Wind turbines operating without curtailment claim many victims among protected bat species in Germany

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LEIBNIZ INSTITUTE FOR ZOO AND WILDLIFE RESEARCH (IZW)

 

IMAGE: KILLED BAT UNDER WIND TURBINE IN GERMANY view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: CHRISTIAN VOIGT/LEIBNIZ-IZW

Protected and rare bats regularly die at wind turbines (WT). This is why the operation of new wind turbines is temporarily curtailed during periods of high bat activity. Old wind turbines run without curtailment, however. A scientific team led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) has now produced an exemplary estimate of bat fatality rates at such old turbines by systematically recording bat carcasses in the vicinity of the turbines. During two months, 70 bats died on average per wind turbine. Even if these figures cannot be extrapolated one-to-one to all 20,000 old turbines in Germany, there is a considerable need for action. The operation of old turbines should be adjusted to the current regulations for new turbines, the authors argue in an article published in the scientific journal “Global Ecology and Conservation”.

Wind turbines help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet they may have unintended side effects on wildlife, as bats of rare and protected species – such as the common noctule (Nyctalus noctula) or Nathusius's pipistrelle (Pipistrellus nathusii) – regularly die when colliding with the rotor blades. The losses contribute to population declines. At new and recently built wind turbines, this grave problem is taken into account by temporarily shutting down turbines when bat activity is high – a measure practiced for only a good ten years in Germany. Older wind turbines, which account for approximately 75% of all onshore turbines in Germany, do not operate under any curtailment regime. “Since we see that these curtailments actually substantially reduce the risk for bats to die at wind turbines, we have to assume that there are considerable fatalities at unregulated turbines and at turbines in unfavourable locations,” says Dr Christian Voigt, Head of the Department of Evolutionary Ecology at the Leibniz-IZW.

In 2021, Voigt and his colleagues estimated the number of bat victims at a wind farm with three turbines that had been in operation since 2001 – with the unpleasant result that in two summer months 70 bats died at each turbine. Extrapolated over the twenty-year lifetime of this wind farm the number of victims at this wind farm is likely to be considerable. In order to obtain these precise figures, the scientific team collected bat carcasses under the three turbines of the wind farm west of Berlin in the months of August and September. “Precise counts of victims are a methodological challenge, as we are far from finding all bat victims – for two reasons,” explains co-author Dr Carolin Scholz. “Firstly, in tall vegetation search teams only find a fraction of the carcasses, and secondly, the carcasses are removed quickly by foxes, crows, birds of prey and other scavengers.” The team therefore conducted an experiment with similar-sized wild mouse carcasses to determine its search efficiency, as mouse and bat carcasses have a similarly high probability of being found. In addition, they determined how long mouse carcasses that were randomly distributed around the turbines remained at each site. “We noted that even experienced search teams only find one in six (17%) bat victims and that just under half of the carcasses were removed by other animals within 24 hours,” says Scholz. “After the first 24 hours, almost all remaining carcasses remained at their spot for about a week. We could therefore generate reliable correction factors for our fatality counts, based on search efforts that took place at an average interval of two days.”

Using both correction factors, the team calculated that a total of 209 bats died at the three wind turbines during two months of the migration period. Although the number of 70 victims per wind turbine per year is high compared to previous numbers, Christian Voigt considers the estimate still to be conservative – because, amongst other things, parts of the migration period did not coincide with the study period. Presumably, the location of this particular wind farm is very unsuitable from the point of view of bat protection, as there are many hedges and bushes near the turbines. “This result is alarming enough, because we have to assume that 20,000 unregulated turbines in Germany will have a high numbers of bat casualties over the course of their lifetime,” says Voigt. “This is unacceptable for endangered species with declining populations such as the common noctule, especially as bats are strictly protected at national and EU levels."

The authors therefore recommend that the operation of old wind turbines should be adjusted to the current regulatory framework for new turbines – for example, with regard to mandatory curtailment at periods of high bat activity. In the case of old turbines located at particularly unfavourable sites, dismantling should also be considered, as the goals of the energy transition to reduce greenhouse gases in energy production should not be achieved unilaterally at the expense of biodiversity.

