It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Droughts in Western states drive up emissions and threaten human health
When drought-stricken rivers and reservoirs run low across the American West, hydropower dries up and utilities fire up hundreds of power plants that burn coal, oil, or natural gas to keep up with demand for electricity. The timing couldn't be worse, as accompanying heat waves drive up energy use, often to power air conditioners.
A new Stanford University study finds these overlooked consequences of drought dramatically increase carbon emissions, methane leakage, and local air pollution and deaths caused by poor air quality.
Together, the social and economic cost of these impacts have cost 11 Western states tens of billions of dollars over the past two decades, according to the study, which was published July 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In California alone, the increase in fossil generation caused by drought between 2012 and 2016 led to more than $5 billion in damages, two-and-a-half times the direct economic cost of switching from cheap hydropower to pricey fossil fuels.
Because climate change is making droughts in the American West more frequent and severe, the results indicate failure to account for these effects leads governments to underestimate the social and economic costs of global warming—and the worth of investments to combat it.
"Our research suggests the impact on greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and human health could represent a large and unaccounted-for cost of climate change," said lead study author Minghao Qiu, a postdoctoral scholar in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health.
Not a local story
Qiu and co-authors estimate the total health and economic damages from drought-induced fossil electricity generation between 2001 and 2021 in U.S. Western states amounted to $20 billion, with the cost of carbon emissions accounting for the lion's share of that damage at $14 billion. Deaths associated with additional air pollution account for $5.1 billion and methane leakage accounts for just under $1 billion of the damage.
Like many climate impacts, these damages often bleed across borders. When hydropower runs low in Northwestern states that normally export electricity to regional neighbors, for example, communities in California and the Southwest feel the effects as fossil fuel power plants fire up to fill the gap.
"This is not a local story. A climate shock in one place can have serious ramifications for a totally different geographic area due to the interconnected nature of many energy systems," said Qiu, who works with senior study author Marshall Burke as part of the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab at Stanford.
While the study focused on the American West, the researchers stress that many countries relying on hydropower around the world are facing greater drought risk due to climate change. In places where high-emitting coal-fired power plants are the most likely replacement for lost hydropower, the authors write that the economic and health damages from deteriorated air quality and greenhouse gas emissions will be higher than in U.S. Western states, which more often turn to natural gas.
"Our findings have implications for many other parts of the world that depend on hydropower but could face increasing drought," said Burke, an associate professor in the global environmental policy area of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability's social sciences division. "In these regions, drought's interaction with the energy system can have a cascading series of negative impacts on emissions and health."
More renewable energy needed
The authors calculated damages based on widely accepted estimates for the costs of carbon and methane emissions, and the statistical value of a human life in the way that regulators calculate it, as well as the best available estimate for how much methane leaks to the atmosphere during the production, processing, and transportation of oil and gas (2.3% per unit of gas consumed).
In states that rely heavily on hydropower for electricity generation, such as Washington, California, and Oregon, planet-warming emissions caused by drought-induced shifts in the energy supply could account for up to 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions from electricity in future drought years, the research shows, even as more solar, wind, and battery storage come online. The research suggests that increasingly frequent droughts will make it more challenging for the electricity sector to fully decarbonize and hydro-reliant states will need to pursue extra initiatives to achieve net-zero emission goals.
That's because when electricity demand spikes, utilities generally turn to fossil fuels to temporarily boost supply. In the coming decades, even as renewable energy and energy storage cover more of the overall average demand for electricity in the American West, fossil fuel based power plants are projected to remain the dominant energy source for these marginal energy needs.
"If we want to solve this issue, we need an even greater expansion of renewable energy alongside better energy storage, so we don't need to tap into fossil fuels as much," said Qiu. "Ultimately, to limit future warming and the drought risks that come with it, we need to reduce our emissions."
More information: Minghao Qiu et al, Drought impacts on the electricity system, emissions, and air quality in the western United States, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2300395120
A new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, examined the development of offense-related expertise in a sample of convicted burglars, depending on their age.
