on Aug. 24, 2021 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0051944). After that date, it can be accessed at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0051944.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes across all areas of renewable and sustainable energy relevant to the physical science and engineering communities. Topics covered include solar, wind, biofuels and more, as well as renewable energy integration, energy meteorology and climatology, and renewable resourcing and forecasting. See https://aip.scitation.org/journal/rse.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy

DOI

10.1063/5.0051944 

ARTICLE TITLE

Influence of pyrolysis temperature on bio-oil produced from hazelnut shells: Physico-chemical properties and antioxidant activity of wood vinegar and tar fraction

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

24-Aug-2021

Disclaimer: AAAS and 

#LEGALIZEDRUGS

Thailand takes kratom off illegal drug list

Issued on: 24/08/2021 -

Kratom is part of the coffee family, used for centuries in Southeast Asia and Papua New Guinea for its pain-relieving and mildly stimulating effects Louis Anderson AFP

Bangkok (AFP)

Thailand on Tuesday decriminalised kratom, a tropical leaf long used as a herbal remedy but which some health regulators around the world have criticised as potentially unsafe.

Kratom -- scientific name Mitragyna speciosa -- is part of the coffee family, used for centuries in Southeast Asia and Papua New Guinea for its pain-relieving and mildly stimulating effects.

It has become increasingly popular in the United States, where the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned against its use, citing risks of addiction and abuse.

The change to Thai law means "the general public will be able to consume and sell kratom legally", government spokesman Anucha Burapachaisri said in a statement, while more than 1,000 prisoners convicted of offences related to the drug will be freed.

A Thailand Development Research Institute study estimated that the decriminalisation will save authorities about 1.69 billion baht ($50 million) in prosecution costs.

Kratom stimulates the same brain receptors as morphine, though with much milder effects, and in Thailand, it is mainly used in the deep south, where Muslim workers use it for pain relief after manual labour.

It has not been subject to international restrictions, though the World Health Organization announced last month that it was examining whether kratom should be considered for control.

Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch said the decriminalisation of kratom -- which is native to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea -- was "welcome, and frankly long overdue".

"The legalisation of kratom in Thailand ends a legacy of rights-abusing criminalisation of a drug that has long been used in traditional, rural communities in the country," Robertson told AFP.

In Indonesia, kratom is legal but its status is under review, with some politicians pushing for it to be banned.

Kratom stimulates the same brain receptors as morphine, though with much milder effects Louis Anderson AFP

Thai lawmakers have shown some appetite for reforming the kingdom's harsh anti-drug laws in recent years.

In 2019, Thailand became the first Southeast Asian country to legalise medical marijuana, and the government has invested in the extraction, distillation and marketing of cannabis oils for use in the health industry.

But overcrowded Thai prisons are still packed with inmates handed long sentences for drugs offences -- possessing just a few methamphetamine pills can earn a decade in jail.

Jeremy Douglas of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said Thailand is discussing and considering drug rehabilitation and diversion programmes for meth users to ease some pressure off the system and "also because it is more effective".

© 2021 AFP

 

Farmed carnivores may become ‘disease reservoirs’ posing human health risk

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Carnivorous animals lack key genes needed to detect and respond to infection by pathogens, a study has found. Farming large numbers of carnivores, like mink, could allow the formation of undetected ‘disease reservoirs’, in which a pathogen could spread to many animals and mutate to become a risk to human health.

Research led by the University of Cambridge has discovered that carnivores have a defective immune system, which makes them likely to be asymptomatic carriers of disease-causing pathogens.

Three key genes in carnivores that are critical for gut health were found to have lost their function. If these genes were working, they would produce protein complexes called inflammasomes to activate inflammatory responses and fight off pathogens. The study is published today in the journal Cell Reports.

The researchers say that the carnivorous diet, which is high in protein, is thought to have antimicrobial properties that could compensate for the loss of these immune pathways in carnivores – any gut infection is expelled by the production of diarrhoea. But the immune deficiency means that other pathogens can reside undetected elsewhere in these animals.

 “We’ve found that a whole cohort of inflammatory genes is missing in carnivores - we didn’t expect this at all,” said Professor Clare Bryant in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, senior author of the paper.

She added: “We think that the lack of these functioning genes contributes to the ability of pathogens to hide undetected in carnivores, to potentially mutate and be transmitted becoming a human health risk.”

Zoonotic pathogens are those that live in animal hosts before jumping to infect humans. The COVID-19 pandemic, thought to originate in a wild animal, has shown the enormous damage that can be wrought by a novel human disease. Carnivores include mink, dogs, and cats, and are the biggest carriers of zoonotic pathogens.