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JOURNAL

Global Ecology and Conservation

DOI

10.1016/j.gecco.2022.e02149 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Wind turbines without curtailment produce large numbers of bat fatalities throughout their lifetime: A call against ignorance and neglect.

 

Black panther spotting one of the cameras trap (IMAGE)

GERMAN CENTRE FOR INTEGRATIVE BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH (IDIV) HALLE-JENA-LEIPZIG

 

CAPTION

A black panther (Panthera onca)– melanic individual – spotting one of the cameras trap in the floodplain várzea forests of Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve (MSDR), Central Amazonia

CREDIT

www.mamiraua.org

Zapping orange peel oil into new, pleasant aroma compounds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY

As oranges are peeled, they spray a tangy, citrus scented oil into the air. The main compound in the fragrant mist is limonene, which can be collected from discarded peels and used in flavorings, perfumes and all-purpose cleaners. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have treated limonene with electricity and ethanol, transforming it into a mixture of pleasant-smelling aroma compounds, some of which haven’t been identified before.

Limonene is regularly used in its original form, but it can also be the starting platform for other scents. But synthetic oxidation techniques that can perform this transformation have traditionally required environmentally harmful substances, such as strong chemicals and heavy metals. So, Holger Zorn and colleagues tested an environmentally benign oxidation method, mixing limonene with ethanol and applying an electrical current to the solution. The process generated an amber-colored liquid with a pleasant odor and 17 different compounds that had fruity, herbal, citrus and resinous notes. According to the researchers, this is the first time that most of these compounds have been described. The simple, sustainable method could create valuable aroma compound mixtures for flavorings or fragrances, but the compounds must be evaluated for safety before use in commercial products, the researchers say.

The authors acknowledge funding from Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung Wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz (LOEWE)-AromaPlus (State Offensive for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence).

The paper’s abstract will be available on June 1 at 8 a.m. Eastern time here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jafc.2c01301.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry

DOI

10.1021/acs.jafc.2c01301 

ARTICLE TITLE

<p>Generation of Flavor Active Compounds by Electrochemical Oxidation of (<em>R</em>)-Limonene</p>

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Jun-2022

D-LIMONENE DISSOLVING STYRENE & STYROFOAM

Scientists call for decision-making to be transformed to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises together

New article published in the journal BioScience with the participation of Victoria Reyes-García from ICTA-UAB and Unai Pascual from BC3.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA

The global scientific community has issued another warning that increasing climate change and biodiversity loss will together reinforce negative impacts on people around the world, including food insecurity, health risks and disrupted livelihoods, as well as involuntary displacements leading to social unrest. The latest assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warn that the window to avoid far-reaching and irreversible impacts of climate change and global biodiversity loss on people and nature is rapidly closing.  

Last year about 50 experts nominated by the IPCC and IPBES produced the first-ever collaborative workshop report bringing together the climate and biodiversity science communities (Portner et al., 2021). The report explored the tradeoffs and synergies between climate and biodiversity considerations, and how such interactions are driven by human economic activity, with very serious impacts on society as well. The report provided information relevant to the implementation of the Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, and the Sustainable Development Goals. The report found that “Simultaneously meeting these agreements relies on immediate and sustained efforts for transformative change which encompass technological and environmental policies as well as changes to economic structures and profound shifts in society”. 

Now, a new article published today in the scientific journal BioScience builds on the IPBES-IPCC workshop report. Written by world-leading climate and biodiversity scientists who were also part of the IPBES-IPCC report, it argues that to effectively and equitable address planetary emergencies, it is crucial to activate deep and urgent (“transformative”) changes across economies and societies. They authors claim that such needed changes contrast with policies being currently proposed that focus on incremental changes; that is, changes restricted to actions that are accommodated within existing societal and economic structures and goals, such as those promoting increases in energy efficiency without questioning the paradigm of continuous exponential economic growth.  

The authors of the new article argue that incremental changes will not gain sufficient traction to be scaled-up if they are not accompanied by broader system-wide changes and that current incremental changes also risk being too slow to avoid severe negative impacts on people and nature. To illustrate the opportunities and challenges that might be encountered when trying to build more transformative approaches to governing the interactions between climate, biodiversity and society, the article draws on examples from forest ecosystems, marine ecosystems, urban environments and the Arctic. 