The results revealed significant differences between the younger (under 21) and older burglars (over 21) in their virtual burglary performances. Older burglars demonstrated more developed expertise in terms of items stolen and the efficiency of their search compared to their younger counterparts. These findings suggest that expertise plays a crucial role in offense-related decision-making across the criminal career.
Researchers from the University of Portsmouth compared indicators of expertise between the two groups as they completed a simulated "virtual burglary." The findings shed new light on the role of expertise in criminal decision-making and have implications for future crime prevention strategies and targeted interventions.
A total of 68 convicted burglars participated in the research, with 36 younger burglars and 32 older burglars taking part in the virtual burglary simulation. All participants were serving sentences in adult prisons or Young Offender Institutions in the UK.
Each offender was given the same virtual environment of a street of five terraced houses. Participants had to first choose which property to burgle and whether to access it through the front door or via an alleyway from the rear. They then had to work their way through the house which included a ground floor consisting of a hallway, kitchen, living room, and dining area. A master bedroom, nursery, study, and bathroom were located on the first floor, and an attic floor consisted of a games room and a third (teenager's) bedroom.
Valuable items were distributed alongside other items (food, books) in locations consistent with a typical home. Some items were placed in clear sight, while others were hidden (for example, a tablet in a rucksack). Participants were able to "steal" anything they wanted and doors, cupboards and drawers could be opened. All participant movements and interactions (i.e., distance traveled, time spent in different areas, items stolen) were recorded by the computer simulation and then analyzed by researchers.
The research was based on the concept of "expertise" which refers to the characteristics, skills and knowledge that distinguish experts from novices. Expertise is developed through repeated practice and learning from that experience. For offenders, expertise has been shown to influence various stages of decision-making, from recognizing relevant cues to guiding actions based on past events and experiences.
Dr. Amy Meenaghan, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Portsmouth says, "One of the major implications of this research is its potential to inform crime prevention strategies and offender rehabilitation initiatives. By understanding the cognitive processes associated with expertise in offending behavior, experts can design crime prevention strategies that disrupt the offense decision chain and so deter further criminal activity."
"This is a significant step forward in applying cognitive psychology concepts to understand criminal behavior. By using virtual reality as a safe and effective proxy for real-life behavior, we have been able to gain unique insights into the decision-making process of burglars."
The researchers hope this study will encourage further exploration of the impact of expertise on offending behavior and contribute to evidence-based approaches to reducing criminal activity and promoting societal safety.
More information: Amy Meenaghan et al, A comparison of younger and older burglars undertaking virtual burglaries: the development of skill and automaticity, Journal of Experimental Criminology (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s11292-023-09573-x
Users of a new mobile app can scan barcodes to access the history of commodities and report damage to individual cans with photographs of the damage and geolocation and timestamp data. Credit: Lincoln Laboratory researchers.
Although more than enough food is produced to feed everyone in the world, as many as 828 million people face hunger today. Poverty, social inequity, climate change, natural disasters, and political conflicts all contribute to inhibiting access to food. For decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) has been a leader in global food assistance, supplying millions of metric tons of food to recipients worldwide. Alleviating hunger—and the conflict and instability hunger causes—is critical to U.S. national security.
But BHA is only one player within a large, complex supply chain in which food gets handed off between more than 100 partner organizations before reaching its final destination. Traditionally, the movement of food through the supply chain has been a black-box operation, with stakeholders largely out of the loop about what happens to the food once it leaves their custody. This lack of direct visibility into operations is due to siloed data repositories, insufficient data sharing among stakeholders, and different data formats that operators must manually sort through and standardize. As a result, accurate, real-time information—such as where food shipments are at any given time, which shipments are affected by delays or food recalls, and when shipments have arrived at their final destination—is lacking. A centralized system capable of tracing food along its entire journey, from manufacture through delivery, would enable a more effective humanitarian response to food-aid needs.