Three genes appear to be in the process of being lost entirely in carnivores: the DNA is still present but it is not expressed, meaning they have become ‘pseudogenes’ and are not functioning. A third gene important for gut health has developed a unique mutation, causing two proteins called caspases to be fused together to change their function so they can no longer respond to some pathogens in the animal’s body.

“When you have a large population of farmed carnivorous animals, like mink, they can harbour a pathogen - like SARS-CoV-2 and others - and it can mutate because the immune system of the mink isn’t being activated. This could potentially spread into humans,” said Bryant.

The researchers say that the results are not a reason to be concerned about COVID-19 being spread by dogs and cats. There is no evidence that these domestic pets carry or transmit COVID-19. It is when large numbers of carnivores are kept together in close proximity that a large reservoir of the pathogen can build up amongst them, and potentially mutate.

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JOURNAL

Cell Reports

DOI

10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109614 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Evolutionary loss of inflammasomes in the Carnivora and implications for the carriage of zoonotic infections

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Aug-2021

Wildfires devastate Bolivian nature reserves

Issued on: 24/08/2021 

The San Matias nature reserve in Bolivia, which is the size of Belgium, has been devastated by wildfires AIZAR RALDES AFP/File

Chiquitos (Bolivia) (AFP)

Wildfires, mostly started intentionally, have scorched almost 600,000 hectares of land in eastern Bolivia already this year, authorities said.

On Monday night there were 20 active fires in Santa Cruz state affecting seven protected areas.

The government said 200,000 hectares (495,000 acres) had burned in just two days.

Most of the fires are in the forests of Chiquitania, a region that lies between the Amazon to the north, the plains of Cahco to the south and the Pantanal -- the world's largest wetland -- to the southeast.

The San Matias nature reserve -- a national park the size of Belgium -- is one of the worst affected areas.

Volunteer firefighters and forest rangers have been digging trenches to try to halt the spreading fires.

The government has deployed around 1,800 military personnel to help, with two helicopters due to join in the effort.

Despite a lack of resources to fight wildfires, Bolivia cannot ask neighboring countries for help unless local and regional authorities declare a "disaster," said Juan Carlos Calvimontes, the deputy civil defense minister.

A disaster can only be declared once the government exhausts its budget for fighting wildfires.

This law "needs to be changed," said Calvimontes.

The government says most of the fires were started deliberately.

Environmentalists blame laws enacted under former leftist President Evo Morales, who for years encouraged burning of forest and pasture land to expand agricultural production.

The practice is legal in Bolivia for areas up to 20 hectares between May and July -- once the rainy season is over.

Penalties for illegal fires can be remarkably lenient, though, amounting to a fine of just one US dollar per hectare burnt.

However, for large scale wildfires, perpetrators can be given a sentence of up to three years in prison.

© 2021 AFP

UN, EU condemn Palestinian Authority over activist arrests

Issued on: 24/08/2021 - 

There have been persistent protests in the West Bank against the death in Palestinian Authority custody of leading activist Nizar Banat ABBAS MOMANI AFP/File

Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP)

The UN and the EU expressed concern Tuesday over a spate of arrests of activists by Palestinian security forces, as the death of a leading activist in custody sparked persistent protests.

Demonstrators in the Israeli-occupied West Bank have demanded justice since the June death of Nizar Banat -- a leading critic of the Palestinian Authority and its 86-year old president Mahmud Abbas -- who died in custody after security forces stormed his home in the flashpoint city of Hebron and dragged him away.

The United Nations human rights office said it was "deeply concerned at continuing pressure on those seeking to exercise their rights to freedom of expression and assembly in Palestine."

It said the security forces had arrested 23 people in Ramallah on Saturday on the grounds that "they were holding a public protest," but noted that 21 of them "were detained before any protest had even started."

It said "more arrests appear to be taking place" targeting "well-known human rights defenders and political activists," and called for "the immediate release without charge of these individuals."

The Palestinian Authority was not immediately available to respond to the criticism.

A statement from the European Union representative in Jerusalem also condemned the weekend arrests, which it said had come "against the backdrop of reports of an increase in apparently politically motivated arrests by the Palestinian Authority over the past few months."

"Violence against peaceful human rights defenders, activists and protesters is unacceptable," the EU said.

Nearly two dozen Palestinian civil society groups issued a statement on Monday warning of "a dangerous decline in rights and public freedoms" and holding prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh responsible "his failure to protect the rights of citizens".