This new article in BioScience is designed to contribute to the much-anticipated and long-delayed “Paris-style agreement for nature” set to take place later this year in Kunming, China where 196 countries will aim to set ambitious goals for biodiversity. The authors hope that their calls for transformative change will help to better inform the setting of biodiversity objectives, targets, and indicators for the next decade.  

According to Unai Pascual, Ikerbasque Research Professor at the Basque Centre for Climate Change, and lead author of the article, “International policy initiatives such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity are surprisingly lagging behind the scientific evidence about the need to integrate a climate-biodiversity-society nexus perspective in their decisions. I hope that the efforts by the global scientific community in this regard will be followed up by action from the policymakers. We need urgent and decisive action amidst the accelerating climate and biodiversity crises”. 

Victoria Reyes-García, ICREA Research Professor at ICTA-UAB, one of the IPBES-IPCC report and co-author of this new article states that “It is unlikely that we are able to resolve the climatic, environmental, and social crises that humanity faces today using the same logic that created these challenges. On their own, technological fixes, current governance structures, and economic incentives/disencentives will not suffice to generate the transformative change needed to ensure a future with a livable climate, a rich environment, and just societies. To achieve these goals, we need urgent changes in the way we value nature and govern the rich common heritage of the Earth”.  

One of the co-authors of the paper, Professor Robert (Bob) Scholes, passed away before publication. Bob Scholes was a fervent advocate of inclusive and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding biodiversity, climate and social interactions, and the article is a tribute to Bob Scholes’ tireless work in the field of sustainability science.  

 

Reference

Pascual, U., McElwee, P.D., Diamond, S.E., Ngo, H.T., Bai, X., Cheung, W.W.L., Lim, M., Steiner, N., Agard, J., Donatti, C. I., Duarte, C.M, Leemans, R., Managi, S., Pires, A. P. F., Reyes-García, V., Trisos, C., Scholes, R.J., Pörtner, H.-O. (2022). Governing for transformative change across the biodiversity-climate-society nexus. BioScience. 72.

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JOURNAL

BioScience

DOI

10.1093/biosci/biac031 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Governing for Transformative Change across the Biodiversity–Climate–Society Nexus

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Jun-2022

New virus variant threatens the health of bees worldwide

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MARTIN-LUTHER-UNIVERSITÄT HALLE-WITTENBERG

 

IMAGE: A HONEYCOMB FROM A BEEHIVE view more 

CREDIT: UNI HALLE / MARKUS SCHOLZ

A dangerous variant of the deformed wing virus is on the rise worldwide. The virus infects honeybees, causing their wings to atrophy and the animals to die. The new variant, which has already replaced the original strain of the virus in Europe, is spreading to other regions of the world and causing entire bee colonies to collapse. This has been shown in a study by an international research team led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), which analysed data on the spread of virus variants over the past 20 years. The paper appeared in the “International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife”.

Deformed wing virus (DWV) is transmitted by the parasitic Varroa mite. “These mites not only transmit viruses between honeybees, they also eat the bees’ tissues,” explains Professor Robert Paxton, a bee researcher from MLU. He has been studying the spread of various pathogens in honeybees and wild bees for many years. “Deformed wing virus is definitely the biggest threat to honeybees,” adds Paxton. The original strain of the virus (“DWV-A”) was discovered in Japan in the early 1980s and the new variant “DWV-B” was first identified in the Netherlands in 2001. “Our laboratory studies have shown that the new variant kills bees faster and is more easily transmitted,” says Paxton.  

The team led by the zoologist wanted to find out how widespread in nature the new variant has become. To figure this out the researchers evaluated roughly 3,000 datasets for honeybees, large earth bumblebees and Varroa mites from the database NCBI. The datasets contain clues about the genetic material of the viruses. They also investigated the first scientifically documented references to the “DWV-B” variant for numerous countries. “Our analyses show that the new variant has already gained a foothold in Europe and that it will only be a matter of time before it is the dominant form around the world,” says Paxton. In the 2000s, the new variant was mainly found in Europe and Africa, the homeland of the honeybee. It was discovered in North and South America in the early 2010s, and in Asia in 2015. The virus variant has now been detected on all major landmasses with the exception of Australia. According to the researchers, this could be because the Varroa mite has not yet been able to spread widely there.