In 2020, a team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory began engaging with BHA to create an intelligent dashboard for their supply-chain operations. This dashboard brings together the expansive food-aid datasets from BHA's existing systems into a single platform, with tools for visualizing and analyzing the data. When the team started developing the dashboard, they quickly realized the need for considerably more data than BHA had access to.
"That's where traceability comes in, with each handoff partner contributing key pieces of information as food moves through the supply chain," explains Megan Richardson, a researcher in the laboratory's Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group.
Richardson and the rest of the team have been working with BHA and their partners to scope, build, and implement such an end-to-end traceability system. This system consists of serialized, unique identifiers (IDs)—akin to fingerprints—that are assigned to individual food items at the time they are produced. These individual IDs remain linked to items as they are aggregated along the supply chain, first domestically and then internationally. For example, individually tagged cans of vegetable oil get packaged into cartons; cartons are placed onto pallets and transported via railway and truck to warehouses; pallets are loaded onto shipping containers at U.S. ports; and pallets are unloaded and cartons are unpackaged overseas.
With a trace
Today, visibility at the single-item level doesn't exist. Most suppliers mark pallets with a lot number (a lot is a batch of items produced in the same run), but this is for internal purposes (i.e., to track issues stemming back to their production supply, like over-enriched ingredients or machinery malfunction), not data sharing. So, organizations know which supplier lot a pallet and carton are associated with, but they can't track the unique history of an individual carton or item within that pallet. As the lots move further downstream toward their final destination, they are often mixed with lots from other productions, and possibly other commodity types altogether, because of space constraints. On the international side, such mixing and the lack of granularity make it difficult to quickly pull commodities out of the supply chain if food safety concerns arise. Current response times can span several months.
"Commodities are grouped differently at different stages of the supply chain, so it is logical to track them in those groupings where needed," Richardson says. "Our item-level granularity serves as a form of Rosetta Stone to enable stakeholders to efficiently communicate throughout these stages. We're trying to enable a way to track not only the movement of commodities, including through their lot information, but also any problems arising independent of lot, like exposure to high humidity levels in a warehouse. Right now, we have no way to associate commodities with histories that may have resulted in an issue."
"You can now track your checked luggage across the world and the fish on your dinner plate," adds Brice MacLaren, also a researcher in the laboratory's Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group. "So, this technology isn't new, but it's new to BHA as they evolve their methodology for commodity tracing. The traceability system needs to be versatile, working across a wide variety of operators who take custody of the commodity along the supply chain and fitting into their existing best practices."
As food products make their way through the supply chain, operators at each receiving point would be able to scan these IDs via a Lincoln Laboratory-developed mobile application (app) to indicate a product's current location and transaction status—for example, that it is en route on a particular shipping container or stored in a certain warehouse. This information would get uploaded to a secure traceability server. By scanning a product, operators would also see its history up until that point.
Hitting the mark
At the laboratory, the team tested the feasibility of their traceability technology, exploring different ways to mark and scan items. In their testing, they considered barcodes and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and handheld and fixed scanners. Their analysis revealed 2D barcodes (specifically data matrices) and smartphone-based scanners were the most feasible options in terms of how the technology works and how it fits into existing operations and infrastructure.
"We needed to come up with a solution that would be practical and sustainable in the field," MacLaren says. "While scanners can automatically read any RFID tags in close proximity as someone is walking by, they can't discriminate exactly where the tags are coming from. RFID is expensive, and it's hard to read commodities in bulk. On the other hand, a phone can scan a barcode on a particular box and tell you that code goes with that box. The challenge then becomes figuring out how to present the codes for people to easily scan without significantly interrupting their usual processes for handling and moving commodities."
As the team learned from partner representatives in Kenya and Djibouti, offloading at the ports is a chaotic, fast operation. At manual warehouses, porters fling bags over their shoulders or stack cartons atop their heads any which way they can and run them to a drop point; at bagging terminals, commodities come down a conveyor belt and land this way or that way. With this variability comes several questions: How many barcodes do you need on an item? Where should they be placed? What size should they be? What will they cost? The laboratory team is considering these questions, keeping in mind that the answers will vary depending on the type of commodity; vegetable oil cartons will have different specifications than, say, 50-kilogram bags of wheat or peas.