Opinion polls suggest support for the PA and Abbas remain low.

Anger ticked up following Abbas's decision to indefinitely postpone elections scheduled for May and July, which would have been the first Palestinian polls in 15 years.

Abbas said the elections could not go ahead until Israel agreed to allow voting in annexed east Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as the capital of their future state,

But Palestinian analysts said the president baulked when it looked like his secular Fatah movement was heading for defeat.

Banat's death appears to have intensified frustration.

A post-mortem found he had been beaten on the head, chest, neck, legs and hands, with less than an hour elapsing between his arrest and his death.

His family has described his death as an "assassination," and said it would reject the conclusions of an official inquiry. It has called instead for an international investigation.

© 2021 AFP

Battery pioneer Akira Yoshino on Tesla, Apple and the electric future

By Paul Lienert 

© Reuters/TT NEWS AGENCY Nobel laureates attend a news conference at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm

(Reuters) - Akira Yoshino, a co-winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on lithium-ion batteries, can take credit for the upheaval in both the automotive and technology industries.

Lithium-ion batteries have provided the first serious competition in a century to fossil fuels and combustion engines for transportation. Now an honorary fellow at Asahi Kasei, the Japanese chemical firm where he has worked for nearly 50 years, Yoshino sees more disruption ahead as transportation and digital technology become one industry, sharing lithium battery technology.

Yoshino spoke with Reuters about about the next generation of electric vehicle batteries, the potential for shared autonomous electric vehicles that can charge themselves, the prospects for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and the possibility that Apple could lead the convergence of the automotive and information technology industries in future mobility.

Here is an edited transcript:

Reuters: What technical innovations — in design, in chemistry and materials, even in processes — might keep lithium ion as the dominant EV battery chemistry and for how much longer?

Yoshino: There are two major areas of innovation that would be the key. One would be new cathode materials and anode materials. The second one would be the system where the EV is used. In other words, how people will be using the EVs, and how they charge them and discharge them.

Reuters: Are you speaking of people using electric vehicles in different ways? That is, not owning vehicles, but paying per use, for instance, through ride sharing?

Yoshino: Yes, I think the biggest potential is in sharing. If autonomous electric vehicles can become practical, that will cause a huge change in the way people use vehicles.

Reuters: How long before wireless charging of electric vehicle batteries will become a reality, whether it's through the roadbed or solar panels on the vehicle or some other means?

Yoshino: The basic technology for wireless charging is not a problem. The problem is how to apply this in a practical system. There are two possibilities. One is cars that are parked in a certain place where wireless charging is available. The second one is while the car is moving. It's probably not going to be on every road, but on certain roads where this is available, that could be possible.

If you think of autonomous electric vehicles, the vehicles will know when they need to charge and on their own just go to the charging station. That kind of situation can be practical sooner than you think.

Reuters: Toyota and Honda are selling small numbers of fuel cell electric vehicles, but the hydrogen infrastructure to support fuel cells seems like it's many years away.

Yoshino: With the fuel cell vehicle, there are challenges on the technology and the costs, but you can overcome them. If you think about the longer term, 2030 to 2050, autonomous shared vehicles are going to come about. Hypothetically, an autonomous vehicle could be run by a gasoline engine, it could be electric, it could be a fuel cell. It doesn't matter what the power source is. But it needs to replenish its energy somehow. If the vehicle can't do that automatically without a human intervention, the system is kind of meaningless. The same thing would be true for gasoline or hydrogen.

In that sense, the electric vehicle is the one that can replace its energy automatically. If you think of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, this goes around the room and it goes and recharges itself. If the Roomba needed a person to come and "fill up the tank," nobody would want to buy the Roomba.

Reuters: What else should we know about the future of mobility?

Yoshino: Right now, the auto industry is thinking about how to invest in the future of mobility. At the same time, the IT industry is also thinking about the future of mobility. Somewhere, sometime, with the auto industry and the IT industry, there is going to be some kind of convergence for the future of mobility.

Tesla has their own independent strategy. The one to look out for is Apple. What will they do? I think they may announce something soon. And what kind of car would they announce? What kind of battery? They probably want to get in around 2025. If they do that, I think they have to announce something by the end of this year. That's just my own personal hypothesis.

(Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit; editing by Edward Tobin)

Blackrock's former sustainable investing chief now thinks ESG is a 'dangerous placebo'
Silvia Amaro

Tariq Fancy argued that financial institutions have an obvious motivation to push for ESG products given these have higher fees, which then improves their profits.

But there are other issues with ESG investing, according to Fancy, including its subjectivity and the unreliability of data and ratings.