Evidence of the virus was also found in samples taken from large earth bumblebees. “Whether the virus will have similarly devastating consequences in bumblebees and other wild bees remains uncertain. So far, commercial bumblebee colonies infected with the virus are not dying at a significantly higher rate,” says Paxton. There are various ways to protect honeybees from the Varroa mite and the virus: “The most important thing is to pay attention to hygiene in the hive. Here, simple measures can help to protect not only one’s own colony from Varroa, but also wild bees that no one else is looking after,” Paxton concludes.

As pollinators of many wild and cultivated plants, honeybees play a major role in fruit yields and in preserving biodiversity. The loss of honeybee colonies is therefore viewed with concern by experts around the world.

Study: Paxton et al. Epidemiology of a major honey bee pathogen, deformed wing virus: potential worldwide replacement of genotype A by genotype B. International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife (2022). doi: doi.org/10.1016/j.ijppaw.2022.04.013

 

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DOI

10.1016/j.ijppaw.2022.04.013 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Epidemiology of a major honey bee pathogen, deformed wing virus: potential worldwide replacement of genotype A by genotype B

Small, rare crayfish thought extinct is rediscovered in cave in Huntsville city limits

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENSOFT PUBLISHERS

 

IMAGE: DR. MATTHEW L. NIEMILLER SNORKELS IN SHELTA CAVE, WHERE A SPECIES OF CRAYFISH BELIEVED TO BE EXTINCT WAS REDISCOVERED. view more 

CREDIT: AMATA HINKLE

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (June 1, 2022) – A small, rare crayfish thought to be extinct for 30 years has been rediscovered in a cave in the City of Huntsville in northern Alabama by a team led by an assistant professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

Dr. Matthew L. Niemiller’s team found individuals of the Shelta Cave Crayfish, known scientifically as Orconectes sheltae, in 2019 and 2020 excursions into Shelta Cave – its only home.

Dr. Niemiller, an assistant professor of biological sciences at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System, is co-author of a paper on the findings in the journal Subterranean Biology. Besides Dr. Niemiller, authors are UAH’s Katherine E. Dooley and K. Denise Kendall Niemiller, and Nathaniel Sturm of the University of Alabama.

The crayfish’s home is a 2,500-foot cave system that’s owned and managed by the National Speleological Society (NSS) and is unobtrusively located beneath the organization’s national headquarters in northwest Huntsville and is surrounded by subdivisions and bustling roadways.

“The crayfish is only a couple of inches long with diminutive pincers that are called chelae,” Dr. Niemiller says. “Interestingly, the crayfish has been known to cave biologists since the early 1960s but was not formally described until 1997 by the late Dr. John Cooper and his wife Martha.”

Dr. Cooper, a biologist and speleologist who was a member of the NSS, studied the aquatic life in Shelta Cave with particular focus on crayfish for his dissertation work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Shelta Cave’s aquatic ecosystem was particularly diverse then, with at least 12 cave-dependent species documented, including three species of cave crayfishes.

“No other cave system to date in the U.S. has more documented cave crayfishes co-occurring with each other,” Dr. Niemiller says.

But the aquatic ecosystem, including the Shelta Cave Crayfish, crashed sometime in the early 1970s. The crash may be related to a gate that was built to keep people out of the cave and yet still allow a grey bat maternity population to move freely in and out.

“The initial design of the gate was not bat friendly, and the bats ultimately vacated the cave system,” Dr. Niemiller says. “Coupled with groundwater pollution and perhaps other stressors, that all may have led to a perfect storm resulting in the collapse of the aquatic cave ecosystem.”

Even before the decline in the aquatic cave community, the Shelta Cave Crayfish was never common compared to the other two species, Southern Cave Crayfish (Orconectes australis) and Alabama Cave Crayfish (Cambarus jonesi).

“To the best of our knowledge, only 115 individuals had been confirmed from 1963 through 1975. Since then, only three have been confirmed – one in 1988 and the two individuals we report in 2019 and 2020,” Dr. Niemiller says.