Leaving a mark
Leveraging results from their testing and insights from international partners, the team has been running a traceability pilot evaluating how their proposed system meshes with real-world domestic and international operations. The current pilot features a domestic component in Houston, Texas, and an international component in Ethiopia, and focuses on tracking individual cartons of vegetable oil and identifying damaged cans. The Ethiopian team with Catholic Relief Services recently received a container filled with pallets of uniquely barcoded cartons of vegetable oil cans (in the next pilot, the cans will be barcoded, too). They are now scanning items and collecting data on product damage by using smartphones with the laboratory-developed mobile traceability app on which they were trained.
"The partners in Ethiopia are comparing a couple lid types to determine whether some are more resilient than others," Richardson says. "With the app—which is designed to scan commodities, collect transaction data, and keep history—the partners can take pictures of damaged cans and see if a trend with the lid type emerges."
Next, the team will run a series of pilots with the World Food Program (WFP), the world's largest humanitarian organization. The first pilot will focus on data connectivity and interoperability, and the team will engage with suppliers to directly print barcodes on individual commodities instead of applying barcode labels to packaging, as they did in the initial feasibility testing. The WFP will provide input on which of their operations are best suited for testing the traceability system, considering factors like the network bandwidth of WFP staff and local partners, the commodity types being distributed, and the country context for scanning. The BHA will likely also prioritize locations for system testing.
"Our goal is to provide an infrastructure to enable as close to real-time data exchange as possible between all parties, given intermittent power and connectivity in these environments," MacLaren says.
In subsequent pilots, the team will try to integrate their approach with existing systems that partners rely on for tracking procurements, inventory, and movement of commodities under their custody so that this information is automatically pushed to the traceability server. The team also hopes to add a capability for real-time alerting of statuses, like the departure and arrival of commodities at a port or the exposure of unclaimed commodities to the elements. Real-time alerts would enable stakeholders to more efficiently respond to food-safety events. Currently, partners are forced to take a conservative approach, pulling out more commodities from the supply chain than are actually suspect, to reduce risk of harm. Both BHA and WHP are interested in testing out a food-safety event during one of the pilots to see how the traceability system works in enabling rapid communication response.
To implement this technology at scale will require some standardization for marking different commodity types as well as give and take among the partners on best practices for handling commodities. It will also require an understanding of country regulations and partner interactions with subcontractors, government entities, and other stakeholders.
"Within several years, I think it's possible for BHA to use our system to mark and trace all their food procured in the United States and sent internationally," MacLaren says.
Once collected, the trove of traceability data could be harnessed for other purposes, among them analyzing historical trends, predicting future demand, and assessing the carbon footprint of commodity transport. In the future, a similar traceability system could scale for nonfood items, including medical supplies distributed to disaster victims, resources like generators and water trucks localized in emergency-response scenarios, and vaccines administered during pandemics. Several groups at the laboratory are also interested in such a system to track items such as tools deployed in space or equipment people carry through different operational environments.
"When we first started this program, colleagues were asking why the laboratory was involved in simple tasks like making a dashboard, marking items with barcodes, and using hand scanners," MacLaren says. "Our impact here isn't about the technology; it's about providing a strategy for coordinated food-aid response and successfully implementing that strategy. Most importantly, it's about people getting fed."
UTM linguistics professor Derek Denis is is examining how Toronto's diverse languages are influencing English locally. Credit: Nick Iwanyshyn
Most Canadians are familiar with the "aboot" stereotype, and any Canadian who has traveled to the American Midwest might pause a bit when some Americans call the common fruit an "epple." And of course, there's "Tor-on-toh" versus "Tronno."
While these distinctions in how we speak English are subtle and may be explained by a difference in dialect or variety, it's how these subtle changes occur in a multicultural city like Toronto that interests Derek Denis, an associate professor of linguistics at University of Toronto Mississauga.