© Provided by CNBC Climate change and low-carbon solutions are impacting investors' portfolios.

LONDON — A former BlackRock executive has outlined why he now thinks that sustainable investing is a "dangerous placebo that harms the public interest," after previously evangelizing the trend for the world's largest asset management firm.

Environmental, social and governance — or ESG — investing has grown increasingly popular in recent years, mainly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

A report published in July, looking at five of the world's top markets, said that this type of investing had $35.3 trillion in assets under management during 2020, representing more than a third of all assets in those large markets. And the trend is not showing any signs of slowing down.

But Tariq Fancy, who was BlackRock's first global chief investment officer for sustainable investing between 2018 and 2019, warned that there were some fallacies associated with this area.

"Green bonds, where companies raise debt for environmentally friendly uses, is one of the largest and fastest-growing categories in sustainable investing, with a market size that has now passed $1 trillion. In practice, it's not totally clear if they create much positive environmental impact that would not have occurred otherwise," Fancy said in an online essay posted last week.

This is because "most companies have a few qualifying green initiatives that they can raise green bonds to specifically fund while not increasing or altering their overall plans. And nothing stops them from pursuing decidedly non-green activities with their other sources of funding," he added.

BlackRock was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC on Tuesday.

He also argued that financial institutions have an obvious motivation to push for ESG products given these have higher fees, which then improves their profits.

According to data from FactSet and published by the Wall Street Journal, ESG funds had an average fee of 0.2% at the end of 2020, whereas other more standard baskets of stocks had fees of 0.14%.

But there are other issues with ESG investing, according to Fancy, including its subjectivity and the unreliability of data and ratings.

Others in the industry have questioned the lack of clarity with these types of investments.

Sheila Patel, chair of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who told CNBC last year: "When you think about the composition of ESG funds, it's first of all important to remember they are still meant to be a fund invested to get a return for the portfolio. And so, they can tilt based on industry groups, based on sector views and that may or may not relate to an ESG view."

The necessity to make profits also leads market players to think about ESG investing within a short-time horizon, according to Fancy. This could become an issue when trying to address climate change and governments' plans to achieve carbon neutrality in the coming decades.

Fancy used a basketball analogy to describe the situation in ESG investing.

"Players have collectively engaged in forms of dirty play for decades because it scores points and wins games. The rules generally haven't changed: in most such cases dirty play can still help maximize points, and players remain under strict instructions to score points and only partake in good sportsmanship insofar as it contributes to (or doesn't detract from) the scoreboard. And on top of that they're exceedingly focused on the short-term (think: today's game), a time horizon for which few believe that good sportsmanship has much of a link to points," he said.

IT GUMMED THE POOR BIRD TO DEATH

Giant tortoise seen attacking and eating baby bird for first time in the wild in 'horrifying' incident

By Amy Woodyatt, CNN 

Researchers have captured the moment when a livelong vegetarian broke rank to eat meat -- and what made it all the more "horrifying" was that it was a tortoise.

© Anna Zora/Fregate Island Foundation/University of Cambridge 

Giant tortoises are the largest herbivores on the Galapagos and Seychelles islands.

Scientists captured the moment on video when a Seychelles giant tortoise -- previously thought to be vegetarian -- attacked and ate a tern chick in what they say is the first documentation of deliberate hunting in any wild tortoise species.

"This is completely unexpected behaviour and has never been seen before in wild tortoises," Justin Gerlach, director of studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge and affiliated researcher at the University of Cambridge's Museum of Zoology, said in a statement Monday.

© Anna Zora/Fregate Island Foundation/University of Cambridge Researchers captured the moment when a Seychelles giant tortoise, Aldabrachelys gigantea, attacked and ate the chick.

"The giant tortoise pursued the tern chick along a log, finally killing the chick and eating it," Gerlach, who led the study, published Monday in the journal Current Biology, said.


"It was a very slow encounter, with the tortoise moving at its normal, slow walking pace -- the whole interaction took seven minutes and was quite horrifying."

Anna Zora, conservation manager on Frégate Island and co-author of the study, captured the ordeal, which took place in July 2020.

"When I saw the tortoise moving in a strange way I sat and watched, and when I realised what it was doing I started filming," said Zora in the statement.

Gerlach told CNN that the way the tortoise moved towards the chick suggested it was "experienced."

"It's moving very deliberately -- it's not just wandering about, it's looking at this tern, and it's walking straight at it, clearly intending to do something. That suggests to me that it's doing it with intent. It knows what it's doing, it's done this before," he said.