“After a couple of decades of no confirmed sightings and the documented dramatic decline of other aquatic cave life at Shelta Cave, it was feared by some, including myself, that the crayfish might now be extinct.”

While it's encouraging that the Shelta Cave Crayfish still persists, he says scientists still haven't rediscovered other aquatic species that once lived in the cave system, such as the Alabama Cave Shrimp and Tennessee Cave Salamander.

“The groundwater level in Shelta Cave is the result of water that works its way naturally through the rock layers above the cave – called epikarst – from the surface,” says Dr. Niemiller. “However, urbanization in the area above the cave system may have altered rates at which water infiltrates into the cave and also increased rates of pollutants, such as pesticides and heavy metals entering the cave system.”

The crayfish was rediscovered during an aquatic survey aimed toward documenting all life that was encountered in the cave system.

“I really wasn't expecting to find the Shelta Cave Crayfish. My students, colleagues and I had visited the cave on several occasions already leading up to the May 2019 trip,” Dr. Niemiller says. “We would be fortunate to see just a couple of Southern Cavefish and Southern Cave Crayfish during a survey.”

While snorkeling in about 15 feet of water in North Lake located in the Jones Hall section of the cave, Dr. Niemiller spotted a smaller-sized cave crayfish below him.

“As I dove and got closer, I noticed that the chelae, or pincers, were quite thin and elongated compared to other crayfish we had seen in the cave,” he says. “I was fortunate to swoop up the crayfish with my net and returned to the bank.”

It was a female, measuring under an inch in carapace length, and had developing ova internally, so it was a mature adult.

“We noted some other morphological characters, took photographs, acquired a tissue sample and released the crayfish,” Dr. Niemiller says.

“The second Shelta Cave Crayfish that we encountered was in August 2020 in the West Lake area,” he says.

The team had searched much of the area and didn’t see much aquatic life. As they started to make their way out the lake passage to return to the surface, Nate Sturm, a master’s student in biology at the University of Alabama who had accompanied the lab for the trip, noticed a small white crayfish in an area that the team had previously walked through.

“It was a male with thin and elongated chelae,” Dr. Niemiller says. “I had already walked ahead of the area and did not see the crayfish. Thank goodness for young eyes!”

To aid identification, the team analyzed short fragments of mitochondrial DNA in the tissue samples collected.

“We compared the newly generated DNA sequences with sequences already available for other crayfish species in the region,” Dr Niemiller says. “A challenge we faced was that no DNA sequences existed prior to our study for the Shelta Cave Crayfish, so it was a bit of a process of elimination, so to speak.”

While few crayfish are considered single-site endemics, in other words known to exist in just one location, that’s somewhat more common in cave-dwelling species like the Shelta Cave Crayfish, he says.

“A couple other cave crayfishes are known from single cave systems in the United States. A challenge we face when trying to conserve such species is determining whether they really are known from a single cave system, or might they have slightly larger distributions but we are hampered by our ability to study life underground.”

CAPTION

The Shelta Cave Crayfish is known to exist only in Shelta Cave.

CREDIT

Dr. Matthew L. Niemiller

Outside of the dissertation work done by Dr. Cooper, little about the life history and ecology of the species is known.

“The Southern Cavefish (Typhlichthys subterraneus) and Tennessee Cave Salamander (Gyrinophilus palleucus) may be predators of smaller young of the Shelta Cave Crayfish. Larger Southern Cave Crayfish and Alabama Cave Crayfish might also feed on small young,” Dr. Niemiller says.

“We know nothing of the diet of the species, but it likely is an omnivore feeding on organic matter washed or brought into the cave, as well as small invertebrates such as copepods and amphipods.”

Although this research occurred prior to the grant, Dr. Niemiller is currently conducting the first-ever comprehensive assessment of groundwater biodiversity in the central and eastern United States, a pioneering search for new species and new understanding of the complex web of life that exists right under our feet. The research is funded by a five-year, $1.029 million National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award.

He says knowing the health of populations of the tiny creatures that are dependent on groundwater is important.

“Groundwater is critically important not just for the organisms that live in groundwater ecosystems, but for human society for drinking water, agriculture, etc.,” Dr. Niemiller says.