Denis was teaching a course at UTM when he told his students of Multicultural London English (MLE), a multiethnolect—a way of speaking with influences from multiple different languages—studied by linguists.
A conversation with a student led him to wonder if Toronto also had its own multiethnolect.
Denis and UTM students Vidhya Elango, Nur Sakinah Nor Kamal, Maria Velasco, and Srishti Prashar, conducted research and found that the Greater Toronto Area does indeed have its own multiethnolect—which they call Multicultural Toronto English (MTE). It's a way of speaking that arises from a variety of features present in Toronto, including its vast diversity of languages. Their findings were published in January 2023 in the Journal of English Linguistics.
"I was telling (students) about the development of a new pronoun, which is the 'man' pronoun, in MLE," Denis says. "Pronouns are slow to change linguistically, so the fact there is this new pronoun was exciting, and one of my students put her hand up and said, "We have that here too.'"
An example of this is "I almost missed the TTC but mans made it here anyways," where 'mans' replaces the pronoun "I." Variations heard in Toronto and in London include man, mans and mandem.
Indeed, "mans," "Tronno" and other observations are features of MTE, Denis says.
The study found that among immigrant youth communities in the Greater Toronto area, vowels were distinctive from previous reports of Canadian English.
While similar phenomena have been documented in European cities, there hasn't been a lot of research on it in North America. It's part of why Denis was so interested in pursuing the research.
"I grew up in Scarborough, in a pretty diverse area," Denis says. "You hear all kinds of English around you, all kinds of accents.
"So, I started looking into this in an academic way."
Denis' team of work-study students collected data through interviews of youth in ethnolinguistically diverse regions of the GTA involving a set of questions to answer, casual conversations, and a word list to read aloud.
"We noticed particular vowel realizations," he says. "So, we created a list of words that had those target sounds in them, about 100 or so."
Canadian raising and 'goat' monophthongization
They investigated a mix of vocalic phenomena, but two of them—Canadian raising and "goat" monophthongization—really caught Denis' attention.
Credit: University of Toronto Mississauga
"(Canadian raising) is the easiest to grasp," Denis explains, referring to the difference between "about" and "aboot."
While "aboot" has become a stereotype resulting from how Americans perceive a much subtler pronunciation, Denis says it's the one people know best.
"Canadian raising affects two vowels," he says. "When the vowel is followed by a certain sound, the realization of that vowel is a little bit higher in the mix. It's subtle."
Except of course the not-so-subtle "aboot" is what Americans hear, as the phenomenon doesn't exist in American English. Denis says the presence of a stereotype means there is a social meaning attached to how the word is pronounced. As a result, their research shows an almost unconscious avoidance of this feature of Canadian raising with the word "about."
That's to say, young Torontonians are trying to avoid saying anything resembling "aboot." It's why Denis doesn't consider "aboot" to be a feature of MTE.
But in another example, where there isn't any social meaning or stereotype present, the data shows a difference in pronunciation consistent with Canadian raising: 'eyes' and 'ice." In MTE, the "I' has distinct sounds in this example.
"They're two different sounds," he says. "But we don't have a stereotype of 'eyes' and 'ice.'" Americans don't make fun of us for saying 'ice,' but they make fun of us for saying 'aboot.'"
Another phenomenon that Denis traces to the influence of other languages and dialects is "goat" monophthongization. To understand this, it's important to know what a monophthong and a diphthong are. The former is a sound formed by one vowel in a syllable, like "cat," while the latter is a sound formed with a combination of two vowels in a syllable, like "coin" or the subtler "goat."
Essentially, it involves the movement of the tongue during speaking.
"It's the process of a vowel that is normatively produced as a diphthong becoming a monophthong, so there's less movement of the tongue," he says.
Denis and his team found that in MTE, youth surveyed exhibited "monophthongization"—that is a two-vowel syllable turning into a one-vowel syllable—with the word "goat."
That is, the "oa" sound was becoming a more "oh" sound. "Goat" versus "goht."