Though tortoises are thought to be vegetarian, they have been spotted "opportunistically" eating carrion, as well as bones and snail shells for calcium.

"It's quite common for herbivores to eat a bit of dead animal as a free protein source, essentially. But this is the first video evidence of them deliberately killing in order to eat," he said.

Still, the team can't say for certain how common such behavior is among the tortoises, and plan to study them further.

Giant tortoises are the largest herbivores on the Galapagos and Seychelles islands, and eat up to 11% of the vegetation, researchers said. Gerlach added that the tortoise's behavior was unlikely to significantly affect tern populations.

Experts said that the new hunting behavior was caused by the "unusual" combination of a tree-nesting tern colony and a resident giant tortoise population on the Seychelles' Frégate island, which is home to around 3,000 tortoises.

It's not the first time uncharacteristic lethal attacks between animal species have been seen in the wild -- chimpanzees were observed killing gorillas in the wild for the first time in 2019.

"It's probably not uncommon for animals to surprise our expectations by eating unexpected things that may just be a one off," Gerlach explained.

"We should try and avoid having too many assumptions about what animals are going to do, or what they are doing. And it really shows the value of observation. Just by watching and recording what animals are doing you can find really totally unexpected things, things that we couldn't discover deliberately -- it has to be by chance," he said.

Stoney Nakoda celebrate name change of Alberta mountain landmark

CANMORE, Alta. — The Alberta government says a prominent landmark in the Rocky Mountains has been renamed in the spirit of reconciliation.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The offensive name for the feature on Mount Charles Stewart combines a derogatory term for an Indigenous woman and slang for a woman's breast. The name had been used since the 1920s and many considered it to be racist and misogynistic.

The formation, visible from the mountain town of Canmore, will now be known by its original name Anû Kathâ Îpa, or Bald Eagle Peak. It is the traditional name used by the Stoney Nakoda Nation. Elders had already revealed the name change last September.

In a statement, Chiniki First Nation Chief Aaron Young said the Stoney Nakoda people have a "deep and lasting respect" for women in their community and are happy the racist term has been cast aside.

An official name change means the landmark will be updated on provincial and federal place name databases and maps.

The fight to change the name went on for many years. Two Canmore lawyers had been working since 2014 to find a formal name for the landmark.

There were also at least two attempts to change the name but both were rejected by the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation board. One contained the second half of the former name and another was not a traditional Indigenous name.

The derogatory nickname for the landmark has been used in several hiking and climbing guides, on Google maps and on many trail websites, although some sites have removed it.

A mountain in Banff National Park with a name Indigenous communities find offensive is also to be renamed. The province says it is working with Parks Canada and First Nations to come up with a replacement.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 23, 2021.

The Canadian Press

THE ARCHITECTURE OF WAR

Month of fighting in Syria's Daraa displaces 38,000: UN



Issued on: 24/08/2021 - 

Swathes of the Syrian city of Daraa have been left deserted after heavy fighting between government forces and rebel fighters who stayed on after its return to government control in 2018 Sam HARIRI AFP/File

Beirut (AFP)

Fighting between government forces and former rebels in the Syrian province of Daraa has displaced more than 38,000 people over the past month, the United Nations said Tuesday, as truce talks falter.

Daraa, retaken by government forces in 2018, has emerged as a new flashpoint in recent weeks as government forces tightened control over Daraa al-Balad, a southern district of the provincial capital that is considered a hub for former rebel fighters.

Clashes, including artillery exchanges, between the two sides since late July have marked the biggest challenge yet to the Russian-brokered deal that returned the southern province to government control but allowed rebels to stay on in some areas.

Russian-sponsored truce talks launched in the wake of the latest fighting have made little headway as the government has stepped up its campaign to root out remaining rebel fighters from Daraa al-Balad.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that 38,600 internally displaced persons are registered in and around Daraa, with most having fled from Daraa al-Balad.

"This includes almost 15,000 women, over 3,200 men and elderly and over 20,400 children," OCHA said.

It warned of a critical situation in the volatile district, saying that access to goods and services, including food and power, is "extremely challenging."

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that government forces are restricting the entry of goods into Daraa al-Balad, where it says 40,000 people still live.

"They are living under siege with families facing shortages of food, medical services, potable water, power and internet," said the monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria.

The Observatory said that many in Daraa al-Balad reject the truce terms being set by the government and its Russian ally.

The pro-government al-Watan newspaper and the official SANA news agency have accused rebel groups of thwarting ceasefire efforts.

The exact terms of the proposed truce remain unclear.

© 2021 AFP