“The organisms that live in groundwater provide important benefits, such as water purification and biodegradation,” he says. “They also can act like ‘canaries in the coal mine,’ indicators of overall groundwater and ecosystem health.”

 

About The University of Alabama in Huntsville

Launched from America's quest to conquer space, The University of Alabama in Huntsville is one of America’s premier doctoral-granting, research-intensive universities. Located in the second largest research park in the United States, UAH has robust capabilities in astrophysics, cybersecurity, data analytics, logistics and supply chain management, optical systems and engineering, reliability and failure analysis, rotorcraft and unmanned systems, severe weather, space propulsion and more. UAH prepares students for demanding positions in engineering, the sciences, business, nursing, education, the arts, humanities and social sciences.

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JOURNAL

Subterranean Biology

DOI

10.3897/subtbiol.43.79993 

Long-banned toxic chemicals remain a global threat

Most countries are failing to remove hazardous PCBs despite Stockholm treaty commitments

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

TORONTO, ON (JUNE 1, 2022) – A new analysis by researchers at Masaryk University, the University of Toronto, and NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) has found most countries are not on track to remove their stocks of highly hazardous polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) by the 2028 deadline set forth in the Stockholm Convention, the global chemicals management treaty. The report found more than 10 million tonnes of PCB-containing materials remain and pose public health and environmental threats globally. 

Additional findings from the report Persistent Problem: Global Challenges to Managing PCBs, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, include: 

• 42 percent of signatories to the Stockholm Convention are unaware of the amounts and locations of PCB stocks in their country.
• Only 30 percent of signatories to the Stockholm Convention are on track to meet the target of environmentally sound management of all PCBs by 2028. 
• A lack of administrative, financial, and political capacities are key impediments to successfully managing PCB stocks, especially in low-income countries, despite these countries not being responsible for most PCB production or use. 
• The U.S., the world’s largest producer and user of PCBs, was found to have decreased its sizable stocks by only about 3 percent since 2006. Despite having the financial capacity to responsibly eliminate PCBs, the U.S. has no regulatory deadlines to do so, is not a party to the Stockholm Convention, and its PCB inventory is poorly documented compared to Canada and Czechia.
• The inability of global agreements like the Stockholm Convention to effectively manage PCBs bodes poorly for the management of other toxic chemicals that are found in myriad products, like the highly persistent PFAS (per-and poly fluoroalkyl substances) and chlorinated paraffin chemicals.

PCBs are persistent organic pollutants and carcinogens and were widely used for their insulating and flame retardant properties. PCBs were banned in the late 1970s by many countries, including the U.S. and Canada, but the chemicals are still present in transformers, capacitors, and building materials in many countries. 

The following are statements from the co-authors of the report: 

“We’re only six years out from the Stockholm Convention’s deadline to responsibly eliminate PCB stocks, but shockingly little progress has been made.” – Lisa Melymuk, Assistant Professor of Environmental Chemistry, Masaryk University

“With effective regulations and good governance, Canada has successfully managed and destroyed its PCB stocks. However, evidence suggests that Canada has not applied this ‘lesson learned’ for PCBs to other highly hazardous chemicals.” – Miriam Diamond, Professor, Department of Earth Sciences and School of the Environment, University of Toronto

“Global mismanagement and inequities make elimination of these persistent chemicals unlikely. This analysis is an international wake-up call to limit the production of hazardous chemicals, like PCBs. We just can’t clean up the mess that they create.” – Veena Singla, Senior Scientist, NRDC

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JOURNAL

Environmental Science & Technology

DOI

10.1021/acs.est.2c01204 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Case study

ARTICLE TITLE

Persistent Problem: Global Challenges to Managing PCBs

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Jun-2022

Australians Back Their New Leader by a 2-to-1 Margin

51% of Australians approve of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s job performance

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on May 23 stands with newly appointed Foreign Minister Penny Wong, at the door of their plane in Canberra, Australia. (David Gray/Getty Images)

BY ALEX WILLEMYNS

June 2, 2022 

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has had a solid first week in office, earning approval from a slim majority of Australians and even a third of voters aligned with the conservative coalition he ousted from power last month, according to a new Morning Consult survey.