"'Goat' monophthongization is probably the phenomenon we can most clearly link from an influence from Jamaica patois," Denis says. "The vowel in Jamaican patois is not quite exactly the same, but we can trace the influence to it."
'Feature pool' of variables
MTE results from what linguists called a "feature pool," where several variables influence how a language slowly changes over time. In Toronto, some of those features might be associated with ethnicities like in the example of "goat." But some features arise from an authenticity of being from a community—like the difference of how "Toronto" is pronounced.
"It's like this mixture that people pick and choose from," Denis says. "That's why I hesitate to call this a dialect because it's not exactly that, it's a pool of features that individuals use to develop their own linguistic style."
The results of the research showed a great deal of "interspeaker variability" in the way of speaking among youth in immigrant communities. But it's a result of English changes and developments within Toronto communities, Denis notes.
Denis continues his research on MTE and plans to publish a book on his findings soon.
More information: Derek Denis et al, Exploring the Vowel Space of Multicultural Toronto English, Journal of English Linguistics (2023). DOI: 10.1177/00754242221145164
Over half of forests in the United States are privately owned, especially in the Eastern part of the country. This can make control of invasive species challenging, as efforts need to be coordinated among many different landowners. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at how family forest landowners in Maine and New Hampshire approach invasive species management and what factors influence their decisions.
"We have mostly public land on the West Coast and privately owned family forestland in the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard. Private landowners are going to have different preferences, so what will happen when collective action is required to manage invasive species?" asked Shadi Atallah, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.
There are three main categories of private family forest landowners, Atallah stated. There are recreational landowners who primarily want to enjoy the land; owners who are looking to get supplemental income from timber; and others who seek to combine recreational and income opportunities. Each group has different priorities and motivations for managing their forests, and this has implications for policy makers.
Atallah is lead author on the study, which focused on control of glossy buckthorn in eastern white pine forests. This is an exotic and invasive species that can cause substantial problems if not managed.
"Glossy buckthorn can grow as high as a person so it can block recreational activities such as hiking, biking, and wildlife watching. It's also going to inhibit the ability of the white pine forest to naturally regenerate, because it will shade juvenile trees and limit their growth. Thus, it is both an economic problem and a problem for the provision of ecosystem services," Atallah said.
The researchers conducted a survey with 939 forest landowners in Maine and New Hampshire to gauge preferences, motivations, and willingness to pay for glossy buckthorn control on their land. Respondents also received an informational brochure about the invader, explaining identification, problems, and control methods.
The survey was designed as a choice experiment, where respondents were presented with a series of different scenarios and asked to make hypothetical choices for management options and outcomes. The options differed in ecosystem service benefits (trail recreation, wildlife, timber), control methods (mechanical or chemical), neighborhood adoption rates, and costs. Each respondent received a random combination of options.
Current conservation cost-share programs in the region reimburse landowners for up to 75% of the cost of controlling invasive species. According to survey results, this is sufficient to encourage mechanical but not chemical control.
"We find that family forest landowners have a very strong preference for mechanical control methods, although they are more expensive and less effective. In fact, owners have a negative willingness to pay for chemical control, which means they actually would have to be paid to use this method," Atallah stated.
On average, landowners prefer control options that increase timber regeneration and wildlife viewing. Owners of large forest lands are also motivated to control invasive species in order to improve trail recreational activities.
The researchers found that owners of smaller forests are strongly influenced by what their neighbors are doing. Neighborhood effects are significant for those owning less than 26 acres, which is 80% of all landowners in the area.
"We show that it's going to increase a landowner's willingness to pay for control if their neighbor is also doing so. If everybody else is controlling, it becomes more cost effective," Atallah said.
Conservation agencies can capitalize on this finding, he noted.
"Because this problem exists in a region with a lot of privately held land, there is an opportunity to build on that neighborhood effect," he said. "For example, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) or Cooperative Extension could provide information to landowners about the control level in their neighborhood to increase their likelihood of action. Landowners view their control as a complement to their neighbors' efforts, which can benefit the areawide management of invasive species."