Albanese’s early approval ratingA slim majority (51%) of adults in Australia — where voting is compulsory for eligible citizens — approve of Albanese’s performance over his first week in office, which included a meeting in Tokyo with U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Half as many Australians (25%) disapprove of Albanese, driven largely by older adults and voters from the conservative Liberal/National government he ousted in the May 21 election.

But even among those Liberal/National voters, Albanese performed fairly well, with 33% approving of his job performance, compared with 42% who disapproved. A majority of Labor voters (74%) and Greens voters (55%) back Australia’s first center-left leader since 2013.

Foundations for a long Labor government

Albanese, a former deputy prime minister, was sworn in on May 23, restoring occupancy of The Lodge to the center-left Labor Party and ending nearly a decade of conservative rule in Australia. But he comes to office after Labor recorded its lowest primary vote since World War II, and a surge of votes for the Greens and “teal” independents means he will govern with only a three-seat majority in Parliament.

However, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal/National coalition also recorded its lowest combined primary vote since the war. It lost some of its historically safest seats to the moderate “teal” candidates, who all ran on an anti-Morrison policy platform of combating climate change, establishing a national corruption commission and increasing female representation in Parliament. In fact, seats once held by the past three conservative prime ministers before Morrison — Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and John Howard — were all lost by his party.

With his opponents reduced to a rump, and now being led by Peter Dutton, a hard-line former police officer who has shaken off comparisons to Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort, Albanese has set his sights on governing for at least two electoral terms by pledging to lead as a centrist.

In the wake of an election where fewer than 1 in 3 voters cast their primary vote for his party, Albanese could do worse than to stake out the center — especially as commentators on Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News vow to push the new opposition further to the right and an invigorated Greens party squeezes Labor from the left ahead of the next federal election due by 2025.

The latest survey was conducted May 23-31, 2022, among a representative sample of 3,770 Australian adults, with an unweighted margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

KULTURKAMPF

What is Québec's Bill 32 on academic freedom, and why does it matter?

Peter Ives, Professor, Political Science, University of Winnipeg 

Eve Haque, Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University, Canada - 

THE CONVERSATION

In the wake of the controversy over the suspension of a professor at the University of Ottawa for using the n-word in a 2020 lecture, the Québec government hopes to pass Bill 32, “a proposed act "respecting academic freedom in the university sector.”


© (Shutterstock)Quebec's bill may be seen as part of on-going 'culture wars,' and alongside Ontario and Québec conservative governments' grandstanding about 'free speech' on university campuses.

The bill was tabled April 6 and is under committee review.

In addition to undermining the autonomy of universities and faculty, and creating myriad implementation problems, the bill blurs the important distinctions between free expression and academic freedom. Most troubling, it signals that politicians are turning academic freedom into a political weapon.

All Canadians should be concerned about the shift in the meaning and control of academic freedom this bill could usher in.

What’s the bill calling for?

Bill 32 aims to define and control the principle of academic freedom that is now under the jurisdiction of universities. The bill redefines university academic freedom as, “the right of every person to engage freely and without doctrinal, ideological or moral constraint in an activity through which the person contributes, in their field of activity, to carrying out the mission of an educational institution.”

As scholars whose combined work engages with the politicization of language and language, race and belonging, we share concerns with other anti-racist scholars that the bill prioritizes the right to speak without consideration for ethical ramifications. The bill would overshadow issues of justice for racialized members of the academy.

Currently, complex questions about creating “safe spaces” or issuing “trigger warnings” in classrooms are addressed within universities. Commentators argue that the bill “spells the end of ‘trigger warnings’ and "safe spaces’ in the classroom.”
Rejected by students, university teachers

The bill has sparked significant controversy and ignited criticism from students and university teachers for its overreach into university autonomy.

The bill’s Article 6 would give the minister of higher education the power to “order an educational institution to include, in its policy, any element indicated by the minister” or “have the necessary corrections made.”

Québec student unions and Canadian Association of University Teachers have opposed the bill. The head of Concordia’s Black Student Union notes the bill would traumatize racialized students by reaching into university jurisdiction to permit derogatory language without concern for its effect, and calls it a “slap in the face.”

Read more: Academic freedom can't be separated from responsibility

Given that the suspended professor did not work in Québec, one might wonder why the province has proposed the bill. In March 2021, when Danielle McCann, Québec’s minister of higher education, announced a committee to examine academic freedom, she said recent events had convinced the government to take action.

One might wonder how Premier François Legault’s criticism of the suspension of a professor who did not work in Québec has culminated in a bill that attempts to radically transform the definition and control of academic freedom. Perhaps the extent of this reaction reflects anxieties specific to Québec’s nationalist articulations of its identity.

U.S. and Canadian contexts

The bill imports American principles by blurring the distinction between academic freedom and free expression or free speech, similar to other Canadian conservative government manoeuvres, discussed below.

The Canadian and U.S. legal frameworks for academic freedom differ. One fundamental difference is that in Canada, Charter rights do not apply to universities. By contrast, in the United States, the First Amendment, the source of equivalent rights, does apply to public universities.

The U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning First Amendment free speech rights have a long history of including academic freedom. This connection is non-existent in Canada.


In Canada, academic freedom is grounded in collective agreements or memoranda of understanding negotiated between faculty associations and university administrations. It usually includes the autonomy of the university and its faculty from outside pressures including provincial and federal governments.

In the U.S., the rate of unionization at universities is far lower than in Canada, making collective agreements less viable as the guarantee of academic freedom.

The Alberta Court ruled that the Charter right to free expression applies to campus anti-abortion protesters in Alberta and that students at the University of Calgary were merely expressing themselves when they denigrated their professor on Facebook. But no court has ruled that the Charter applies to universities’ classrooms or university teaching.

To further confuse matters

But Bill 32 focuses not on freedom of speech, but on academic freedom. The only other province to legislate on issues concerning academic freedom to our knowledge is Manitoba.

Manitoba’s Advanced Education Administration Act merely states that the minister responsible for post-secondary education, “respects the appropriate autonomy of educational institutions and the recognized principles of academic freedom.”

But the goal and functioning of Bill 32 is to define and control the principle of academic freedom (now under universities’ jurisdiction).

The Québec government claims it can do better than universities in protecting this core principle of academic freedom. More substantially, this bill politicizes complex questions of how professors do their work at the university.

Ignores right to criticize government

Commentators have criticized the bill for omitting what is usually considered a fundamental dimension, that is, the right for academics to criticize their own universities as well as government.

University collective agreements are clear in granting academic freedom to faculty members based on them having fulfilled years of education to become experts in their fields.

But the bill ignores these standard definitions of academic freedom and presents it as if it is like the right to free expression: universal, applicable to everyone regardless of their qualifications.

As American historian Joan Wallach Scott argues about the American right-wing: by “collapsing the distinction between academic freedom and free speech, they deny the authority of knowledge and of the teacher who purveys it.”

Potential problems with scope

Since the bill does not restrict itself to academics but speaks of “the right of every person … in their field of activity,” concrete problems for implementation are evident.

For example, if a professor gives a student a C in a course, could this be challenged as restricting the student’s academic freedom from “doctrinal” constraint?

Could not the offence of plagiarism be argued as a “moral” constraint and thus against a student’s academic freedom?

Joins Ontario and Alberta ‘culture wars’

The purpose of this bill seems comparable to the influential statement issued by the University of Chicago, known as the Chicago Principles of Free Expression. Those principles nowhere mention academic freedom. But, they were also the grounds for the university to speak against “trigger warnings” and the notion of the university as a “safe space.”

The Chicago Principles have been adopted by many American universities, although not without controversy.

When Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford insisted that universities in their respective provinces adopt freedom of speech policies, they referenced the Chicago Principles.

Québec’s bill may be seen as part of the on-going “culture wars,” along with Ford and Kenney’s grandstanding about free speech crises on university campuses.

As in those cases, maybe this is just political posturing with little genuine concern for the quality of university education.

In sum, even if this bill is revised or fails, its very proposal signals a move towards using academic freedom as a political weapon.

Read more:
Academic freedom can’t be separated from responsibility

Universities: The often overlooked player in determining healthy democracies

Peter Ives is affiliated with the University of Winnipeg and is a representative-at-large to the council of the University of Winnipeg Faculty Association.

Eve Haque has received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for an Insight Development Grant on 'Reconciling Academic Freedom and Equity in Canada'