Forest landowners' strong preference for mechanical control also has policy implications.
"We have these environmental preferences that could lead to the invasive species spreading because mechanical controls are less effective than chemical methods. An agency concerned with effectiveness at the landscape level might end up subsidizing chemical control more than mechanical," Atallah stated. "The crux of the problem is how to balance the tradeoffs between landowner preferences, available treatment methods, and the forest health as an ecosystem that would benefit from the removal of non-native, invasive plants."
Atallah is currently working on a research project to estimate those tradeoffs, which can provide guidelines for conservation agencies seeking to develop management strategies.
More information: Shady S. Atallah et al, Family forest landowner preferences for managing invasive species: Control methods, ecosystem services, and neighborhood effects, Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (2023). DOI: 10.1002/jaa2.60
Emotions can run high when the topic of how much red and processed meat to eat is raised. For many of us, eating these foods is culturally important—often tied to specific dishes and traditions.
That's why this week's landmark new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) is welcome. The report focuses explicitly on what the science says about how red and processed meat affects our health—and the health of the ecosystems on which we depend.
What does it say? Moderation is important. In high-income countries, we tend to eat too much red meat, which boosts the risk of some cancers and heart disease. We should treat processed meat, such as salami, with even greater caution, as the link to cancer risk is even clearer.
If you want a quick take-home, it's this: eat less red meat, avoid processed meat and choose meat farmed under better conditions. But this is not always easy or affordable for everyone. So most importantly, we need changes to the policies that affect how our food systems operate so that our well-being and the health of the planet are prioritized.
What does the evidence say about red meat and our health?
Red meat is a rich source of many important nutrients, including iron, B-vitamins and all essential amino acids. These are compounds essential for human growth, development and good health.
Importantly, these nutrients are not exclusively found in red meat. Beans and legumes are also high in iron and B-vitamins, though in less easily absorbed form. Many cultures have developed healthy diets without an over-reliance on red meat by including beans and legumes.
In populations that experience food insecurity, red meat can be an important source of nutrition. In these contexts, it doesn't make sense to advise people to avoid red meat.
But in other parts of the world, red meat intake is too high. Australians are some of the world's biggest red meat eaters, which puts us at higher risk of chronic diseases such as bowel cancer and cardiovascular disease. Both of these are among Australia's top killers.
Processed and ultra-processed meats such as ham and chicken nuggets come with even greater health risks, especially when consumed in excess. The WHO considers processed meat a Group 1 carcinogen. That means there's strong evidence linking consumption to cancer risk.
The way we produce red and processed meat comes with a host of other health issues, such as antimicrobial resistance due to overuse of antibiotics, as well as the risk of new zoonotic animal-to-human diseases. Intensive farming done on industrial scales poses particular risks.
What does the evidence tell us about red meat and the environment?
Ruminant livestock need grass, which often means farmers chop down the trees or shrubs previously there, making pasture inhospitable for native species. In feedlots, these animals are often fed on grains or soy. Producing the volumes needed—of both animal feed and livestock—means felling more forests. That's why we can clearly link increased livestock farming to damaged biodiversity.
In Australia, livestock farming is generally less intensive compared to the United States. Even so, deforestation to make room for cattle is still a major issue in Australia. In the last five years, 13,500 hectares have been cleared for beef cattle operations in Queensland alone.
It doesn't have to be so destructive. Mixed farming systems, where cattle graze on land covered by trees and native grasses, is less destructive.
So are farming methods built around agro-ecological principles where the health of the land and fairness are prioritized.
As global heating escalates, it will pose increasing challenges for livestock farmers (and livestock animals). Increases in extreme weather have major implications for animal welfare, farmer livelihoods and food security.
What does the evidence say about industrial farming?
Many farmers care greatly about the welfare of their animals and the environment.
But meat production in many parts of the world is now dominated by large corporations. To maximize production, these companies rely on intensive farming techniques such as feedlots and extensive use of antibiotics. These techniques are spreading as low- and middle-income countries such as China and Brazil gain more appetite for meat.
Industrial scale farming comes with real costs. If we can make meat production better, we will lower the risk of antimicrobial resistance and zoonotic diseases, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss, and improve the lives of workers and the animals themselves.
Knowing this, what should we do?
If we leave the situation as it is, intensive farming and red and processed meat consumption will continue to increase.
But this is not sustainable. To improve the health of people and the planet we need to change how we produce meat. And we need to consume more diverse diets. These changes have to be sensitive to the local context.
Changing what we eat must involve governments. Just as governments have a role in encouraging food manufacturers to avoid carcinogens or dangerous chemical additives, they have a role in promoting healthy diets from food systems that are sustainable over the long term.
What does that look like? It could be investing in agro-ecological farming practices, tackling corporate concentration of meat production, penalizing antibiotic overuse and subsidizing healthy options like beans and legumes. Taxing the riskiest meat-based foods, such as heavily processed meat, is another option.
Sensible policy-making may also help shift cultural norms in which meat is so highly valued.
Could we just swap red meat for different meat? It's not that simple. The majority of chickens are intensively farmed, too, meaning antibiotic resistance remains a risk. Ultra-processed plant-based meats may also pose problems for human health.
A better option is to focus on minimally-processed whole foods (think brown rice, nuts and pulses) and sustainably-produced foods from animals. But we need action from the government to make these options affordable and convenient.
Importantly, the WHO report does not say stop eating red meat—it simply lays out the evidence about what it does to your health. It also points to ways of farming livestock that are less destructive and outlines ways to reduce our habitual consumption.
Credit: Science of The Total Environment (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165312
Eutrophication, the cycle whereby nutrients overstimulate the growth of potentially harmful plankton and cyanobacterial "blooms" in freshwater lakes, has become a problem for more than 60% of global inland waters. The problem is set to be exacerbated by climate change, and so our priority should be to further reduce external nutrient inputs to diminish the basis of cyanobacterial bloom outbreaks.
The study of one lake in China, an important source of water for more than 20 million people and for industry, establishes the mechanisms between lake heat waves and potentially poisonous cyanobacteria blooms.
The research by Dr. Iestyn Woolway of Bangor University and research colleagues in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China and Aarhus University, Denmark, published in Science of the Total Environment studies the heat wave experienced in 2022 in Lake Taihu, one of China's largest freshwater lakes situated in the Yangtze delta, and the associated cyanobacteria blooms. (Cyanobacterial are similar to plankton. Under certain conditions they can thrive in freshwater causing harm to other plants and animals).
Increasing surface air temperature is one of the most recognized consequences of man-made climate change. In lakes, these conditions are exacerbated by "run-offs" from other human activities which add nutrients to the lakes, these in turn, help the cyanobacteria to thrive. An increase in lake surface water temperature has a knock-on effect on the entire lake environment.
Woolway says, "In addition to reducing run-off into freshwater as a result of our activities, we should be working towards systematic monitoring, prediction and early warning to reduce the damaging impact of heat waves on lake ecosystems. We need to better understand the mechanisms and triggers in lakes with different nutrient levels in order to formulate strategies to address and adapt to climate change.
"The whole thing becomes a vicious circle when heat waves occur. An increased temperature reduces vertical mixing within the freshwater water column. This benefits buoyant cyanobacteria floating and forming dense surface blooms. These dense blooms, in turn, slightly increase the water temperature.
"The lower winds experienced during heat waves also contribute to reduced mixing in the water column and reduce dissolved oxygen in the water. In turn, the low dissolved oxygen levels at the lake bottom increase the release of phosphorus from the sediment, which then supports further growth of more cyanobacteria.
"Heat waves are predicted to increase eleven-fold during this century, and this will have profound negative effects on the structure, function, and ecosystem services of aquatic systems."
More information: Na Li et al, The unprecedented 2022 extreme summer heatwaves increased harmful cyanobacteria blooms, Science of The Total Environment (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165312
